‘The Most Beautiful Suicide’: A Violent Death, an Immortal Photo | LIFE.com: In May 1947, LIFE magazine devoted a full page to a picture taken by a photography student named Robert Wiles. The photograph is extraordinary in several ways — not least because it remains, seven decades later, one of the most famous portraits of suicide ever made. Along with Malcolm Browne’s 1963 image of a self-immolating Buddhist monk and a small handful of other photos of men and women seen before, during, or after their own self-slaughter, Wiles’ picture graphically and unforgettably captures the destruction — both literal and figurative — that attends virtually all suicides.
