Iconic Photographs

Over Easter, I decided to throw most of my essay research out of the window and start again.  As I am aiming to produce iconic photographs, I will be researching iconic images and trying to discover what makes them iconic for my extended essay.  Looking at the photographs featured in this blog, many of them could be described as iconic in style.

The following is a collection of iconic photographs that I may research for my essay. 

‘Jimi Hendrix’ by Gered Mankowitz	‘Jim Morrison’ by Joel Brodsky
‘David Bowie’ by Terry O’Neill	Abbey Road record cover by Iain MacMillan
‘James Dean on  Times Square’ by Dennis Stock	Publicity photo from the film ‘The Seven Year Itch’
Publicity photo from the film ‘The Wild One’	A Betty Grable publicity photo

It seems that there are many iconic photographs of pop and film stars, and I am presuming (as I haven’t done a great deal of theoretical research yet) that it is the aim of the photographer to produce such iconic and memorable images.

‘Guerrillero Heroico’ by Alberto Korda	Portrait of Mao Zedong	‘Times Square Kiss’ by
‘Migrant Mother’ by Dorothea Lange	‘Iwo Jima’ by Joe Rosenthal	‘Winston Churchill’ byb Yousef Karsch
‘Afghan Girl’ by Steve McCurry	‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel’ by Robert Howlett	‘Christine Keeler’ by Lewis Morley
‘Ernest Hemmingway’ by Yousef Karsch	‘Buzz Aldrin’ by Neil Armstrong	‘They’re Coming’ by Helmut Newton

All these photographs feature people.  There are iconic photographs that are not portraits, but I am concentrating my efforts on the iconic portrait because that is what I am trying to achieve in my work.

Most of these photographs looks too ‘obvious’ for me to research, but that is the whole point. Iconic images are well known to most of us.
The rest of my research on iconic images will be featured further in my journal in the section ‘THE ICONIC IMAGE’.