Opinion: Why This Is the Iconic Gulf Oil Spill Picture

(June 4) -- A man helplessly tries to stop a convoy of tanks with his body. Three firefighters raise an American flag in the rubble of the World Trade Center. A turtle-necked hippie places a carnation in the barrel of a rifle during a Vietnam War protest.

You can never predict when a single photograph will transcend that day's front page and become an icon of an era. You just know it when it does. And in the case of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, that picture arrived Thursday.

A sea bird encased in oil, looking more like some mutated prehistoric creature, struggles along the shore of East Grand Terre Island in Louisiana.

Open Facebook, scroll through your friends' news feeds and the picture pops up seemingly every other post. It's the lead picture in The Washington Post print edition, The Boston Globe online, and newspapers from the Press-Register of Mobile, Ala., to the Anchorage Daily News. The Huffington Post had it as a full-screen banner image, complete with the headline "A Deed Most Fowl."

Taken by Associated Press photographer Charlie Riedel, the arresting image was packaged as part of a photo gallery of affected wildlife along the Gulf Coast. All the photographs are heartbreaking: A tiny bird lies on its back, its legs up in the air as if rigor mortis had set in prematurely; a brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana, flails, open-billed, in the murky water.

But there's something about Riedel's first picture, the creature-from-the-deep image, that clearly makes it the anointed one that everyone is talking about and the one that everyone will remember for decades to come.

Why? Well, for most people, the answer lies in a question. What is it? Is it duck? A sea bird? There's so much oil on this animal that you're hard-pressed to tell where the wing actually begins or where the beak ends. As Charles Ledford, a commercial photographer in Richmond, Va., told me, "It's a riddle of sorts. It asks the question, 'What can this be?' rather than telling us immediately, this is an oil-soaked pelican."

That's it exactly. (For the record, I don't actually think this is a pelican, but who can say?) There's something positively mutant about this bird, as if its body had become a host for some alien life form Jules Verne could never have imagined. Australian platypus by way of Chernobyl.

Robert Longhitano, a photographer in Philadelphia, agrees. "As soon as the lead photo popped up on my screen, it shook me to the core. I literally had to fight back the tears. It's truly an iconic image. In my mind, it's as if this spill took something beautiful and turned it into a monster."

Other photo professionals weighed in on what makes Riedel's photograph stand out. Molly Roberts, photo editor of Smithsonian Magazine, says it's a picture that demands a response from the viewer. "The power lies in the raw emotion it evokes, the immediacy. It transports you into the time and place and reality of the spill. You practically feel and breathe the viscous suffocating slime on your own skin. It's an image that insists on a visceral and, I think, compassionate response."

Britt Bailey, a portrait photographer in Illinois, had a more personal reaction. "What makes me so uncomfortable about this image is that for me, it's a 'we did this' picture. I'm used to blaming BP, but this image makes me realize we're all going to be held accountable for this."

But maybe my sister Jennifer -- who's a writer, not a photographer -- put it best. "To me, it looks like a monument, like the lions outside a pyramid or something. Like if you were actually trying to create a bronzed statue of a bird encased in oil as a tribute to the spill. Only this isn't a tribute."

Back on May 16, Fox News anchor Brit Hume, picking up the mantle of Rush Limbaugh and running into a hopeless corner, scoffed, "Where's the oil?"

Thanks to the work of Charlie Riedel, I'd say it's arrived.

Matt Mendelsohn is a former photo editor at USA Today.

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Editors note: Several readers asked about the fate of the bird in the photograph. We asked Matt to look into it, and here is his response: The birds, including our sad looking creature, are all being taken to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Fort Jackson, La. The problem with tracking our particular bird, the one in the photo, is that it became "famous" after it had been taken to the center and attended to. (Meaning Charlie Riedel's photo didn't become an international sensation until the bird had already been cleaned. So no one would know which one it is or was.)

Here's what Jay Holcomb of the IBRRC wrote to me: "I honestly don't know. It was a laughing gull and we received quite a few that day. The problem is that they all got put together and by the time we got them much of the loose oil had been whipped off. A few of the gulls died in the last few days but most are alive. Just really not sure if it made it or not."

The IBRRC has a web site and readers can make donations to their ongoing efforts: http://www.ibrrc.org/index.html

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