Kent State Massacre – May 4th, 1970

III. Findings and Analysis
Photo 1: Kent State
The Kent State Massacre occurred on May 4,
1970, when soldiers of the Ohio National Guard opened
fire on students who were protesting the Vietnam War.
Thirteen students were shot, killing four. Student photographer John Filo took a photo of a girl screaming out over
a body lying on the pavement and the photo went out on
the AP wire later that day. That photo would become an
iconic photo of the Kent State Massacre and the Vietnam
War.
According to the categories that Perlmutter
uses to define the qualities of an iconic photo, the Kent
State photo is iconic because it is has a celebrity quality,
meaning people recognize the photo, it instantaneously
achieved fame, and it shows a significant historical event.
16 These photos are defined as iconic images by Hariman and Lucaites (2007) and Sturken
(1997).
17 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 89-94.
18 Andrew L. Mendelson and C. Zoe Smith, “Vision of a New State: Israel as Mythologized by
Robert Capa,” Journalism Studies 7 (2006): 191.
19 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (London: Sage Publications, 2001): 69.
20 Mendelson and Smith, “Vision of a New State,” 191.
21 Paul, Messaris, Visual “Literacy” Image, Mind, & Reality (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press,
1994).
38 — The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications • Vol. 1, No. 1 • Winter 2010
The subject of the photo is not famous, and therefore does not fit into Perlmutter’s category of fame because,
as he states, only a handful of people alive today could identify the woman kneeling over the body.
22
The Kent State photo has been studied excessively by scholars, finding that much of the power of the
photo comes from the expression of outrage on the woman’s face. According to Hariman and Luciates, “The
girl’s cry is a direct demand for accountability and compensatory action.”23 The feeling on her face is powerful
not only because of its expressiveness but also because it matches the political situation represented by the
photograph.24 The woman draws attention onto herself, away from the boy who is lying in front of her, presumably dead, because of her intense emotional response. In their book No Caption Needed, Hariman and
Luciates said, “Her scream seems to be ripping out of her heart, spontaneous, uninhibited, and unanswerable—almost if she had been the one shot.”25
Hariman and Luciates also believe that the photo has become an icon for the event because the
photo is gendered. A woman is a more appropriate vessel for a public emotional response. The woman is positioned between two males, the one lying motionless on the ground and the one standing beside her, seemingly unmoved.26 Hariman and Luciates also pointed out that the Kent State girl acts as a ventriloquist for the
murdered body on the pavement.”27
One of the less than praising aspects of the photo, as Perlmutter pointed out, is that this photo is
technically poor; it violates the techniques of photography because “a fence post grows out of the woman’s
head.”28 This compositional error prevents it from falling into the striking composition category that Perlmutter
has determined a quality of an iconic photo.