Flower Power (photograph)

Photographed by Bernie Boston on October 21, 1967 while he was sitting on the wall of The Mall entrance by the Pentagon. Flower Power, 1967

Flower Power is an historic photograph taken by photographer Bernie Boston for the now-defunct Washington Star, nominated for the 1967 Pulitzer Prize.^[1] Taken on October 21, 1967 during a march to the Pentagon, the iconic photo shows a young, long-haired Vietnam protestor in a turtleneck sweater, placing carnations into the barrel of a rifle of a National Guardsman.

When the antiwar demonstrators approached The Pentagon, Boston was sitting on top of a wall of the Mall Entrance of the Pentagon when he saw a lieutenant marched a squad of guardsmen into the crowd of demonstrators. The squad then formed a semicircle around the demonstrators, and out of the crowd was the young man in the photo that emerged and started placing carnations in the rifles. Boston took it as an opportunity to capture the moment, or a decisive moment as put in journalistic terms, seeing that “everything came together” and he had a good angle sitting on top of the wall.

When Boston showed the photograph to his editor at the Washington Star, he “didn’t see the importance of the picture” so it was put aside. Instead, Boston started entering it in photography competitions, and that is where it earned its recognition.^[2]

Subject

Young protesters shown at the same march at the Pentagon on October 21, 1967

Many debates have been brought up as to who the young demonstrator is placing the carnations in the gun barrels on that day. According to a 2007 Washington Post article by David Montgomery, his name is George Edgerly Harris III. Harris was a young actor from New York, about 18 years old, and on the similar mecca to San Francisco that the hippie movement was famous for. There, he would come out as being gay, change his name to Hibiscus, and was co-founder of the Cockettes, a “flamboyant, psychedelic gay-themed drag troupe.”

Harris died in the dawn of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s.^[3]

Other disputes have suggested the protestor is Joel Tornabene, suggested by a Huffington Post article written by Paul Krassner in 2008, right after Bernie Boston’s death. Tornabene was described by Krassner “as an unheralded Yippie organizer known as Super-Joel,” convincing him that his grandfather was Mafia boss Sam Giancana and escaped the wrath of the family business, making means by selling LSD.

However, this rumor of the Giancana relation was quickly debunked after his sister Fran wrote to Krassner after the publication of his autobiography Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture. Krassner only became aware of this information after Tornabene’s death in Mexico in 1993.^[4]

Photographer

Bernie Boston was born on May 18, 1933, in Washington, D.C., and graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in photography, after which he studied at the School of Aviation Medicine in the U.S. Air Force. He served in the Army for two years while in Germany practicing radiology “in a neurosurgical unit.” In 1958, he left the Army and returned to Washington, working in custom photofinishing.^[5]

Tired of working as a freelancer in photography, he joined the staff of the Dayton Daily News in Ohio five years later. Three years after that, he returned to Washington D.C. and joined the staff of the Washington Star, becoming the director of photography two years later, and remained in that position until the paper folded in 1981. After that, he worked at the Los Angeles Times.

In 1967, the same year he captured Flower Power, Boston was commissioned to shoot a portrait of former Black Panther H. Rap Brown. Noticing the trend of a call for civil rights in the late sixties, Boston took more images of the civil rights movement, “including a portrait of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. during his Poor People's Campaign, and other history-making events.”

Boston also photographed every American president from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton. He taught a photojournalism class at Northern Virginia Community College and at Rochester Institute of Technology.^[5]

Boston died on January 22, 2008 from Amyloidosis, a rare blood disease he had been diagnosed with in 2006.

Awards

In 1987, Boston was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Photography for a photograph of Coretta Scott King unveiling a bust of her late husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

In 1993, The National Press Photographers Association presented Boston with its highest honor, the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award—“the The honor recognizes a working photojournalist who advances, elevates, or attains unusual recognition for the profession by their conduct, initiative, leadership, skill, and devotion to duty.” ^[6] Three years later, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Sigma Delta Chi, The Society of Professional Journalists. He also served as a chairman of the NPPA Freedom of Information Committee, which is a “a private non-profit visual artists' organization formed to help define fine art to the viewing general community, to protect the interest of artists, and to provide scholarships to promising student artists.” ^[7]

Publication

Boston's photography has been published in many books which include: "The Best of Life," "Life: The First Fifty Years," "150 Years of Photojournalism," "Life's Classic Moments," and a myriad of textbooks on government and photography.^[5]

Symbolic significance

A young woman offers a flower as a symbol of peace to a Military Police Officer at the October 21st march at the Pentagon.

The Flower Power movement was birthed in Berkeley, California as means of symbolic protest against the Vietnam War. According to beatnik writer Allen Ginsberg, in his November 1965 essay titled How to make a March/ Spectacle, in which he promoted the use of “masses of flowers” to hand to policemen, press, politicians and spectators to civilly fight violence with peace.

The use of nonviolent objects such as toys, flags, candy and music were meant so that their movement was not associated with anger or violence. They even went as far as trying to negate the rallies of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, that supported the war.

Critical acclaim

This photo has had an influential effect on both the antiwar movement of the sixties, and for a visual representation of how photojournalism can help with a movement. Specific exhibits and discussions have been curated solely around this photo by Boston to display the political, curtural and social aspects of the Flower Power movement. Although it is usually overshadowed by psychedelic drug use, it served to bring clarity in the midst both the Civil Rights Movement and when the Vietnam war set in.^[8]

The exhibit, "From Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation," was featured at Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts which displayed Boston's image as a large gelatin silver print. At this exhibit, it used this image as a representation of the antiwar movement.^[9]

Mass reproduction

As a result of this image being a representation of an influential movement in American history, there has been a mass reproduction of it in forms of posters and blog articles written about it. Although it was captured in a very decisive moment of American History, its message remains constant through later generations, remaining relevant and timely throughout.^[10][11]

See also

• Jan Rose Kasmir, for a similar photograph taken by Marc Riboud the same day

References