Behind the Image: Protesting the Vietnam War with a Flower
Marc Riboud took the famous image that would become emblematic of the anti-Vietnam War movement
On October 21, 1967, almost 100,000 people rallied in Washington, D.C. to peacefully protest the war in Vietnam. Magnum photographer Marc Riboud’s most published image from this protest was the final shot on his last roll of film. Riboud remembered this day for an essay about his career, published in 1989:
“One day in October 1967, I found myself in Washington, swept along in the slipstream of a cause at the time simple and straightforward. A vast, ecstatic crowd was marching for peace in Vietnam as the sunlight of an Indian summer flooded the city’s streets. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women, both black and white, were defiantly closing in on the Pentagon, the citadel of the most powerful army in the world, and for one day America’s youth presented America with a handsome face. I was taking photographs like mad, running out of film as night fell. The very last photo was the best. Framed in my viewfinder was the symbol of that America youth: a flower held before a row of bayonets.”
The young woman bearing the chrysanthemum was 17-year-old Jan Rose Kasmir, and the soldier who stood before her “seemed more frightened than the girl,” Riboud later recalled.
Kasmir was not aware of the photograph being taken at the time, but the image has come to represent the power of peaceful protest. Speaking to The Guardian in 2015, Kasmir said: “It wasn’t until I saw the impact of this photograph that I realized it wasn’t only momentary folly – I was standing for something important.”
Riboud visited both North and South Vietnam about a dozen times between 1966-76, chronicling everyday life under siege. He took hundreds of photographs of villagers, farmers, and refugees, documenting their will to survive. Witnessing the atrocities of the war firsthand, he was moved by the people’s “brave resistance to the relentless bombing.” “Sympathy,” he said, “helps one understand a country or a person” more than “indifference or objectivity.”
Riboud’s photographs of the March on the Pentagon memorialize one of the largest displays of protest during the war — one of the many mass outcries against America’s involvement.
An exhibition of Riboud’s work in Vietnam from 1966 to 1978 is on view until May 12 at the Musée Guimet in Paris until June 12 — plan your visit here.
