an inspector calls generation essay

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Older Vs Younger Generation in an Inspector Calls

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Published: Jun 29, 2018

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Introduction, an inspector calls: older and younger generation.

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Grade 9: The Older v Younger Generation

An inspector calls, by aysha amzad.

How successfully does Priestley present different attitudes between the older and younger generations in An Inspector Calls?

In "An Inspector Calls," Priestley successfully presents different attitudes between the older and younger generations. The younger generation represent a false sense of hope, because in the end, the capitalist patriarchy overcomes them. However, the older generation is trapped by hubris, because they are too obstinate to acknowledge their faults and choose to forget the inspector's lesson.

Throughout the play, Sheila is seen as the proxy of the inspector, yet ultimately giving a false sense of hope that she has truly learned her lesson. She changes from being in the comfort of complacency in capitalist society to being a representative of socialist change. When she exclaims " these girls aren't cheap labour, they're people ," we glimpse Sheila's change. The contrast of " they’re people " portrays her raw emotion of being faced with the bitter reality of her father and fiance exploiting helpless workers. They are forced to operate within a cartel, so they do not have the viable option to work in another factory. However, Sheila refers to the women as " girls " which could suggest that she too has a diminished identity as woman. Despite her high status in society, this isn’t enough to overcome the patriarchal dismissal of women.

However, once the inspector leaves Sheila seems powerless to retain the inspector’s lesson. Gerald confirms Sheila's somewhat reluctant acceptance of capitalism. When he offers " what about this ring? " Sheila replies, " I must think ," which implies that she has not changed. The fact that she even considers the potential marriage after Gerald's newfound affair and Eva’s suicide explicitly portrays how she has not learned her lesson.

For example, she later goes on to say " it was my fault she was so desperate ," therefore blaming herself for Gerald's affair. In 19th century society, women were conditioned from birth to blame themselves for men's faults, trying to pretend that they were content with their unequal marriage. The curtailed phrase " just out of pity " further emphasises her attempt at deluding herself that Gerald is truly, in fact, her “ fairy Prince ” and not someone who, in actuality, had a premeditated plan to install Eva in his friend's apartment in order to sexually exploit her for less money than a prostitute at the Palace Bar.

Alternatively, Sheila has learned her lesson, but Priestly suggests that because of the patriarchy, a woman did not have a voice to advocate for political change, and therefore, he is also implying the severe inequality of capitalist society and that having a socialist reform would restore said equality.

Similarly, Eric represents the younger generation, but he follows the attitudes of Gerald and Mr. Birling in that he, out of cowardice, chooses to delude himself by trivialising his heinous crimes towards Eva. He normalises his sexual violation by using the euphemism " I was in that state when a chap easily turns nasty ." The phrase “ that state ” implies that his behaviour is universally accepted as typically male because it is so common. He sees himself as a good “chap”, who is terribly influenced by drinking. Priestley makes Eric use the third person of " chap " as a way of displaying Eric's deceiving nature, as he used this to disassociate from his guilt in how he treated Eva. Thus Eric is the epitome of sexual exploitation in the play.

Mr. Birling represents the upper class exploitation of the working classes, full of Eva Smiths and John Smiths. Just as Eric knows his behaviour is criminal, Birling knows his treatment of the strike leaders is criminal. So, when Birling says " we were paying the usual rates, and if they did not like those rates, they could go and work somewhere else ," he essentially justifies sacking Eva despite knowing full well that the Birlings and Crofts are an illegal cartel. They can’t “ go and work somewhere else ” if that somewhere is a factory. This criminality reveals there is only a very slight difference between the younger and older generations.

Furthermore, the Inspector accuses all the male characters of being the issue in society, regardless of their generation. This is significant because Priestly conveys that they are equal in attitudes despite their age. So he warns, " If men will not learn, they will be taught in fire and blood and anguish ." The distinctive address to men portrays how women had no influence or voice in the patriarchal society of 1912. The triplet " fire, blood, and anguish " is a direct reference to the war, emphasising how the capitalist regime sees people as pawns to earn a profit as they are merely expendable, just like a balance sheet of profit and loss.

Its triadic structure could also arguably imply how capitalism is anti-trinity, hence socialism would be what Christians should follow.

Therefore, Priestly captures the younger generation's false hope for socialist reform, as they seem to drown in capitalist conformity by the end, standing with capitalist constructs (Birling, Gerald), though they have little control within society. The play ultimately presents a scathing critique of capitalism and its inherent inequalities, and the failure of individuals to recognise and change their own complicity in perpetuating those inequalities.

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Generation Gap Theme in An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley Essay Example

One of the main themes presented by Priestly in an inspector calls in the generation gap, who the two generations have different ideas of responsibility, the way they treat for perceive others and changing their actions in the future. This concept at the time would make the audience question if there was a divides society with differences between the different classes which was a growing topic when the play was performed in 1945.

Priestly portrays Eric as a half shy middle-class man of the younger generation. At the start of the play in Act1 Sheila calls Eric ‘squiffy’ as he is drunk. However, Mrs Birling replies with ‘What an expression, Sheila! Really the things you girls pick up these days!’ This implies the lack of understanding or compassion for Eric and his drinking problem as Mrs. birling just dismisses it showing the lack of understanding between the two generations. The phrase ‘these days’ implies that the phrases Sheila has picked up are new or unfamiliar to Mrs. Birling further showing the generation gap as the younger generation have picked up more modern phrases while the older generation still speak in a more old and formal way. Later, in the play when Mr., Birling is being interrogated by the inspector he says. ‘He could have kept her on instead of throwing her out’ This shows that Eric sympathizes with the strikers and Eva as he says he could have not fired her. This further implies that the younger generation in general have more social responsibility and more empathy than the older generation, who do not care much if not at all and have little to no social responsibility. Towards the end of the play in Act 3 when the inspector has left Eric says, ‘And it doesn't alter the fact that we all helped to kill her.' The adjective ‘all’ suggests that Eric is not blaming it all on one individual like the older generation, instead he is saying they all did things that helped caused Eva Smith’s death. Additionally, the phrase ‘doesn’t alter’ implies that Eric is taking responsibility for his actions as he knows he cannot change them showing that the younger generation can take responsibility and the older generation cannot.

Priestly portrays Sheila as a selfish and generic upper-class woman of the younger generation at the start of the play, who is willing to change their ways later in the play. Sheila’s selfish ways were first portrayed at the start of the play when Gerald gives her an expensive engagement ring she says, ‘Now I feel really engaged’. The adverb ‘Now’ implies that Sheila did not feel engaged before showing that she needed the ring to feel engaged. Additionally, the word ‘really’ implies that she may have felt a little engaged before, she now feels really engaged because of the ring. All of this shows she was materialistic which is a selfish trait implying she was selfish. A bit later in the play when Sheila was being interrogated by the inspector she says ‘No, not really. It was my own fault.’ This implies that Sheila is taking responsibility for her actions as she says the death of Eva was her fault showing that the younger generation take responsibility for their actions unlike the older generation who blame it on everyone else. Towards the end of the play when everyone is trying to dismiss Eva’s death Sheila says, ‘There is nothing to be sorry for, nothing to learn?’ The word ‘sorry’ implies that Sheila thinks that every should still feel bad for what they have done to Eva and take responsibility. Additionally, the word ‘learn’ suggests that as well as everyone taking responsibility for their actions, they should learn what not to do in the future. In this quote, Sheila has taken the role of Priestley’s mouthpiece since the inspector has gone showing how the younger generation have changed towards the end of the play.

Mr. Birling is portrayed as a typical upper-class man of the older generation who has very capitalist views and is not willing to change. At the start of the play Mr. Birling says ‘Now you three young people, just listen to this... by the time you’ll be living in a world that’ll have forgotten all these Capital versus Labour agitators and these silly little war scares’ The word ‘silly’ implies that Mr. Birling sees the war talks as hoaxes and that they won’t happen showing his lack of understanding and naiveness. The word ‘little’ shows how big Mr. Birling thinks the scale of the war talks are further showing his lack of understanding. The phrase ‘forgotten all these Capital vs Labour’ agitators shows that Mr. Birling thinks that no one will vote labour as he is a strong capitalist supporter. Later on, in the play Mr. Birling says ‘ I’ve got to cover this up as soon as I can’ The word ‘cover’ shows that Mr. Birling doesn’t want to take responsibility, instead he wants to cover up what he has done wrong showing that he is selfish. This is reinforced with the phrase ‘as soon as’ implying that he wants to keep his reputation at all costs not caring one bit about Eva. This idea is further reinforced when Mr. Birling says, ‘You’re the one I blame for this.’ This shows that Mr. Birling cannot take responsibility for his actions which is a common theme in the older generation. The word ‘one’ shows that he cannot take responsibility for his actions as he is blaming it all on one person. This is reenforced with the word ‘blame’ showing he thinks it was all one person’s doing unlike the younger generation who say that they all helped to kill Eva.

Priestly portrays Mrs Birling as a cold-hearted upper-class woman who is unable to change or take responsibility for her actions. In Act 2 Mrs Birling says, ‘Girls of that class.’ This shows Mrs. Birling’s cold heartedness and lack of care for Eva. The word ‘that’ suggests that Mrs Birling thinks she is on a whole different level to Eva believing she is more superior to her. This would have been a common belief of the upper class at the time as the country at the time was very capitalist. Later on, Mrs Birling says, ‘As if a girl of that sought would refuse money.’ The word ‘sought’ reenforces the idea of Mrs birling being very classist and snobby, thinking she is superior to everyone with less money. The phrase ‘as if’ implies that Mrs Birling thinks its almost impossible that a girl would refuse money showing her stereotypical capitalist views on the lower class. Towards the end of the play, Mrs Birling says, ‘But I think she has only herself to blame’ This shows that Mrs Birling like Mr Birling does not care about Eva and does not take responsibility for her actions.

Priestly portrays Gerald as a well-mannered upper-class man who is a mix of both the older and younger generation. Just before Gerald is about to be interrogated by the inspector he says ‘We can keep it from him’ This shows that like the older generation, Gerald cannot take responsibility for what he has done so he has resorted to hiding the truth. However later on when he finds out what happened he says ‘I’m rather more – upset – by this business than I probably appear to be’ This shows that unlike the older generation, actually cared about Eva up to a point. This separates him from the older generation. However, towards the end of the play Gerald says ‘Everything is alright now Sheila.’ This shows that Gerald has completely forgotten what he has done and is dismissing it. This implies that he has learned nothing.

In conclusion, the generation gap is one of Priestley’s biggest topic in an inspector calls because when the play was performed in 1945 after the second world war, it was a time where the divisions of classes were being lost and more equality acts were being put in which the two generations in the play had very different views on.

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Example Essay: Age

How does Priestley explore the difference in attitudes between older and younger generations in An Inspector Calls?

‘An Inspector Calls’ is about responsibility. Priestley purposely contrasts the responsibility of the younger generation and the irresponsibility of the older generation to suggest the younger generation are the hope for the future.

Priestley presents the attitude of older characters through the character of Arthur Birling. Before the Inspector arrives, Arthur Birling boasts to Gerald and Eric that ‘a man has to mind his own business, look after himself and his own’. Arthur Birling appears proud of his selfish business model. The use of the words ‘his’ and ‘himself’ shows that Birling only wants to protect his own interests and does not take responsibility for his workers. Priestley also has him state ‘I refused of course’ which demonstrates that Birling is proud that he refused his workers a pay rise. The words ‘of course’ suggest that Arthur Birling believes it was an obvious decision and that he acted in the right way. Priestley makes clear that Arthur Birling accepts no blame for his actions. Additionally, he conveys that Arthur Birling is more concerned about his own reputation by having him offer the inspector ‘thousands’. Priestley demonstrates that Birling has lots of money but still refuses to give his workers a pay rise which indicates that he only uses his money for selfish reasons. Priestley could have been criticising the selfish attitudes of the wealthy.

Priestley also presents the attitude of older characters through the character of Sybil Birling.. When questioned by the Inspector, Sybil states that she was ‘perfectly justified’. The word ‘perfectly’ suggests that she feels she did absolutely nothing wrong and is surprised to even be questioned about her actions. Priestley has Sybil say the word ‘justified’ more than once, to emphasise how right she feels she was in denying help to Eva Smith. Priestley also presents Sybil as prejudiced when she describes Eva Smith as one of many ‘girls of that class’. The words ‘that class’ conveys Sybil looks down on the working class and believes they are all bad people. Perhaps Priestley put Sybil in charge of a charity in order to criticise wealthy people who used charities to make themselves look good rather than helping the poor.

Priestley presents the difference between older and younger characters through the character of Sheila. It is clear that, before the Inspector’s arrival, Sheila is immature and selfish. She is extremely ‘pleased’ with herself at the start of the play because she is engaged. When the Inspector arrives, Sheila takes responsibility for her actions and admits she had Eva Smith fired. However, when the Inspector questions Sheila, Sheila goes as far as to say ‘I started it’. Priestley makes clear that Shiela immediately accepts responsibility, unlike her father, who was the one who started it by refusing to give Eva a pay rise. Priestley contrasts Sheila with Sybil, who says ‘I was perfectly justified’ and Arthur, who says ‘I can’t accept any responsibility’. Whereas Sheila, a guilty character, acknowledges her mistakes, Arthur and Sybil refuse to admit that they did anything wrong. Through Sheila’s character, Priestley suggests the younger generation are more responsible and will bring change to society.

Priestley also presents the difference between older and younger characters through the character of Eric. When questioned by the Inspector, Priestley makes clear Eric feels guilty by having him describe his actions as ‘hellish’. The word ‘hellish’ shows Eric regrets his actions and takes responsibility. Priestley also presents Eric as responsible when he has him say ‘you’re beginning to pretend that nothing really happened’. These words show Eric is angry with his parents because unlike him they will not take responsibility. Priestley contrasts Eric, a guilty and ashamed man, with Sybil, who says to the inspector ‘go and look for the father of the child’. Priestley’s use of dramatic irony when Sybil says these words reveals how little Sybil understands about her son’s actions. Priestley uses Eric to contrast the older generation because he realises that he should still feel guilty but his parents are happy to forget their actions.

In ‘An Inspector Calls’, Priestley exposes the lack of responsibility among the middle and upper classes and offers a cry for change, commanding his 1945 audience to show greater compassion for the working classes and promote greater social responsibility in British society. Priestley uses the contrast between older and younger characters in the play to reveal the chasm between traditional classist attitudes and more progressive socialist ideals, hoping that the transformation of his younger characters will propel his audience on the same trajectory and build a fairer, more equal society for all.

Priestley uses the character of Arthur Birling to exhibit the selfish, capitalist attitudes of many wealthy businessmen in the 1900s. Before the Inspector arrives, Arthur Birling boasts to Gerald and Eric that ‘a man has to mind his own business, look after himself and his own’. Priestley’s repetition of the words ‘his’ and ‘himself’ emphasise how much Arthur Birling protects his own interests, and how little responsibility he takes for others outside of his own family. This becomes even clearer when Arthur Birling states ‘I refused, of course’ in response to the Inspector’s questions about Eva Smith. Birling ‘refused’ to give a very small pay rise to his workers because he is more interested in his own profits than their welfare. The words ‘of course’ suggest that Arthur Birling is arrogant, and is surprised to even be questioned about his actions, which he clearly feels were justified. Priestley uses the Inspector’s arrival to challenge the way the Birlings behaved. While some of the characters respond well to the Inspector’s questioning, Arthur Birling accepts no blame for his part in Eva Smith’s death. He is more concerned about his own reputation and tries to pay off the Inspector, offering ‘thousands’ if the Inspector will keep quiet about his involvement. The fact that Birling can afford ‘thousands’, yet ‘refused’ a small pay rise to his workers, demonstrates his lack of responsibility for others. Priestley could have been criticising capitalist values through presenting Arthur Birling in this way.

Priestley’s presentation of Sybil Birling as prejudiced and unsympathetic reveals the ineffectiveness of private charities as a means of support and welfare for the working classes in 1912. When questioned by the Inspector about why she influenced others in her charitable organisation to refuse help to Eva Smith, Sybil states that she was ‘perfectly justified’. The word ‘perfectly’, a bit like the words ‘of course’ when Arthur Birling explains himself, suggest that she feels she did absolutely nothing wrong and is surprised to even be questioned about her actions. Priestley has Sybil say the word ‘justified’ more than once, to emphasise how right she feels she was in denying help to Eva Smith. It is clear that, although Sybil should be always looking to help others, she is too judgemental to offer help to the working classes. She describes Eva Smith as one of many ‘girls of that class’. The words ‘that class’ have a very snobbish tone, suggesting that Sybil Birling sees herself as superior and looks down on the working classes. It is clear that she thinks the working classes are not deserving of help and should accept responsibility for the trouble they find themselves in. This is highly hypocritical, given that she is supposed to be working for an organisation that will help them. Priestley could have deliberately put Sybil in charge of a charity in order to criticise private organisations run by wealthy individuals, who were less interested in the people they were helping, and more interested in how it made them look. Perhaps he was proposing that the only way people would be able to get the help they needed was through government run organisations, such as the NHS, which was established in the same year that he wrote the play.

Priestley contrasts Sybil and Arthur’s unsympathetic attitudes with Sheila’s guilt. It is clear that, before the Inspector’s arrival, Sheila is immature and selfish. She is extremely ‘pleased’ with herself at the start of the play because she is engaged to a respectable gentleman, and the entire family are celebrating her engagement. When the Inspector arrives, Sheila is forced to face up to the fact that she selfishly had Eva Smith fired from her job at Milwards because she was jealous of her good looks. It is clear, therefore, that Sheila had quite willingingly misused her parents’ account at Milwards to get what she wanted. However, when the Inspector questions Sheila, Sheila goes as far as to say ‘I started it’. The audience knows, in fact, that it was Arthur Birling who started it but, unlike Sheila, Arthur Birling feels no sympathy and no guilt. Through Sheila’s character, Priestley offers hope to his audience that the younger generation will be more socially responsible, and will take actions that benefit others.

Priestley contrasts Arthur and Sybil’s double standards with Eric’s guilt. When the family learn that Eric is the father of Eva Smith’s unborn child, both parents are shocked; they could never have imagined that their son would have got himself involved with a working class girl in this way. However, as soon as they learn from Gerald that the Inspector isn’t real, they are happy to return to the way things were, feeling confident in the knowledge that Eric’s actions won’t damage their reputation. In this sense, they display double standards. Arthur Birling was highly critical of Eva Smith for stepping out of line in asking for a pay rise, yet seems happy to ignore and forget the irresponsible behaviour of his son. Sybil looks down on ‘girls of that class’ for getting themselves into difficult situations, yet is also happy to return to the celebratory mood in spite of the fact that it was her own son who contributed to Eva Smith’s situation. Eric, on the other hand, feels terrible guilt for his actions. When questioned by the Inspector, he describes the circumstances in which he met Eva Smith as ‘hellish’. It is clear that he regrets drinking too much and forcing himself upon her. He cannot believe it when his parents are prepared to go back to the way things were, accusing them of ‘beginning to pretend now that nothing really happened at all’. Priestley uses Eric’s confrontational attitude to highlight the extreme difference in the thoughts and behaviour of the older and younger characters and to suggest that the younger generation will need to be forceful in order to change the bad habits of the older generation.

Priestley challenges traditional age roles in the play. In 1912, it would have been expected that young people respected and obeyed their elders. By the end of the play, however, Sheila and Eric begin to challenge their parents’ values, giving hope that society can change for the better. The Inspector has activated their conscience and, through displaying this, Priestley hopes to activate his audience’s conscience too. Perhaps he hoped the audience would leave feeling proud that a new socialist Labour party had been voted in earlier that year, and were set to make changes that would create greater equality for all.

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An Inspector Calls

Generation vs generation alexandra rozanski 11th grade.

There are drastic differences that are seen in people who are born in different generations. One may argue that the younger generations are more impressionable and naive while the older generations are very hardheaded and assertive. By creating characters like Sheila and Eric with a large age gap between Mr. and Mrs. Birling in the play An Inspector Calls, tension is created through their differences clashing. J.B. Priestley’s use of contrasting characterization within the Birling family in the play An Inspector Calls creates tension and communicates his theme that one must take into consideration the consequences of their actions and take responsibility for them.

The Birling’s children, Erica and Sheila, are presumed to be very naive and still listening and agreeing with their parent’s words due to their ages. Yet, thought the play both Eric and Sheila prove to be mentally mature and responsible while directly reflect the inspector’s message. Eric Birling was caught up in the complicated situation relating to the death of Eva Smith through his role in impregnating her. Although he is ashamed, he steps up to the plate and confesses his actions and even admits to the fact that “I wasn’t in love with her or anything”, yet he...

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An Inspector Calls

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Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls in attempt to change what society valued. He wanted British society to value people and not profit. This is quite a fundamental change when you consider that Britain ran the slave trade for profit; sent working men to their deaths in the mines for profit; and created an empire that was built on the suffering of human beings, for profit.

Britain - and the west in general - has struggled to put people before profit since forever, and priestley wanted to change that., however, the trouble with fundamental change is that it takes time - often generations have to pass before it is really accepted - and the bitter truth is that a lot of people can't keep up. the image of the racist old uncle at a family gathering is a cliche for a reason: older people tend to struggle to keep up with change, simply because their previous prejudices were so engrained. if you were brought up in the late 1800s, for example, believing that people of colour were inferior to white europeans, then it's no surprise that by the time you're in your 80s you'll be struggling to deal with the civil rights movement., this isn't true for everyone, of course, and lots of people do change. there are lots and lots of older people who embrace newness and see the positivity that can come when tired, old ideas are put aside for fairer, more innovative solutions. mr and mrs birling are not like that; though their children very definitely are..., the older generation, mr birling is adamant that he won't change. even as he is being challenged by the inspector he makes it clear that he " can't " take responsibility for everyone, and throughout the interrogation birling constantly tries to get out of taking the blame. immediately after the inspector leaves, birling blames his son for the whole thing which demonstrates clearly that he has learnt nothing. as soon as gerald makes it clear that the inspector wasn't real birling begins to show his relief, calling the whole thing " moonshine ," and claiming "w e've been had, that's all ." he wants sheila to take the ring back and he wants to go back to normal. he has not changed., mrs birling does the same - though her repeated arguments that she " wasn't fooled " show that she's not only resisted the changed, but feels so disgusted by the process that she feels the need to claim she wasn't ever even affected by the event. she also, like her husband, dismisses the event and tries to go back to normal. one of the first things she does is tell her children that they're " overtired ," which is simply her going back to treating her children like the infants they were at the beginning of the play., the younger generation:, shiela and eric have definitely changed - and sheila even more so than her brother. at the beginning of the play, both sheila and eric are infantilised by their parents (which means they are treated like small children.) both eric and sheila live up to this by bickering over the dinner table. during the inspector's visit, however, we can see sheila growing up. she refuses to leave the room when asked, she stands up to her parents, and, at one point, reminds them that " i'm not a child, don't forget . " and after the inspector leaves she remains determined and resolute in her desire to stand up to her parents: " the point is, you don't seem to have learnt anything ." eric is similar, in that he also stands up to his parents, but often is best summarised by the line: " sheila is right. " in this play, the younger generation change, and sheila is at their head., it's also worth reflecting on the fact that any teenagers watching this play in 1945 would have been encouraged to identify with sheila and eric. and those teenagers grew up into the rebellious 1950s, and then came the counter culture movements of the 1960s and 1970s where thousands of teenagers protested for civil rights, peace and harmony amongst all peoples., gerald: the man in the middle, gerald is often presented as someone who sits between the generations and this is reflected in his behaviour. he is an aristocrat, which, in the play makes him a part of the older world. however, he is also much younger than birling. his character arc here, means he changes when the inspector is around and then changes back once the inspector has gone. almost as though he can see priestley's truth while it is presented to him; but, left to his own devices, he will shift back to his old ways., socialism, capitalism and age, at one point the inspector agrees that he is having an impact on sheila by saying: " we often do on the young ones ." this has been historically very true. there is an old saying that everyone becomes more right wing as we get older. the idea is that socialism, the left wing, believe in justice and fairness; and that a belief in justice and fairness is a little naive. the theory is that since life isn't actually like that, the older you get the more cynical you become and the more you decide you'd quite like to keep what you've earned, thank-you very much. as a result, you naturally become more right wing., this is often proven in elections when younger voters tend to vote labour, while older voters tend to vote tory. in this play, priestley presents the younger generation as being more capable of changing, and it's quite possible that this is the reason why younger people tend to be more socialist. as an ideology, capitalism is really very similar to darwinism, which is the system that runs the natural world - the strong survive, the weak die off. socialist ideas, however, often mark the areas where human civilisation differs from the natural world - we work together, we support one another, and we help those in need in a way that animals don't., if the shift from capitalism to socialism is really a shift from darwinism to civilisation, then it is to be expected that the young - who are simply one step further away from our animal pasts - will be more ready to adapt., quotes bank, mr birling : ‘now you three young people, just listen to this.. by the time you’ll be living in a world that’ll have forgotten all these capital versus labour agitators and these silly little war scares’ this is a great example of mr birling's arrogance - he's older and thinks he knows best - but the audience at the time knew that the labour and war scares were very real and would lead to decades of death and disaster. so much for wisdom, mr bilring: 'you've a lot to learn yet' (about eric), sheila - “we are all to blame”, sheila - “mother – stop – stop”, mrs birling: you seem to have made a great impression on this child, inspector. inspector: we often do on the young ones. they’re more impressionable., sheila - “the point is, you don’t seem to have learnt anything”, eric – “i'm ashamed of you as well - both of you”, eric – “the fact remains that i did what i did. and mother did what she did. and the rest of you did what you did to her.", " you began to learn something. and now you’ve stopped… it frightens me the way you talk, and i can’t listen to any more of it ." here, sheila shows how the older generation may seem to learn things before going back to their old ways. sheila, though, as part of the younger generation is showing how capable of change she is . the fact that she says they "frighten " her is quite central here though, as it really reflects the wars and turmoil that were on their way., ‘now look at the pair of them - the famous younger generation who know it all. and they can’t even take a joke-’ mr birling can be a real idiot sometimes..

An Inspector Calls: A* / L9 Example Intro + Paragraph

Here are some samples of an essay on An Inspector Calls, on the theme of responsibility. I wrote these myself as a teacher to show students an example of the standard required to get a high level at GCSE. I’ve also broken down the structure below so you can see what to put into each paragraph and how to organise all of your ideas – this is the most important thing for getting a high level in an essay !

Thanks for reading! If you’re stuck on An Inspector Calls and need more help, you can access our full course .

How does Priestley explore the theme of responsibility in the play?

EXAMPLE INTRO:

Responsibility is a very important theme in An Inspector Calls, as the Inspector reveals one by one that all the Birling family are partly responsible for Eva’s death. Eva represents the lower classes, and Priestley uses the tragic ending of her character to spread his message about social responsibility, a message which is delivered by the Inspector himself, who acts as a mouthpiece for Priestley’s own views on socialism and equality. Overall, the audience realizes that their actions affect other people’s lives, so they are responsible for looking after and caring for everyone in society.

An Inspector Calls: Character Revision

EXAMPLE MIDDLE PARAGRAPH:

Point (one sentence that answers part of the question, your idea)
Evidence (quotes/references that prove your point)
The technique (language features/dramatic features/structure features)
Explanation (analysis – how/why the evidence proves the point)
Development (context/alternative interpretations)
Link (linking back to the argument/thesis in the Intro)

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Are you studying ‘An Inspector Calls’ at school or college? Don’t worry – we have a complete course that will help you get to grips with the text. It includes:

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JB Priestley embedded strong political messages in his play, and you need to understand those well to be able to write a high level essay or exam answer on the text. This course will enable you o revise the major characters and social messages in the play, and go deeper into the themes and context so you can get the most out of each essay

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Former top US Army general in Europe calls Ukrainian complaints about the M1 Abrams tank 'BS'

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Retired US Army general Mark Hertling challenged Ukrainian soldiers' criticisms of the M1 Abrams tank.

Ukrainian soldiers complained the armor is insufficient and that the tank has equipment issues.

Hertling said the high maintenance demands for the tanks makes them less suitable for Ukraine.

Retired US Army general Mark Hertling pushed back after Ukrainian soldiers criticized US-supplied M1 Abrams tanks during a recent interview with CNN.

"That's BS," Hertling said on Monday in response to Ukrainian soldiers who told CNN last week that the armor on the Abrams offers inadequate protection and "is not sufficient for this moment" in which exploding drones threaten anything that moves.

The Ukrainian tank crew members told CNN that what they really need is artillery and aviation assets. "We have no aviation and artillery. We have only tank. And it's the problem," one soldier said.

The soldiers also complained that the Abrams tanks are not well suited for the environment, specifically the rain and fog, which they say has damaged the electronic equipment inside the tanks.

"Some of the indicators they talked about like condensation on the instruments — that's BS," Hertling told CNN's Jessica Dean. He argued that the Abrams tank was built for war in Europe. This tank was built with the Soviet threat in mind.

Sorry for getting passionate about tanks, but there were a few things that Ukrainian tank crew said that were just not true. https://t.co/NW3rqywM7F — Mark Hertling (@MarkHertling) June 2, 2024

The former tanker and commander of United States Army Europe dismissed the Ukrainian soldiers' claims that the tank has the wrong kind of ammunition and that it couldn't bring down a house even after 17 rounds were fired into it.

The general said that "I know for a fact having fired these vehicles and having been a tanker all my life that this is a crew that is not either selecting the right weapon system or isn't maintaining their tanks very well."

Hertling said he spent three decades on the Abrams in Europe and didn't encounter the problems that the soldiers described. He suggested they were simply complaining because the vehicle broke down, noting that disgruntled tankers will sometimes give every reason for why something is not working or why "this piece of crap" is something they don't need.

That said, the Abrams "was not the best tank to give to Ukraine because there are maintenance challenges and you have to have a highly trained crew," he said. But "Ukraine continued to ask for these vehicles even though they knew there was a high maintenance standard to keep them running."

Throughout the war, Ukrainian troops have had to learn how to use a wide variety of systems, some more complicated than others. The Abrams, particularly the engine, is a complex system. And maintenance has long been a concern.

A Department of Defense Office of Inspector General report from February concluded that there wasn't a plan for sustainment and that "without deliberate and planned sustainment support, including proper spare parts, ammunition, and maintenance support, the Ukrainians would not be capable of maintaining these weapon systems in their ongoing fight against Russia's full-scale invasion."

All 31 of the Abrams tanks the US provided are currently in service with the 47th Mechanized Brigade.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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An Inspector Calls Generation Gap

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

14 May 2024

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As we study An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley we look at how a generation gap seems to form between young and older characters, particularly in Act 3 as The Inspector leaves and allows the characters to discuss amongst themselves what has happened and what they have discovered about themselves. The lesson includes differentiated activities, thought-provoking questions and opportunities to link context to the play.

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An Inspector Calls Revision

An Inspector Calls exam model answers collection. Currently includes: 2017 model essay - Mrs Birling 2017 model essay - The Inspector 2018 model essay - Eric 2018 model essay - Social class 2019 model essay - Selfishness and its effects 2019 model essay - Sheila Birling 2020 model essay - Birling 2020 model essay - Male characters as irresponsible 2021 model essay 2021 model essay 2022 model essay 2022 model essay 2023 model essay 2023 model essay

An Inspector Calls Revision 2024

An Inspector Calls revision pack for the 2024 exams. Includes the following masterclasses: * Characters * Plot * Themes * Structure and Form * Context * Football manager lesson This is the perfect pack for preparing for the English Literature Paper 2 exam, recapping all of the key specification areas for the examination. It provides adaptive learning approaches, key information sheets for revision, modelled examples and more. Find the pack useful? Leave a review and we’ll send you another resource of your choice for free. Just send an email to [email protected] after you’ve left your review.

English KS3 3 Year Complete

Over 360 English lessons and resources for Years 7, 8 and 9! The pack contains units of work for 18 terms (6 terms in Year 7, 6 in Year 8 and 6 in Year 9) for 4-5 lessons per week. The overview of the pack has been designed to ensure all elements of English Language and English Literature are covered over the three years. All 18 term lesson packs are complete with detailed, well-differentiated and easy to follow PowerPoints for every lesson, accompanying differentiated worksheets, clip links with questions, plenaries, clear LOs, starters and engaging activities. These resources include modelled examples, scaffolds, sentence starters, extensive student and teacher notes and more. You also have the option to pay through school invoice - just contact us at [email protected] and let us know you'd like to, or if you'd like to discuss different combinations of resources, discounts or any other product. If you were to buy each resource separately at a cost of £3, it would cost you around £930! Includes the following packs: Year 7 A Midsummer Night's Dream (Literature Paper 1) Travel Writing (Language P2 Section A) Myths and Legends (Language P1 Section A) Cirque du Freak (Literature P1) Science Fiction (Language P1 and Q5) Poetry From Other Cultures (Literature Paper 2) Year 8 Richard III (Literature P1) Gothic Fiction (Language P1 Q5) War Poetry (Literature P2) Animal Farm (Language P1 Section A) Non-Fiction Reading (Lang P2 Section A) Non-Fiction Writing (Magazine Project - Language P2 Question 5) Year 9 Of Mice And Men (Language P1 Section A) Non-Fiction Writing (Language P2 Q5) Modern Drama (Literature P2): Our Day Out Language P2 - Non-Fiction Extracts Othello (Literature P1) Short Stories / Descriptive and Narrative Writing (Language P1 Q5)

An Inspector Calls

An Inspector Calls **TES AWARD NOMINATED** - Over 20 hours worth of fully differentiated lessons (powerpoints, worksheets and exam practice / prep) + a GCSE revision guide AND a knowledge organiser. A bundle of very highly rated lessons, projects and revision sessions for the study of An Inspector Calls. It basically covers everything you need to teach 'An Inspector Calls' and get successful results (I do). If you think there's anything missing, let me know. Hope you find this useful, as a Head of English I have given this to my whole department to use and they are very pleased about how much time they've saved. Here is the order of lessons: 1 - Introduction 2 - Act One Introduction 3 - Arthur Birling 4 - The Inspector 5 - Responsibility 6 - Sheila Birling 7 - Gerald Croft 8 - Sheila Birling and Historical Context 9 - Gerald and Daisy 10 - Mrs Birling 11- Eric Birling 12 - Eric and Eva 13 - The Inspector Leaves 14 - Young and Old 15 - The End 16 - Revision Guide 17 - Knowledge Organiser 18 - Exam Practice Pack 19 - Revision Session 20 - Scheme of Work document

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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

A group of experts met to discuss the images that have best captured — and changed — the world since 1955.

Supported by

By M.H. Miller , Brendan Embser , Emmanuel Iduma and Lucy McKeon

Published June 3, 2024 Updated June 4, 2024, 12:05 p.m. ET

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Of the dozens of photographers not represented here that a reasonable person might expect to have been included, the most conspicuous absentees include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. Putting together a list of the 25 most significant photographs since 1955 — both fine art photos and reportage — proved a difficult task for the panelists (even the chosen time frame was controversial). They were: the Canadian conceptual photographer Stan Douglas , 63; the Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê , 64; the acting chief curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, 66; the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas , 75; the American photographer Shikeith , 35; and Nadia Vellam, 51, T’s photo and video director. Each participant (including myself, the moderator, 36) submitted up to seven possible nominees for the list. We gathered at The New York Times Building on a morning last February (with Shikeith joining on video from a shoot in Los Angeles) to begin our deliberations.

We chose judges from the realms of both fine art and reportage because, increasingly, the line between the two has collapsed. The modern age has been defined by photographs — images that began their lives in newspapers or magazines are repurposed as art; art has become a vehicle for information. Therefore, it was important to us and our jurors that we not draw boundaries between what was created as journalism and what was created as art. What was important was that the photographs we chose changed, in some way, how we see the world.

Six people sit around a circular table. On the wall, a t.v. showing an image of that room.

The conversation naturally turned into a series of questions. Like how important was it for a photograph to have expanded the possibilities of the medium? And how much did it matter who took a photo and what their intentions were? The list that emerged is less concerned with a historical chronology or an accepted canon than it is with a set of themes that have been linked indelibly to the photographic medium since its inception: labor and activism; war; the self and the family. Intriguingly, beyond an image by Wolfgang Tillmans from the ’90s, fashion photography is largely absent. So, too, are many world historical events that have been captured in landmark photographs, including the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall and anything from the pandemic lockdown or the presidency of Donald Trump. There were just too many other photographs to consider.

The process of producing the final list was clearly not scientific. It was more of a debate among a certain group of people on a certain day and is best considered that way. At the end of nearly four hours, jittery from caffeine, the group stood before a pile of crumpled masterworks on the floor as we assembled our chosen 25 images on a conference table. Many of our questions weren’t resolved (indeed, are unresolvable), but the results — which aren’t ranked but rather presented in the order in which we discussed them — are nothing if not surprising. — M.H. Miller

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

M.H. Miller: I thought we should start by talking about the time frame we settled on, starting in 1955.

Stan Douglas: It’s an agenda.

Miller: A little bit. It certainly shows an American bias, so I apologize to our Canadian representative — 1955 is really the beginning of the American civil rights movement, an era from which a number of us nominated photographs, and photography was so important in just making people aware of what was going on in the country. An-My, you chose Robert Frank’s picture of a streetcar in New Orleans, taken that year.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

Robert Frank used “Trolley — New Orleans” as the original cover of his influential photo book “The Americans,” first published in the United States in 1959. Frank, a Swiss émigré, spent two years traveling the States and capturing what he saw. In this photograph, two Black passengers sit at the rear of a New Orleans streetcar while four white passengers sit at the front; all look out from a row of windows, the mullions between them emphasizing their strict separation. At the time of its publication, “The Americans” was considered by several critics to be a pessimistic, angry portrait of the country. (The magazine Popular Photography famously called it a “warped” and “wart-covered” depiction “by a joyless man.”) Many more viewers and artists, however, found inspiration in the direct, unromantic style pioneered by Frank, whose outsider status likely let him view America’s contradictions from a clarifying distance. He had “sucked a sad poem out of America onto film,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in an introduction to the book. This image, shot in the months before the Montgomery bus boycotts made segregation a national debate, showed America to itself, as if for the first time. The faces in the photographs, Kerouac wrote, don’t “editorialize or criticize, or say anything but ‘this is the way we are in real life.’” — Emmanuel Iduma

An-My Lê: I tried to look for things that spoke to me, but also spoke to a generation.

Douglas: If I had to choose a civil rights image, I wouldn’t choose this one. Great photograph. But something happening on the street would be more appropriate, I think, like the dog attacking protesters , or the photo with the firemen .

Roxana Marcoci: But this was the cover of “The Americans,” and it does happen in the street, actually. I think that what you’re saying is, it’s not a photojournalistic image.

Douglas: The most important thing to me is: does a photograph reveal a new reality, or reveal something that’s been hidden previously? I think that’s a key criterion for making it significant. What impact on the world can that image have? A European might not have recognized that this was happening in the U.S. Maybe a lot of Americans in the North didn’t realize this was happening in the U.S. And I love this photograph, so I’m very happy to keep it.

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

Mamie Till fixes her eyes on her dead son, as her fiancé, Gene Mobley, holding her, stares at the viewer. Emmett Till , 14, is laid out on a cot in a Chicago funeral home, his face disfigured and bloated. His mother allowed the photojournalist David Jackson to take this picture in September 1955, a few days after two white men had abducted and murdered Till while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Quickly acquitted by an all-white jury, the men would go on to sell their confession to Look magazine for $4,000. When this photo was published, first in Jet magazine and then in The Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers, it incited an unprecedented level of outrage in America over racial violence; Jet had to reprint the Sept. 15, 1955, issue in which it appeared because of high demand. For the same reason Mamie Till let this picture be taken, she chose to keep her son’s coffin open during the funeral. “The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all,” she said. An estimated 100,000 people came to view his body. Jackson’s photograph was a call to action for many, including Rosa Parks, who said she thought of Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus later that same year. — E.I.

Miller: I feel like you can’t have this conversation, especially with the year we designated as the starting point, without talking about Emmett Till. There’s the devastating series of photographs of Till’s funeral. But there’s also the one from the trial — when Till’s great-uncle is identifying the men who murdered his nephew. The judge didn’t allow that photographer, Ernest C. Withers, to shoot in the courtroom. So it’s a miracle that the picture exists, and that it’s composed as well as it is when it had to be taken in secret. And it’s a moment where you saw a larger shift taking place. Up to that point in the South, a Black witness identifying white defendants in court was unheard-of.

Marcoci: The picture [of his body] was also about the power of the witness, right?

Susan Meiselas: Oh, for sure. Mamie Till and her insistence on an open coffin: how brave an act that was. And it ran in Jet and moved around the world.

Douglas: The issue for me with the trial picture is that it needs a paragraph to explain why we’re looking at it.

Marcoci: The courtroom was a travesty. They went free. But this, Mamie Till with her son, created a generation of Black activists.

Shikeith: I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and when we were learning about Black history in the fourth or fifth grade, that picture was brazenly shared with students. It was probably the first time I learned how powerful a photograph can be in having real material change in the world. It’s an image that I’ve lived with my [whole] life, and that’s impacted how I viewed the world and racism and its violence. It scares me. But, you know, it’s the truth. The truth can be very scary for a lot of us.

Miller: Shikeith, you also selected this Gordon Parks photograph, which is one of two color images the group nominated from the 1950s and ’60s — and the second was taken from outer space.

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

In 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to document the effects of Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South through the experiences of one extended family in Mobile, Ala. Parks was one of the few Black photojournalists to work for an establishment magazine at the time, and was known especially for his fashion photography, as is easily apparent from this image. For Life, he photographed everyday scenes — a church choir singing or children drinking from water fountains — intentionally capturing signs reading “White Only” or “ Lots for Colored .” “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) was shot for the Life story, which ran at 12 pages under the title “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” but, for unknown reasons, it didn’t make the final edit, and it wasn’t published until 2012, when a five-volume collection of Parks’s photographs was released. “Department Store” has since become a belated icon, one of the most memorable images in a career that also includes directing the 1971 film “Shaft.” Notable most of all for its vivid color, a startling contrast to the predominantly black-and-white imagery from the civil rights era, the portrait depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson, then age 27, dressed in an ice-blue, A-line cocktail dress, with her young niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing beneath the red neon “Colored Entrance” sign in front of a department store. Wilson’s upright posture and outward gaze — peering in the opposite direction of the sign’s blue arrow — subtly signify defiance. But there’s an intimacy and vulnerability in the picture, too. In 2013, Wilson, who went on to become a high school teacher, told the art historian Maurice Berger that she regretted that the strap of her slip had visibly fallen. “Dressing well made me feel first class,” she said. “I wanted to set an example.” She had set an example, of course, which Parks had recorded with such clarity: Wilson also told Berger that she refused to take her niece through the “colored” entrance. — Brendan Embser

Shikeith: I think what’s beautiful about this image is that it’s brilliantly composed — it uses beauty to draw you into a poignant moment in history, becoming a record of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern U.S. I tried to pick photographs that had an influence on me, and that I thought my mother would recognize, to indicate their influence on people who might operate outside of art history conversations. It [can be used as] a tool for educating even the youngest of minds about what marginalized communities went through.

Marcoci: I think that’s a great point: the pedagogical nature of photographs. In this picture, there’s the elegance and grace of these two figures, and then the ugliness of that “Colored Entrance” sign. There’s such a tension between them.

Nadia Vellam: You don’t immediately realize the context because you’re so attracted to the two people in the image. It asks you to spend more time looking.

Douglas: It’s quite an exquisite picture. It’s basically an X, which draws your eye into the center, which then takes you to that woman’s gaze outside the frame. Inside the frame, there’s something quite sweet. But outside — both beyond that door and out in the world that’s made that door — there’s something quite ugly.

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960

Alberto Korda, a favored photographer of Fidel Castro, captured this image of a 31-year-old Che Guevara by chance during a funeral in Havana in 1960 to honor the victims of a freighter explosion. Guevara, at the time the president of the National Bank of Cuba, happened to move into Korda’s line of sight while Castro was giving a speech. His expression is one of restrained anger; the Cuban government accused the United States of being responsible for the tragedy, which it denied. Five years later, Guevara resigned from Castro’s cabinet and joined revolutionary causes abroad, including in Congo and Bolivia, where he led guerrillas in a failed coup attempt. Korda’s photo wasn’t widely published until after Guevara’s execution by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, when posters, murals and eventually T-shirts emblazoned with Guevara’s face began to appear around the world. In the original portrait, he is flanked by another man and some palm fronds, but the reproductions are cropped to show just Guevara’s head. Korda’s image made Guevara into something more than a man, or even a famous revolutionary; he became a symbol for revolution itself. — E.I.

Miller: We have two pictures of Che Guevara to consider. Stan, you picked Che following his execution , and Susan, you picked the more famous portrait of him by Alberto Korda. It’s in every college dorm.

Marcoci: It’s in every tattoo parlor.

Douglas: They’re both propaganda images. One is the revolutionary looking to the future, which we’ve seen in everything from Soviet realist paintings to Obama posters. So, in many ways, a cliché, even though it’s had this huge impact. The image of Che dead [which was taken by the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta] is both iconic in that it’s like [an Andrea] Mantegna [1431-1506] painting of the dead Christ [“ Lamentation Over the Dead Christ ,” circa 1480], but also as evidence, on the part of the people who killed him, that the guy is dead. It’s just such a weird photograph: the officer on the right who’s poking at Che’s body to prove he’s just a human. Just mortal. And it somehow seemed like the end of the export of revolution from Cuba, which very much shut down after Che’s death.

Meiselas: And then he’s resurrected as a tattoo.

5. Diane Arbus, “Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C., 1967”

The boy in “Boy With a Straw Hat” doesn’t look like a typical Arbus subject. Wearing a prim collared shirt, bow-tie and boater hat, with one American flag at his side and another, much smaller one twisted into a bow on his lapel, the thin-lipped paradegoer seems like the paragon of anodyne conservatism. He’s nothing like the cross-dressers, carnival entertainers, nudists and others relegated to the margins of society that fascinated Arbus, whose work prompted one of the more protracted debates on the ethics of photography, as her images were so often said to skirt the lines of voyeurism and exploitation. Yet his steady gaze prompts a similar sense of unease in the viewer, as does the small pin on his jacket that reads Bomb Hanoi. “Boy With a Straw Hat” was the cover image of Artforum’s May 1971 issue, published two months before Arbus’s death by suicide at age 48. In 1972, when her posthumous MoMA retrospective drew record crowds, the art critic Hilton Kramer refuted the idea that she was merely capturing her subjects for the sake of spectacle; he argued that she collaborated with the people she photographed, and that that act of participation provided dignity — or at least authenticity — especially for those individuals who are shunned or otherwise invisible. Arbus herself once said that the “best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.” — B.E.

Miller: A number of us nominated Diane Arbus photos.

Douglas: [I picked] the sitting room in Levittown [“ Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I., 1962 ”], which is one of those suburbs created in the postwar period that people could buy [homes in] with their G.I. Bill money, in which Black people couldn’t live. It’s a case of there [being] something outside the image, which is very powerful: The construction of this new suburban reality, while Emmett Till’s being killed.

Marcoci: I chose the “Giant” [“ A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970 .”], because this was one of the first pictures where I was really thinking, “Who is that person? What would it be like to be him?”

Meiselas: One of the things that photographs do is make us emotional. Some of Arbus’s most memorable pictures are the ones that make you feel more than think.

Vellam: I’d vote for “Giant” just because it spawned so many people’s idea of portraiture: Katy Grannan, Deana Lawson, Larry Sultan. Like this idea of going into a place — in her case, middle-class suburbia — that you may not even have spent any time in otherwise. I feel like that became its own genre: There’s so much photography that has come out of her idea of going into people’s homes.

Marcoci: If I were to choose just one Arbus, I’d probably choose “Boy With a Straw Hat”: A portrait of an individual that’s this very interesting collective portrait of America, too. There’s this tension between the innocent face and then those buttons: “God Bless America” and “Bomb Hanoi.”

Shikeith: He’s sort of the archetype for the Proud Boys. You can see that smirk on his face.

Meiselas: There were pictures from the R.N.C. [Republican National Convention] four years ago that looked so much like this.

Miller: Stan and An-My both nominated a very different kind of photograph from the Vietnam War era: Malcolm Browne’s picture of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation.

6. Malcolm Browne, the Self-Immolation of the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, 1963

The AP reporter Malcolm Browne was among the only photojournalists on the scene when the monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as an act of protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of the Buddhist majority. As flames engulfed Quảng Đức, hundreds of monks surrounded him, mourning while he burned. The photo, sent out as soon as possible on a commercial flight to reach the AP’s offices, was published on front pages internationally the following morning. When President John F. Kennedy saw it, he reportedly exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” and then ordered a review of his administration’s Vietnam policy. (He would later say, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”) Browne won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for the photograph, which also contributed to the collapse of support for the South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, who was assassinated in a coup that year. President Kennedy was assassinated just a few weeks later, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, would escalate the war. Browne’s photograph, which is newly resonant today, enshrined the act of self-immolation as the most extreme form of protest. — Lucy McKeon

Lê: I think it’s one of the most incredible monuments that exists as a photograph. [It documents] an extraordinary act of sacrifice for a cause. These days, you see [some] people protesting, and it’s all about their egos. And here, there’s no ego. It’s one of the few pictures I know that’s so violent and peaceful at the same time.

Douglas: He was there for five minutes, apparently, burning, and just didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. This is what you do when you have no other recourse, when you feel the suppression is so severe that this is the only way you can get your statement heard.

Meiselas: It makes me think of the Napalm Girl, as well [ Nick Ut’s 1972 image of Kim Phuc Phan Thi , age 9, fleeing a napalm attack in the village of Trảng Bàng]. That moment impacted a generation. The question is, which one mobilized us further?

Lê: The Napalm Girl picture, for me, represents the notion that all Vietnamese are victims of war. I started watching war movies in college, and every time the word “Vietnam” comes up, that is the image that people have in their mind. I think the monk speaks to [something] beyond himself. He’s not a victim.

7. NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise,” 1968

On Christmas Eve 1968, aboard Apollo 8 during its pioneering orbit of the moon, William A. Anders photographed the Earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. The picture was the first of its kind — and it was also unplanned. Anders, the youngest of the three astronauts on the spacecraft, had been tasked with taking photographs of the moon’s craters, mountains and other geological features. He spontaneously decided, however, to include Earth in the frame when he noticed how beautiful it was. “Here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament, very fragile,” Anders would recall in a NASA oral history. “And yet it was our home.” His first shot was in black and white. For the next, he switched to color, which emphasized the contrast between the moon’s gray surface and the planet’s blue-green vibrancy. “Earthrise” was the first image most of humanity saw of the planet we live on, a nature photo like none before it and a reminder of how small our world really is, in comparison with the rest of the universe. As Joni Mitchell would sing of the image, on 1976’s “ Refuge of the Roads ”: “And you couldn’t see a city on that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest or a highway/Or me here least of all. …” — E.I.

Lê: “Earthrise” isn’t the first image of the Earth seen from space. There were earlier low-resolution ones in the ’40s , made from unmanned missiles or whatever. There was one made on Apollo 4, in 1967 . But I think this one, taken by a crew member on Apollo 8 the next year with a Hasselblad, is important because it’s humbling: seeing the Earth in relationship to the Moon, and thinking about us not being the only people on this Earth. Perhaps this is when we started thinking about how we should take care of our home.

Miller: Stan, you nominated a later photo, “ Sunset on Mars ” (2005).

Douglas: I’ve always had this knee-jerk response to Apollo being American propaganda somehow, part of the arms race — who’s going to get [to the Moon] first, the U.S. or the Russians? And once the U.S. got there, they lost interest. It wasn’t really about exploration, but dominance. This image on Mars is something quite extraordinary, because in effect, the camera is a prosthesis. It’s both a very artificial one and a human one. We actually extend our vision through it.

8. Ernest C. Withers, “I Am a Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee,” 1968

In the last weeks of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. took part in a protest of Black sanitation workers striking for safer conditions and decent wages in Memphis, Tenn. In a speech, King emphasized the connection between the United States’ civil rights battle and the struggles of poor and disenfranchised people worldwide, a message that resonated with the crowd. Their protest signs bore the phrase “I Am a Man,” a stark acknowledgment of all the ways this most basic fact was disrespected. “We were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has,” one of the participants, James Douglas, recalled in a 1978 documentary titled “I Am a Man.” The defining photo of the strike was taken by the Black photojournalist Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis native who previously shot the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, and also made famous images of the Montgomery bus boycott , the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Withers’s picture became the official record of King’s last major civil rights action. Years later, however, Withers’s own story was revealed to have been more complicated. Like King, the photographer drew the attention of the F.B.I. Unlike King, he became a paid informant. Yet he continued to produce some of the most iconic images of the movement: On April 4, 1968, less than a week after taking this photo, Withers was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, photographing the blood stain at the scene of King’s assassination. — L.M.

Shikeith: I think I first saw this image around the time the Million Man March was happening [in 1995]. I have a greater understanding of manhood [now] and how much of it I want to align with, and how much I don’t. But I understand how vital the need to identify as a man was in that moment.

Meiselas: I love the contrast of “I am a man,” singular, and “I am a collective.” It’s just all there: perfect distance, perfect composition. Whether or not Withers was working for the F.B.I. …

Douglas: Was he?

Meiselas: Yeah.

Douglas: And his role was to just …

Meiselas: Report on his fellow men. They paid him to spy on his colleagues. It’s a dark story. But let’s not go there.

9. Blair Stapp, Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, 1968

In the summer of 1968, outside of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., where Huey P. Newton stood trial for the murder of a police officer, supporters held up posters of him that instantly became synonymous with the Black Panther Party. The year before, Newton, the party’s co-founder and Minister of Defense, had collaborated with fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver and the photographer Blair Stapp to stage a portrait of himself in a black leather jacket and a tipped beret, holding a shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other. He’s seated on a rattan peacock chair that recalls chairs woven by inmates in the United States-colonized Philippines decades earlier. Its oval back piece frames Newton’s head like an oversize halo. Two Zulu warrior shields are propped against the wall. Stapp’s portrait and the peacock chair itself have since become an enduring symbol of Black Power. Michelle Obama sat in one for her 1982 prom portrait . Melvin Van Peebles recreated the photograph in his 1995 film “Panther.” The visual artist Sam Durant memorialized Newton in bronze in 2004 , and Henry Taylor painted it in 2007 . After two hung juries, the murder charges against Newton were dropped in 1971. For him, the struggle was about survival — or as he put it, “survival pending revolution.” — B.E.

Shikeith: I was trying to think of images that my grandmothers revered in a way. I think this is one of those images that exists in a lot of Black domestic spaces as a symbol for strength and determination. And it has this royal demeanor that’s been continuously emulated in Black photographic practice, whether amateur or professional.

Marcoci: The beret is almost [like] Che’s.

Shikeith: You can see people replicating this pose on the wicker chair throughout Black portraiture in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m really interested in photographs that’ve had a long-lasting effect on our daily lives.

10. W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko in Her Bath,” 1972

In the Magnum photojournalist W. Eugene Smith’s picture of Tomoko Kamimura, 15, she is being bathed by her mother at their home, in Minamata, Japan. Kamimura had been born with a kind of mercury poisoning that would later come to be known as Minamata disease, caused by a chemical factory contaminating the city’s water and food supply for more than 30 years. Smith and his wife, the photographer and activist Aileen M. Smith, lived in Minamata in the early 1970s, taking thousands of photographs to document the toll of the disaster — 1,784 people died after contracting the disease and thousands were left with severe neurological and musculoskeletal disabilities. Images from the series were printed by Life magazine in 1972, and Kamimura’s portrait became, for a time, one of the most famous images in the world. Amid the public outcry, “rumors began to circulate through the neighborhood claiming that we were making money from the publicity,” Kamimura’s father, Yoshio, would later write, “but this was untrue — it had never entered our minds to profit from the photograph of Tomoko. We never dreamed that a photograph like that could be commercial.” The Chisso Corporation, which owned the factory, has paid damages to some 10,000 victims. Kamimura died in 1977, at the age of 21. Smith died the following year. Twenty years later, after a French TV network wanted to use the photograph, Aileen M. Smith transferred control of it to Kamimura’s family. They haven’t allowed the photograph to be reproduced since. — L.M.

Meiselas: Without this documentation by Eugene Smith, I don’t think Minamata and the mercury poisoning would ever have been confronted. So when you do choose to represent a victim, I hope it’s purposeful.

Douglas: I heartily agree. And it’s a beautiful image of a loving relationship between mother and daughter.

Vellam: Smith documented people, but he was also very conscious of what he was doing while he was documenting them. I think he took a very long time after he shot everyone to figure out what he even wanted to show from them.

Meiselas: He believed that they should be better understood.

11. Photo Archive Group, “Photographs From S-21: 1975-79”

Some photographs, taken in the darkest moments of history, end up saying very different things from what their creators intended — like the images that Stalin’s secret police took during the Great Purge, or the ones white spectators took of lynchings in the United States. One of the more extensive photographic records of an authoritarian regime comes from the Khmer Rouge army, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and whose genocidal purges of minority groups and political opponents led to the murder of almost a quarter of the country’s population. Before killing most of its victims, the army took their portraits, in part to prove to leaders that the supposed enemies of the state were indeed being executed. Of the nearly 20,000 people sent between 1975 and 1979 to what was known as the S-21 death camp, the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, only about a dozen survived. In 1994, the American nonprofit organization Photo Archive Group cleaned and cataloged more than 5,000 photographs taken of prisoners before their executions. A selection of the images, known as “Photographs from S-21: 1975-79,” was published as a book called “The Killing Fields” in 1996 and shown at MoMA the following year. Who was the girl pictured here? What had she seen? It’s impossible to know. And yet the regime’s photographic record offers a way into humanizing and remembering the victims of one of the most ruthless atrocities of the 20th century. S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where a number of the images from “Photographs From S-21: 1975-1979” are on permanent display. — L.M.

Lê: So these pictures were found in an archive in Cambodia [in 1993]. After the Khmer Rouge took over [in 1975], they went on a rampage, killing teachers and anyone who they felt wasn’t one of theirs. The bodies were buried in different locations. But they photographed these people before killing them. There were thousands of these pictures.

Douglas: If you want to make them disappear, why do you document them?

Lê: But that’s the thing. It’s the banality of evil. It’s unconscionable, right? Civilians being just collateral damage in war. Perhaps there are other ways to speak about violence, and I think this [set of photographs] certainly does.

12. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80

Cindy Sherman was 23 when she began making her “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white staged self-portraits that explore stereotypes of women in film and mass media. As a student at Buffalo State College, where she originally studied painting, she became fascinated by performers such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, artists who put their own bodies center stage. Sherman also liked to dress up as stock characters for parties, purchasing clothes from flea markets and experimenting with cosmetics. In “Untitled Film Stills,” she plays the career girl, ingénue, librarian , mistress, femme fatale and runaway , alternately heartbroken, hung over, daydreaming or determined to escape a predator as though trapped in some film noir. But which film? That feeling of vague recognition was Sherman’s point, as well as that of other artists of the era experimenting with pictures from mass media, who would eventually be called the Pictures Generation, a name based on a 1977 exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp . They wanted viewers to almost recognize the images, so as to heighten the uncanny nature of their work. Sherman initially sold eight-by-ten prints from “Untitled Film Stills” for $50 out of a binder from her desk at her day job as a receptionist at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space in New York. Douglas Eklund, who organized a Pictures Generation exhibition in 2009, noted that the series “never ceases to astonish, as if Sherman knew how to operate all of the machinery of mass-cultural representation with one hand tied behind her back.” Her intuitive grasp of the self-portrait’s theatrical appeal, especially when that self could be manipulated — decades before anyone could have imagined camera filters on an iPhone — has kept “Untitled Film Stills” relevant ever since. — B.E.

Marcoci: There’s something about the “Untitled Film Stills.” It’s this relationship between still and moving images. Cindy Sherman has the capacity to encapsulate, in a single [work], a narrative. She calls on this pantheon of women’s roles from movies that we think we’ve seen, but none of them are based on an actual film still. There’s one [“Untitled Film Still #13,” 1978] where she looks like Brigitte Bardot in a head scarf from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), but she’s a librarian. She’s reaching for a book. She makes the Bardot type into an intellectual, which is [an agency] that most male Hollywood filmmakers of the time, or even a filmmaker like Godard, would not have given the real Bardot. She was able to see something about how we engage with mass media and tweak it.

Douglas: I’m not convinced about Sherman. [There’s] an art-world canonization of the work. How important was it? How influential? I don’t think it was that important or influential outside of a very small area.

Marcoci: On the other hand, if you ask people if they know about Sherman, they probably do.

Lê: They do. Many young women find Sherman’s work empowering.

Marcoci: I never thought that we would just be considering photojournalism.

Meiselas: No.

Douglas: I mean, looking at the art world, I would include Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” [1966].

13. Ed Ruscha, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” 1966

As a teenager in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, Ed Ruscha delivered newspapers by bicycle daily along a two-mile route. He dreamed about making a model of all the buildings on his circuit, he later recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “like an architect standing over a table and plotting out a city.” After moving to Los Angeles for art school in 1956, Ruscha became obsessed with the city’s architecture, particularly on the Sunset Strip, that part of Sunset Boulevard that stretches for about two miles, like his old paper route, across West Hollywood. In 1966, Ruscha photographed both sides of the Strip by securing a motorized camera to the bed of a pickup truck. The result was “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a nearly 25-foot accordion-fold, self-published artist’s book. Today, Ruscha is most famous for his text-based paintings, many of which reference corporate logos and advertising slogans, for which he is widely celebrated as postwar America’s answer to the Dadaist nonsense movement. But his photography shares with the paintings a repetitive, deadpan humor. In addition to the Sunset Strip, Ruscha photographed swimming pools, gas stations, parking lots and apartments, and collected the images into small books that provoked the ire of critics — and fellow photographers — who deemed the work lacking in style and meaning. (“Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but the filling stations,” the photographer Jeff Wall once complained.) But what he created was a kind of time travel, a meticulous, obsessive visual cartography of a long-lost Los Angeles. He and his brother, Paul, still make the trip to photograph the street every couple of years. — B.E.

Marcoci: I love [Ed] Ruscha, and I think we’ve barely touched on conceptual photography. Obviously superimportant, but is he really the photographer that did so much for photography through that series?

Meiselas: I know what you mean. Of course, because the photographs came way early, we rediscovered them after he became famous for painting.

Miller: Well, he’s certainly not as famous as a photographer as some people on this list, but I don’t know if we need to get hung up on that.

Douglas: I think “Sunset Strip” was extraordinary. Ruscha produces photographs governed by a hard-core conceptual procedure. In the case of “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” the procedure is in the title and, in order to fulfill it, he had to make hundreds of stops along a Los Angeles street. But I also thought this was too inside the art world.

Miller: Maybe this is a good time to talk about Nan Goldin.

14. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1979-2004

Nan Goldin originally presented “Ballad,” named after a song from Bertolt Brecht’s satirical musical “The Threepenny Opera,” as a series of 35-millimeter slides shown by a carousel projector in bars and nightclubs and backed by an eclectic soundtrack — from Dean Martin to the Velvet Underground. Goldin’s visual diary is itself a bohemian opera of New York’s downtown counterculture, a community freed from convention yet abandoned many times over by society; it documents sex, addiction, beauty, violence, powerful friendship, the AIDS crisis and the joyful struggle to live beyond the limits of the mainstream. Friends were photographed doing the twist at a party or preparing to inject heroin. In “Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984), a portrait of domestic abuse, the artist’s bloodshot eye meets the lens head-on. Goldin’s “Ballad” has since been credited with inspiring everything from selfie culture to the raw, diaristic aesthetic and saturated color now commonplace across social media and in fine art. Over the years, Goldin would revise and update the series, presenting it with new images and a different soundtrack, and it would become an ubiquitous presence in galleries and museums. But because the work has so thoroughly permeated the culture, it’s easy to overlook just how radical it was when it debuted. In “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ,” Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Goldin, the photographer describes a resistance to her art in the ’80s, “especially from male artists and gallerists who said ‘This isn’t photography. Nobody photographs their own life.’ It was still a kind of outlier act.” — L.M.

Marcoci: We’re talking about an artist who’s very much engaged with youth culture, with the cultures that transgress gender binaries. Also with the ravages of a generation that takes drugs, that loves, that dies young. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is a ballad. It shows this group of people as images set to music.

Meiselas: It was radical, it was very impactful to the photographic medium. But here’s my question: Would we be choosing either Nan [Goldin] or Cindy Sherman if we didn’t know their names?

Marcoci: Did you watch the “Ballad”?

Meiselas: Of course. I watched it in 1985.

Marcoci: How many times?

Meiselas: How many times has she changed it?

Marcoci: But even that I like. You don’t need to choose one picture. It’s interesting for me when photography is not just a moment that’s frozen in time, when it has the capacity to change.

15. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W),” 1993

A slightly different, color image of the same people in “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W)” was first published by i-D magazine in 1993 for an unconventional fashion story about camouflage. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans staged the scene in Bournemouth, England, where he’d attended art school the previous year, and captured a whorl of bodies in military fatigues, each person clasping another’s arm, thigh or chest, and all wearing camouflage patterns from different countries — a post-Cold War utopia. The black-and-white version was printed on color paper, which accounts for the warmth of its tone. On the beach, Lutz, Alex, Suzanne and Christoph appear as if from a scene in Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 short film “Powers of Ten,” which zooms out from a sunny picnic into the farthest reaches of the universe. Tillmans’s photograph “seems to model something like chosen family,” says the curator Phil Taylor, who edited a collection of the artist’s interviews. The way Tillmans envisions family in this early portrait — as a tight embrace amid the implied violence of the outside world — is emblematic of the way he would go on to depict men kissing at gay nightclubs or activists at antiwar demonstrations, each a picture of solidarity against the odds. — B.E.

Lê: I think Wolfgang [Tillmans] captured youth culture — in magazines like i-D and The Face — at a time [the early ’90s] when young people were being captured in a different way: It was very clinical and idealized, and he just came out with this very real [take on] youth culture. The pictures were a little more grainy, and I think it [changed] the way young people are seen. My students always bring up his work. I think it’s a way to photograph your family and friends and turn them into real protagonists. And I see that influence as very long-lasting.

Marcoci: What’s interesting in this image is [that] it’s four friends on a beach, dressed in camouflage. Camouflage immediately makes you think of military uniforms, of obedience, of listening to orders. But in the techno culture of these clubs in the 1990s, it had become a symbol of individuality and freedom: the exact opposite of what the uniform means.

Meiselas: This image, if I didn’t know his name, I would’ve just turned the page.

Lê: I think we need a picture that speaks about youth. And I think even though this picture was made in ’93 …

Miller: … That’s still how young people are photographed today.

16. Lee Friedlander, “Boston,” 1986, From the Series “At Work,” 1975-95

Lee Friedlander is best known for photographing America’s social landscape, from mundane street scenes in the Midwest to nudes of Madonna that were taken in the late 1970s. Between 1975 and 1995, he created six series of photographs depicting employees at different types of workplaces, including Rust Belt factories, a telemarketing call center and a New York investment firm. One of these series, commissioned by the M.I.T. Museum and produced between 1985 and 1986, looks at office workers in the Boston area who used desktop computers for their jobs. At the time, this was a fairly new development, but one that Friedlander presciently recognized would come to define not just corporate life but humanity itself. His subjects are often seemingly oblivious — or indifferent — to the presence of the camera. Likewise, his camera often omits the computers themselves, the ostensible subject of his images. Instead, the workers, sitting at brightly lit desks, are pictured from the chest up, their detached expressions familiar to any of us as they sit engrossed in (or bored by) screens just out of frame. With this series Friedlander had tapped into the dark comedy of the mundane. His influence can be seen in a generation of younger photographers who seek to question everyday life — from Alec Soth to LaToya Ruby Frazier — and whose images would mostly be viewed on screens. — E.I.

Marcoci: I love this series.

Douglas: I love it, too, but I put this in out of guilt for not having more art people in here. It’s images of these people just engaged in the world around them.

Meiselas: In autonomous labor. I remember when I first saw this series of white-collar workers in front of machines.

Lê: No one had done that before.

17. LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze,” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze,” named after the compact car made by General Motors, follows the 2019 closure of an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that had been open since 1966. Over nine months, Frazier documented the impact one corporation can have on a community, which lost thousands of jobs. A selection of images from the series were first published in The New York Times Magazine in May 2019, and the work was later presented as a multimedia installation: More than 60 portraits and video interviews with union workers and their families were mounted to orange metal trusses at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. In the accompanying monograph, Frazier included essays by artists and critics as well as members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers union. On its cover is this photograph, which she shot from a helicopter, showing a group of workers and their families protesting the plant’s abrupt shuttering and requesting a new product to work on. Other images show Lordstown residents in various states of mourning — wiping away tears or proudly displaying union memorabilia. Born in a Pennsylvania steel manufacturing town, Frazier embedded herself with the Ohio workers, producing one of the most detailed records of the gutting of America’s working class. “‘The Last Cruze’ is a workers’ monument,” she has said. “It is half-holy, half-assembly line.” — L.M.

Marcoci: LaToya Ruby Frazier is a true artist-activist. These workers were losing their pension plans, their health benefits, you name it. It’s a work that includes more than 60 pictures of union workers along with their testimonies, because she also did these interviews with them.

Miller: I think “The Last Cruze” might be the only complete photographic record we have of the impact that corporate decision-making has on a work force. GM skipped town, cut their costs and the people of Lordstown were left holding the bag. We have another picture, nominated by Susan, that also documents labor.

18. Sebastião Salgado, “Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil,” 1986

One of the most striking aspects of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of an open-air gold mine in Brazil is the scale. Several thousand men — their bodies hunched and fragile — are rendered miniature against the backdrop of a massive pit in the earth. In the photos, most of the miners are climbing into or out of that pit, holding tools or ferrying sacks up and down narrow ladders and steep slopes. In several shots, Salgado chose not to include the horizon within the frame; the viewer can’t see where the workers’ dangerous journey ends. The photographer, who was born in the state of Minas Gerais (which means “general mines”) in Brazil, spent 35 days at Serra Pelada, living alongside the miners while he took these photographs. When they were published in 1987 in The New York Times Magazine, they revealed a late-20th-century gold rush and the appalling conditions facing those at the bottom of it. In the nearly four decades since, Salgado has gone on to capture the burning oil wells in Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Some critics have labeled him an “aesthete of misery,” using the plight of the poor and disenfranchised to make visually striking pictures. When these images are exhibited in a fine art context, their size is so massive, the sheer aesthetics of the imagery threaten to eclipse the act of documentation. But in a profile in The Guardian this year marking his 80th birthday, Salgado responded, “I came from the third world. When I was born, Brazil was a developing country. The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come from. … The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt.” — E.I.

Meiselas: The scale of what he presented to us at the time was really quite amazing.

Douglas: It was like, “Holy moly, that’s still going on?”

Meiselas: Exactly.

19. Stuart Franklin, an Unidentified Man Blocking a Column of Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

On June 5, 1989, as a column of tanks rolled into formation on Chang’an Avenue bordering Tiananmen Square, the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin watched from the sixth-floor balcony of the nearby Beijing Hotel. He was holed up there with several other foreign correspondents, who were all covering the weekslong protests, led by hundreds of thousands of unarmed students, against the Chinese Community Party. Two nights before, the People’s Liberation Army had cleared the area with force; the next morning, they prevented parents from looking for students lost in the fray, and the soldiers fired live rounds even as medics attempted to rush the injured to safety. (Thousands are thought to have been killed in the protests, although an official death toll has never been released.) Suddenly, around noon on the 5th, a young man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding shopping bags in his hands, approached the first tank. On the video footage, it attempts to maneuver around him. Like a matador taunting a bull, he flings his arms in fury and, when the tank turns back, the man jumps out again. Yet the dramatic photograph Franklin took, with five tanks and a destroyed bus in the frame, draws its power from its stillness, its potential energy. (Four other photographers are known to have captured the same scene, including Jeff Widener, whose tightly framed version for The Associated Press ran on the front page of The Times.) Authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate symbolic images of resistance and, while the Tank Man — whose identity has never been confirmed — became an inspiration for pro-democracy movements across the world, he was snuffed out from official Chinese memory. Today, image searches in China for “Tiananmen Square” only turn up cheerful pictures of a tourist destination. — B.E.

Douglas: Multiple photographers shot this image because they were all in the same corner of a hotel overlooking Tiananmen Square. They couldn’t really shoot anywhere else on the square. The first time I saw this scene, it was a video.

Meiselas: Right, there was a television camera. The stills are very different. And I don’t care whose image it is. I’m thinking about the man in front of the tank and what happens when one man stands up. And I love how this looks alongside Ernest Withers’s “I Am a Man.”

20. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” 2008

In 2008, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan during a period that was, at the time, the deadliest week since the war began in 2001. They brought a lightproof box containing a roll of photographic paper, and, occasionally, exposed six-meter segments of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds at a time. They were creating photograms, which, as opposed to conventional war photographs, display the marks of their making but little else. The resulting works — 12 in total — set out “to create a kind of post-mortem of photojournalistic representation of conflict,” as the artists wrote when the work was first exhibited. They made these images on days when a BBC fixer was executed or a suicide attack killed nine Afghan soldiers. But they also made one on the day that the title refers to — a day with no fatalities. In a literal sense, there isn’t anything to see in the images except splashes of light as abstract as a blurry sonogram. When Broomberg and Chanarin arrived in Afghanistan, the war was in its seventh year and, by then, a surfeit of photographs depicting death and violence had long been circulating. There’s hardly consensus on what to leave out when depicting war, but there is some consensus on the need to bear witness. With their photograms, Broomberg and Chanarin found a new, unexpected, but no less emotional way of doing so. — E.I.

Miller: There were a lot of different kinds of images of war from the George W. Bush era. Nadia, you nominated Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s “The Day Nobody Died,” which is very abstract.

Douglas: What is it?

Vellam: They did this project in Afghanistan where they took rolls of photo paper and put them outside, exposing them to the sun or the weather. Whatever would happen while the photo paper was exposed was the work. It’s about a new idea of photography, about it not depicting something specific but creating a mood. And this one was taken, as the title says, on a day nobody died, which is such an interesting and different way to talk about a conflict.

21. Richard Drew, “Falling Man,” 2001

When it was first published by The Associated Press, the photojournalist Richard Drew’s image of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was denounced by many readers as exploitative. Several media outlets published the image once, on Sept. 12 — including The Times, on page A7 — but it then disappeared from circulation, confined to shock websites like rotten.com. There was no shortage of graphic images of 9/11, including footage of the planes flying into the buildings. But Drew’s photo was uniquely unsettling because of its uncomfortable elegance: a single victim, framed by both north and south towers, caught in a fragile stasis before death. The image eventually began a strange afterlife as “one of the most famous photographs in human history,” according to the journalist Tom Junod, who wrote a 2003 essay in Esquire in which he attempts to identify the falling man. He couldn’t — not definitively. No one has. Recalling war photography that valorizes the unknown soldier, “Falling Man” would go on to be one of the inspirations for a novel by Don DeLillo and an opera by Daniel Levy. Long after the dust settled on the former site of the World Trade Center, the photograph of the unnamed man remains, like “an unmarked grave,” in Junod’s words, merely asking that we look at it. — E.I.

Miller: I think “Falling Man” is the defining image from the most violent day in America since the Civil War.

Shikeith: I was in middle school when 9/11 happened. Images from that day seem to seep into you. You carry them for life and they dictate certain fears and anxieties.

Miller: And then there are all the images from what happened in the years to come. The pictures of soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib military prison are arguably the most famous photographs from the war on terror.

22. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, Abu Ghraib Hooded Detainee, 2003

In early 2004, investigations into abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility had already been reported by news outlets including The New York Times and CNN. But the government had kept all photographs of torture out of view — until leaked images reached CBS. Even then, the news anchor Dan Rather would claim, the network’s executives only granted permission to show them when faced with the threat of a scoop by The New Yorker’s investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. (CBS executives justified holding the photos on various grounds, including the desire to avoid retaliation against American hostages.) The Abu Ghraib photos finally appeared in both outlets later that year. Their subject matter is brutal: men stripped naked and made to form a human pyramid with soldiers grinning behind them; a hooded man standing atop a box, hooked to electrical wires. The fact that American soldiers had recorded these scenes on their personal cameras only made them more disturbing. The photos significantly shifted American public opinion on the war on terror, further demonstrating the power of an image to alter a story. They also speak to a broader shift in news photography, in which everyone — no matter their intentions — is now a potential journalist. — L.M.

Shikeith: Both “Falling Man” and the hooded Iraqi detainee have a hard-core bodily effect on me. I think there was a sort of naïveté to the world I grew up in, just this idea that America is the greatest place on earth. For a moment there, we believed the myth. At least I did. When I started seeing these images, I developed a distrust in a lot of things. It only got worse. I have a very pessimistic outlook, but it sort of begins here, with these images.

23. Carrie Mae Weems, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” 1995-96

Carrie Mae Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is a work of appropriation that brings together 34 photographs, many of them of Black Americans, dating from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s, which collectively form a lesson on the history of racism in America. At the heart of the work are four images of people who were enslaved in South Carolina — some of the earliest known images that exist of America’s original sin — taken by the photographer Joseph T. Zealy and commissioned in 1850 by the Harvard University biologist Louis Agassiz. Originally intended to illustrate Agassiz’s baseless phrenological theories of Black inferiority, the pictures were rescaled and reframed by Weems, who also tinted them blood-red, making explicit the violence that allowed for their creation. Stored in Harvard’s archives for more than a century, Zealy’s images fell into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in 1976. After Weems used them without permission, the school threatened her with a lawsuit. “I think that your suing me would be a really good thing,” she told the university, as she later recalled to the art historian Deborah Willis. “You should, and we should have this conversation in court.” Instead of proceeding with the suit, Harvard acquired the work, further complicating the idea of ownership that Weems investigates. — E.I.

Vellam: We should talk about Carrie [Mae Weems].

Meiselas: We should definitely talk about Carrie. There are two very different options [“ Kitchen Table Series ,” 1990, and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.”]

Lê: I chose the “Kitchen Table Series” [in which Weems poses as the matriarch in various domestic scenes she staged in a single room, containing little else but an overhead lamp and a table]. The kitchen table is symbolic — it’s the intimacy of the home. In a way I always felt these pictures were about people being able to be themselves, being open and visible in a way that they maybe can’t in public.

Marcoci: To me, the “Kitchen Table Series” is a true performance for the camera in a way that Cindy’s is in “Untitled Film Stills.” But “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is an amazing work because it engages with race, with slavery, with colonialism, through an archive. The subjects here were really originally presented as specimens. But what Carrie does is give a voice back to these subjects, whose voices were completely muted. She enlarges the photographs. She tints them blood-red. The whole thing becomes a poem.

Shikeith: This particular work taught me how to use photographs to tell a story. And the fact that [Harvard threatened to sue her] introduces this whole other issue about who gets to tell what stories.

24. Deana Lawson, “Nation,” 2018

The idea for “Nation” came to Deana Lawson in a dream. She was haunted by a story that George Washington’s false teeth were made from the teeth of enslaved people . For months, she kept an image of Washington’s dentures — held in Mount Vernon’s collection — on the wall of her bedroom. Lawson dreamed about a person wearing a mouth guard and wondered if she might forge a connection between the majesty of gold — the jewelry of hip-hop and the regalia of the Ashanti Kingdom — and the fact that the first president of the United States could only speak the lofty words of liberty through teeth that once belonged to the oppressed. Lawson is known for portraits she stages in homes and other intimate spaces, often decorated with a large array of objects: family pictures, children’s toys, a Michael Jackson poster. In her images, Black men and women, their skin captured in color with meticulous attention to shade and tone, appear not as documentary subjects but as vessels. “Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory,” the novelist Zadie Smith has written of Lawson’s photography. At the photo shoot for “Nation,” Lawson offered three hip-hop artists a selection of jewelry and a mouth guard, typically worn during dental procedures, painted gold. “Someone said that I’m ruthless when it comes to what I want,” Lawson says in an interview in her self-titled 2018 monograph. “I have an image in mind that … burns so deeply that I have to make it, and I don’t care what people are going to think.” “Nation” presents an endless series of questions about Black lineage, going back centuries before the nation’s founding. Lawson later printed the picture of Washington’s teeth on a card and slipped it into the edge of the work’s golden frame. — B.E.

Miller: Deana Lawson seems to be doing something similar to Weems in “Nation.”

Marcoci: I think that’s an amazing image. It’s actually a collage, with the picture of George Washington’s dentures tucked into the top right corner. She’s said photography has the power to make history and the present speak to each other.

25. Carlijn Jacobs, “Renaissance,” 2022

On July 29, 2022, when Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” the first of what she’s envisioned as a three-act magnum opus (act two, “Cowboy Carter,” was released this March), the public was exhausted after two and a half years of pandemic restrictions and unprecedented change to their daily routines. They were stir-crazy and impatient for the dance floor. Beyoncé embraced the sounds of house music pioneered by Black and queer D.J.s, as well as the subversive, high-gloss styling of ballroom culture. The singer appears on the album’s cover in a Giannina Azar-designed silver rope dress, sitting astride a horse covered in mirrors. The image was taken by Carlijn Jacobs, a Dutch fashion photographer interested in the art of masquerade and maximalist glamour, and alludes to both rodeo and royalty. It also conjures a range of artistic references, including Kehinde Wiley’s painting “ Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon ” (2016); Rose Hartman’s snapshots of Bianca Jagger on a white horse at Studio 54 in 1977; and John Collier’s 1890s painting of Lady Godiva, the 11th-century Englishwoman said to have rode her horse naked through the streets as a form of protest. — B.E.

Vellam: Does anybody else feel like we’re missing a pop-culture celebrity moment? If we’re talking about images that go everywhere, and that people who live in the middle of the country all are going to look at, I don’t feel we have that.

Douglas: I think it’s important to include the idea of celebrity culture in photography. I’m not quite sure what that would be.

Lê: There’s the [2017] picture of Beyoncé pregnant with all the flowers .

Miller: Initially, Shikeith had also picked Beyoncé from the album cover of “Dangerously in Love” (2003).

Marcoci: But sorry, why don’t we then just choose a [Richard] Avedon of a celebrity?

Vellam: Marilyn Monroe [from 1957]. But don’t we feel like we have plenty of photographs from the past? Don’t we want to think about what celebrity is now?

Miller: What’s the iconic pop culture image from the last five years?

Douglas: Is there a Kardashian image?

Vellam: I can’t, because I hate them so much. But yes, you want the thing of [Kim Kardashian] when she broke the internet with her butt [an image that ran on the cover of Paper magazine in 2014].

Douglas: I’m going back to Beyoncé, because [you want] an image of a celebrity who’s not a person but an image. She’s like a simulacrum somehow.

Vellam: With her “Renaissance” cover, suddenly she was plastered everywhere. It was all over the city.

Douglas: I’d buy that.

Shikeith: I think it’s very important that she released this album and highlighted Black queer contributions to music in the culture because, very frequently, those same contributions are erased or attributed to someone else. Especially in pop culture.

Marcoci: Can you hold it up on your phone?

Vellam: Yeah. I listen to it all the time.

Top: Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) © the Gordon Parks Foundation; NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise” (1968); Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara)” (1960) © Alberto Korda, courtesy of the Alberto Korda Estate; Stuart Franklin, an unidentified man blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989) © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos; Deana Lawson, “Nation” (2018) © Deana Lawson, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery; LaToya Ruby Frazier, “United Auto Workers and Their Families Holding up ‘Drive It Home’ Campaign Signs Outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli Union Hall, Lordstown, OH, 2019,” from the series “The Last Cruze” (2019) © LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the first presentation of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze.” A selection of images from the series ran in The New York Times Magazine in May 2019, and the larger work was later shown as a multimedia installation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. It was not first presented at the Renaissance Society. The article also misstated the date of the Tank Man photograph by Stuart Franklin in Beijing; it was June 5, 1989, not June 4.

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M.H. Miller is a features director for T Magazine. More about M.H. Miller

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COMMENTS

Older Vs Younger Generation in an Inspector Calls
An Inspector Calls: older and younger generation. The Birling's children, Erica and Sheila, are presumed to be very naive and still listening and agreeing with their parent's words due to their ages. Yet, thought the play both Eric and Sheila prove to be mentally mature and responsible while directly reflect the inspector's message.
Grade 9: The Older v Younger Generation
To read the essay with my examiner comments for each paragraph, consider becoming a paid subscriber. How successfully does Priestley present different attitudes between the older and younger generations in An Inspector Calls? In "An Inspector Calls," Priestley successfully presents different attitudes between the older and younger generations.
Generation Gap Theme in An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley Essay Example
22 April 2022. One of the main themes presented by Priestly in an inspector calls in the generation gap, who the two generations have different ideas of responsibility, the way they treat for perceive others and changing their actions in the future. This concept at the time would make the audience question if there was a divides society with ...
Older vs younger generation essay
In the exposition of "An inspector calls", we are given valuable insights into the differences between Sheila's and Mrs Birling's characters. Priestley uses the character of Sheila to show how younger generation in general, can change their way of thinking and form their own ideas about class, society and responsibility unlike the older ...
AQA English Revision
An Inspector Calls Essays. One of the best things you can do to revise for any English exam is to read examples of essays. Below you'll find a range of essays which you can read at your leisure. Though there are always benefits in reading essays, becoming use to "active reading" is also important. To do this, use one of these strategies to help:
PDF Edexcel English Literature GCSE An Inspector Calls: Themes
Generations: Young vs. Old. The idea of age and generational identity runs throughout the play. The Birling family is split into two generations: the parents and the children. The generational divide doesn't just refer to the relationship between a parent and their child in a familial context. Priestley examines how your life experiences and ...
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How does Priestley explore the difference in attitudes between older and younger generations in An Inspector Calls? Grade 5+: 'An Inspector Calls' is about responsibility. Priestley purposely contrasts the responsibility of the younger generation and the irresponsibility of the older generation to suggest the younger generation are the hope ...
Themes
Age in An Inspector Calls. Sheila and Eric Birling represent the younger generation who learn from their mistakes. Age is an important theme in An Inspector Calls. Priestley uses it to show how he ...
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Model Answer: A structured essay answers the question, "How does Priestley present the older and the younger generation in An Inspector Calls?" It's an excellent template for students to understand essay construction and argument development. Benefits: For Educators: A streamlined approach to a significant theme, saving preparation time.
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An Inspector Calls - Essay Plan Bundle. These resources are essay plans for all the characters in the play An Inspector Calls and the theme of Generation. They are created in line with GCSE Literature exams ; originally for WJEC but are applicable to other exam boards also. Each essay plan has a suggested introduction and conclusion ...
Age Divide/ Generation differences Theme, An Inspector Calls: GCSE
The four other themes of An Inspector Calls discussed on OxNotes are Responsibility, Conflict between characters and classes, Social Class and Sexism/ Gender Differences. Click the links to visit those themes. This page discusses the 'generational gap' idea used by J. B. Priestley.
PDF An Inspector Calls
GCSE English Literature for AQA: An Inspector Calls Student Book, with a focus on differentiated tasks and attainment for setting student targets. The emphasis throughout, as with the Student Books, is on engaging the reader as an active interrogator of the text and on helping them to reflect on the text's relevance to themselves and others.
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Generation vs Generation Alexandra Rozanski 11th Grade. There are drastic differences that are seen in people who are born in different generations. One may argue that the younger generations are more impressionable and naive while the older generations are very hardheaded and assertive. By creating characters like Sheila and Eric with a large ...
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This is an example of a high grade A* / L9 essay for 'An Inspector Calls'. It was completed by myself, not in timed conditions, to set an example for high achieving students, so it is beyond the requirement of a high grade for GCSE. However, students are encouraged to read it and deconstruct it to get ideas for their own essays and ...
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docx, 18.6 KB. This is a model essay about inter-generational conflict in An Inspector Calls. It develops a detailed argument, using a range of contextual and analytical ideas to develop important points. It has been written with the AQA English Literature exam in mind, but could be used to help any GCSE student who will write about this text.
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Friendly and approachable Cambridge graduate and PhD student, committed to making English accessible to all. £45 / hour. SEND. Graduate. Book Tutor. This topic is included in Paper 2. You can find notes and guides for it below.
The generation gap
The generation gap. A thorough set of resources for studying the key theme of youth versus older age. Includes a differentiated planning tool, quotations table and help sheet to start writing an essay on the theme. A thorough set of resources for studying the key theme of youth versus older age. Includes a differentiated planning tool ...
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Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls in attempt to change what society valued. He wanted British society to value people and not profit. This is quite a fundamental change when you consider that Britain ran the slave trade for profit; sent working men to their deaths in the mines for profit; and created an empire that was built on the suffering of human beings, for profit.
An Inspector Calls: A* / L9 Example Intro + Paragraph
EXAMPLE INTRO: Responsibility is a very important theme in An Inspector Calls, as the Inspector reveals one by one that all the Birling family are partly responsible for Eva's death. Eva represents the lower classes, and Priestley uses the tragic ending of her character to spread his message about social responsibility, a message which is ...
PDF Edexcel English Literature GCSE An Inspector Calls: Character Profile
Character in context. Gerald is Sheila's fiancé and the son of the wealthy businessman. Mr Croft. He is employed at his father's company which is called Crofts Limited. The Croft family business is in competition with, and also both bigger and older than, Birling & Co. Gerald's parents are Sir George Croft and Lady Croft, who are socially ...
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GCSE An Inspector Calls Exemplar Essays Level 9. This useful bundle contains full mark essays and level 8/9 essays covering the heart of potential questions that could be asked on 'An Inspector Calls'. £15.00. This resource hasn't been reviewed yet. To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it.
An Inspector Calls Generation Gap
PNG, 113.12 KB. PNG, 100.47 KB. zip, 2.5 MB. As we study An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley we look at how a generation gap seems to form between young and older characters, particularly in Act 3 as The Inspector leaves and allows the characters to discuss amongst themselves what has happened and what they have discovered about themselves.
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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960