Search Results for “napalm”

Why Photographs Don’t Stop the War

December 15, 2016December 19, 2016
Hariman
no caption needed
3 Comments

Because it’s the photographs’ fault, apparently.

Today the New York Times featured Michael Kimmelman’s impassioned critique of the lack of public response to the carnage in Syria. “They keep coming, both the bombs and the images from Aleppo, so many of them.” The theme, and pathos, of the article is that while the bombs are effective, the images are not. Worse, they are not as effective as other images from previous catastrophes. Referring to photographs such as the Accidental Napalm icon from the Vietnam War, we are told that those images “drove news cycles for weeks, months, years, helping tip the scales of policy.”

The question naturally becomes, what’s wrong with us? The usual suspects are trotted out: bigotry, social media, and compassion fatigue not least among them. Well, sure, all of those factors could be in play, but once again photography is being framed.

Let’s start with the facts: First of all, coverage of the war in Syria–and the refugee crisis it has created–has motivated many governments and many individuals to help. Hundreds of millions of dollars in government and charitable aid have been supplied, and thousands have opened their doors around the world. The photographs probably had something to do with that. The fact that some of them are as recognizable as earlier icons attests to their likely contribution, as do many testimonials.

But they didn’t do it all, which gets to the next problem. Those great images from the past did not drive news cycles for years. Those of us who have studied iconic photographs have learned that their value does not depend on a direct causal effect. The news cycle moves on regardless, while the iconic images develop over time. (If they don’t persist, they aren’t iconic.) They come to have many uses and may have long wave influence, but they don’t end the war or the famine or otherwise stop history in its tracks.

And neither does anything else, which gets to the next problem with the conventional critique of photography’s ineffectiveness. How many words have been written about Aleppo? How many articles and editorials and blog posts? How many special reports and pastoral letters and letters to the editor? Why don’t these texts have to bear the burden of ineffectiveness? They, too, are ephemeral, they don’t drive the news cycle for long periods of time, and although they bear witness they don’t provoke mass protests.

Nor does this mean that the public is hopelessly indifferent. As we’ve argued before (here and here), for anything to be persuasive, a lot has to be in place. A political process, just to take one example. The public has not been indifferent, it still has stores of compassion, we are perfectly capable of using social media and caring at the same time, and support from the bigots isn’t needed. But there have been massive failures of governance and diplomacy, and political leaders should be held accountable.

The catastrophe in Aleppo was not inevitable, and there still is great need to resolve the conflicts there and elsewhere in the region. Kimmelman is right about the most important things: We should feel horror and shame when watching the destruction of Aleppo. The public should demand help for those are displaced and destroyed by war, and for an end to the war. He also is wise in suggesting that an effective protest movement is likely to require “slow, brick by brick construction.” It always has–and those doing the killing can count on that. The problem is complex, and so many alternatives large and small need to be tried.

If social media can help as well, so much the better. If photographs can make a difference, we should be grateful we have them. But let’s not kid ourselves. The fault is not primarily in ourselves or in our media. Aleppo has been allowed to die, and while it has happened on our watch, those who are responsible have yet to be confronted.

UPDATE: Readers might want to see similar arguments set forth (in French) here and summarized here.

Cross-posted: a slightly adapted version is at Reading the Pictures.

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Vietnam and Afghanistan: Kicking the Ball Down the Road

August 5, 2013August 4, 2013
Hariman
visualizing war
1 Comment

The slide shows currently are full of human interest shots from city streets, small towns, tourist havens, summer festivals, and similar settings where people can kick back a bit and enjoy life. But for one detail, this photo could easily be included in the mix.

A girl kicks a ball down the corridor of a hospital, reminding us that you don’t have to be at the beach to have a good time. The red ball is clearly out of place in the grey and white functionalist decor, and the pastel gown now seems a bit festive, adding to the contrast between her free spirit and the institutional setting. What’s not to like?

The caption read, “8-year-old Razia plays ball at the U.S. military hospital in Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, on June 11, 2009. Razia was evacuated to the hospital in May after she was severely burned when a white phosphorus round hit her home in the Tagab Valley, killing two of her sisters during fighting between French troops and Taliban militants.”

And so we get to her face. That, and not the 2009 date is the reason this photo isn’t a human interest story. But why bring it up now? 2009 was, well, a long time ago, and isn’t the US pulling out of Afghanistan, or something like that?

The basic reason I’m writing about the photograph now is that none of us are likely to have seen it earlier. Fortunately, Alan Taylor at In Focus apparently thought that August shouldn’t be devoted entirely to forgetting about the rest of the world. This image is part of his current retrospective on Afghanistan’s Children of War. Some viewers may find it inappropriate–say, because it might invoke pity, or exploit the child or childhood, or suggest that the US cares for the war’s victims as much as it might harm them. Those reactions may be worth discussing, but I want to go back a step and ask why the image was not seen previously or regularly and widely in the first place.

More to the point, why has it not played a part in public discussion of the war in Afghanistan, despite its similarities to another photo that continues to be a flash point for debate about the Vietnam War?

You will recognize this iconic image of Kim Phuc and other children running from a napalm attack. Obviously, the photos are not identical. The girl in one photo is naked, while in the other she is fully clothed. One is alone in a safe place, while one is part of a traumatic event whose shock waves are still reverberating through others in her family. Combat soldiers are bringing up the rear in Vietnam, while we see what appear to be medical personal in Afghanistan. Oh, and one is burned on her face (at the very least), while the other is burned on her back and arm. And one was burned in June and the other in May. . . . Very different images, right?

Well, not exactly. Napalm then, phosphorus now. The girls were about the same age at the time. Both had siblings killed in the attack that wounded them. The attack in each case was by US proxies. Both attacks were hardly unique, but rather examples of what had become all too common occurrences. And the wars. . . . .

John Lucaites and I have written a fair amount about this iconic image (see chapter six of No Caption Needed), so let me be very clear that I don’t think one can explain exactly why some photos acquire iconic status and others don’t. John and I identify many possible factors, but the outcomes can depend on many accidents of history. That said, it still is fair to raise the question of why a burned girl was major news then and not now. One very bad answer is that the public is experiencing “compassion fatigue”: as David Campbell has argued, this is a myth of media influence rather than a real problem of public responsiveness.

I would argue that the first photo both hampers emotional response while also lacking some of the other important features of iconic composition. To put the matter very simply, her playfulness complicates one’s reaction to her injury, while cues for public significance are missing due to the dominance of the hospital setting. By contrast, the soldiers, family, and road are important elements for framing the naked girl’s suffering, which is being voiced. Thus, the difference in uptake may be due to important differences in the photos themselves.

But still. I have to think that something else is involved. Something like compassion fatigue, perhaps, although neither merely emotional nor a myth. Too many people have simply gotten used to not paying attention, to accepting what are essentially colonial wars as business as usual, to not caring in the first place what happens over there.

The military learned a lot from Vietnam. The American public, not so much.

Photographs by Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press and Nick Ut/Associated Press.

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In Memoriam: Horst Faas, 1933-2012

Horst Faas photographed everything from wars in Algeria and the Congo to the 1972 Munich Olympics and much more, but he was most noted for his work in Vietnam and later the horrific conflict in Bangladesh, twice winning both the Pulitzer Prize for Photography(1965, 1972) and the vaunted Robert Capa Gold Medal (1964, 1997). By all accounts he was responsible for setting new standards for war photography. His photographs in general displayed a gritty realism and his images from Vietnam in particular depicted the execrable effects of the war on both sides of what he called “this little bloodstained country so far away.” He was chief of photo operations for the AP in Saigon from 1962 to 1972. In 1967 he was seriously wounded by a rocket propelled grenade that nearly took his life; but even then, forced out of the field and confined to a desk he was pivotal in insisting that two controversial (and ultimately iconic) photographs were distributed over the AP wire: Eddie Adam’s “Saigon Execution” and Nick Ut’s “Accidental Napalm.” He was the AP’s senior editor for Europe until his retirement in 2004.

At NCN we mourn his passing and celebrate his vital contributions to the public art of photojournalism under the most difficult of circumstances.

Photo Credits: Horst Faas/AP

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How Does One Survive a Moral Virus?

November 30, 2011December 3, 2011
Lucaites
no caption needed
9 Comments

The above photograph was taken while we were on a brief hiatus but I figured there would be plenty of time to write about it once we returned after the Thanksgiving Holiday. Little did I imagine that it would go viral, become a meme, and basically disappear from attention in a period of ten days.

One of the things that we’ve learned in writing this blog for the past three years is that the news cycle can be brutal. Blink and it has moved on to something more immediately interesting, as if our attention span is incapable of pondering the rightness and wrongness of human behavior for more than the time it takes to click through a slideshow. But one would hope that genuine acts of unrepentant moral turpitude would not be cast aside so easily or so quickly. Maybe it is because the image of Mary Anne Vecchio wailing in distress at the murder of Jeffrey Miller at a different student protest in the 1970s is so seared in my consciousness that I find the photograph of Officer Pike assaulting students who are the very image of nonviolent rectitude to be so appalling. I taste bile in my mouth every time I look at the image, even now, ten days after first seeing it.

Others have commented on how casual Office Pike appears as he sprays the students, and the point is all the more pronounced in the various U-tube videos that provide live documentation of the event. Indeed, he looks rather like the weekend gardener in ads I’ve seen selling weed spray, killing the chickweed that has infested his otherwise perfectly green lawn as if it doing so makes him a good neighbor by maintaining property values. It is no doubt in large measure that sense of nonchalance that has animated the “Officer Pike” meme that became the basis for literally hundreds of appropriations that show the pepper spraying of everything from cuddly kittens to the founding fathers, as well as inserting him into virtually everyone of the major iconic photographs of 20^th century U.S. public culture, such as the flag being raised at Iwo Jima, the Times Square Kiss, accidental napalm, the Tiananmen Square tank man, and the photograph of Mary Anne Vecchio at Kent State.

One could go on at some length to analyze these many appropriations, though their production in such a compressed time period, coupled with how quickly they seem to have become irrelevant, makes it difficult to know quite what to make of it all. There is outrage being expressed at Officer Pike’s nonchalance, to be sure, but also equally heavy doses of adolescent irreverence and cynicism that might lead one to think that the response in general is as much a conditioned, knee jerk reaction as anything at all.

But there is an additional point to be made and one that seems to have been missed by the many commentators and appropriators of the Officer Pike meme. What makes the scene captured here so morally outrageous is not just that the behavior of the police officer is casual, but that it lacks any moral concern at all, despite the fact that it is being witnessed by hundreds of photographers and videographers. It is one think to behave casually in ways that might be morally questionable, it is something altogether different to do so in the full light of day and with the knowledge that the world is watching. Indeed, if anything Officer Pike’s behavior is marked by a conceit that reminds me of the photograph of a lynching that took place in Marian, Indiana in the 1930s where the townspeople are smiling for the camera as they direct attention to the hanging black bodies in the background. Lacking any sense of shame for the scene in which they found themselves, they pointed with pride to what their community had “accomplished.” The officers in the photograph above—and here I mean to call attention to all of the officers—know that they are being photographed and yet they proceed as if there could be no question but that it is appropriate to shoot pepper spray into the faces of citizens sitting on the ground and posing a threat to no one. It is, in short, an image of moral hubris that should be anathema to a liberal-democratic public culture that relies for its life blood on civil (and civilized) dissent.

And yet for all that, we seem to have moved on, the viral video little more than one of the millions of u–tube videos that seem to serve the contemporary role of bread and circuses, the Officer Pike meme an online joke that is on the verge of becoming a trivia question. And the moral outrage that should haunt us all is lost to the news cycle.

Photo Credit: Louise Macabitis

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On Barbie's Fiftieth Birthday

We have written about Eddie Adams’ infamous, Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner in the middle of a street in Saigon before (here, here, and here) It is among a small handfull of photographs regularly referred to when one talks or writes about the Vietnam War—the others include most prominently the “Burning Monk,” “Accidental Napalm,” and the “Kent State Massacre.”

As with so many other iconic photographs, it retains its symbolic currency through mass circulation and reproduction, a process of distribution that animates it as an inventional resource for cultural commentary and critique as it is appropriated, performed, and parodied to particular cultural and political interests. We were recently reminded of the ubiquity of such usages by a post at frgdr.com where a number of such efforts have been collected. A quick google search turned up a number of others, including one by an artist named minipliman that appears to be joining the mass media celebration of Barbie’s fiftieth birthday:

We leave it to our readers to decide how the legend for this image should read … though on second thought, perhaps in this case “no caption” really is needed.

Photo Credit: Eddie Adams/AP; minipliman

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Domesticating Dissent

When I ask my students to make a list of iconic photographs they almost invariably recall the image of the two black athletes at the 1968 Olympics with their hands raised in a “black power” salute.

They rarely know the names of the athletes, nor can they typically recall the particular track event that was being celebrated or who won what medal, but the image itself seems to be seared in their collective consciousness. And why not? Reproductions of the photograph of this moment of political dissent during a time of social and civic turmoil are ubiquitous. Indeed, one can barely read about the 1968 Olympics without the picture showing up, and indeed it has been the subject of several movies including an HBO documentary film titled “Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games.” It was prominently displayed in the movie Remember the Titans and it is available for purchase as a mural-sized poster and as a fine art print, as well as stenciled on t-shirts; a rendition of it was cast as a larger than life size statue and is on display at San Jose State University were the two athletes went to school. Both of the men—Tommie Smith and John Carlos—have recently published autobiographies about their experiences featuring their moment on the victory stand.

Given the notoriety of the photograph it is of little surprise that Smith and Carlos have embarked on a year long lecture tour in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of the “black power” salute and the significance of the moment of political dissent that it depicts. What is surprising—if not altogether disappointing—is how the NYT chose to cover the lecture tour as it made its way to the Black National Theater in Harlem last Wednesday. The Times article is titled “Enduring Image Leads to Enduring Dispute” and the story it reports focuses on the petty and personal jealousies that have vexed the lives of Smith and Carlos, once good friends who now “harbor deep-seated and previously unexpressed resentment toward each other.”

As with so many iconic photographs – think of the migrant mother, the flag raising on Iwo Jima, the Times Square Kiss, the Kent State massacre, accidental napalm, and the list goes on – popular interest seems quickly to shift from the key public issues represented and negotiated by such images to the subsequent private lives of the individuals being depicted, i.e., who are they? what became of them? And so on. And in the process, the complexities of significant political events central to the history of liberal-democratic public culture fade deeper and deeper into the background, as a neo-liberal interest in the life of the individual trumps the public interests of a democratic polity. Or at least that is how such images are typically treated by the national media.

This cultural and ideological revisionism is marked by the photograph that accompanies the NYT report on Smith and Carlos:

The first thing to note is that the image signifies the tension between “then” and “now” while putting the accent on the present moment. The point is emphasized spatially as the contemporary Carlos (on the left) and Smith (on the right) dominate the image. But note too that the two men are cast in the light and seen in living color, while the past that spawned their relationship is represented by black and white photographs and cast in dark shadows. The author of the article bemoans the “inevitable” moment when “idealism” (then, black and white) gives way to “reality” (now, in color), but the focus in the article on the contemporary travails of these two men (now more private individuals than citizens) seems reinforced by the photograph which treats the past as a antique and fading memory. One might wish for more attention to the idealism of that earlier time, perhaps emphasizing a truly “Olympian” moment when at least some athletes were guided more by issues of social justice—and its attendant risks—than by private self-interest. But I think that there is a different and more important point to be made here, for the photograph above also functions to domesticate the original image of the “black power salute.”

Notice how the contemporary photograph puts the black and white image of King closer to the foreground than the iconic image of Smith and Carlos, even though chronologically the later image is more recent. Our present day remembrances of King thus become the frame through which we are encouraged to view and interpret the original image of the two athletes, and accordingly it is the standard of King’s Christianized, “beloved community” that becomes the marker of idealism against which the current day dispute between Carlos and Smith is to be measured (and found lacking). What this ignores is that the 1968 summer Olympics took place nine months after the publication of the Kerner Commission Report, six months after the assassination of Dr. King, and in the midst of increasing concerns that the then so-called “civil rights movement” had lost its political edge and effectivity. And most of all, what it ignores is that the “black power salute” – a phrase which is never once mentioned in the NYT article – constituted a very different and more threatening political idealism than the one we retrospectively affiliate with King’s “dream.”

In short, what we seem to be witnessing is the domestication of a valued photograph that marks and models an important and radical moment of dissent in the life of the polity. The tragedy here is that the “enduring dispute” announced in the title of the NYT article refers to a normalizing, private quarrel between two individuals, and not the more important tension animating our understanding of the relationship between the “civil rights movement” and the “black power movement.”

Photo Credits: Staff Photo/AP, Gabriele Stabile/NYT

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An Icon Goes Global with a Bang

November 19, 2007
Hariman
afterimages
0 Comments

Eddie Adams’ photo of General Nguyen Nguc Loan executing a bound Vietcong prisoner of war remains one of the searing indictments of the criminal conduct of that war.

Adams went to his grave insisting that the photograph was being misused because the execution was a justifiable act in the context of the battle for Saigon. That may be so, but the literal dimension of the image has from the beginning been irrelevant to its distribution, interpretation, and acclaim. The photograph’s rhetorical power comes from its symbolic and ethical implications in respect to the justification of the war itself. Whatever else was happening on the street that day, this image provides stunning illustration that the war was spiraling far out of control–militarily, politically, and morally.

If this interpretation of the photograph is valid, it nonetheless remains one of many. As John and I elaborate in No Caption Needed, iconic images are important not only because of the role the images play at the time of their initial distribution, but also subsequently as they become templates for artistic imitation and improvisation across a wide range of media, arts, topics, and standpoints. This image from a recent art fair in New York City is only the latest example:

According to the review of the show, you are looking at Xiang Jing’s “Bang!” (2002), a work in painted fiberglass. That this image was selected from the hundreds at the show probably is testament to the continuing power of the iconic image, although we also should recognize the reviewer’s rationale: “Ms. Xiang’s sculpture embodies the mood of the first Asian Contemporary Art Fair . . . Fizzy and entertaining on the surface, it has a disquieting underside.” Likewise, the reviewer remarks that “the playful surface of ‘Bang!’ masks a half-repressed trauma.”

I’m not so sure that anything is being “masked” or “half-repressed.” The language of art criticism, and not least its depth psychology, really doesn’t get this one right. There is no underside to this image: the horror is right there on the fizzy surface.

One might wonder why Adams’ photograph was mentioned at all. Jing’s artwork has reversed virtually everything of note in the original image: the figures are women instead of men, civilians instead of soldiers, wearing stylish contemporary clothes instead of the de facto uniforms of the past, highly expressive instead of stony faced or having a tight grimace, hairless instead of having hair, positioned right to left instead of left to right, backed into a corner instead of an open street, colored statues rather than people in a black and white photograph, and fictional instead of real. The “killer” is even more obviously transformed, as she is using a finger instead of a gun, facing the viewer, looking away from the victim, and smiling. And why is a Chinese artist appropriating American photojournalism about the Vietnam War to depict contemporary young women?

Just as the meaning of the iconic photograph quickly escaped the photographer’s sense of scene, our response to this work of art is not likely to be tied to knowledge of the artist’s intentions. If there is no intended connection between the two images, then the sculpture still is troubling, if somewhat puzzling. If the viewer makes the connection, intended or not, part of the experience of the artwork, then it instantly becomes deeply disturbing. Now the social violence of adolescence acquires the killing power of warfare, while the passage of time suggests that killing is becoming ever more casual, routine, normative, and even enjoyable. And just as the traumatic image from Vietnam lives on it the contemporary artwork, so does a history of war, dislocation, and layered betrayals continue to shape contemporary life, not least in societies experiencing both hidden violence and comprehensive modernization.

Don’t be too quick to guess which nation I might be referring to. On reflection, it can make sense after all to speak of surface and depth. “Bang!” might place the medium of photojournalism under the medium of sculptural art, as with a palimpsest, to suggest that under the fizzy surface of modern consumer culture there still are layers of personal and collective violence.

Finally, a footnote: The title “Bang!” may be a double allusion, including both the Adams photograph and another iconic image from the Vietnam War: the photograph of a naked girl running away from the napalm drop on her village. The name of the village was Trảng Bàng.

Photographs by Eddie Adams/Associated Press; ChinaSquare.

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Remembering to Forget … Vietnam

As we prepare for General Petraeus’s report on Iraq later this week, we should perhaps recall earlier times when Generals have addressed Congress in the interest of an embattled admistration seeking to prolong a contentious military engagement. Here, of course, we have General Westmoreland who had just travelled from Vietnam to “brief” the U.S. Congress on “military gains in Vietnam” in 1967, six months prior to the “Tet Offensive” :

Of course, for Bush the Elder one of the significant outcomes of the First Persian Gulf War—Desert Storm—was putting “Vietnam syndrome” to rest. It is at least somewhat odd then, if not wholly ironic, that Bush the Younger would seek to revive the specter of Vietnam as a point of comparison to the current war in the Persian Gulf, particularly given how contentious it has become at home. Nevertheless, the current administration has made a concerted effort of late to use our experience in Vietnam as an analogy to support our continued military occupation of Iraq, lest a precipitous withdrawal of troops animate the middle east equivalent of the “killing fields.” It is an odd argument that seems to reverse the terms of George Santayana’s famous “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it.” Here, by reliving the past, it seems, we put ourselves in position to forget it. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson makes the case as well as anyone:

“Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney and the other principal architects of the Iraq war never served in Vietnam … [but] I’m less concerned with their hypocrisy than their distortion of history. To say that the US should not have withdrawn its forces from Vietnam is to say that there was something those forces could have done—something beyond napalm, carpet-bombing, destroying villages in order to save them—that would have led to some kind of victory. Of course, Bush and others don’t say what that special something might have been, because they don’t know. They’re seeing nothing but a historical mirage ….

“George W. Bush wants us to remember Vietnam? Fine, then let’s remember those iconic images – the Viet Cong prisoner being executed in cold blood with a pistol shot to the temple, the little girl running naked and screaming from a napalm attack. Let’s remember how little we really understood about Vietnamese society. Let’s remember how wrong the domino theory proved to be. Let’s remember how much damage prolonging an unpopular war did to our armed forces and our nation, and how long it took us to recover”

For our part, here are the iconic images that Robinson invokes:

And lest we forget the effects of a government that actively strives to limit and demonize public dissent from a policy of war, there is this poignant reminder:

Photo Credits: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images, Eddie Adams/AP Photo, Nick Ut/AP Photo, John Filo/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. The phrase “remembering to forget” comes from the fine book by Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye.

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Who is that Man in the Picture?

Last week I commented on the latest effort to discover the “true” identity of the kissers in the famous “Times Square Kiss” photograph. Reporting on such efforts is a fairly common narrative that follows along with the circulation of many iconic photographs. After all, most such photographs rely upon a certain degree of anonymity and when we encounter the anonymous our curiosity is piqued. Who is the migrant mother? Or that young girl at Kent State? Or the man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square? And so on. Earlier this week Erroll Morris, an important documentary film maker, reprised the question raised last year (3/11/2006) in the NYT concerning the alleged identity of the man known as”Gilligan” in the iconic Abu Ghraib torture photograph:

Morris argues that the controversy demonstrates “how we make false inferences from pictures.” We think that he gets it wrong, or perhaps more to the point, he asks the wrong question and thus diverts attention from the very important range of ways in which photojournalism contributes to a vital and robust democratic public culture. Robert posted our response as a comment at the Times. We’ve reposted that comment below, but we also encourage our readers to attend to the continuing and very spirited and engaged debate on this topic at the NYT.

Posted at the New York Times, August 16, 2007:

Errol Morris’s essay is one example of his claim that “We do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is determined by our beliefs.” His critique of the Abu Ghraib story depends on several axioms of Susan Sontag’s critique of photography. Unfortunately, each one of them is at best half true.

1. Photographs corrupt moral response by substituting the image of the victim for reality: “The no longer anonymous Hooded Man became a national news story – not because he was a victim of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib but because he was in a famous photograph.”

2. Photographs corrupt our knowledge of reality: “Namely, the central role that photography itself played in the mistaken identification, and the way that photography lends itself to those errors and may even engender them. . . . photographs attract false beliefs – as fly-paper attracts flies.”

The basic problem with both of these ideas is that the critic is attributing to photography what is true of all representation, verbal as well as visual. Think about it: can you depend any more on written accounts of reality? If so, I have a bridge to sell. You don’t have to spend more than ten minutes in a court of law to see that writing is highly suspect. Newspaper reportage is partial at best while details often are mistaken; government reports have an additional set of problems, scholarship is subject to paradigmatic restrictions, and so forth and so on. The most false, dangerous, immoral, and harmful publication in the world is not a photograph, but a book: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And for all that, writing, like photography, is a remarkable tool for learning about, knowing, and navigating through the world. If left only to what we see directly, we would know and care about very few people (and no more accurately, by the way: eyewitness testimony is notoriously bad evidence). That we care about victims because we see images of them—or read about them, say, by reading the Diary of Anne Frank—demonstrates that we can expand our capacity to care through our use of the public media. Nor are we trapped in our representations. In fact, belief and experience work both ways: prior belief shapes perception, yet human beings, like other animals, continually adjust their conception of the world based on what they observe.

That said, I’ve gotta like the attention Morris pays to iconic images such as the photo from Abu Ghraib. (Full disclosure: I’m co-author with John Lucaites of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, and John and I maintain the blog No Caption Needed.) The debate about identifying the specific individual in the Abu Ghraib icon is one measure of the photo’s status: similar efforts are made with every iconic photo. At least two issues need to be noted here: one is that, although indifference to the specific individual in the photo could be a moral mistake, the moral testimony of the photograph requires only that someone is there, not any one person. Morris makes the right distinction but gets things backwards when he claims, “Now we are talking about reality – not about photographs.” No, we are talking about photographs, specifically, about a photograph’s documentation of torture. As with other iconic photographs, the image’s moral power depends on the anonymity of those in the picture. We empathize because the person could be anyone, not because it is this or that individual. The photograph of the napalmed girl running down the road in Vietnam was moving not because it was a picture of Kim Phuc, but because it was a picture of a girl much like children you have known.

This is why I can’t get excited about the stories of who was in the photographs from Iwo Jima, Vietnam, Kent State, or Abu Ghraib. These narratives usually serve to domesticate the image, to transform its powerful call for public action into a feel-good story about private life. Barthes said the photograph could be mad or tame. Locating the individual in the iconic image, however accurately, only tames the photograph and perhaps the public as well.

Photo credit: Shawn Baldwin/New York Times

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