MARC RIBOUD | PEACE MARCH, WASHINGTON, D. C.

Marc Riboud: Photographs at Home and Abroad (New York, 1986), pl. 74

Marc Riboud: 50 Years of Photography (Paris, 2004), pp. 82-3

Early prints of this seminal image are rare. Only a handful have appeared at auction the last few decades. In October 1967 nearly 100,000 people gathered in Washington, D. C., to protest America’s involvement in Vietnam. At what has become known as the March on the Pentagon, Magnum photographer Marc Riboud documented a sea of peaceful demonstrators and the more than 2,500 National Guard soldiers blocking their access to the building. The incongruous image of 17-year-old Jan Rose Kasmir offering a chrysanthemum flower to faceless, bayonet-wielding soldiers has come to define the antiwar era.

Of this day, Riboud later recalled, ‘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. America’s might that day, presented America with a sad face.’