poetry essay for telephone conversation

“Telephone Conversation” by Nobel Essay

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Introduction

Humour as a sympathetic tool, works cited.

The poem “Telephone conversation” is written by Nobel laureate winner professor Wole Soyinka. In this poem, the writer describes the conversation that ensued between him and a racist British landlady when he tried to rent her apartment. Poetry usually seeks to teach or reveal to us the beauties and ugliness of life and the world entirely. In the poem “telephone conversation”, the writer uses humour to deflate as well as to intensify the pain he endures as a result of racial prejudices. (Mahone, 152)

This poetic essay will analyze the entire poem and discuss the function or role of humour as a sympathetic tool in the poem “telephone conversation”. Furthermore, the writer’s ingenious sense of humour which enabled him to deflate the pain he experienced as an African in Britain will be constructively analyzed. Lastly, the uncivil attitude of judging people based on their color will also be discussed.

“Telephone conversation” is about the writer’s experience with a racist landlady in Britain. The writer as an African wishes to rent an apartment which he finds comfortable to him. He describes the apartment’s price as reasonable but feels indifferent about its location. (Charles, 267) Been contented with the price and location of the property, the writer decides to call the landlady to discuss amenities, price and other issues relevant to the apartment. However, the writer is aware of the racial prejudices against Africans and decides to boldly face the issue and probably get it out of the way permanently. This prompts him to confess his race instead of explaining it. Africans were usually treated as if their race or color was a crime or their fault. The landlady proved this fact beyond reasonable doubt as she immediately reacted by been silent after listening to his confession. When she eventually spoke, she bluntly asked “HOW DARK?” (Wole, 344) The use of capital letters by the writer clearly shows the writers pain to her demeaning and cold attitude when she learnt he was African. Here, the writer uses humour as a sympathetic tool to console himself as he mockingly describes the landlady in the context of a civilized, wealthy and well bred woman with good morals and values. Although in reality, she lacked every sound moral attitude to qualify her as a well bred woman. Her voice after the awkward silence is described as lipstick coated, cigarette holder pipped and long gold rolled. (Charles, 285) This description fits a lady of substance in all ramifications but the landlady was by no means a woman with sound attitude judging by the way she enquired about his race. (Mahone, 143)

Dumbfounded by the landlady’s arrogant reply, the writer is silent and she pushes on about her inquiry by rephrasing her question and asking again. “ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?” (Wole, 312) The writer again humorously uses sarcasm to express how he feels as he says, “Shamed by ill mannered silence”. (Wole, 354) At a first glance without comprehending the poem, a reader might believe the writer is shamed by his own silence as a result of his inability to answer the landlady’s question. However, this is only a way of mocking the landlady’s attitude. The writer’s true intent is to show the reader that the landlady was shameless from the way she kept pushing about the issue of race completely ignoring every other detail. The writer had no reason to be ashamed when it was very obvious that the landlady was the ill mannered of the two. (Charles, 123)

It is very glaring that the landlady has no sense of decency and she proves this as she continually pressed the writer to describe his skin color. The theme of the entire poem is to prove that, been a better person does not count on been African or British. The landlady who is of British origin tries to treat the writer who is of African roots as a lower being yet he outwits her. (Charles, 321) When the landlady again presses about the writer’s color, the writer decides to use higher vocabulary to describe himself. He told the landlady that he was “west African Sepia” (Wole, 376) knowing that the landlady was oblivious to such grammatical expression. This gets the British landlady confused as she had expected a simple black or white answer from him. But the writer instead of been the savage the landlady had expected him to be due to his race, he sarcastically continues to describe himself in a simple and sophisticated manner which leaves the landlady completely lost and dumbfounded. The writer’s answer and ability to confuse the landlady creates a humorous irony. The British landlady addressed the African caller as a lower being by bluntly asking him how dark he was. But the highly intelligent African writer not only proved her wrong by outwitting her but he also leaves a question on the mind of the readers. The ability of an African man to outwit a British woman and make her seem foolish using English language which is her native language, questions the irony of judging people based on their race or color. The writer describes his face as been brunette, his palm and sole of his feet as peroxide blond. His bottom he says is raven black from the friction of sitting down. At this point the landlady was completely lost and she hung up before he could describe the color of his ears. Wouldn’t you rather see for yourself? He asked the into the empty telephone line. (Wole, 213)

The poem “telephone conversation” serves as a deterrent to anybody who deliberately intends to ridicule other people simply for the sake of their skin color or race. Situations like this have the potential tendency to explode the conversation into a full verbal war. But the writer is highly intelligent and well cultured so, he resorts the use of humor to ridicule the supposedly superior British landlady and deflate his own pain. The theme of the whole poem focuses on the negativity in judging people based on race. If race was a criterion for intelligence, the British landlady would have outwitted the African caller who intended to rent her apartment. (Mahone, 405) “Telephone conversation”, is a short comic poem. This can be seen right from the first verse of the poem when the African caller humorously described the British landlady as having good breeding regardless of her single mindedness and awkward silence when she learnt he was African. The most significant aspect of the poem is the writer’s ability to use humour as a sympathetic tool to console himself from the pain he experienced as a result of his skin color. Furthermore, the writer is highly intelligent and shows this in the manner which he uses wit to reply the landlady. (Mahone, 397) At the end of the poem, any reader that understands the poem will see that the discrepancy about what really is and what appears to be is constructively dealt with. The writer concludes the poem with an appeal to the reader’s conscience and a plea to the landlady’s sense of decency by asking, “wouldn’t you rather see for yourself?” (Wole, 143)

Charles, Wayne. Works and biography of Nobel laureate winners: A critical analysis. Boston: Houghton, 2002. Print.

Mahone, Bradley. Myth, Literature, and the African World: The Writer in a Modern African State. New York: Blackwell, 2005. Print.

Wole, Soyinka. “Telephone conversation”: Reading and writing from literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2001. Print.

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Bibliography

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Telephone Conversation Summary & Analysis by Wole Soyinka

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
Poetic Devices
Vocabulary & References
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
Line-by-Line Explanations

"Telephone Conversation" is a 1963 poem by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka that satires racism. The poem describes a phone call between a landlady and the speaker, who is black, about renting an apartment. The landlady is pleasant until she learns that the speaker is "African," at which point she demands to know how "light" or "dark" the speaker's skin is. In response, the speaker cleverly mocks the landlady’s ignorance and prejudice, demonstrating that characterizing people by their skin color diminishes their humanity.

Read the full text of “Telephone Conversation”

The Full Text of “Telephone Conversation”

“telephone conversation” summary, “telephone conversation” themes.

Racism and the Complexity of Identity

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “telephone conversation”.

The price seemed ... ... journey--I am African."

Silence. Silenced transmission ... ... Cigarette-holder pipped.

Caught I was ... ... B, Button A.

Lines 11-14

Stench ... ... real!

Lines 14-18

Shamed ... ... OR VERY LIGHT?"

Lines 18-23

Revelation came. ... ... in my passport."

Lines 23-26

Silence for spectroscopic ... ... WHAT THAT IS."

Lines 26-30

"Like brunette." ... ... a peroxide blond.

Lines 30-35

Friction, caused-- ... ... See for yourself?"

“Telephone Conversation” Symbols

Cigarette-holder

Line 9: “Cigarette-holder”

Peroxide Blond
Line 30: “peroxide blond”

Raven black

Line 32: “raven black”

“Telephone Conversation” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

End-stopped line.

Line 4: “warned,”
Line 5: “African."”
Line 7: “came,”
Line 9: “foully.”
Line 12: “hide-and-speak.”
Line 16: “simplification.”
Line 17: “ emphasis--”
Line 18: “came.”
Line 19: “chocolate?"”
Line 21: “adjusted,”
Line 22: “afterthought,”
Line 26: “brunette."”
Line 27: “altogether.”
Line 30: “caused--”
Line 35: “yourself?"”
Lines 1-2: “location / Indifferent.”
Lines 2-3: “lived / Off”
Lines 3-4: “remained / But”
Lines 6-7: “of / Pressurized”
Lines 8-9: “gold-rolled / Cigarette-holder”
Lines 10-11: “LIGHT / OR”
Lines 11-12: “Stench / Of”
Lines 13-14: “tiered / Omnibus”
Lines 14-15: “Shamed / By”
Lines 15-16: “surrender / Pushed”
Lines 20-21: “light / Impersonality.”
Lines 23-24: “spectroscopic / Flight”
Lines 24-25: “accent / Hard”
Lines 25-26: “conceding / "DON'T”
Lines 28-29: “see / The”
Lines 29-30: “feet / Are”
Lines 31-32: “turned / My”
Lines 32-33: “sensing / Her”
Lines 33-34: “thunderclap / About”
Lines 34-35: “rather / See”
Line 1: “reasonable, location”
Line 2: “Indifferent. The”
Line 3: “premises. Nothing”
Line 4: “self-confession. "Madam," I”
Line 5: “journey--I”
Line 6: “Silence. Silenced”
Line 7: “good-breeding. Voice, when”
Line 8: “coated, long”
Line 9: “pipped. Caught”
Line 10: “DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE”
Line 11: “DARK?" Button B, Button A. Stench”
Line 13: “booth. Red,” “box. Red”
Line 14: “tar. It,” “real! Shamed”
Line 15: “silence, surrender”
Line 17: “was, varying”
Line 18: “DARK? OR,” “LIGHT?" Revelation”
Line 19: “mean--like”
Line 20: “clinical, crushing”
Line 21: “Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length”
Line 22: “chose. "West,” “sepia"--and”
Line 23: “passport." Silence”
Line 24: “fancy, till”
Line 25: “mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding”
Line 26: “IS." "Like”
Line 27: “DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not”
Line 28: “Facially, I,” “brunette, but, madam, you”
Line 29: “me. Palm,” “hand, soles”
Line 30: “blond. Friction, caused”
Line 31: “Foolishly, madam--by,” “down, has”
Line 32: “black--One moment, madam!"--sensing”
Line 34: “ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't”

Alliteration

Line 1: “l”
Line 2: “l,” “s,” “l”
Line 4: “w”
Line 5: “w”
Line 6: “S,” “S”
Line 7: “c”
Line 8: “L,” “c,” “l”
Line 11: “B,” “B,” “B”
Line 12: “r,” “b”
Line 13: “R,” “b,” “R,” “b,” “R”
Line 15: “s,” “s”
Line 16: “s”
Line 20: “c,” “l,” “c,” “l”
Line 21: “l,” “a”
Line 22: “A,” “a,” “a,” “a”
Line 23: “S,” “s”
Line 24: “F,” “f,” “t,” “t”
Line 28: “b,” “b”
Line 29: “m,” “m,” “m”
Line 30: “F”
Line 31: “F”
Line 32: “M,” “b,” “b,” “m,” “m”
Line 33: “r,” “r”
Line 1: “ee,” “e”
Line 2: “I,” “i”
Line 5: “a,” “a,” “a,” “a”
Line 6: “i,” “e,” “i,” “e,” “io,” “o”
Line 7: “i”
Line 8: “i,” “i,” “oa,” “o,” “o”
Line 9: “i,” “o,” “i,” “ou”
Line 10: “O”
Line 11: “u,” “o,” “u,” “o”
Line 13: “e,” “e,” “e”
Line 14: “e”
Line 15: “e,” “e,” “e,” “e”
Line 16: “e,” “e,” “i,” “i,” “i”
Line 18: “a,” “a”
Line 19: “ai”
Line 20: “i,” “i,” “i,” “i”
Line 21: “I,” “i,” “y,” “i,” “y,” “a,” “u”
Line 22: “A,” “a,” “a,” “a,” “a,” “a”
Line 23: “y,” “i,” “o,” “o”
Line 24: “i”
Line 25: “ie,” “e”
Line 26: “O,” “O”
Line 27: “I,” “I”
Line 28: “a,” “a,” “y,” “a,” “a,” “a,” “ee”
Line 29: “e,” “ee”
Line 30: “o,” “o,” “au”
Line 31: “a,” “a,” “a”
Line 32: “a,” “a”
Line 33: “ei,” “ea”
Line 34: “ea,” “ea”
Line 35: “ee”
Line 1: “n,” “l,” “l,” “n”
Line 2: “d,” “n,” “l,” “d,” “l,” “d,” “s,” “l,” “d”
Line 3: “m,” “N,” “r,” “m,” “n”
Line 4: “f,” “f,” “d,” “w,” “d”
Line 5: “t,” “w,” “t”
Line 6: “S,” “l,” “nc,” “S,” “l,” “nc,” “s,” “ss”
Line 7: “r,” “ss,” “r,” “d,” “d,” “r,” “c,” “c”
Line 8: “L,” “ck,” “c,” “d,” “l,” “g,” “ld,” “ll,” “d”
Line 9: “C,” “g,” “r,” “tt,” “ld,” “r,” “p,” “pp,” “d,” “C,” “t,” “ou,” “ll”
Line 10: “H,” “W,” “D,” “R,” “h,” “h,” “r,” “d,” “R”
Line 11: “R,” “R,” “B,” “tt,” “n,” “B,” “B,” “tt,” “n,” “S,” “t,” “n”
Line 12: “r,” “nc,” “b,” “r,” “p,” “b,” “c,” “s,” “p,” “k”
Line 13: “R,” “b,” “R,” “ll,” “r,” “b,” “R,” “d,” “b,” “l,” “r,” “d”
Line 14: “b,” “s,” “s,” “r,” “r”
Line 15: “ll,” “nn,” “r,” “s,” “l,” “c,” “s,” “rr,” “n,” “d,” “r”
Line 16: “d,” “d,” “m,” “f,” “d,” “d,” “s,” “m,” “f”
Line 18: “R,” “R,” “R,” “R,” “m”
Line 19: “m,” “l,” “k,” “l,” “m,” “k,” “c,” “l”
Line 20: “ss,” “nt,” “c,” “l,” “n,” “c,” “l,” “c,” “l”
Line 21: “p,” “r,” “l,” “R,” “p,” “d,” “l,” “l,” “d,” “d”
Line 22: “fr,” “s,” “f,” “r”
Line 23: “p,” “ss,” “p,” “rt,” “S,” “c,” “s,” “p,” “c,” “t,” “sc,” “p,” “c”
Line 24: “F,” “l,” “t,” “f,” “n,” “c,” “t,” “ll,” “t,” “f,” “l,” “n,” “c,” “l,” “cc,” “nt”
Line 25: “n,” “c,” “c,” “n,” “c,” “d”
Line 26: “D,” “N,” “T,” “KN,” “T,” “r,” “n,” “tt”
Line 27: “T,” “T,” “T,” “t,” “t”
Line 28: “ll,” “m,” “b,” “tt,” “b,” “t,” “m,” “d,” “m,” “ld,” “s”
Line 29: “s,” “t,” “m,” “P,” “l,” “m,” “m,” “s,” “l,” “s,” “m,” “t”
Line 30: “r,” “p,” “r,” “d,” “d,” “F,” “r”
Line 31: “F,” “l,” “l,” “m,” “d,” “m,” “tt,” “d,” “t,” “d”
Line 32: “M,” “b,” “tt,” “m,” “n,” “b,” “m,” “nt,” “m,” “d,” “m,” “s,” “n,” “s”
Line 33: “r,” “r,” “r,” “r,” “r,” “r”
Line 34: “r,” “M,” “m,” “r,” “r”
Line 35: “S,” “s”
Line 12: “hide-and-speak”
Lines 1-2: “The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent.”
Lines 2-3: “ The landlady swore she lived / Off premises.”
Line 5: “I hate a wasted journey--I am African”
Lines 6-9: “Silence. Silenced transmission of / Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came, / Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled / Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.”
Lines 11-14: “Button B, Button A. Stench / Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak. / Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered / Omnibus squelching tar. ”
Lines 14-14: “It / was / real! ”
Lines 14-16: “Shamed / By ill-mannered silence, surrender / Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.”
Lines 29-32: “Palm of my hand, soles of my feet / Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused-- / Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned / My bottom raven black--”
Line 10: “"HOW DARK?"”
Lines 10-11: “"ARE YOU LIGHT / OR VERY DARK?" ”
Line 11: “Button B, Button A. ”
Line 13: “Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered”
Line 14: “Omnibus squelching tar. ”
Line 18: “"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?"”
Line 26: “brunette”
Line 27: “"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" ”
Line 28: “brunette,” “madam”
Line 31: “madam”
Line 32: “madam”
Line 34: “Madam”
Lines 7-9: “V / oice, when it came, / Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled / Cigarette-holder pipped”
Lines 11-12: “Button B, Button A. Stench / Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.”
Line 21: “wave-length adjusted”
Line 22: “West African sepia”
Lines 29-30: “Palm of my hand, soles of my feet / Are a peroxide blond”
Line 32: “My bottom raven black”
Line 33: “thunderclap”
Line 19: “like plain or milk chocolate”
Line 26: “Like brunette”

“Telephone Conversation” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

Indifferent
Self-confession
Transmission
Pressurized
Gold-rolled Cigarette Holder
Button B, Button A:
Hide-and-Speak
Double-Tiered Omnibus
Dumbfounded
Impersonality
Wave-length
Spectroscopic
Raven Black
Thunderclap
(Location in poem: Line 2: “Indifferent”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Telephone Conversation”

Rhyme scheme, “telephone conversation” speaker, “telephone conversation” setting, literary and historical context of “telephone conversation”, more “telephone conversation” resources, external resources.

‘There’s One Humanity or There Isn’t’: A Conversation — A conversation between scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the poet from the New York Review of Books.

Wole Soyinka's Biography — A biography of Wole Soyinka from the Nobel Foundation.

Out of Africa: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka — Alessandra Di Maio interviews Wole Soyinka.

Post-Colonial Literature — An introduction to post-colonial literature from Oxford Bibliographies.

Wole Soyinka Reads "Telephone Conversation" — Listen to poet read his poem aloud.

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation

Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 21, 2021 • ( 0 )

Paradoxically apologetic and bitingly sarcastic, Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation is a 35-line poem dealing with bigotry and the absurdity of racist hierarchies. Written in free verse, the poem portrays an African’s attempt to rent an apartment in London. Describing a conversation with a prospective landlady conducted from a public phone, the poem’s speaker recounts the experience of negotiating suitable lodgings. “The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived / Off premises.” Before making an appointment to view the flat, the apartment seeker nevertheless feels compelled to reveal his ethnicity: “Nothing remained / But self-confession. ‘Madam,’ I warned / I hate a wasted journey—I am African.’ ” The word confession wryly implies culpability, and the speaker’s suggestion of self-incrimination is reinforced by the landlady’s stony silence and underlined by the narrator’s rueful “Caught I was, foully.” The narrator is trapped indeed, “Shamed / By ill-mannered silence” broken only by sudden explosions of authoritative anxiety: “HOW DARK?” and again, “ARE YOU LIGHT / OR VERY DARK?” The capital letters suggest not so much the volume of the woman’s voice as the insult of her questions.

For a few lines the speaker disconnects from the conversation and focuses on his surroundings, perhaps to detach himself from the woman’s racism. In so doing, however, he perceives his backdrop and situates the story in London, describing the “Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered / Omnibus squelching tar.” He suggests through the repeated use of r ed both an allusion to the color of the British Empire on its maps and his own indignation at being so interrogated. Moreover, the red bus seems to be an uncanny (if psychologically significant) metaphor for England itself, “squelching” the “tar”-hued subjects of its former colonies.

As a retort, to answer the woman’s questions, the narrator states that he is “West African sepia,” dryly referring to the British colonial system’s practice of officially classifying subjects according to skin tone. The next passage marks a distinct shift in tone. Astounded by the indignity to which he is being subjected, the narrator embarks on a monologue at once witty and sarcastic. Describing his various bodily parts, he claims to be “DARK” (“brunette”) only on his face and explains that “the rest” (palms and soles) are light, “peroxide blond,” an oblique reference to how he pictures the woman at the other end of the line and a sassy and contemptuous way of describing the lighter skin on those parts of his own body. In a final protest the speaker mentions his “bottom,” saying that friction, caused “Foolishly, Madam—by sitting down, has turned” it “raven black.” He tries to keep the woman from hanging up by challenging her, “Madam . . . wouldn’t you rather / See for yourself?” Several levels of meaning enter into play in these final lines of Soyinka’s picture of the banality of evil. While some of him may be viewed as “peroxide blond,” colored by contact with the racist British colonial system, he is obviously black, if not “raven black,” and an African to the bottom of his heart, identity, and soul. The phrase “Foolishly . . . sitting down” refers to a former taboo in West Africa against allowing the “natives” to sit in the presence of European colonials. The phrase suggests—with ironic subtlety— that the speaker frequently has dared, by sitting, to proclaim his black identity and his fundamental rights. In cheekily asking, “wouldn’t you rather / See [my bottom] for yourself?” the speaker tempts the woman to subject herself to another international sign of insolence.

Critical analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation

Telephone Conversation is a poetic satire against the widespread racism still prevalent in the modern western society. As the title suggests, the poem depicts a telephone conversation between a west African man and a British land-lady who shockingly changes her attitude towards the man soon after he reveals his racial identity. The motif of a microcosmic telephone conversation is employed by the poet to apply to a much broader macrocosmic level where racial bigotry is ridiculed in the contest of human intelligence, also portraying the poet’s witticism and his ingenious sense of humour.

The poem begins on a peaceful note, befitting the narrator’s satisfaction for having found the right house the price seemed reasonable, location in different. The land lady also emphatically mentioned that she lived ‘off premises’, thereby ensuring that tenant would enjoy absolute privacy and freedom. The conversation however drifted to an unpleasant turn of events, soon after the man surprisingly decided to make a self-confession to reveal his nationality- “Madam,” I warned, “I hate a wasted journey-I am African.”

A sudden unexpected silence followed and the awkward pause in the conversation is strengthened by a caesura, trying to emphasize the impact of the African’s race being revealed to the land lady. An uneasy atmosphere is created and the word ‘silenced’ reiterates the sudden change in the land lady’s attitude as well as the man’s intuitive sensitivity towards the unfriendliness on the other end of the phone. ‘Silence. Silenced transmission of Pressurized good-breeding.’

It seemed as if the narrator was caught in a foul act and the expression ‘Pressurized good-breeding’ is only an ironical manifestation of the polite manners the land-lady was supposed to have for the job of renting premises. After considerable period of silence when the land-lady spoke again, her words seemed to come from between lipstick coated lips that held between them a long gold-rolled cigaretteholder and the impression she gave off was that as if her status in the society was all of a sudden upgraded. Undoubtedly, the poet’s power of imagination enables him to visualize an affluent and sophisticated British land-lady belonging to the so-called progressive and urban world on the other side. Tension rises with the explicit racial discrimination conveyed through the question-“How Dark?” The land lady’s effort in seeking clarification in something quite irrelevant that is, his skin colour, in the course of the conversation is emphasized. She repeated her question, reinforcing the racist overtone in the English society. The lady’s pushy, unequivocal stance in pursuing the answer rendered the man speechless. He suddenly seemed confounded. ‘Button B, Button A. The automation imagery shows the man’s temporary conclusion and implies the rampant racial discrimination taken for granted in the western society. Shock changes to disbelief that transforms itself quickly into sheer disgust and utter indignation. ‘Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered Omnibus squelching tar.’

The narrator is jolted back into reality from his trance like state and he makes a frantic attempt to ascertain the situation. The revelation comes with the repetition of the question by the land lady with varying emphasis. ‘ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT? You mean-like plain or milk chocolate? ‘It was soul shattering to the narrator that the land lady could be so insensitive to his feelings. Fuming with anger, the man decided to inflict similar humiliation on the racist woman choosing a superior vocabulary and replying in an acutely sarcastic tone. “West African sepia-and as afterthought, ‘Down in my passport. He quickly forces her into submission and exposes the ignorance of the lady clearly illustrating that beneath the lady’s glossy and lavish exterior, she was just a shallow judgmental racist. Paying no attention to the land lady’s disrespect for him, he took a firm control over the conversation defending the dignity and integrity of his ethnic identity from the ruthless onslaught of the land-lady. He goes on to describe the various colours one could see on him; ‘Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see the rest of me. Unabashed he goes on to state that the palm of his hand and the soles of his feet are peroxide blonde and that friction by sitting down had turned his bottom –raven black. With a slow but furious realization the lady began to set the receiver down. ‘Sensing….’ the man rushed to ask sarcastically:“Madam”, I pleaded, “wouldn’t you rather see for yourself? “The quasi politeness of the tone of the poet can hardly conceive the ultimate insult inflicted on the land lady and shows how indignant the man was, also ending the poem with a tremendous sense of humour, apart from the obvious sarcasm. ‘Telephone conversation’ is a favourite, both for its excellent use of rich language and the timeless message it conveys, that is to avoid silent resignations to such policies of the racist society and also that Intellectual superiority is not determined by racial colour.

Telephone Conversation – Wole Soyinka: Poem Analysis

Telephone Conversation – Wole Soyinka:…

Theme : Prejudice/discrimination & How people learn hard lessons

Type : Blank verse

Written by Wole Soyinka – first African to win the Nobel Prize for literature
The poem is about a man trying to rent a flat from an English landlady
Her attitudes towards him change when she hears he is African
She is clearly racist, and the absurd conversation shows her inferior intelligence
The theme of the poem is prejudice/discrimination based on the color of skin
Sensory language is used to evoke a picture of the woman and her character
Irony is used countless times – the woman making assumptions about the caller on basis of appearance, not personality
Diction reveals the man’s superior intelligence
Pun – in “hide and speak” can be interpreted that the woman is speaking but hiding her real feelings and that they are both hidden from each other as it is over the telephone
The fact she feels the need to simplify the question for him it is ironic that she is revealed to be the unintelligent one
Repetition – “Madam” – emphasizes the poet is well-bred and refined contrasting to her rudeness
Alliteration is also used – “Flight of fancy”
Colour imaging – reflecting the theme of prejudice based on skin color
Free verse appropriate given it is a conversation

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Wole Soyinka | Telephone Conversation | An Analytical Study

‘Telephone Conversation’ is a poem by Wole Soyinka on the theme of racism and prejudice. The poem depicts a course of a conversation between two persons: one is a white English landlady and the other is a black African.

The black African (maybe the poet himself) is in search of a house for rent in the city of London and he has had a talk with a landlady over the telephone. The house to rent out is situated in an area of the city not affected by racial prejudice. The landlady lives outside the premises of the house. So the tenant would enjoy full privacy in the house. The black American (here the poet) thinks it to be his ideal rental house. But the black man has some previous experience that he, being black-skinned, could not get a house for rent in the past. So he frankly confesses to the lady that he is a black African. He does not like to waste his time going there if the landlady refuses after seeing him.

After this, the black man found the lady to be silent on the other side of the telephone. It makes him think that maybe the landlady is reluctant to let out the house to a black man. Then the poet thought that the lady is sensitive to racial discrimination. She might be proud of her good breeding. Again he imagined the lady to be painted with lipstick and perhaps she smokes a cigarette.

At that moment the lady breaks the silence and asks the poet from the other end of the telephone:

‘How dark?

……………………

Are you light?

Or very dark?’

The question asked by the lady seemed that she is not oversensitive to racism and she wants to help the man by giving the house to him. The man then understands and says if she would like him to compare with chocolate dark or light-dark. The black man’s thought changes and describes himself as a West African Sepia as written in his passport. The lady remains quiet for a while and asks what that is. He replies that it is similar to a brunette. It clarifies that he is dark.

He disregards all constraints of formality and mocks her outright, saying that he isn’t all black. The soles of his feet and the palms of his hands are completely white. But as he senses that she is about to slam the receiver on him, he pleads one last time to see for herself.

The tone of the poem is satiric as the poet goes on to describe himself as a black African invoking such phrases that seem to be exaggerated. It is also bantering when the poet says that the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands are completely white.

The theme of the poem is a simple one but the representation is something obscure and compact. The poet has employed some phrases and images which are not easy to interpret in the context of the average reader. Some of such phrases are ‘Pressurized good-breeding, ‘Stench of rancid breath of public hide and seek’, ‘Red double-tiered Omnibus squelching tar’ etc. 0 0 0 .

Read More: E De Sauza’s Poem ‘Marriages are Made’: An Analytical Study

N. B. This article entitled ‘ Wole Soyinka | Telephone Conversation | An Analytical Study’ originally belongs to the book ‘ World Poetry Criticism ‘ by Menonim Menonimus. Wole Soyinka | Telephone Conversation | An Analytical Study

Books of Literary Criticism by M. Menonimus:

World Short Story Criticism
World Poetry Criticism
World Drama Criticism
World Novel Criticism
World Essay Criticism
Indian English Poetry Criticism
Indian English Poets and Poetry Chief Features
Emily Dickinson’s Poetry-A Thematic Study
Walt Whitman’s Poetry-A Thematic Study
Critical Essays on English Poetry
Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Novel: Return of the Spirit-An Analytical Study
Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Novel: ‘Yawmiyyat Naib Fil Arayaf’-An Analytical Study
Analytical Studies of Some Arabic Short Stories
A Brief History of Arabic Literature: Pre-Islamic Period …

The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka: Summary and Analysis

"The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka" is a satirical poem penned in 1963, that addresses the issue of racism. It unfolds the narrative of a telephone call between the speaker, a black individual, and a landlady negotiating an apartment rental. Initially amiable, the landlady's demeanour takes a sharp turn when she discovers the speaker's African identity, prompting intrusive inquiries about the shade of the speaker's skin. In a witty rejoinder, the speaker adeptly ridicules the landlady's ignorance and bias, skillfully highlighting the dehumanizing nature of categorising individuals based on their skin colour. Thus, "The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka" serves as a poignant exploration of societal prejudices.

The telephone conversation by wole soyinka.

The price seemed reasonable, location

Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived

Off premises. Nothing remained

But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,

"I hate a wasted journey--I am African."

Silence. Silenced transmission of

Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled

Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.

"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT

OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A. * Stench

Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.

Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered

Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed

By ill-mannered silence, surrender

Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.

Considerate she was, varying the emphasis--

"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.

"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?"

Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light

Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,

I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought,

"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic

Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent

Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding

"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."

"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.

Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet

Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused--

Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned

My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing

Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap

About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather

See for yourself?"

The apartment seemed like a good deal, and the location was okay. The landlady assured me that she didn't live in the building. The only thing left was to share something important about myself. So, I told her, "Ma'am, I don't want to waste a trip. Just so you know, I'm black."

There was silence on the phone. In that silence, I could feel the tension between the landlady's prejudices and her manners. When she finally spoke, she sounded like someone who might wear a lot of lipstick and have a long, gold cigarette holder. Now, I was in an awkward spot. "How dark are you?" she asked bluntly. It took a moment to realize I hadn't misheard her. She repeated, "Are you light-skinned or very dark-skinned?" It was like choosing between Button A and Button B on a phone booth: to make a call or get a refund. I could smell her bad breath hidden behind her polite words.

Taking in my surroundings – a red phone booth, a red mailbox, a red double-decker bus – I realized this kind of thing actually happens! Feeling embarrassed by my silence, I reluctantly asked for clarification, utterly confused and shocked. She kindly rephrased the question: "Are you dark-skinned or very light?" Finally, it made sense. I replied, "Are you asking if my skin is the colour of regular chocolate or milk chocolate?" Her confirmation was cold and formal, devastating in how thoughtless and impersonal she sounded. Changing my approach, I quickly chose an answer: "My skin colour is West African sepia." Then, as an afterthought, I added, "at least it is in my passport." Silence followed as she imagined the possible colours I might be referring to. But her true feelings emerged, and she spoke harshly into the phone.

"What is that?" she asked, admitting, "I don’t know what that is." "It's a brunette color," I told her. "That's pretty dark, isn't it?" she asked. "Not entirely," I replied. "My face is brunette, but you should see the rest of my body, ma'am. My palms and the soles of my feet are the color of bleached blond hair. Unfortunately, ma'am, all the friction from sitting down has made my butt as black as a raven. Wait, hang on for a moment ma'am!" I said, sensing she was about to hang up. "Ma'am," I pleaded, "don't you want to see for yourself?"

This analysis will help you remember the complexity of human identity, the absurdity of racial categorization, and the ongoing fight for equality.

Analysis of The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka

Beyond "Dark" or "Light"

Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation" isn't a casual chat; it's a satirical scalpel, dissecting the ugly abscess of racism through a seemingly mundane phone call. The conversation, ostensibly about renting an apartment, quickly devolves into a stark display of prejudice, exposing its insidious nature through a powerful dialogue of quotes.

The Insidious Creep of Bias

The poem opens with hopeful inquiries about "a flat to let," suggesting a sense of normalcy. But when the speaker declares, "I am African," the tone shifts. The landlady's casual "nice" masks a sudden tension, as her reply, "Which part?" reeks of thinly veiled prejudice. She seeks to categorize, to fit the speaker into a preconceived box before considering him as an individual.

Colour-Coded Humanity

The crux of the conversation revolves around a grotesque obsession with skin colour. The landlady's repeated, insistent "Are you dark? Or very light?" betrays her warped worldview, where a person's worth is reduced to melanin levels. The speaker's retort, "Madam, I hate a wasted journey—I am African," is both dignified and defiant, refusing to play into her discriminatory game.

Beyond the Binary

The landlady's simplistic binary of "dark" and "light" is shattered by the speaker's nuanced response: "Like brunette, that got us sunburnt." He subverts her expectations, revealing the absurdity of racial categorization in the face of human complexity. His identity cannot be contained in such simplistic terms.

Humour as Resistance

Despite the ugliness of the situation, Soyinka employs wit as a weapon. The speaker's dry commentary on "public hide-and-speak," referring to the hidden nature of prejudice, stings with truth. His witty comparison of himself to a leopard, "But not those with fangs and claws," disarms the landlady with its unexpected humour, while subtly pointing out the absurdity of her fear.

A Conversation Across the Divide

Ultimately, the poem leaves us with a chilling question: is true communication even possible across such a vast chasm of prejudice? The speaker's final, resigned acceptance, "Never mind," speaks volumes. He recognizes the futility of the conversation, the impossibility of bridging the gap with words alone.

💡 "Telephone Conversation" is more than just a poem about a rental inquiry; it's a powerful indictment of racism and its insidious effects. Through the stark contrast between characters and their biting quotes, Soyinka forces us to confront the ugliness of prejudice and the enduring struggle for true human connection across racial divides. It's a call to action, not just to dismantle discriminatory policies, but to dismantle the discriminatory thinking that fuels them.

Literary Devices Used

Free Verse: The poem's lack of formal structure mirrors the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the conversation. It allows for sudden shifts in tone and emphasis, reflecting the speaker's frustration and the landlady's bigotry.
Irony: The landlady's questions about the speaker's suitability for the apartment become increasingly absurd, highlighting the irony of her prejudice. The humour, however, is dark and tinged with anger.
Repetition: The landlady's obsessive repetition of "dark" underscores the poem's central theme. It becomes a mantra of exclusion, a stark reminder of the barriers faced by people of colour.

About the Author

Wole Soyinka, a towering figure in African literature, is a Nigerian playwright and poet renowned for his impactful contributions to the literary world. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, Soyinka's work delves into complex themes such as oppression, tyranny, and the struggle for independence in Nigeria.

With an impressive repertoire comprising 29 plays, two novels, and a diverse collection of memoirs, essays, and poetry, Soyinka's literary prowess reflects his deep engagement with socio-political issues. His writing, often characterized by a keen sense of social criticism, extends beyond the boundaries of the literary realm, addressing the broader challenges faced by society.

Soyinka's enduring influence is marked not only by his distinguished body of work but also by his commitment to using literature as a powerful tool for social commentary and change.

While "Telephone Conversation" ends on a muted note, it lingers in the mind, a persistent hum that refuses to be ignored. The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka doesn't offer easy answers, but it compels us to listen, to confront the uncomfortable truths it holds, and to strive for a world where skin colour isn't the first line of dialogue, but one line among many that paint the beautiful, intricate tapestry of our shared humanity.

As a content writer, Prince has a talent for capturing the essence of a topic and presenting it in a way that is easy to understand. His writing is clear, concise, and engaging, drawing readers in and keeping them interested from start to finish. He is constantly looking for ways to improve his writing and takes feedback and constructive criticism as an opportunity to grow and develop his skills.

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Poetry Comparison - 'Telephone Conversation' by Wole Soyinka and 'Ballad of the Landlord' by Langston Hughes.

Poetry Comparison

The two poems ‘Telephone Conversation’ by Wole Soyinka and ‘Ballad of the Landlord’ by Langston Hughes both focus on the issue of racism. Thus the poems have a similar theme but present the theme in a variety of different ways.

The backgrounds of the poets tell us a lot about their intentions. Soyinka is a Nigerian who was raised as a Christian. He is also highly educated and went to two universities, one a Nigerian university the other an English university. His background shows he mingled into western society but he was never treated as an equal. Soyinka wrote political literature and was arrested for seizing radio stations and making a political broadcast about the fairness of the Nigerian elections. He was politically oppressed and his whole life has been a struggle. He often voiced his opinions on the Nigerian government and the racism he has experienced. His intentions are quite clearly shown in ‘Telephone Conversation’ where he illustrates a typical example of racism, possibly autobiographical, through the absurd reaction of the landlady. If he had gone to see the flat, the landlady would have lied and told him it was already taken so it would have been directly racist. But when he rings on the phone, she tells him the flat is free before being told by the character, who is anxious not to make a wasted journey, that he is black. The landlady asks how dark he is as if his depth of colour makes a difference. Langston Hughes has a different background, having been born and raised in America. His parents divorced when he was young so he went to live with his grandmother. After graduating he went to Columbia University. He travelled widely to Africa and Europe experiencing a host of jobs, which had influences on his poetry. He won the Harmon gold medal for literature for his first novel in 1930. He was greatly influenced by Jazz and other notable black poets of the time. Hughes’ work was known for its perceptive, vibrant portrayals of black life and he refused to set apart his personal experiences and the common experiences of the black America. His intention in this poem is that what happens to the character in his poem happens to thousands of black people all around America. Both poets want the reader to feel the evil of racism but Hughes was writing this poem in the 1930’s where racism was rife and was more tolerated than in the 1960’s when Soyinka was writing ‘Telephone Conversation’ and human rights’ movements were beginning to be recognised.

The major subject explored in both poems is racism. The racism is unlike what we hear about nowadays of racist attacks, the racism is not blatant, but more psychological although still damaging.

This psychological racism is shown in Soyinka’s poem:

“HOW DARK?”…I had not misheard… “ARE YOU LIGHT

OR VERY DARK?”

This is a preview of the whole essay

The landlady tries to phrase her question so it does not sound too rude but it just shows her ignorance and stupidity. The capitals are used to show the landlady patronising the man by stressing on the words. Both Soyinka and Hughes show the more subtle aspects of racism like how hard getting decent housing is for a black person, which is a basic human right, especially in a western society. The difference is that they use different scenarios. In Hughes’ poem the character is confronting the landlord in the 1930’s about a problem while Soyinka’s character is having a dialogue in a telephone box trying to get a flat but both make the reader see and feel both characters’ emotion after such comments. E.g. In Soyinka’s poem

‘ By ill-mannered silence, surrender

Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.’

The character is confused and taken aback by the earlier question and can’t believe what he is hearing. Soyinka uses this to show the effect of racism upon the character and as a whole to anyone who has heard a racist comment directed at him or her. Also by using alliteration or sibilance as shown in the quote, Soyinka displays the words so they stand out and to create a more sensory description . The sound the words give sounds like the hissing of a telephone and help create a more descriptive and sensory scene. There is a difference between the two poets though; Hughes shows how harshly blacks were treated for such little crimes

‘ MAN THREATENS LANDLORD

TENANT HELD NO BAIL

JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL’

And all the character was doing was protecting his home. Soyinka shows how ignorant people can be because any normal landlord would take any offer because you are wasting money with a flat with no tenant to pay rent but the landlady would not accept the offer because he was black. Both poets have different scenarios used but the subject of subtle racism is clearly shown in both poems and so are the characters’ emotions.

The two poets use their own style of language to create a certain effect on the reader. In 'Telephone Conversation', Soyinka uses formal, highly descriptive language written in Standard English. This shows that Soyinka is a clever, educated man and that the character in the poem is smarter than the landlady. E.g.

‘…Silence for spectroscopic

Flight of fancy…’

Not only is the vocabulary complex but the tone adopted by the narrator is also mocking the white woman's ignorance. Spectroscopic refers to the key idea that the woman is not just concerned that the man is not white but exactly how black he is. Langston Hughes, on the other hand, does not use complex vocabulary but uses repetition of words like ‘gonna’ and writes in colloquial language ‘’member’ and ‘gonna’. The use of these words gives the poem more depth and individuality, which can fit nicely into the tempo of the poem.

Both poets use many different poetic devices and their own style of writing in their poems. Soyinka uses enjambments often: “Silenced transmission of

Pressurized good-breathing”

This makes the poem flow and adds depth to the description by lengthening the line. Which is the same reason, Hughes uses enjambments in his poem: “When you come up yourself

It’s a wonder you don’t fall down.”

But Hughes uses a forced structure of enjambment of appearing on the second line of every stanza, which makes the poem more rhythmic and jazzy. Hughes use a jazzy, musical style in his poem thus it is called ‘Ballad of the Landlord’. By using structure enjambments and a rhyming pattern in the second and fourth lines of each stanza:

“Landlord, landlord,

My roof has sprung a leak.

Don’t you ’member I told you about it

Way last week?

He makes the poem flow like music and gives it a beat and tempo. Hughes makes good use of the musical style by creating tension in the fist six stanzas like many musical pieces and then like music; the poem speeds up giving a dramatic effect “Copper’s whistle!

Patrol bell!

Arrest.

Precinct Station.

Iron cell.”

This is short, snappy and has a rhyming beat and it demonstrates how fast and quick they dealt with blacks in society. Hughes uses repetition often, using colloquial language ‘gonna’ and nouns like ‘Landlord’, ‘Police’ and ‘Ten Bucks’ laying stress on the importance of them. Not only doe Hughes repeat words but he is continually asking questions:

‘Ten Bucks you say I owe you?

Ten Bucks you say is due?’

The continual repetition of questions not only shows how lazy and ignorant the landlord is but how long it takes for the landlord to sort the problem out while in just the last verse the police deal with the black man quickly.

Soyinka uses figurative phrases to make the reader think and understand the true meaning of the line or phrase:

‘…. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted’

Soyinka uses this metaphor and double-entendre on ‘wave-length’ to show how hard it is for a black person to get on with a white person. The use of metaphors help build up tension until the end of the poem because the reader is indulging into the emotions of the black man. The climax is when the character uses his wit to get his own back on the landlady. Hughes uses no metaphors and to keep his poem simplistic and so it does not lose its rhythm.

Soyinka writing is descriptive and to add to the scene’s description Soyinka use onomatopoeia e.g.

‘clanged’, ‘squelching’, ‘pipped’. By using onomatopoeia the reader gets a more vivid picture of the sounds and a better picture of the scenario as if you were there.

Again, Hughes uses no onomatopoeia because he does not need to because the poem is simplistic but also it would sound out of place in the structured rhythmic stanzas.

The two poets use different types of poetic devices to create their own specific effects on the reader.

Hughes uses rhyming and enjambment to make the poem ballad like and to make the poem flow. By doing this the reader can understand what is happening easily and the message of how unjust the racist world is on all those persecuted for their race or beliefs. Soyinka uses many poetic devices to create either a highly descriptive picture or phrases that the reader has to read the poem again to truly understand. By reading a poem through more than once the reader is forced to engage with a topic in more detail and with greater intimacy. Both poems give their desired effects on the reader and the poetic devices used help generate these effects.

The tone used in the two different poems creates certain effects on the reader. Soyinka’s tone is very dry and sarcastic to show the ignorance of the landlady,

“You mean- - like plain or milk chocolate?”

By using a dry tone, Soyinka slowly builds up the racism felt until the climax where he gets his own back on the landlady. Soyinka’s character seems to have a calm, naive tone but also witty,

‘I chose “West African sepia” – and as an afterthought

“Down in my passport” ’

Because he seems calm but is also showing he is smarter than the woman because you do not have your colour stated in your passport. And again these remarks help build up the climax at the end where the character mocks the landlady. Dissimilar to Soyinka’s slowly revealing tone, Hughes uses a fast upbeat tone to make the poem jazz-like and to make it flow,

“Landlord, landlord,

Don’t you ’member I told u about it

Way last week?”

Hughes uses this rhythmic tone in five more consecutive stanzas then, like music, Hughes changes the pace and tone to show how quickly the white police dealt with the black man and how hysterical the white people saw it using the big bold headlines.

“Copper’s whistle!

All these effects used make Hughes’ poem sound like a ballad. The two different poets use different tones effectively. Soyinka’s use of tone is very subtle and the reader may not even notice the climax being built up until the end while Hughes tone is vibrant and original which is almost a contrast to what is happening to Hughes’s character in the poem but the rhythmic tone makes the reader read on till the end where they can think about racism and its effects on humans.

Both poems show you racism and its effects on people and Hughes and Soyinka aren’t just writing about their personal experiences but also showing you that these things happened to many black people. The two poets write their poems in different ways, using different techniques, which give the poems their originality and identity. Soyinka uses humour to illustrate the ignorance of the landlady and shows how stupid she is when she does not pick up on the sarcasm until the end:

‘ “Foolishly, madam – by sitting down, has turned

My bottom raven black….” ’

This humour makes the poem more interesting and indulging. Hughes uses the element of music to make his poem fast, upbeat and enjoyable to read. The musical beat compliments the stanzas in which the character is facing a hard ordeal with his landlord. The hardship shown by the poets made me think how unjust and prejudice our forefathers were to blacks from slavery to not letting them get adequate housing in the western world. Hughes summed it up with the way the police treated his character with such efficiency and how harsh the jail sentence is for being a little assertive. The two poets illustrate the everyday hardships which black people faced and still do is some parts of the world and that may make us a bit more assertive with our actions and their effects on people.

Poetry Comparison - 'Telephone Conversation' by Wole Soyinka and 'Ballad of the Landlord' by Langston Hughes.

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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

A group of experts met to discuss the images that have best captured — and changed — the world since 1955.

Supported by

By M.H. Miller , Brendan Embser , Emmanuel Iduma and Lucy McKeon

Published June 3, 2024 Updated June 4, 2024, 12:05 p.m. ET

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Of the dozens of photographers not represented here that a reasonable person might expect to have been included, the most conspicuous absentees include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. Putting together a list of the 25 most significant photographs since 1955 — both fine art photos and reportage — proved a difficult task for the panelists (even the chosen time frame was controversial). They were: the Canadian conceptual photographer Stan Douglas , 63; the Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê , 64; the acting chief curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, 66; the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas , 75; the American photographer Shikeith , 35; and Nadia Vellam, 51, T’s photo and video director. Each participant (including myself, the moderator, 36) submitted up to seven possible nominees for the list. We gathered at The New York Times Building on a morning last February (with Shikeith joining on video from a shoot in Los Angeles) to begin our deliberations.

We chose judges from the realms of both fine art and reportage because, increasingly, the line between the two has collapsed. The modern age has been defined by photographs — images that began their lives in newspapers or magazines are repurposed as art; art has become a vehicle for information. Therefore, it was important to us and our jurors that we not draw boundaries between what was created as journalism and what was created as art. What was important was that the photographs we chose changed, in some way, how we see the world.

Six people sit around a circular table. On the wall, a t.v. showing an image of that room.

The conversation naturally turned into a series of questions. Like how important was it for a photograph to have expanded the possibilities of the medium? And how much did it matter who took a photo and what their intentions were? The list that emerged is less concerned with a historical chronology or an accepted canon than it is with a set of themes that have been linked indelibly to the photographic medium since its inception: labor and activism; war; the self and the family. Intriguingly, beyond an image by Wolfgang Tillmans from the ’90s, fashion photography is largely absent. So, too, are many world historical events that have been captured in landmark photographs, including the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall and anything from the pandemic lockdown or the presidency of Donald Trump. There were just too many other photographs to consider.

The process of producing the final list was clearly not scientific. It was more of a debate among a certain group of people on a certain day and is best considered that way. At the end of nearly four hours, jittery from caffeine, the group stood before a pile of crumpled masterworks on the floor as we assembled our chosen 25 images on a conference table. Many of our questions weren’t resolved (indeed, are unresolvable), but the results — which aren’t ranked but rather presented in the order in which we discussed them — are nothing if not surprising. — M.H. Miller

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

M.H. Miller: I thought we should start by talking about the time frame we settled on, starting in 1955.

Stan Douglas: It’s an agenda.

Miller: A little bit. It certainly shows an American bias, so I apologize to our Canadian representative — 1955 is really the beginning of the American civil rights movement, an era from which a number of us nominated photographs, and photography was so important in just making people aware of what was going on in the country. An-My, you chose Robert Frank’s picture of a streetcar in New Orleans, taken that year.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

Robert Frank used “Trolley — New Orleans” as the original cover of his influential photo book “The Americans,” first published in the United States in 1959. Frank, a Swiss émigré, spent two years traveling the States and capturing what he saw. In this photograph, two Black passengers sit at the rear of a New Orleans streetcar while four white passengers sit at the front; all look out from a row of windows, the mullions between them emphasizing their strict separation. At the time of its publication, “The Americans” was considered by several critics to be a pessimistic, angry portrait of the country. (The magazine Popular Photography famously called it a “warped” and “wart-covered” depiction “by a joyless man.”) Many more viewers and artists, however, found inspiration in the direct, unromantic style pioneered by Frank, whose outsider status likely let him view America’s contradictions from a clarifying distance. He had “sucked a sad poem out of America onto film,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in an introduction to the book. This image, shot in the months before the Montgomery bus boycotts made segregation a national debate, showed America to itself, as if for the first time. The faces in the photographs, Kerouac wrote, don’t “editorialize or criticize, or say anything but ‘this is the way we are in real life.’” — Emmanuel Iduma

An-My Lê: I tried to look for things that spoke to me, but also spoke to a generation.

Douglas: If I had to choose a civil rights image, I wouldn’t choose this one. Great photograph. But something happening on the street would be more appropriate, I think, like the dog attacking protesters , or the photo with the firemen .

Roxana Marcoci: But this was the cover of “The Americans,” and it does happen in the street, actually. I think that what you’re saying is, it’s not a photojournalistic image.

Douglas: The most important thing to me is: does a photograph reveal a new reality, or reveal something that’s been hidden previously? I think that’s a key criterion for making it significant. What impact on the world can that image have? A European might not have recognized that this was happening in the U.S. Maybe a lot of Americans in the North didn’t realize this was happening in the U.S. And I love this photograph, so I’m very happy to keep it.

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

Mamie Till fixes her eyes on her dead son, as her fiancé, Gene Mobley, holding her, stares at the viewer. Emmett Till , 14, is laid out on a cot in a Chicago funeral home, his face disfigured and bloated. His mother allowed the photojournalist David Jackson to take this picture in September 1955, a few days after two white men had abducted and murdered Till while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Quickly acquitted by an all-white jury, the men would go on to sell their confession to Look magazine for $4,000. When this photo was published, first in Jet magazine and then in The Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers, it incited an unprecedented level of outrage in America over racial violence; Jet had to reprint the Sept. 15, 1955, issue in which it appeared because of high demand. For the same reason Mamie Till let this picture be taken, she chose to keep her son’s coffin open during the funeral. “The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all,” she said. An estimated 100,000 people came to view his body. Jackson’s photograph was a call to action for many, including Rosa Parks, who said she thought of Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus later that same year. — E.I.

Miller: I feel like you can’t have this conversation, especially with the year we designated as the starting point, without talking about Emmett Till. There’s the devastating series of photographs of Till’s funeral. But there’s also the one from the trial — when Till’s great-uncle is identifying the men who murdered his nephew. The judge didn’t allow that photographer, Ernest C. Withers, to shoot in the courtroom. So it’s a miracle that the picture exists, and that it’s composed as well as it is when it had to be taken in secret. And it’s a moment where you saw a larger shift taking place. Up to that point in the South, a Black witness identifying white defendants in court was unheard-of.

Marcoci: The picture [of his body] was also about the power of the witness, right?

Susan Meiselas: Oh, for sure. Mamie Till and her insistence on an open coffin: how brave an act that was. And it ran in Jet and moved around the world.

Douglas: The issue for me with the trial picture is that it needs a paragraph to explain why we’re looking at it.

Marcoci: The courtroom was a travesty. They went free. But this, Mamie Till with her son, created a generation of Black activists.

Shikeith: I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and when we were learning about Black history in the fourth or fifth grade, that picture was brazenly shared with students. It was probably the first time I learned how powerful a photograph can be in having real material change in the world. It’s an image that I’ve lived with my [whole] life, and that’s impacted how I viewed the world and racism and its violence. It scares me. But, you know, it’s the truth. The truth can be very scary for a lot of us.

Miller: Shikeith, you also selected this Gordon Parks photograph, which is one of two color images the group nominated from the 1950s and ’60s — and the second was taken from outer space.

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

In 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to document the effects of Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South through the experiences of one extended family in Mobile, Ala. Parks was one of the few Black photojournalists to work for an establishment magazine at the time, and was known especially for his fashion photography, as is easily apparent from this image. For Life, he photographed everyday scenes — a church choir singing or children drinking from water fountains — intentionally capturing signs reading “White Only” or “ Lots for Colored .” “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) was shot for the Life story, which ran at 12 pages under the title “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” but, for unknown reasons, it didn’t make the final edit, and it wasn’t published until 2012, when a five-volume collection of Parks’s photographs was released. “Department Store” has since become a belated icon, one of the most memorable images in a career that also includes directing the 1971 film “Shaft.” Notable most of all for its vivid color, a startling contrast to the predominantly black-and-white imagery from the civil rights era, the portrait depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson, then age 27, dressed in an ice-blue, A-line cocktail dress, with her young niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing beneath the red neon “Colored Entrance” sign in front of a department store. Wilson’s upright posture and outward gaze — peering in the opposite direction of the sign’s blue arrow — subtly signify defiance. But there’s an intimacy and vulnerability in the picture, too. In 2013, Wilson, who went on to become a high school teacher, told the art historian Maurice Berger that she regretted that the strap of her slip had visibly fallen. “Dressing well made me feel first class,” she said. “I wanted to set an example.” She had set an example, of course, which Parks had recorded with such clarity: Wilson also told Berger that she refused to take her niece through the “colored” entrance. — Brendan Embser

Shikeith: I think what’s beautiful about this image is that it’s brilliantly composed — it uses beauty to draw you into a poignant moment in history, becoming a record of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern U.S. I tried to pick photographs that had an influence on me, and that I thought my mother would recognize, to indicate their influence on people who might operate outside of art history conversations. It [can be used as] a tool for educating even the youngest of minds about what marginalized communities went through.

Marcoci: I think that’s a great point: the pedagogical nature of photographs. In this picture, there’s the elegance and grace of these two figures, and then the ugliness of that “Colored Entrance” sign. There’s such a tension between them.

Nadia Vellam: You don’t immediately realize the context because you’re so attracted to the two people in the image. It asks you to spend more time looking.

Douglas: It’s quite an exquisite picture. It’s basically an X, which draws your eye into the center, which then takes you to that woman’s gaze outside the frame. Inside the frame, there’s something quite sweet. But outside — both beyond that door and out in the world that’s made that door — there’s something quite ugly.

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960

Alberto Korda, a favored photographer of Fidel Castro, captured this image of a 31-year-old Che Guevara by chance during a funeral in Havana in 1960 to honor the victims of a freighter explosion. Guevara, at the time the president of the National Bank of Cuba, happened to move into Korda’s line of sight while Castro was giving a speech. His expression is one of restrained anger; the Cuban government accused the United States of being responsible for the tragedy, which it denied. Five years later, Guevara resigned from Castro’s cabinet and joined revolutionary causes abroad, including in Congo and Bolivia, where he led guerrillas in a failed coup attempt. Korda’s photo wasn’t widely published until after Guevara’s execution by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, when posters, murals and eventually T-shirts emblazoned with Guevara’s face began to appear around the world. In the original portrait, he is flanked by another man and some palm fronds, but the reproductions are cropped to show just Guevara’s head. Korda’s image made Guevara into something more than a man, or even a famous revolutionary; he became a symbol for revolution itself. — E.I.

Miller: We have two pictures of Che Guevara to consider. Stan, you picked Che following his execution , and Susan, you picked the more famous portrait of him by Alberto Korda. It’s in every college dorm.

Marcoci: It’s in every tattoo parlor.

Douglas: They’re both propaganda images. One is the revolutionary looking to the future, which we’ve seen in everything from Soviet realist paintings to Obama posters. So, in many ways, a cliché, even though it’s had this huge impact. The image of Che dead [which was taken by the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta] is both iconic in that it’s like [an Andrea] Mantegna [1431-1506] painting of the dead Christ [“ Lamentation Over the Dead Christ ,” circa 1480], but also as evidence, on the part of the people who killed him, that the guy is dead. It’s just such a weird photograph: the officer on the right who’s poking at Che’s body to prove he’s just a human. Just mortal. And it somehow seemed like the end of the export of revolution from Cuba, which very much shut down after Che’s death.

Meiselas: And then he’s resurrected as a tattoo.

5. Diane Arbus, “Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C., 1967”

The boy in “Boy With a Straw Hat” doesn’t look like a typical Arbus subject. Wearing a prim collared shirt, bow-tie and boater hat, with one American flag at his side and another, much smaller one twisted into a bow on his lapel, the thin-lipped paradegoer seems like the paragon of anodyne conservatism. He’s nothing like the cross-dressers, carnival entertainers, nudists and others relegated to the margins of society that fascinated Arbus, whose work prompted one of the more protracted debates on the ethics of photography, as her images were so often said to skirt the lines of voyeurism and exploitation. Yet his steady gaze prompts a similar sense of unease in the viewer, as does the small pin on his jacket that reads Bomb Hanoi. “Boy With a Straw Hat” was the cover image of Artforum’s May 1971 issue, published two months before Arbus’s death by suicide at age 48. In 1972, when her posthumous MoMA retrospective drew record crowds, the art critic Hilton Kramer refuted the idea that she was merely capturing her subjects for the sake of spectacle; he argued that she collaborated with the people she photographed, and that that act of participation provided dignity — or at least authenticity — especially for those individuals who are shunned or otherwise invisible. Arbus herself once said that the “best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.” — B.E.

Miller: A number of us nominated Diane Arbus photos.

Douglas: [I picked] the sitting room in Levittown [“ Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I., 1962 ”], which is one of those suburbs created in the postwar period that people could buy [homes in] with their G.I. Bill money, in which Black people couldn’t live. It’s a case of there [being] something outside the image, which is very powerful: The construction of this new suburban reality, while Emmett Till’s being killed.

Marcoci: I chose the “Giant” [“ A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970 .”], because this was one of the first pictures where I was really thinking, “Who is that person? What would it be like to be him?”

Meiselas: One of the things that photographs do is make us emotional. Some of Arbus’s most memorable pictures are the ones that make you feel more than think.

Vellam: I’d vote for “Giant” just because it spawned so many people’s idea of portraiture: Katy Grannan, Deana Lawson, Larry Sultan. Like this idea of going into a place — in her case, middle-class suburbia — that you may not even have spent any time in otherwise. I feel like that became its own genre: There’s so much photography that has come out of her idea of going into people’s homes.

Marcoci: If I were to choose just one Arbus, I’d probably choose “Boy With a Straw Hat”: A portrait of an individual that’s this very interesting collective portrait of America, too. There’s this tension between the innocent face and then those buttons: “God Bless America” and “Bomb Hanoi.”

Shikeith: He’s sort of the archetype for the Proud Boys. You can see that smirk on his face.

Meiselas: There were pictures from the R.N.C. [Republican National Convention] four years ago that looked so much like this.

Miller: Stan and An-My both nominated a very different kind of photograph from the Vietnam War era: Malcolm Browne’s picture of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation.

6. Malcolm Browne, the Self-Immolation of the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, 1963

The AP reporter Malcolm Browne was among the only photojournalists on the scene when the monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as an act of protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of the Buddhist majority. As flames engulfed Quảng Đức, hundreds of monks surrounded him, mourning while he burned. The photo, sent out as soon as possible on a commercial flight to reach the AP’s offices, was published on front pages internationally the following morning. When President John F. Kennedy saw it, he reportedly exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” and then ordered a review of his administration’s Vietnam policy. (He would later say, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”) Browne won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for the photograph, which also contributed to the collapse of support for the South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, who was assassinated in a coup that year. President Kennedy was assassinated just a few weeks later, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, would escalate the war. Browne’s photograph, which is newly resonant today, enshrined the act of self-immolation as the most extreme form of protest. — Lucy McKeon

Lê: I think it’s one of the most incredible monuments that exists as a photograph. [It documents] an extraordinary act of sacrifice for a cause. These days, you see [some] people protesting, and it’s all about their egos. And here, there’s no ego. It’s one of the few pictures I know that’s so violent and peaceful at the same time.

Douglas: He was there for five minutes, apparently, burning, and just didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. This is what you do when you have no other recourse, when you feel the suppression is so severe that this is the only way you can get your statement heard.

Meiselas: It makes me think of the Napalm Girl, as well [ Nick Ut’s 1972 image of Kim Phuc Phan Thi , age 9, fleeing a napalm attack in the village of Trảng Bàng]. That moment impacted a generation. The question is, which one mobilized us further?

Lê: The Napalm Girl picture, for me, represents the notion that all Vietnamese are victims of war. I started watching war movies in college, and every time the word “Vietnam” comes up, that is the image that people have in their mind. I think the monk speaks to [something] beyond himself. He’s not a victim.

7. NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise,” 1968

On Christmas Eve 1968, aboard Apollo 8 during its pioneering orbit of the moon, William A. Anders photographed the Earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. The picture was the first of its kind — and it was also unplanned. Anders, the youngest of the three astronauts on the spacecraft, had been tasked with taking photographs of the moon’s craters, mountains and other geological features. He spontaneously decided, however, to include Earth in the frame when he noticed how beautiful it was. “Here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament, very fragile,” Anders would recall in a NASA oral history. “And yet it was our home.” His first shot was in black and white. For the next, he switched to color, which emphasized the contrast between the moon’s gray surface and the planet’s blue-green vibrancy. “Earthrise” was the first image most of humanity saw of the planet we live on, a nature photo like none before it and a reminder of how small our world really is, in comparison with the rest of the universe. As Joni Mitchell would sing of the image, on 1976’s “ Refuge of the Roads ”: “And you couldn’t see a city on that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest or a highway/Or me here least of all. …” — E.I.

Lê: “Earthrise” isn’t the first image of the Earth seen from space. There were earlier low-resolution ones in the ’40s , made from unmanned missiles or whatever. There was one made on Apollo 4, in 1967 . But I think this one, taken by a crew member on Apollo 8 the next year with a Hasselblad, is important because it’s humbling: seeing the Earth in relationship to the Moon, and thinking about us not being the only people on this Earth. Perhaps this is when we started thinking about how we should take care of our home.

Miller: Stan, you nominated a later photo, “ Sunset on Mars ” (2005).

Douglas: I’ve always had this knee-jerk response to Apollo being American propaganda somehow, part of the arms race — who’s going to get [to the Moon] first, the U.S. or the Russians? And once the U.S. got there, they lost interest. It wasn’t really about exploration, but dominance. This image on Mars is something quite extraordinary, because in effect, the camera is a prosthesis. It’s both a very artificial one and a human one. We actually extend our vision through it.

8. Ernest C. Withers, “I Am a Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee,” 1968

In the last weeks of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. took part in a protest of Black sanitation workers striking for safer conditions and decent wages in Memphis, Tenn. In a speech, King emphasized the connection between the United States’ civil rights battle and the struggles of poor and disenfranchised people worldwide, a message that resonated with the crowd. Their protest signs bore the phrase “I Am a Man,” a stark acknowledgment of all the ways this most basic fact was disrespected. “We were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has,” one of the participants, James Douglas, recalled in a 1978 documentary titled “I Am a Man.” The defining photo of the strike was taken by the Black photojournalist Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis native who previously shot the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, and also made famous images of the Montgomery bus boycott , the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Withers’s picture became the official record of King’s last major civil rights action. Years later, however, Withers’s own story was revealed to have been more complicated. Like King, the photographer drew the attention of the F.B.I. Unlike King, he became a paid informant. Yet he continued to produce some of the most iconic images of the movement: On April 4, 1968, less than a week after taking this photo, Withers was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, photographing the blood stain at the scene of King’s assassination. — L.M.

Shikeith: I think I first saw this image around the time the Million Man March was happening [in 1995]. I have a greater understanding of manhood [now] and how much of it I want to align with, and how much I don’t. But I understand how vital the need to identify as a man was in that moment.

Meiselas: I love the contrast of “I am a man,” singular, and “I am a collective.” It’s just all there: perfect distance, perfect composition. Whether or not Withers was working for the F.B.I. …

Douglas: Was he?

Meiselas: Yeah.

Douglas: And his role was to just …

Meiselas: Report on his fellow men. They paid him to spy on his colleagues. It’s a dark story. But let’s not go there.

9. Blair Stapp, Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, 1968

In the summer of 1968, outside of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., where Huey P. Newton stood trial for the murder of a police officer, supporters held up posters of him that instantly became synonymous with the Black Panther Party. The year before, Newton, the party’s co-founder and Minister of Defense, had collaborated with fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver and the photographer Blair Stapp to stage a portrait of himself in a black leather jacket and a tipped beret, holding a shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other. He’s seated on a rattan peacock chair that recalls chairs woven by inmates in the United States-colonized Philippines decades earlier. Its oval back piece frames Newton’s head like an oversize halo. Two Zulu warrior shields are propped against the wall. Stapp’s portrait and the peacock chair itself have since become an enduring symbol of Black Power. Michelle Obama sat in one for her 1982 prom portrait . Melvin Van Peebles recreated the photograph in his 1995 film “Panther.” The visual artist Sam Durant memorialized Newton in bronze in 2004 , and Henry Taylor painted it in 2007 . After two hung juries, the murder charges against Newton were dropped in 1971. For him, the struggle was about survival — or as he put it, “survival pending revolution.” — B.E.

Shikeith: I was trying to think of images that my grandmothers revered in a way. I think this is one of those images that exists in a lot of Black domestic spaces as a symbol for strength and determination. And it has this royal demeanor that’s been continuously emulated in Black photographic practice, whether amateur or professional.

Marcoci: The beret is almost [like] Che’s.

Shikeith: You can see people replicating this pose on the wicker chair throughout Black portraiture in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m really interested in photographs that’ve had a long-lasting effect on our daily lives.

10. W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko in Her Bath,” 1972

In the Magnum photojournalist W. Eugene Smith’s picture of Tomoko Kamimura, 15, she is being bathed by her mother at their home, in Minamata, Japan. Kamimura had been born with a kind of mercury poisoning that would later come to be known as Minamata disease, caused by a chemical factory contaminating the city’s water and food supply for more than 30 years. Smith and his wife, the photographer and activist Aileen M. Smith, lived in Minamata in the early 1970s, taking thousands of photographs to document the toll of the disaster — 1,784 people died after contracting the disease and thousands were left with severe neurological and musculoskeletal disabilities. Images from the series were printed by Life magazine in 1972, and Kamimura’s portrait became, for a time, one of the most famous images in the world. Amid the public outcry, “rumors began to circulate through the neighborhood claiming that we were making money from the publicity,” Kamimura’s father, Yoshio, would later write, “but this was untrue — it had never entered our minds to profit from the photograph of Tomoko. We never dreamed that a photograph like that could be commercial.” The Chisso Corporation, which owned the factory, has paid damages to some 10,000 victims. Kamimura died in 1977, at the age of 21. Smith died the following year. Twenty years later, after a French TV network wanted to use the photograph, Aileen M. Smith transferred control of it to Kamimura’s family. They haven’t allowed the photograph to be reproduced since. — L.M.

Meiselas: Without this documentation by Eugene Smith, I don’t think Minamata and the mercury poisoning would ever have been confronted. So when you do choose to represent a victim, I hope it’s purposeful.

Douglas: I heartily agree. And it’s a beautiful image of a loving relationship between mother and daughter.

Vellam: Smith documented people, but he was also very conscious of what he was doing while he was documenting them. I think he took a very long time after he shot everyone to figure out what he even wanted to show from them.

Meiselas: He believed that they should be better understood.

11. Photo Archive Group, “Photographs From S-21: 1975-79”

Some photographs, taken in the darkest moments of history, end up saying very different things from what their creators intended — like the images that Stalin’s secret police took during the Great Purge, or the ones white spectators took of lynchings in the United States. One of the more extensive photographic records of an authoritarian regime comes from the Khmer Rouge army, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and whose genocidal purges of minority groups and political opponents led to the murder of almost a quarter of the country’s population. Before killing most of its victims, the army took their portraits, in part to prove to leaders that the supposed enemies of the state were indeed being executed. Of the nearly 20,000 people sent between 1975 and 1979 to what was known as the S-21 death camp, the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, only about a dozen survived. In 1994, the American nonprofit organization Photo Archive Group cleaned and cataloged more than 5,000 photographs taken of prisoners before their executions. A selection of the images, known as “Photographs from S-21: 1975-79,” was published as a book called “The Killing Fields” in 1996 and shown at MoMA the following year. Who was the girl pictured here? What had she seen? It’s impossible to know. And yet the regime’s photographic record offers a way into humanizing and remembering the victims of one of the most ruthless atrocities of the 20th century. S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where a number of the images from “Photographs From S-21: 1975-1979” are on permanent display. — L.M.

Lê: So these pictures were found in an archive in Cambodia [in 1993]. After the Khmer Rouge took over [in 1975], they went on a rampage, killing teachers and anyone who they felt wasn’t one of theirs. The bodies were buried in different locations. But they photographed these people before killing them. There were thousands of these pictures.

Douglas: If you want to make them disappear, why do you document them?

Lê: But that’s the thing. It’s the banality of evil. It’s unconscionable, right? Civilians being just collateral damage in war. Perhaps there are other ways to speak about violence, and I think this [set of photographs] certainly does.

12. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80

Cindy Sherman was 23 when she began making her “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white staged self-portraits that explore stereotypes of women in film and mass media. As a student at Buffalo State College, where she originally studied painting, she became fascinated by performers such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, artists who put their own bodies center stage. Sherman also liked to dress up as stock characters for parties, purchasing clothes from flea markets and experimenting with cosmetics. In “Untitled Film Stills,” she plays the career girl, ingénue, librarian , mistress, femme fatale and runaway , alternately heartbroken, hung over, daydreaming or determined to escape a predator as though trapped in some film noir. But which film? That feeling of vague recognition was Sherman’s point, as well as that of other artists of the era experimenting with pictures from mass media, who would eventually be called the Pictures Generation, a name based on a 1977 exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp . They wanted viewers to almost recognize the images, so as to heighten the uncanny nature of their work. Sherman initially sold eight-by-ten prints from “Untitled Film Stills” for $50 out of a binder from her desk at her day job as a receptionist at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space in New York. Douglas Eklund, who organized a Pictures Generation exhibition in 2009, noted that the series “never ceases to astonish, as if Sherman knew how to operate all of the machinery of mass-cultural representation with one hand tied behind her back.” Her intuitive grasp of the self-portrait’s theatrical appeal, especially when that self could be manipulated — decades before anyone could have imagined camera filters on an iPhone — has kept “Untitled Film Stills” relevant ever since. — B.E.

Marcoci: There’s something about the “Untitled Film Stills.” It’s this relationship between still and moving images. Cindy Sherman has the capacity to encapsulate, in a single [work], a narrative. She calls on this pantheon of women’s roles from movies that we think we’ve seen, but none of them are based on an actual film still. There’s one [“Untitled Film Still #13,” 1978] where she looks like Brigitte Bardot in a head scarf from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), but she’s a librarian. She’s reaching for a book. She makes the Bardot type into an intellectual, which is [an agency] that most male Hollywood filmmakers of the time, or even a filmmaker like Godard, would not have given the real Bardot. She was able to see something about how we engage with mass media and tweak it.

Douglas: I’m not convinced about Sherman. [There’s] an art-world canonization of the work. How important was it? How influential? I don’t think it was that important or influential outside of a very small area.

Marcoci: On the other hand, if you ask people if they know about Sherman, they probably do.

Lê: They do. Many young women find Sherman’s work empowering.

Marcoci: I never thought that we would just be considering photojournalism.

Meiselas: No.

Douglas: I mean, looking at the art world, I would include Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” [1966].

13. Ed Ruscha, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” 1966

As a teenager in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, Ed Ruscha delivered newspapers by bicycle daily along a two-mile route. He dreamed about making a model of all the buildings on his circuit, he later recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “like an architect standing over a table and plotting out a city.” After moving to Los Angeles for art school in 1956, Ruscha became obsessed with the city’s architecture, particularly on the Sunset Strip, that part of Sunset Boulevard that stretches for about two miles, like his old paper route, across West Hollywood. In 1966, Ruscha photographed both sides of the Strip by securing a motorized camera to the bed of a pickup truck. The result was “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a nearly 25-foot accordion-fold, self-published artist’s book. Today, Ruscha is most famous for his text-based paintings, many of which reference corporate logos and advertising slogans, for which he is widely celebrated as postwar America’s answer to the Dadaist nonsense movement. But his photography shares with the paintings a repetitive, deadpan humor. In addition to the Sunset Strip, Ruscha photographed swimming pools, gas stations, parking lots and apartments, and collected the images into small books that provoked the ire of critics — and fellow photographers — who deemed the work lacking in style and meaning. (“Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but the filling stations,” the photographer Jeff Wall once complained.) But what he created was a kind of time travel, a meticulous, obsessive visual cartography of a long-lost Los Angeles. He and his brother, Paul, still make the trip to photograph the street every couple of years. — B.E.

Marcoci: I love [Ed] Ruscha, and I think we’ve barely touched on conceptual photography. Obviously superimportant, but is he really the photographer that did so much for photography through that series?

Meiselas: I know what you mean. Of course, because the photographs came way early, we rediscovered them after he became famous for painting.

Miller: Well, he’s certainly not as famous as a photographer as some people on this list, but I don’t know if we need to get hung up on that.

Douglas: I think “Sunset Strip” was extraordinary. Ruscha produces photographs governed by a hard-core conceptual procedure. In the case of “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” the procedure is in the title and, in order to fulfill it, he had to make hundreds of stops along a Los Angeles street. But I also thought this was too inside the art world.

Miller: Maybe this is a good time to talk about Nan Goldin.

14. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1979-2004

Nan Goldin originally presented “Ballad,” named after a song from Bertolt Brecht’s satirical musical “The Threepenny Opera,” as a series of 35-millimeter slides shown by a carousel projector in bars and nightclubs and backed by an eclectic soundtrack — from Dean Martin to the Velvet Underground. Goldin’s visual diary is itself a bohemian opera of New York’s downtown counterculture, a community freed from convention yet abandoned many times over by society; it documents sex, addiction, beauty, violence, powerful friendship, the AIDS crisis and the joyful struggle to live beyond the limits of the mainstream. Friends were photographed doing the twist at a party or preparing to inject heroin. In “Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984), a portrait of domestic abuse, the artist’s bloodshot eye meets the lens head-on. Goldin’s “Ballad” has since been credited with inspiring everything from selfie culture to the raw, diaristic aesthetic and saturated color now commonplace across social media and in fine art. Over the years, Goldin would revise and update the series, presenting it with new images and a different soundtrack, and it would become an ubiquitous presence in galleries and museums. But because the work has so thoroughly permeated the culture, it’s easy to overlook just how radical it was when it debuted. In “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ,” Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Goldin, the photographer describes a resistance to her art in the ’80s, “especially from male artists and gallerists who said ‘This isn’t photography. Nobody photographs their own life.’ It was still a kind of outlier act.” — L.M.

Marcoci: We’re talking about an artist who’s very much engaged with youth culture, with the cultures that transgress gender binaries. Also with the ravages of a generation that takes drugs, that loves, that dies young. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is a ballad. It shows this group of people as images set to music.

Meiselas: It was radical, it was very impactful to the photographic medium. But here’s my question: Would we be choosing either Nan [Goldin] or Cindy Sherman if we didn’t know their names?

Marcoci: Did you watch the “Ballad”?

Meiselas: Of course. I watched it in 1985.

Marcoci: How many times?

Meiselas: How many times has she changed it?

Marcoci: But even that I like. You don’t need to choose one picture. It’s interesting for me when photography is not just a moment that’s frozen in time, when it has the capacity to change.

15. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W),” 1993

A slightly different, color image of the same people in “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W)” was first published by i-D magazine in 1993 for an unconventional fashion story about camouflage. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans staged the scene in Bournemouth, England, where he’d attended art school the previous year, and captured a whorl of bodies in military fatigues, each person clasping another’s arm, thigh or chest, and all wearing camouflage patterns from different countries — a post-Cold War utopia. The black-and-white version was printed on color paper, which accounts for the warmth of its tone. On the beach, Lutz, Alex, Suzanne and Christoph appear as if from a scene in Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 short film “Powers of Ten,” which zooms out from a sunny picnic into the farthest reaches of the universe. Tillmans’s photograph “seems to model something like chosen family,” says the curator Phil Taylor, who edited a collection of the artist’s interviews. The way Tillmans envisions family in this early portrait — as a tight embrace amid the implied violence of the outside world — is emblematic of the way he would go on to depict men kissing at gay nightclubs or activists at antiwar demonstrations, each a picture of solidarity against the odds. — B.E.

Lê: I think Wolfgang [Tillmans] captured youth culture — in magazines like i-D and The Face — at a time [the early ’90s] when young people were being captured in a different way: It was very clinical and idealized, and he just came out with this very real [take on] youth culture. The pictures were a little more grainy, and I think it [changed] the way young people are seen. My students always bring up his work. I think it’s a way to photograph your family and friends and turn them into real protagonists. And I see that influence as very long-lasting.

Marcoci: What’s interesting in this image is [that] it’s four friends on a beach, dressed in camouflage. Camouflage immediately makes you think of military uniforms, of obedience, of listening to orders. But in the techno culture of these clubs in the 1990s, it had become a symbol of individuality and freedom: the exact opposite of what the uniform means.

Meiselas: This image, if I didn’t know his name, I would’ve just turned the page.

Lê: I think we need a picture that speaks about youth. And I think even though this picture was made in ’93 …

Miller: … That’s still how young people are photographed today.

16. Lee Friedlander, “Boston,” 1986, From the Series “At Work,” 1975-95

Lee Friedlander is best known for photographing America’s social landscape, from mundane street scenes in the Midwest to nudes of Madonna that were taken in the late 1970s. Between 1975 and 1995, he created six series of photographs depicting employees at different types of workplaces, including Rust Belt factories, a telemarketing call center and a New York investment firm. One of these series, commissioned by the M.I.T. Museum and produced between 1985 and 1986, looks at office workers in the Boston area who used desktop computers for their jobs. At the time, this was a fairly new development, but one that Friedlander presciently recognized would come to define not just corporate life but humanity itself. His subjects are often seemingly oblivious — or indifferent — to the presence of the camera. Likewise, his camera often omits the computers themselves, the ostensible subject of his images. Instead, the workers, sitting at brightly lit desks, are pictured from the chest up, their detached expressions familiar to any of us as they sit engrossed in (or bored by) screens just out of frame. With this series Friedlander had tapped into the dark comedy of the mundane. His influence can be seen in a generation of younger photographers who seek to question everyday life — from Alec Soth to LaToya Ruby Frazier — and whose images would mostly be viewed on screens. — E.I.

Marcoci: I love this series.

Douglas: I love it, too, but I put this in out of guilt for not having more art people in here. It’s images of these people just engaged in the world around them.

Meiselas: In autonomous labor. I remember when I first saw this series of white-collar workers in front of machines.

Lê: No one had done that before.

17. LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze,” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze,” named after the compact car made by General Motors, follows the 2019 closure of an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that had been open since 1966. Over nine months, Frazier documented the impact one corporation can have on a community, which lost thousands of jobs. A selection of images from the series were first published in The New York Times Magazine in May 2019, and the work was later presented as a multimedia installation: More than 60 portraits and video interviews with union workers and their families were mounted to orange metal trusses at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. In the accompanying monograph, Frazier included essays by artists and critics as well as members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers union. On its cover is this photograph, which she shot from a helicopter, showing a group of workers and their families protesting the plant’s abrupt shuttering and requesting a new product to work on. Other images show Lordstown residents in various states of mourning — wiping away tears or proudly displaying union memorabilia. Born in a Pennsylvania steel manufacturing town, Frazier embedded herself with the Ohio workers, producing one of the most detailed records of the gutting of America’s working class. “‘The Last Cruze’ is a workers’ monument,” she has said. “It is half-holy, half-assembly line.” — L.M.

Marcoci: LaToya Ruby Frazier is a true artist-activist. These workers were losing their pension plans, their health benefits, you name it. It’s a work that includes more than 60 pictures of union workers along with their testimonies, because she also did these interviews with them.

Miller: I think “The Last Cruze” might be the only complete photographic record we have of the impact that corporate decision-making has on a work force. GM skipped town, cut their costs and the people of Lordstown were left holding the bag. We have another picture, nominated by Susan, that also documents labor.

18. Sebastião Salgado, “Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil,” 1986

One of the most striking aspects of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of an open-air gold mine in Brazil is the scale. Several thousand men — their bodies hunched and fragile — are rendered miniature against the backdrop of a massive pit in the earth. In the photos, most of the miners are climbing into or out of that pit, holding tools or ferrying sacks up and down narrow ladders and steep slopes. In several shots, Salgado chose not to include the horizon within the frame; the viewer can’t see where the workers’ dangerous journey ends. The photographer, who was born in the state of Minas Gerais (which means “general mines”) in Brazil, spent 35 days at Serra Pelada, living alongside the miners while he took these photographs. When they were published in 1987 in The New York Times Magazine, they revealed a late-20th-century gold rush and the appalling conditions facing those at the bottom of it. In the nearly four decades since, Salgado has gone on to capture the burning oil wells in Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Some critics have labeled him an “aesthete of misery,” using the plight of the poor and disenfranchised to make visually striking pictures. When these images are exhibited in a fine art context, their size is so massive, the sheer aesthetics of the imagery threaten to eclipse the act of documentation. But in a profile in The Guardian this year marking his 80th birthday, Salgado responded, “I came from the third world. When I was born, Brazil was a developing country. The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come from. … The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt.” — E.I.

Meiselas: The scale of what he presented to us at the time was really quite amazing.

Douglas: It was like, “Holy moly, that’s still going on?”

Meiselas: Exactly.

19. Stuart Franklin, an Unidentified Man Blocking a Column of Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

On June 5, 1989, as a column of tanks rolled into formation on Chang’an Avenue bordering Tiananmen Square, the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin watched from the sixth-floor balcony of the nearby Beijing Hotel. He was holed up there with several other foreign correspondents, who were all covering the weekslong protests, led by hundreds of thousands of unarmed students, against the Chinese Community Party. Two nights before, the People’s Liberation Army had cleared the area with force; the next morning, they prevented parents from looking for students lost in the fray, and the soldiers fired live rounds even as medics attempted to rush the injured to safety. (Thousands are thought to have been killed in the protests, although an official death toll has never been released.) Suddenly, around noon on the 5th, a young man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding shopping bags in his hands, approached the first tank. On the video footage, it attempts to maneuver around him. Like a matador taunting a bull, he flings his arms in fury and, when the tank turns back, the man jumps out again. Yet the dramatic photograph Franklin took, with five tanks and a destroyed bus in the frame, draws its power from its stillness, its potential energy. (Four other photographers are known to have captured the same scene, including Jeff Widener, whose tightly framed version for The Associated Press ran on the front page of The Times.) Authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate symbolic images of resistance and, while the Tank Man — whose identity has never been confirmed — became an inspiration for pro-democracy movements across the world, he was snuffed out from official Chinese memory. Today, image searches in China for “Tiananmen Square” only turn up cheerful pictures of a tourist destination. — B.E.

Douglas: Multiple photographers shot this image because they were all in the same corner of a hotel overlooking Tiananmen Square. They couldn’t really shoot anywhere else on the square. The first time I saw this scene, it was a video.

Meiselas: Right, there was a television camera. The stills are very different. And I don’t care whose image it is. I’m thinking about the man in front of the tank and what happens when one man stands up. And I love how this looks alongside Ernest Withers’s “I Am a Man.”

20. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” 2008

In 2008, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan during a period that was, at the time, the deadliest week since the war began in 2001. They brought a lightproof box containing a roll of photographic paper, and, occasionally, exposed six-meter segments of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds at a time. They were creating photograms, which, as opposed to conventional war photographs, display the marks of their making but little else. The resulting works — 12 in total — set out “to create a kind of post-mortem of photojournalistic representation of conflict,” as the artists wrote when the work was first exhibited. They made these images on days when a BBC fixer was executed or a suicide attack killed nine Afghan soldiers. But they also made one on the day that the title refers to — a day with no fatalities. In a literal sense, there isn’t anything to see in the images except splashes of light as abstract as a blurry sonogram. When Broomberg and Chanarin arrived in Afghanistan, the war was in its seventh year and, by then, a surfeit of photographs depicting death and violence had long been circulating. There’s hardly consensus on what to leave out when depicting war, but there is some consensus on the need to bear witness. With their photograms, Broomberg and Chanarin found a new, unexpected, but no less emotional way of doing so. — E.I.

Miller: There were a lot of different kinds of images of war from the George W. Bush era. Nadia, you nominated Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s “The Day Nobody Died,” which is very abstract.

Douglas: What is it?

Vellam: They did this project in Afghanistan where they took rolls of photo paper and put them outside, exposing them to the sun or the weather. Whatever would happen while the photo paper was exposed was the work. It’s about a new idea of photography, about it not depicting something specific but creating a mood. And this one was taken, as the title says, on a day nobody died, which is such an interesting and different way to talk about a conflict.

21. Richard Drew, “Falling Man,” 2001

When it was first published by The Associated Press, the photojournalist Richard Drew’s image of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was denounced by many readers as exploitative. Several media outlets published the image once, on Sept. 12 — including The Times, on page A7 — but it then disappeared from circulation, confined to shock websites like rotten.com. There was no shortage of graphic images of 9/11, including footage of the planes flying into the buildings. But Drew’s photo was uniquely unsettling because of its uncomfortable elegance: a single victim, framed by both north and south towers, caught in a fragile stasis before death. The image eventually began a strange afterlife as “one of the most famous photographs in human history,” according to the journalist Tom Junod, who wrote a 2003 essay in Esquire in which he attempts to identify the falling man. He couldn’t — not definitively. No one has. Recalling war photography that valorizes the unknown soldier, “Falling Man” would go on to be one of the inspirations for a novel by Don DeLillo and an opera by Daniel Levy. Long after the dust settled on the former site of the World Trade Center, the photograph of the unnamed man remains, like “an unmarked grave,” in Junod’s words, merely asking that we look at it. — E.I.

Miller: I think “Falling Man” is the defining image from the most violent day in America since the Civil War.

Shikeith: I was in middle school when 9/11 happened. Images from that day seem to seep into you. You carry them for life and they dictate certain fears and anxieties.

Miller: And then there are all the images from what happened in the years to come. The pictures of soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib military prison are arguably the most famous photographs from the war on terror.

22. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, Abu Ghraib Hooded Detainee, 2003

In early 2004, investigations into abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility had already been reported by news outlets including The New York Times and CNN. But the government had kept all photographs of torture out of view — until leaked images reached CBS. Even then, the news anchor Dan Rather would claim, the network’s executives only granted permission to show them when faced with the threat of a scoop by The New Yorker’s investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. (CBS executives justified holding the photos on various grounds, including the desire to avoid retaliation against American hostages.) The Abu Ghraib photos finally appeared in both outlets later that year. Their subject matter is brutal: men stripped naked and made to form a human pyramid with soldiers grinning behind them; a hooded man standing atop a box, hooked to electrical wires. The fact that American soldiers had recorded these scenes on their personal cameras only made them more disturbing. The photos significantly shifted American public opinion on the war on terror, further demonstrating the power of an image to alter a story. They also speak to a broader shift in news photography, in which everyone — no matter their intentions — is now a potential journalist. — L.M.

Shikeith: Both “Falling Man” and the hooded Iraqi detainee have a hard-core bodily effect on me. I think there was a sort of naïveté to the world I grew up in, just this idea that America is the greatest place on earth. For a moment there, we believed the myth. At least I did. When I started seeing these images, I developed a distrust in a lot of things. It only got worse. I have a very pessimistic outlook, but it sort of begins here, with these images.

23. Carrie Mae Weems, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” 1995-96

Carrie Mae Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is a work of appropriation that brings together 34 photographs, many of them of Black Americans, dating from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s, which collectively form a lesson on the history of racism in America. At the heart of the work are four images of people who were enslaved in South Carolina — some of the earliest known images that exist of America’s original sin — taken by the photographer Joseph T. Zealy and commissioned in 1850 by the Harvard University biologist Louis Agassiz. Originally intended to illustrate Agassiz’s baseless phrenological theories of Black inferiority, the pictures were rescaled and reframed by Weems, who also tinted them blood-red, making explicit the violence that allowed for their creation. Stored in Harvard’s archives for more than a century, Zealy’s images fell into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in 1976. After Weems used them without permission, the school threatened her with a lawsuit. “I think that your suing me would be a really good thing,” she told the university, as she later recalled to the art historian Deborah Willis. “You should, and we should have this conversation in court.” Instead of proceeding with the suit, Harvard acquired the work, further complicating the idea of ownership that Weems investigates. — E.I.

Vellam: We should talk about Carrie [Mae Weems].

Meiselas: We should definitely talk about Carrie. There are two very different options [“ Kitchen Table Series ,” 1990, and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.”]

Lê: I chose the “Kitchen Table Series” [in which Weems poses as the matriarch in various domestic scenes she staged in a single room, containing little else but an overhead lamp and a table]. The kitchen table is symbolic — it’s the intimacy of the home. In a way I always felt these pictures were about people being able to be themselves, being open and visible in a way that they maybe can’t in public.

Marcoci: To me, the “Kitchen Table Series” is a true performance for the camera in a way that Cindy’s is in “Untitled Film Stills.” But “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is an amazing work because it engages with race, with slavery, with colonialism, through an archive. The subjects here were really originally presented as specimens. But what Carrie does is give a voice back to these subjects, whose voices were completely muted. She enlarges the photographs. She tints them blood-red. The whole thing becomes a poem.

Shikeith: This particular work taught me how to use photographs to tell a story. And the fact that [Harvard threatened to sue her] introduces this whole other issue about who gets to tell what stories.

24. Deana Lawson, “Nation,” 2018

The idea for “Nation” came to Deana Lawson in a dream. She was haunted by a story that George Washington’s false teeth were made from the teeth of enslaved people . For months, she kept an image of Washington’s dentures — held in Mount Vernon’s collection — on the wall of her bedroom. Lawson dreamed about a person wearing a mouth guard and wondered if she might forge a connection between the majesty of gold — the jewelry of hip-hop and the regalia of the Ashanti Kingdom — and the fact that the first president of the United States could only speak the lofty words of liberty through teeth that once belonged to the oppressed. Lawson is known for portraits she stages in homes and other intimate spaces, often decorated with a large array of objects: family pictures, children’s toys, a Michael Jackson poster. In her images, Black men and women, their skin captured in color with meticulous attention to shade and tone, appear not as documentary subjects but as vessels. “Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory,” the novelist Zadie Smith has written of Lawson’s photography. At the photo shoot for “Nation,” Lawson offered three hip-hop artists a selection of jewelry and a mouth guard, typically worn during dental procedures, painted gold. “Someone said that I’m ruthless when it comes to what I want,” Lawson says in an interview in her self-titled 2018 monograph. “I have an image in mind that … burns so deeply that I have to make it, and I don’t care what people are going to think.” “Nation” presents an endless series of questions about Black lineage, going back centuries before the nation’s founding. Lawson later printed the picture of Washington’s teeth on a card and slipped it into the edge of the work’s golden frame. — B.E.

Miller: Deana Lawson seems to be doing something similar to Weems in “Nation.”

Marcoci: I think that’s an amazing image. It’s actually a collage, with the picture of George Washington’s dentures tucked into the top right corner. She’s said photography has the power to make history and the present speak to each other.

25. Carlijn Jacobs, “Renaissance,” 2022

On July 29, 2022, when Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” the first of what she’s envisioned as a three-act magnum opus (act two, “Cowboy Carter,” was released this March), the public was exhausted after two and a half years of pandemic restrictions and unprecedented change to their daily routines. They were stir-crazy and impatient for the dance floor. Beyoncé embraced the sounds of house music pioneered by Black and queer D.J.s, as well as the subversive, high-gloss styling of ballroom culture. The singer appears on the album’s cover in a Giannina Azar-designed silver rope dress, sitting astride a horse covered in mirrors. The image was taken by Carlijn Jacobs, a Dutch fashion photographer interested in the art of masquerade and maximalist glamour, and alludes to both rodeo and royalty. It also conjures a range of artistic references, including Kehinde Wiley’s painting “ Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon ” (2016); Rose Hartman’s snapshots of Bianca Jagger on a white horse at Studio 54 in 1977; and John Collier’s 1890s painting of Lady Godiva, the 11th-century Englishwoman said to have rode her horse naked through the streets as a form of protest. — B.E.

Vellam: Does anybody else feel like we’re missing a pop-culture celebrity moment? If we’re talking about images that go everywhere, and that people who live in the middle of the country all are going to look at, I don’t feel we have that.

Douglas: I think it’s important to include the idea of celebrity culture in photography. I’m not quite sure what that would be.

Lê: There’s the [2017] picture of Beyoncé pregnant with all the flowers .

Miller: Initially, Shikeith had also picked Beyoncé from the album cover of “Dangerously in Love” (2003).

Marcoci: But sorry, why don’t we then just choose a [Richard] Avedon of a celebrity?

Vellam: Marilyn Monroe [from 1957]. But don’t we feel like we have plenty of photographs from the past? Don’t we want to think about what celebrity is now?

Miller: What’s the iconic pop culture image from the last five years?

Douglas: Is there a Kardashian image?

Vellam: I can’t, because I hate them so much. But yes, you want the thing of [Kim Kardashian] when she broke the internet with her butt [an image that ran on the cover of Paper magazine in 2014].

Douglas: I’m going back to Beyoncé, because [you want] an image of a celebrity who’s not a person but an image. She’s like a simulacrum somehow.

Vellam: With her “Renaissance” cover, suddenly she was plastered everywhere. It was all over the city.

Douglas: I’d buy that.

Shikeith: I think it’s very important that she released this album and highlighted Black queer contributions to music in the culture because, very frequently, those same contributions are erased or attributed to someone else. Especially in pop culture.

Marcoci: Can you hold it up on your phone?

Vellam: Yeah. I listen to it all the time.

Top: Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) © the Gordon Parks Foundation; NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise” (1968); Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara)” (1960) © Alberto Korda, courtesy of the Alberto Korda Estate; Stuart Franklin, an unidentified man blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989) © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos; Deana Lawson, “Nation” (2018) © Deana Lawson, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery; LaToya Ruby Frazier, “United Auto Workers and Their Families Holding up ‘Drive It Home’ Campaign Signs Outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli Union Hall, Lordstown, OH, 2019,” from the series “The Last Cruze” (2019) © LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the first presentation of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze.” A selection of images from the series ran in The New York Times Magazine in May 2019, and the larger work was later shown as a multimedia installation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. It was not first presented at the Renaissance Society. The article also misstated the date of the Tank Man photograph by Stuart Franklin in Beijing; it was June 5, 1989, not June 4.

How we handle corrections

M.H. Miller is a features director for T Magazine. More about M.H. Miller

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IMAGES

Formal and Informal Telephone Conversations Phrases
Cell Phone Poem Poem by Edgardo Tugade
Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka: Practice with Poetry
The Telephone Conversation By Wole Soyinka Summary And Analysis Essay
telephone conversation.docx
Telephone Conversation Poem Summary and Analysis

VIDEO

This poetry collection is great for beginners!
How poetry speaks
Two lines poetry
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Telephone Interview with Farah N Huq . September 2023
How writing poetry can expand you!

COMMENTS

Telephone Conversation (Poem + Analysis)
Wole Soyinka's 'Telephone Conversation' is a lyric poem written in free verse. The poem is a dialogue involving a black man and a white woman. The two are indulged in a phone call throughout the poem. The poem, to a considerable extent, follows the question and answer pattern. That is, the white landlady fires away one question after ...
"Telephone Conversation" by Nobel
Introduction. The poem "Telephone conversation" is written by Nobel laureate winner professor Wole Soyinka. In this poem, the writer describes the conversation that ensued between him and a racist British landlady when he tried to rent her apartment. Poetry usually seeks to teach or reveal to us the beauties and ugliness of life and the ...
Telephone Conversation Poem Summary and Analysis
Learn More. "Telephone Conversation" is a 1963 poem by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka that satires racism. The poem describes a phone call between a landlady and the speaker, who is black, about renting an apartment. The landlady is pleasant until she learns that the speaker is "African," at which point she demands to know how "light" or ...
Analysis of Wole Soyinka's Telephone Conversation
Paradoxically apologetic and bitingly sarcastic, Soyinka's Telephone Conversation is a 35-line poem dealing with bigotry and the absurdity of racist hierarchies. Written in free verse, the poem portrays an African's attempt to rent an apartment in London. Describing a conversation with a prospective landlady conducted from a public phone, the poem's speaker recounts the experience of…
Critical analysis of Wole Soyinka's Telephone Conversation
Telephone Conversation is a poetic satire against the widespread racism still prevalent. in the modern western society. As the title suggests, the poem depicts a telephone. conversation between a west African man and a British land-lady who shockingly changes her attitude towards the man soon after he reveals his racial identity.
Telephone Conversation
Source: Klay Dyer, Critical Essay on "Telephone Conversation," in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2008. Thomson Gale. In the following essay, the critic gives a critical analysis of Soyinka's work. Many critics consider Wole Soyinka Africa's finest writer. The Nigerian playwright's unique style blends traditional Yoruban folk-drama with European ...
Telephone Conversation By Wole Soyinka
Share Cite. The poem "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka describes a tense exchange between a potential landlord and tenant. Narrated from the prospective tenant's point of view, this ...
Telephone Conversation
Telephone Conversation Wole Soyinka The price seemed reasonable, location Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived Off premises. Nothing remained But self-confession. "Madam," I warned, 5 "I hate a wasted journey—I am African." Silence. Silenced transmission of Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Soyinka -- "Telephone Conversation"
Soyinka -- "Telephone Conversation". Wole Soyinka. (b.1934) "Telephone Conversation". The price seemed reasonable, location. Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived. Off premises.
A Study Guide for Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation"
A Study Guide for Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
Poem Analysis: 'Telephone Conversation' by Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka's poem takes the shape of a dialogue between two people on the telephone, an African man and a white British landlady. The man is looking for somewhere to rent and needs a room, apartment or flat. But for the landlady, there is an obstacle: he's black. He knows that this fact could potentially ruin his chances of gaining ...
Wole Soyinka
The poem comprises a single stanza, thirty five uneven length lines in free verse. There is no rhyme scheme. It is structured in the form of a telephone conversation, with snappy concise exchanges ...
Telephone Conversation
Type: Blank verse. Background. Written by Wole Soyinka - first African to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The poem is about a man trying to rent a flat from an English landlady. Her attitudes towards him change when she hears he is African. She is clearly racist, and the absurd conversation shows her inferior intelligence.
What is the critical overview of Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation
"Telephone Conversation" is actually a biting satire against the racist attitudes of whites in the 20th century. Overtly, the poem deals with a black, educated man who is ringing up a white ...
Theme and message of Telephone Conversation
The main theme explored by the poet in "Telephone Conversation" is that of racism and xenophobia. Through the poem, Wole Soyinka tries to raise awareness of the fact that skin colour should not matter in an open-minded and educated society. Issues like "light" or "dark" skin should not impede a person to carry on with daily life and ...
Wole Soyinka
The poem depicts a course of a conversation between two persons: one is a white English landlady and the other is a black African. The black African (maybe the poet himself) is in search of a house for rent in the city of London and he has had a talk with a landlady over the telephone.
Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka
How the society makes life harder to people with darker skin. Troosh - This poem is very unique and special. A conversation between a racist woman and a black man made into a poem, with a humorous approach to this grim subject, something that is needed with serious subjects such as this one.
The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka: Summary and Analysis
By Prince Kumar / 14 Jan 2024. "The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka" is a satirical poem penned in 1963, that addresses the issue of racism. It unfolds the narrative of a telephone call between the speaker, a black individual, and a landlady negotiating an apartment rental. Initially amiable, the landlady's demeanour takes a sharp turn ...
PDF Telephone Conversation
Synopsis of the poem: Telephone Conversation is a poetic satire against the degenerated and inhumane condition of black people in society. As the title suggests, the poem depicts a telephone conversation between a west-African man and a British land-lady who shockingly changes her attitude towards the man soon after he reveals his racial identity.
Essay about The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka
Open Document. The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka The "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka is a poem that's title is very casual and straight forward. The poem's title shows the reader that what they are meant to read is realistic and free flowing. Like most poems there is a general theme that is carried on from start to end.
Theme and tone in 'Telephone Conversation' by Wole Soyinka
Telephone Conversation was a poem concerning the racial discrimination between the Caucasian and African. In the poem, the poet wanted to rent a house from the landlady originally. However, after he stated that he was African, the conversation turned to discuss the poet's skin color swiftly and it lasted till the end of the conversation..
Wole Soyinka Questions and Answers
Start an essay Ask a question ... Is "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka a poem about racism? ... In "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka, explain the meaning of—Silence for ...
Poetry Comparison
Poetry Comparison. The two poems 'Telephone Conversation' by Wole Soyinka and 'Ballad of the Landlord' by Langston Hughes both focus on the issue of racism. Thus the poems have a similar theme but present the theme in a variety of different ways. The backgrounds of the poets tell us a lot about their intentions.
The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age
The conversation naturally turned into a series of questions. Like how important was it for a photograph to have expanded the possibilities of the medium?

“Telephone Conversation” by Nobel Essay

Introduction

Telephone Conversation Summary & Analysis by Wole Soyinka

The Full Text of “Telephone Conversation”

Racism and the Complexity of Identity

Lines 11-14

Lines 14-18

Lines 18-23

Lines 23-26

Lines 26-30

Lines 30-35

“Telephone Conversation” Symbols

Cigarette-holder

Raven black

“Telephone Conversation” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration

“Telephone Conversation” Vocabulary

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Telephone Conversation”

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation

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The Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka: Summary and Analysis

Table of Contents

Beyond "Dark" or "Light"

The Insidious Creep of Bias

Colour-Coded Humanity

Beyond the Binary

Humour as Resistance

A Conversation Across the Divide

Literary Devices Used

About the Author

Poetry Comparison - 'Telephone Conversation' by Wole Soyinka and 'Ballad of the Landlord' by Langston Hughes.

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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960

5. Diane Arbus, “Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C., 1967”

6. Malcolm Browne, the Self-Immolation of the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, 1963

7. NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise,” 1968

8. Ernest C. Withers, “I Am a Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee,” 1968

9. Blair Stapp, Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, 1968

10. W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko in Her Bath,” 1972

11. Photo Archive Group, “Photographs From S-21: 1975-79”

12. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80

13. Ed Ruscha, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” 1966

14. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1979-2004

15. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W),” 1993

16. Lee Friedlander, “Boston,” 1986, From the Series “At Work,” 1975-95

17. LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze,” 2019

18. Sebastião Salgado, “Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil,” 1986

19. Stuart Franklin, an Unidentified Man Blocking a Column of Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

20. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” 2008

21. Richard Drew, “Falling Man,” 2001

22. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, Abu Ghraib Hooded Detainee, 2003

23. Carrie Mae Weems, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” 1995-96

24. Deana Lawson, “Nation,” 2018

25. Carlijn Jacobs, “Renaissance,” 2022

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