Talk:Patrick Cloutier

Proposed deletion

I can see why you might feel that this is a bio of living person notable for one event only, but I would suggest that it doesn't quite match the criteria. This isn't someone who, say, won the Delaware state lottery six years ago - Patrick Cloutier is significant part of an iconic image that is readily identifiable to nearly every Canadian over a certain age. As well, his bio isn't just notable because of he was a part of that image, but because he subsequently was both promoted and then dishonourably discharged in rapid succession and eventually appeared in a pornographic movie. I would argue that that's at least three (albeit related) interesting things about the subject of the biography. Certainly, he doesn't warrant a long article, but some entry is relevant to Wikipedia and his subsequent promotion, dismissal and appearance in a porno doesn't really belong in the Oka Crisis article itself. Geoff NoNick (talk) 18:51, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments. I believe I see your point-of-view but I seriously doubt that the subsequent events in his life would have any interest or coverage had it not been for the Oka face-off. More importantly, I don't believe that we have enough significant, reliable sources about Cloutier that would permit a fair, NPOV article about him and, without such, I have serious WP:BLP concerns. Cheers, DoubleBlue (Talk) 19:04, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

With respect DoubleBlue, I would suggest that there are any number of articles within Wikipedia dealing with a subject who initially only came to public notice through involvement in a single event. Apart from the caption appearing under the image itself, I would maintain that the sources cited at the bottom of the article completely meet Wikipedia's "reliability" standards, in that they are based on information obtained from articles in major Canadian newspapers, which are of course subject to the normal editorial vetting processes found to be acceptable throughout the encyclopedia. I believe that a short 'free standing' article in Wikipedia regarding Patrick Cloutier provides significant historical context for one of the subjects of a photograph that has been described as "Canada's most famous image"(see below),this information is unavailable anywhere else in the encyclopedia. Further, I would respectfully suggest that deleting the article might arguably be seen by some as a form of censorship in an attempt at obfuscating Cloutier's later activities, despite the fact that they are well documented. As underlined by Geoff NoNick, Cloutier's notability is not soley restricted to his activities during the Oka Crisis. His rapid promotion, his subsequent arrest, demotion and discharge from the Canadian Forces, as well as his involvement in the production of a pornographic film, all took place over a period of ten years and were widely covered in the Canadian media of the time. I agree with Geoff NoNick that merger into the Oka Crisis article is not an appropriate option in this case, which is why I argue for a short stand alone article. I'm including an excerpt from a recent National Post article below to point out that the Oka photo including Cloutier continues to resonate as a significant Canadian historical document:

Capturing pride

Zosia Bielski, National Post (Toronto) Published: Tuesday, June 03, 2008

[...]

"In a new paper to be presented at a massive gathering of academics this week in Vancouver, Prof. Whalen argues that unlike Americans, Canadians have no truly iconic photographs because we are a younger country with a less fully formed collective memory, a nation that identifies predominantly with its diverse immigrants and has traditionally been more discreet about its flourishes of nationalism.

Prof. Whalen says that for decades, Americans have revered nationalistic photographs such as Joe Rosenthal's Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and the 1986 Challenger explosion.

Others are John Paul Filo's 1970 image of the Kent State shooting, the Times Square Kiss captured by Life photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1945, three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin in 1963, and Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, a portrait of a hungry woman and her children on a migratory farm in California, which became one of the enduring images of the Great Depression.

"I can mention all of those photos and everyone says, 'Oh yes.' I have yet to reach that unambivalent 'Oh yes' moment with a Canadian photograph," says Prof. Whalen, who argues her controversial point in a presentation called, "At a Loss for Photos: The Canadian Iconic Image and Civic Discourse."

"I would not say entirely that Canada does not have important salient images, but I think that in Canada, we don't have as much resolution about what we can say is the representative Canadian picture," she said in an interview.

Her research stems from the work of American theorists such as Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, who say, "An iconic picture has to be that pinnacle that is compositionally beautiful, that highlights a historic moment, that has tremendous circulation in the country and internationally. It's easily recognized, it's venerated and it's transcendent," and should also be widely reproduced across different mediums, be it print, screen or T-shirt.

This is the definition Prof. Whalen used when she showed her class various Canadian photographs. Many, she argued, are memorable and important, but fall short of iconic because they do not possess all of the above characteristics.

Think of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau pirouetting behind Queen Elizabeth's back at Buckingham Palace. For many Canadians of a certain age, Prof. Whalen says, that pirouette stood for Mr. Trudeau's democratic derision of aristocratic pomp. Yet it is unlikely to be an image ever reproduced on T-shirts the country over, or even recognized by all Canadians for its significance many years afterwards, she argues.

Or former prime minister Jean Chretien throttling an anti-poverty protester, an attack later dubbed the Shawinigan Handshake. Many of Prof. Whalen's students remembered the chokehold, but the image does not resonate emotionally. Nor does it represent an ideal that would instill a sense of national pride, the way most of the U. S. iconic photos do.

One of the few Canadian photos that comes close to being iconic is an image from the 1990 Oka Crisis that shows Private Patrick Cloutier facing off against Mohawk Warrior Brad Larocque.

Prof. Whalen says that "some have called it Canada's most famous image," but what she finds interesting is that viewers who look at the photo can identify with either of the men, or take a third viewpoint, a quintessentially Canadian one that she calls "the idealized Canadian citizen as mediator.""

[...] cheers Deconstructhis (talk) 20:20, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I absolutely agree about the importance and resonance of the moment captured by the photograph (in minor fact, I was the person who uploaded it nearly three years ago). I think it rightly belongs with the Oka Crisis article, however.

I'm not interested in censoring Wikipedia or obfuscating Cloutier's later activities, however, it is vitally important that we have NPOV articles on living people WP:BLP. I don't think that there is enough coverage of Cloutier, himself, to create such an article. Regards, DoubleBlue (Talk) 20:34, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Proposed move?

I'm not sure Cloutier himself is notable enough to deserve an article, but the image itself is, and I don't see why all of this information couldn't be contained in such an article. Thoughts? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 23:34, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

An interesting idea that I'm certainly willing to think about. I'm still not completely convinced that Cloutier himself doesn't warrant a separate article as well. I've been looking at other instances of "iconic" national photographs, from the U.S. in particular and in those cases the prominent subjects themselves all appear to have separate articles written about them, despite the fact that basically their only (at least) initial claim to national and international attention is dependent on their appearance in a single photo. For instance:

Mary Ann Vecchio

John Bradley (Iwo Jima)

Rene Gagnon

Ira Hayes

Phan Thị Kim Phúc

Gerri Santoro

The fact that Cloutier's subsequent life may be viewed as somewhat less than exemplary, in my opinion should not factor into this. His presence as one of only two subjects in an important Canadian historical photograph, as widely recognised as this one, indicates to me that information regarding his life provides significant context to readers of the encyclopedia, as do the details regarding the lives of the subjects contained in the articles I've mentioned above do for the historical events in which they were personally involved. cheers Deconstructhis (talk) 00:21, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Like Mary Ann Vecchio, many of the articles in Category:Photographs (people) show the fine line between an article about a person and an article about a photograph of a person. - TheMightyQuill (talk) 16:43, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. But I'd argue that that line does exist, although faint. To me it's drawn between the more "iconic" aspects of the photo itself and the real live people who are the subjects of those particular images in the first place. I regard both as valid categories in an encyclopedic sense and I've noticed that other editors appear to recognise that distinction as well, as evidenced in part in Category:Photographs (people) and many other examples in Wikipedia. I believe that not drawing that line, shifts the context toward *only* the "iconic" aspects, ignoring the fact that there are people with actual lives in these images. As an historian (amateur) many times I feel 'cheated' when exactly that sort of contextualizing evidence is lacking in the historical record and often wonder if it was available, how it might alter our perceptions of some of those "iconic" images we see. I'm not just talking here about what might be perceived as "negative" aspects of the lives of the subjects, positive as well, without context, how can we know? There's also the perspective that by ignoring the subjects as people, we are in a real sense robbing them of their humanity, as if the only aspect that should matter is the iconic. I'd suggest that a particularly grotesque example of the dangers implicit in taking that approach can be found in the article Phan Thị Kim Phúc. Just to make it clear, I'd also like to say that I believe that the other subject of the "Oka photo", Bradley Larocque, is in my opinion also an appropriate subject for a short article as well. I believe that it should include details from Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera'a book People of the Pines, that some might regard as less than positive in nature in regard to Larocque, see page 355 for example. I have no desire to unnecessarily prolong the debate on this subject and of course in the end I will abide by the decision of the community. I have deliberately left the current template in place because I've noted that a call for discussion has been made in several forums and I want to give that process time to work. However, it is my intention to remove it before it expires and if required, to continue this debate in another context. regards Deconstructhis (talk) 18:53, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure where you're suggesting we draw the line of notability. Do Françoise Bornet and Jacques Carteaud, featured in this photo each deserve bio articles? I agree that ignoring the people in iconic photos isn't a good idea, but at the same time, I think WP:BLP1E is a good rule.

Furthermore, I would have trouble deciding when an article should be officially about the person or the photograph. That category is described as "articles about well-known photographs where the article is named after the person in the photograph" but almost all the contained articles are bio articles (with birth/death categories etc), not photograph articles. I would argue that Phan Thị Kim Phúc more deserving of a bio than Cloutier, because she has continued to maintain a public presence. What is it you don't like about that article? Should Sharbat Gula be about the photo or the person? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 16:13, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

First off MightyQuill, thanks for continuing this dialogue with me, it's encouraging me to really think about what I'm talking about it and forces me to refine my argument. I'm in total agreement with you about Category:Photographs (people). Last time I checked, most of the image articles displayed were misfiled by being there, because they didn't match the category requirement consisting of "photographs whose titles were someones name". Anything else is supposed to be categorized as "Photograph". What I'm suggesting is that there may or may not be a need for a category called something like "articles that contain famous [or "iconic"] photographs" or "articles about famous photographs" but I do think that the category "articles about the subjects of famous photographs" already does exist in a certain sense, at least there's at present quite a few articles regarding that subject out there. Take your example of Sharbat Gula. Here's an article about someone whose claim to notability is a second or two in front of a camera a couple of decades ago. Someone took the time to actually track her down and learn about her after all those years, she had zero "public presence" in the interim and as far as I know has returned to a "normal life" subsequently. Does any of that mean that she *shouldn't* have an article? Personally, I think she should, for reasons I've outlined earlier. Some people might have problems with Cloutier's suitability for an article because of issues centred on concerns regarding some of his 'life choices'. In my opinion that's potentially shaky ground in terms of NPOV, once we begin to pick and choose "suitability" based on that sort of thing, where is the line drawn? There are any number of articles in the encyclopedia about 'ordinary" criminals' who have committed (and become famous) through a limited number of actions during a brief period of time, only to disappear into jail and continue to remain there, completely out of the public eye for the duration. Are we prepared to say that all those articles actually *shouldn't* be in Wikipedia?

I'd like to leave you with one final example of what I'm talking about. Florence Owens Thompson. If you run her name on Google in quotes you get 4650 hits. Almost 5000 returns for a woman whose only actual personal physical excursion into the public eye was a few moments sitting on a porch with her children in the 1930's with a camera pointed at her and yet for photo/social historians and still many members of the general public, her image instantly evokes an entire era of suffering and loss. Her actual identity wasn't even known until the past few decades. Let's say that upon discovering who she actually was, it was determined that she had lived a less than "desirable" life in ethical terms after that photo had been taken; would that imply that because of that she was less entitled to an encyclopedia article. Again, personally I don't think so and I know there are other editors who might not share that perspective.

Thanks to everyone who read and thought about this issue. I'm going to be off line for a couple of days and I leave this in the communities capable hands. I'm going to proceed to remove the existing template at this point as an indicator that I disagree with the proposed deletion of this article and if allowed to, I'd like to contest it further through another step of the deletion process. cheers Deconstructhis (talk) 07:35, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Deconstructthis, I agree this is an interesting, useful and enjoyable discussion. While I agree that the articles in that category are biographical articles, rather than articles about photos, I'm not sure a) that's a good thing, or b) that it justifies doing the same thing here. Personally, I think it would make more sense to have an article called Afghan Girl ostensibly about the photo, but with all the same information. The same for Florence OWens Thompson - 5000 hits on google actually a pretty small number, certainly not enough to show notability. "Jacques Carteaud" of the French kiss photo nets 2000. Do you really think he deserves an article to himself? Let me put it another way, if there was an article about the Oka photo which contained the information from this biography, and info on Larocque, and other information on the photo, photographer, and it's reception, don't you think it would make for a better, longer and more interesting article? And can you imagine there would be anything in this existing bio article which would not belong in the photograph article? The two articles would be redundant, and I'd be willing to bet if a merger was proposed, there would be more support for maintaining the better/longer/more interesting photo article than the narrower biography article. No? TheMightyQuill (talk) 16:15, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Proposal

Okay, I'll propose the following: that an article be created with the image under discussion as its subject and that the information (including references) found in the current article, along with information and references regarding Bradley Larocque and the context in which the photo was taken will be included and that the current article will be merged into the new article upon its completion. I'd suggest that we need to know more about this photo. Who took it? Does it have an "official" ascribed title? If it does, in my opinion it would make a lot of sense to simply title the article in the same way.(viz.Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. cheers Deconstructhis (talk) 20:32, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Support. Check out the following link. There was a criminal case brought against the photographer. All very interesting. - TheMightyQuill (talk) 16:42, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

• http://www.ccla.org/pos/columns/photo.shtml

This article suggests the title is "Standoff at Oka." Anyone opposed to a move to Standoff at Oka (photograph)? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 14:49, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

I strongly support a move to Standoff at Oka per the Citizen/Beaver Magazine article. I don't see why a disambiguator is needed. DoubleBlue (Talk) 15:02, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

This article suggests "Face to Face", while this article doesn't provide a name but does provide names for other photos. This gallery listing does not provide a name, either. I suspect there is no official title for the photograph. --Rob Kelk 00:07, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

I guess it's not technically needed, but since Oka standoff is already a redirect to Oka Crisis is would be clearer to include the "(photograph)" dab. Anyone else have thoughts on this? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 18:07, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

The article itself shouldn't be moved, but the non-trivial information can be moved in the description of the photo (in image space, where information regarding images and photograph belongs). This article should definitely be deleted as non-notable (once you strip the trivia, there's not much left). Was there ever a proper deletion request filed? --Qyd (talk) 17:37, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

By that logic, we should also delete this page, for exactly the same reasons. --Rob Kelk 00:07, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Removal

I removed the word "famous". If it is actually quoted in the article, then we should put quotes around it.174.3.110.108 (talk) 02:37, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Capitalization

In this sentence... "Patrick Cloutier is shown in a face to face confrontation with a masked Mohawk Warrior..." shouldn't "Warrior" be in small case? It seems clumsy there; Warrior would imply a formal title. One wouldn't do this with, say, a "Canadian Soldier" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.245.252.42 (talk) 11:06, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

There's a difference between the two terms - "soldier" is a job description, while "Mohawk Warrior" is a title. (See Mohawk Warrior Society for (currently sparse) details.) The capitalization is correct. --Rob Kelk 23:43, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Requested Merge

Cloutier is famous only for his appearance in a photograph. Alternately, a new article could be created about this photograph, and this article could be merged into it. His appearance in one photograph, even a relatively famous photograph, does not justify a biography article. - TheMightyQuill (talk) 15:00, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

He has significant coverage over the years beyond this one event. There's coverage of his discharge from the military, his pornography career and his later life. He clearly meets WP:GNG and should have his own entry. Tchaliburton (talk) 04:57, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Agree with TheMightyQuill. The only reason there has been any coverage of this individual is because of the photograph. An article about the photo and its significance could include any relevant information. WP:BIO1E. Wikipedia not a tabloid. (Now if he married a Kardashian ...) Mannanan51 (talk) 03:45, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

This is analogous to saying "The only reason there has been any coverage of Neil Armstrong is because of a half-hour walk he made in July 1969." The event in question here is an important one in recent Canadian history; anyone involved in the event is by definition noteworthy, in my opinion. --Rob Kelk 23:57, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

I've created an article about the photograph, Patrick Cloutier - Brad Larocque standoff photo, that covers Cloutier and the others involved. Let met know if you all find this suitable, and I can redirect it. I think the name I chose is pretty poor, but I can't think of anything better, since it's apparently unnamed. I'm certainly open to suggestions for alternatives. - Themightyquill (talk) 15:06, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Was in the middle of making the article aswell...The image is called "Face-à-face " or "face to face" and Nationalism20(3), 2014, 481–502.DOI: 10.1111/nana.12067© The author(s) 2014. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2014 -- Moxy (talk) 18:18, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh, nice. I assumed I wouldn't be able to get access to that article. Thanks for sharing. - Themightyquill (talk) 18:55, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh...about the merger..redirect to new image article? he is only famous to this point.--Moxy (talk) 19:24, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Yep, I'd say that WP:BLP1E was written precisely for cases like this. - Themightyquill (talk) 19:31, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

New interview in LePress

A new interview has been released in LaPress, but my français is terrible and Google Translate isn't much better. Anyone care to read the story and decide if this article needs to be updated?

http://plus.lapresse.ca/screens/e4f14441-a63f-44b1-a9c4-ee41fe5bb532%7Ck7.TPyTcO7.l.html CubBC (talk) 19:04, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

There's a mention that he "found love" aboard the Amundsen, but no specifics are given. I think the article here doesn't need updating because of that interview. --Rob Kelk 23:52, 1 October 2015 (UTC)