The shot heard around the world

It is already a T-shirt.

Barely hours after the failed assassination attempt on US presidential candidate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on 13 July, the image of the former President, bloodied but defiant, was on T-shirts and tattoos.

Even before the Republican and Democratic conventions actually anointed their respective candidates, the American presidential campaign had found its iconic image.

In 1775, the opening shot at the battles of Lexington and Concord was poetically called “the shot heard around the world” because it sparked the American Revolutionary War. Donald Trump wants to lead another American revolution. And this image by Pulitzer-winning photographer Evan Vucci of Associated Press might well be the new shot “heard” around the world.

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Many photographers were at the rally. Doug Mills of The New York Times managed to capture the bullet in motion as it headed towards Trump. But Vucci’s shot stood out. Content creator David Altizer, analysed it diagrammatically on X, pointing out that “Trump’s face is almost perfect center and is looking up while the secret service looks down. Perfect contrast”. The American flag, Trump’s upraised fist, the blue sky all work together seamlessly.

“It wouldn’t have looked as good if he had been standing slightly to the right like the other photographers,” tweeted Altizer. “He was in the perfect spot and he knew it.” And he calmly stood there, in the midst of the melee, as if he was “born to frame and compose shots.”

“I knew it was a moment in American history and it had to be documented,” Vucci said later.

Vucci’s instincts served him well. And Trump’s instincts, honed from years of television, served him well too. Instead of just being bundled off stage, he insisted on pumping his fist, exhorting his followers to “Fight” while they roared “USA! USA!”. Mills, The New York Times photographer, said in an interview, “As tough as he looked in that one picture with his fist looking very defiant, the next frame I took, he looked completely drained. Very, very shocked.”

Others worried the “Fight, fight” rhetoric would make an already inflamed campaign even more incendiary. But that does not matter. In a world where we rarely look beyond the headlines, that image of Trump rising like a battered gladiator was the one that made front pages around the world. It was pure Hollywood. Cue the theme from Rocky.

While the shooter missed Trump, pundits say he might have blown a hole through President Joe Biden’s already bumbling campaign. It’s too early to say if one picture can make a difference but Trump’s numbers definitely shot up.

When we think of iconic photographs we tend to gravitate towards ones that defined historic events—the little girl running naked after a napalm attack in My Lai, Vietnam; the ghostly dead child, her eyes eerily opaque after the gas leak in Bhopal; the well-dressed little Syrian boy lying face down on a beach in Turkey, as tranquil in death as the war he was fleeing was horrific; the weary migrant mother during the American depression; and the unknown lonely protester facing off the tanks of Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Those images somehow managed to humanise tragedies that otherwise become a fog of numbers and headlines. It’s no longer just an image, it’s almost an accusation that demands our attention. It distils a complex saga into something we can finally wrap our minds around leaving an imprint on us long after the numbers fade. I don’t remember the exact death toll of Bhopal but will never forget Raghu Rai’s photograph of the dead child.

The Trump photograph was a different kind of picture. It didn’t humanise a great tragedy and catapult an ordinary person centre stage. Instead it might well imbue a controversial human being with some superhuman lustre, taking someone who was already centre stage and making him even larger-than-life. Trump was no longer America’s clown figure.

Perhaps the real comparisons here are not to the iconic photographs of wars, famines or terror attacks. It should rather be compared to other images of its ilk—Robert Kennedy lying in a pool of blood on a concrete floor while a shell-shocked busboy holds his hand; civil rights leaders standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis all pointing in the direction of the assassin while Dr Martin Luther King Jr. lies dying at their feet; serious little John F. Kennedy Jr saluting his father’s casket; the Gandhi family at Indira’s funeral pyre.

The key difference here is those were all successful assassination attempts which made the pictures poignant. This one is triumphant. Trump survived the assassination which adds to the myth of indestructibility he wants to project. During the last presidential election when after months of playing down covid, he himself contracted the disease, he was desperate to return to active campaigning, defying his doctor’s orders because he could not afford to look weak. His greatest fear is to be seen as a loser. He infamously said “I don’t like losers” while referring to Vietnam war hero John McCain, who had lost the 2008 presidential election. That is why he never accepted his loss to Joe Biden and has been hell bent on defeating him in a rematch. The photograph has already become part of that narrative. The New York Post ran it with a headline that described Trump as “bloodied but unbowed.” It’s evoking comparisons with another famous flag picture—the US Marines raising the American flag in Iwo Jima, Japan, during World War II, an ironic comparison given that Trump managed to get out of serving in Vietnam.

Many of these historic photographs have proved controversial. The New York Times faced huge anger for Falling Man, the photo of the man plummeting to his death at the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer for his harrowing picture of a starving Sudanese child and a vulture waiting calmly behind him. But he faced immense backlash as well. Susan Sontag wrote in an essay that “there is shame as well as shock in looking at a close-up of a real horror” and said viewers who could do nothing to alleviate the situation were “voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.” Four months after winning the Pulitzer, Carter killed himself. Trump’s picture, on the other hand, will be embraced wholeheartedly by its subject. Trump adroitly used his mugshot from his arrest as a campaign tool. This one will certainly play a starring role in his campaign.

The other difference between this image and the pictures of Kennedy and King is we live in an age oversaturated with images. Everything exists on video. Smartphones are capturing every moment of every public event whether it’s a political rally or the Ambani wedding. And all those images are instantly edited, filtered and memed. At the time of some of these other iconic photographs that was not true. Joseph Louw was in fact the only photographer around when Dr King was shot. Malcolm Browne was the only Western journalist on the scene when the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc immolated himself in Saigon as a mark of protest against the Vietnamese regime.

Now everyone is a photographer. My phone constantly pops up Instagram advertisements telling me to shell out money for a course that will turn me into an ace phone photographer. “The great thing about photography is that it’s an easily learnable skill,” it promises. “Once you master the techniques in this course I promise you will be taking better photos for the rest of your life.”

Given that my photography skills are pretty slipshod that might well be true. But Vucci’s photograph demonstrates that it’s not exactly “easily learnable” either from an online photo academy. He didn’t just get the photograph by luck, the right man at the right place at the right time. He knew the pops were gunfire, he anticipated which direction the secret service agents would try to hustle Trump off the stage, and he knew the cloudless blue sky and the flag had to be part of the composition. He was both quick and patient.

And he proved that in this frenzied world of moving images, a still image still matters. It freezes time in a way little else can. It becomes a shot admired around the world.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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