An iconic photograph from the Vietnam Era that is again relevant...in recognition of which I hereby grant our burgeoning Humanitarian Liberation Movement full rights for use-with-attribution.

Photo by Loren Bliss © 1971, 2022
(Permission for use with attribution hereby granted.)  

History: I grab-shot this un-posed, increasingly iconic picture at the end of a major anti-Vietnam-War protest-march in Bellingham, Washington. The young woman – her name on tear-sheets and notes forever lost in the arson fire that destroyed all my life’s significant work on 1 September 1983 – was among a group of about 500 demonstrators, most of whom were Western Washington State College students mobilized to protest Nixon’s illegal invasion of Laos in the Spring of 1971. The photo was published several times c. 1971-72 – that data also destroyed by the arsonist(s); the print survived only because it was with me in my portfolio case when the arsonist(s) attacked. It was subsequently published as the August 2022 cover of BSceneZine, a New York City art magazine produced in Paris, that issue primarily a retrospective view of the birth, life and suppression of the '60s Counterculture on Manhattan's Lower East Side.   

Technical data: Nikon F w/105mm f/2.5 Nikkor; Tri-X at 800ASA in D-76; print on DuPont Varilure, archivally processed. 

LB/14 January 2026

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