(June 4) -- A man helplessly tries to stop a convoy of tanks with his body. Three firefighters raise an American flag in the rubble of the World Trade Center. A turtle-necked hippie places a carnation in the barrel of a rifle during a Vietnam War protest.
You can never predict when a single photograph will transcend that day's front page and become an icon of an era. You just know it when it does. And in the case of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, that picture arrived Thursday.
A sea bird encased in oil, looking more like some mutated prehistoric creature, struggles along the shore of East Grand Terre Island in Louisiana.
Taken by Associated Press photographer Charlie Riedel, the arresting image was packaged as part of a photo gallery of affected wildlife along the Gulf Coast. All the photographs are heartbreaking: A tiny bird lies on its back, its legs up in the air as if rigor mortis had set in prematurely; a brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana, flails, open-billed, in the murky water.
But there's something about Riedel's first picture, the creature-from-the-deep image, that clearly makes it the anointed one that everyone is talking about and the one that everyone will remember for decades to come.
Why? Well, for most people, the answer lies in a question. What is it? Is it duck? A sea bird? There's so much oil on this animal that you're hard-pressed to tell where the wing actually begins or where the beak ends. As Charles Ledford, a commercial photographer in Richmond, Va., told me, "It's a riddle of sorts. It asks the question, 'What can this be?' rather than telling us immediately, this is an oil-soaked pelican."
That's it exactly. (For the record, I don't actually think this is a pelican, but who can say?) There's something positively mutant about this bird, as if its body had become a host for some alien life form Jules Verne could never have imagined. Australian platypus by way of Chernobyl.
Robert Longhitano, a photographer in Philadelphia, agrees. "As soon as the lead photo popped up on my screen, it shook me to the core. I literally had to fight back the tears. It's truly an iconic image. In my mind, it's as if this spill took something beautiful and turned it into a monster."
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-why-oil-soaked-bird-photo-is-the-iconic-gulf-oil-spill-image/19503566