If you are having trouble making sense of the carnage that is spreading across Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and other fracturing states in the Middle East and Africa, just take a look at this photograph from Aleppo.

The smooth surfaces, sharp clothing, and crisp visual tonality make it seem like a movie still.  The surreal juxtaposition of that killer weapon and the athletic field might suggest a photo taken on a movie set, or one that was Photoshopped.  Camouflage pants and a polo shirt are a good combination when every day is casual Friday at the revolution, but even so this guy seems disturbingly out of place.

That may be why the movie allusion comes to mind, as the line between fantasy and reality seems to be evaporating, or as artificial and irrelevant as the chalk line on the turf behind him.  The exceptional visual clarity in the visual field enhances this sense of fabricated unreality: it becomes hard to believe that the gun is a real gun, or that he isn’t an actor doing take two.   (“OK, this time keep looking wary, but don’t look look at the camera.”)  Of course, he is in role but for very deadly effect.

The journalistic context assures us that the scene is real rather than imaginary, while the blast hole in the wall reminds us of the lethal potentiality at hand.  Even so, the primary value of the photograph is precisely how it capture’s war’s surrealism.  And unlike the artistic scrambling of texts and images, war’s destruction of ordinary conventions such as games and walls is regressive.  Instead of challenging a society to grow, it destroys the fictions and arbitrary distinctions that sustain civilization.

The regression in this image is that he is walking a foundational analogy backwards.  Instead of thinking of sport as a metaphor for war, we see sport being left behind as it is transformed back into war.  What was a playing field is now a war zone–really.  As he walks warily from the field into the space before him, he is walking back into a Hobbesian world of all against all, a world without rules, clear lines, or any occasion for coming together for anything other than a battle.

Sports are not one thing, but they certainly function in part as a symbolic substitution for armed combat. Civilization advances by transforming violence into less harmful forms of competition, and athletic competition in turn becomes most representative of that substitution.  Sports can be physical metaphors for warfare, and their rules are the most obvious example of how competitive passions can be regulated and how arbitrary regulations can create productive activity.  Being performed for spectators ensures that these lessons acquire high social status while being taught through participation in collective rituals.  No wonder one might wish the photo above were from a movie: otherwise, too much is being destroyed.

To make the point one more time, let’s look at the photo I was going to feature today before I saw the one above.

The caption said that Pittsburgh Pirates’ Starling Marte ducked out of the way of a wild pitch, but it sure looks like he has been shot.  That thought might come to mind because of the formal similarity with Robert Capa’s famous photo of the Falling Soldier in the Spanish Civil War.  Even without the allusion, the athlete’s bodily contortion and the way the bat has flown out of his hands suggest extreme duress as if he had been hit with a bullet.  And of course he is in uniform, surrounded by other uniformed comrades from both his side and the opposition, while the ball and the bat are like weapons, etc.

I liked the photo because it was visually dramatic, captured the athleticism and grace of the professional athlete in an unusual manner, and suggested that the conventional comparison of sport and military prowess wasn’t quite so trite after all.  After seeing the photo from Allepo, however, I realized that it showed much more as well.

The photo is a portrait of a society that continues to be very fortunate.  Sports are still a metaphor for war, not its backdrop.  The stadium is full, not emptied by violence so that those yet alive can cower in their homes or stagnate in refugee camps.  The lines are clear and the rules are followed by both sides, sectarian hatred has been transmuted into booing the ump, and heroes risk a concussion, not bleeding to death.  In this world, an image of being shot is only a trick of the eye, and one the draws on a heritage of visual forms in sport, dance, photography, and probably other arts as well.

It is a cliche now that truth is the first casualty in war.  We forget that it is not the only value at risk.  Ambiguity goes just as fast, and nuance, tolerance, patience, compassion, and many other virtues are soon under siege.  Consider also that these are part and parcel of the ritual forms for civic life.  The wars we are witnessing today may have lower death rates than seen in the past, but they are more vicious in their destruction of games, festivals, markets, holidays, and the other events that, we now can appreciate, should be included among the genuine achievements of civilization.

Photographs by Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images and Keith Srakocic/Associated Press.

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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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