"Looking for an Icon" examines the process by which photos become icons, revealing that once a photo is published, social forces are at work beyond the photographer's control. The film focuses on four World Press Photo winners, including Eddie Adams's 1968 photo of the public execution of a Viet Cong prisoner, an anonymous photographer's last image of Salvador Allende during the 1973 coup, Charlie Cole's 1989 photo of a lone student confronting tanks in Tiananmen Square, and David Turnley's 1991
photo of a grieving soldier during the first Gulf War.
This documentary about four World Press Photo contest winners defines icon to mean a still image so searing that it supplants memories of the event it was supposed to record.
Structured like a freewheeling crash course in media studies, Looking for an Icon offers close readings of four famous photographs, each a past winner of the World Press Photo of the Year.
If a great photograph is one that is symbolic, inviting us to project our wide-ranging interpretations onto them, then the images selected for deconstruction by Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman are almost beyond reproach.
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