This Day In Photographyy, 1937: The Hindenburg

On May 6, 1937, the German zeppelin Hindenberg exploded while attempting to moor in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 people. The disaster resulted in the death of the commercial trans-Atlantic zeppelin service and the rise of the mass news media. On this date, still photographers, filmmakers, and radio broadcasters put together a perfect storm of coverage that set the stage for the future of communications.
     At least it seems that way to me, but I’m no historian. Yet I can’t think of any event before the Hindenburg explosion that equaled it’s multi-media coverage.
     There are a couple of angles here that are interesting for photographers today.
     (And lots of interesting trivia: According to this article, the Hindenburg was to have been filled with non-flammable helium; however, the United States owned all the world’s helium and had placed an embargo against selling it to Nazi Germany. The Graf Zeppelin Company, which built the Hindenburg, turned to hydrogen as an lifting agent. Kapow!)

      But back to pictures: At this point in history, almost everyone recognizes the shot of the Hindenburg exploding. Many have seen the short film clip of the disaster. And of course there is radio announcer Ralph Morrison’s live description:

Oh, it’s flashing, it’s flashing terribly. It’s bursting into flames and falling on the mooring mast. Oh, this is one of the worst catastrophes…the flames are leaping 400, 500 feet into the sky. It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen, the smoke and the flames. And now it’s crashing to the ground, not quite at the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity.

As author Bill Jay (winner of this year’s International Center of Photography Infinity Award for writing) has noted, “it was these words which the image [of the disaster], published in the next morning’s newspapers, brought to life and made close-up and real. The potent combination of words and image, sound and sight, gave the Hindenburg photograph a special, unique power…."
     But who made the iconic image? That is a problematic question. The arrival of the Hindenburg was big news. The zeppelin had taken off from Frankfurt, Germany on the night of May 3, amid heavy publicity marking the first trans-Atlantic zeppelin flight of 1937, and there were many photographers and film crews on hand record its arrival. Jay says that the Hindenburg image recalled by any particular person might have been made by any number of photographers, since the images were so similar to each other. There was Charles Hoff of the New York Daily News, Gus Pasquarella of the Philadelphia Bulletin, and Murray Becker of the Associated Press., to name a few.
     Jay notes that Beaumont Newhall included a Hindenberg image in his definitive “The History of Photography,” and that the shot is credited to photographer Sam Shere. “Shere’s name therefore should have entered the ranks of the “greats” in photographic history,” writes Jay. But today Shere is not particularly well known, a fact from which Jay draws an amazing conclusion:

It does raise an intriguing issue in the field of photography in general: If its images can be so memorable without any interest in or knowledge of the author then perhaps the cult of personality fostered by academia is misplaced. Individuality of expression, the stress on authorship, the emphasis on a pantheon of master-photographers, might all be irrelevant.

I wonder if photography at least hasn’t changed somewhat in recent years, with greater emphasis put on the idea of authorship and art. Thoughts?—David Schonauer

Comments

[Fred B]

Is this an example of Orphan work ? ...who was paid for this usage ? anyone ?

[John Lucaites]

At the risk of self promotion, you might read the chapter "Ritualizing Modernity's Gamble" in No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy (U. of Chicago UP, 2007) where Robert Hariman and I trace out the development of the history/history of circulation of the Hindenburg photo AND compare it with the explosion of the Challenger that occurred almost fifty years later (off by only a few months).

[David Schonauer]

Thanks for this...I definitely will do that. The comparison between the two events is really interesting.

[larry danick]

larry has a man-gina