Flower Power is the title of a photograph taken by American photographer Bernie Boston for the now-defunct newspaper The Washington Evening Star . Taken on October 21, 1967, during the March on the Pentagon by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the photo shows protester George Harris placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion (Airborne).
The photograph was nominated for the 1967 Pulitzer Prize.
The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam's March on the Pentagon took place on October 21, 1967. When the antiwar demonstrators approached The Pentagon, they were confronted by a squad of soldiers from the 503rd Military Police Battalion (Airborne). [1] The soldiers pointed their rifles, marched into the crowd and formed a semicircle around the demonstrators to prevent them from climbing the Pentagon steps. Bernie Boston, newspaper photographer for The Washington Evening Star (shortened to The Washington Star in later years), had been assigned by his editor to cover the demonstration. [2] Boston was sitting on a wall at the mall entrance which allowed him to see the events unfold. [3] In a 2005 interview he said, "When I saw the sea of demonstrators, I knew something had to happen. I saw the troops march down into the sea of people and I was ready for it." [4] A young man emerged from the crowd of demonstrators and started placing carnations into the barrels of their rifles. [3] Boston captured the moment in what would become an iconic image and his signature photograph. [3]
When Boston showed the photograph to his editor at the Star, "the editor didn't see the importance" and the picture was run on a page deep inside the newspaper. [3] It did not gain recognition until Boston entered it into photography competitions, which it won. [3]
The young man in the photo is most commonly identified as George Edgerly Harris III, an 18-year-old actor from New York who had moved to San Francisco in 1967. [1] [5] In 2005, Boston talked in an interview about the effort it took to learn that the protester was Harris. [4] Harris, who performed under the stage name Hibiscus and co-founded The Cockettes, a "flamboyant, psychedelic gay-themed drag troupe", died in the early 1980s during the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. [1]
Paul Krassner, in a 2008 blogger's article written for the Huffington Post a week after Bernie Boston died, said the young man in the photo was Joel Tornabene, a fellow counter-culture leader of the Youth International Party (the Yippies) who lived in Berkeley, California in the 1960s. [6] Tornabene, like Harris and Boston, died before Krassner posted this statement. [6]
The Flower power movement began in Berkeley, California as a means of symbolic protest against the Vietnam War. Beat Generation writer Allen Ginsberg, in his November 1965 essay How to Make a March/Spectacle, promoted the use of "masses of flowers" to hand to policemen, press, politicians and spectators to fight violence with peace.
They intended the use of nonviolent objects such as toys, flags, candy and music to show that the peace movement was not associated with anger or violence. Members of the movement tried to offset the rallies of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, who supported the war.
Flower Power was nominated for the 1967 Pulitzer Prize. [7]
It had an influential effect on both the antiwar movement of the sixties, and as a visual representation of how photojournalism can help with a movement. [8]
Specific exhibits and discussions have been curated solely around the photograph to display the political, cultural and social aspects of the Flower Power movement. The exhibit From Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation was shown at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, which displayed Boston's image as a large gelatin silver print. The image was included as a representation of the antiwar movement. [9]
In 1993, for his body of work –including Flower Power and his Pulitzer-nominated 1987 photograph of Coretta Scott King unveiling a bust of her late husband, Martin Luther King Jr., in the U.S. Capitol [10] –Boston received the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award from the National Press Photographers Association, their highest honor. [11]
Flower Power continues to be used as an iconic image of the 1960s. [12]
The Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography is one of the American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for journalism. From 2000 it has used the "breaking news" name but it is considered a continuation of the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography, which was awarded from 1968 to 1999. Prior to 1968, a single Prize was awarded for photojournalism, the Pulitzer Prize for Photography, which was replaced in that year by Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
Huỳnh Công Út, known professionally as Nick Ut, is a Vietnamese-American photographer who worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles. He won both the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year for his 1972 photograph The Terror of War, depicting children running away from a napalm bombing attack during the Vietnam War. In 2017, he retired. Examples of his work may be found in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Flower power was a slogan used during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of passive resistance and nonviolence. It is rooted in the opposition movement to the Vietnam War. The expression was coined by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965 as a means to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles. Hippies embraced the symbolism by dressing in clothing with embroidered flowers and vibrant colors, wearing flowers in their hair, and distributing flowers to the public, becoming known as flower children. The term later became generalized as a modern reference to the hippie movement and the so-called counterculture of drugs, psychedelic music, psychedelic art and social permissiveness.
Flower child originated as a synonym for Hippie, especially among the idealistic young people who gathered in San Francisco and the surrounding area during the Summer of Love in 1967. It was the custom of "flower children" to wear and distribute flowers or floral-themed decorations to symbolize ideals of universal belonging, peace, and love. The mass media picked up on the term and used it to refer in a broad sense to any Hippie. Flower children were also associated with the flower power political movement, which originated in ideas written by Allen Ginsberg in 1965.
Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began in 1965 with demonstrations against the escalating role of the United States in the war. Over the next several years, these demonstrations grew into a social movement which was incorporated into the broader counterculture of the 1960s.
David Hume Kennerly is an American photographer. He won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his portfolio of photographs of the Vietnam War, Cambodia, East Pakistani refugees near Calcutta, and the Ali-Frazier fight in Madison Square Garden. He has photographed every American president since Lyndon B Johnson. He is the first presidential scholar at the University of Arizona.
Hibiscus was an American actor and performance artist. Starting his career in New York City, he moved to San Francisco, where in the early 1970s he founded the psychedelic gay liberation theater collective known as the Cockettes.
Horst Faas was a German photo-journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He is best known for his images of the Vietnam War.
The Pulitzer Prizes for 1975, the 59th annual prizes, were ratified by the Pulitzer Prize advisory board on April 11, 1975, and by the trustees of Columbia University on May 5. For the first time, the role of accepting or rejecting recommendations of the advisory board was delegated by the trustees to the university's president, William J. McGill; the change was prompted by the desire of the trustees to distance themselves from the appearance of approval of controversial awards based on work involving what some considered to be illegal leaks, such as the 1972 Pulitzer Prize awarded for the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1977.
Stanley Joseph Forman is an American photojournalist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography two years in a row while working at the Boston Herald American.
The Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which became the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, was a coalition of American antiwar activists formed in November 1966 to organize large demonstrations in opposition to the Vietnam War. The organization was informally known as "the Mobe".
Bernie Boston was an American photographer most noted for his iconic Flower Power image.
The Soiling of Old Glory is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken by Stanley Forman during the Boston busing crisis in 1976. It depicts a white teenager, Joseph Rakes, assaulting a black man—lawyer and civil rights activist Ted Landsmark—with a flagpole bearing the American flag.
Michael Francis Bowen was an American fine artist known as one of the co-founders of the late 20th and 21st century Visionary art movements. His works include paintings on canvas and paper, 92 intaglio etchings based on Jungian psychology, assemblage, bronze sculpture, collage, and handmade art books.
The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet is a photograph of Jan Rose Kasmir, at that time an American high-school student. This iconic photograph was taken by French photographer Marc Riboud. Riboud photographed Kasmir on 21 October 1967 while taking part with over 100,000 anti-war activists in the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam's March on the Pentagon to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Seventeen-year-old Kasmir was shown clasping a chrysanthemum and gazing at bayonet-wielding soldiers. The photo was featured in the December 30, 1969 special edition of Look magazine under the title The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet. The photo was republished world-wide and became a symbol of the flower power movement. Smithsonian magazine later called it "a gauzy juxtaposition of armed force and flower child innocence".
James Kenneth Ward Atherton was a press photographer active in Washington D.C. for over forty years.
He came out of nowhere, and it took me years to find out who he was ... his name was Harris.
The young man in the 1967 photograph -- an 18-year-old stage actor named George Harris