Digital photography, just like film photography, can be used to construct realities and frame political agendas. The big difference between the two formats is that it no longer takes a trained professional to enter the arena of visual reportage. It is also a whole lot easier, cheaper and faster.
There is an understated effect of the media's role in the globalization of information and the shaping of public opinion. I believe that media images can have both a hardening and softening effect on social consciousness around the globe. The over abundance of images of starving babies in Africa, war in the Middle East, or any number of news images that make up our visual diet can harden the human heart from thinking and acting compassionately. At the same time, different sorts of images, sensational pictures like this one, can soften the visual consumer through novelty and humor, even if the situation means escalating tensions between America and the rest of the world.
Nearly a year ago I wrote about how the digital camera is revolutionizing the ways in which images are made and shared by citizen shutterbugs. The use of digital cameras and the Internet by amateur journalists circumvents the traditional institutional conduits of information. The Abu Ghraib prison photographs are an important example of this shift from conventional to unconventional sources for news imagery.
The images made by amateurs with digital technology, show naked, beaten and tortured human beings. The immediacy of these images and their dissemination through the Internet circumvents the formidable "food chain" of communication channels imposed by government and carried out through conventional mainstream mass media. As the natural proclivities of soldiers snapping scrapbook trophies to show the grandchildren someday, these images add a grainy and unaesthetic reality to an often-sanitized portrayal of our foreign exploits.
The recent publication of a nearly naked Saddam Hussein folding laundry in his underwear makes me think that we are no longer dealing with the potential of digital photography as a democratizing tool in an information economy. Images released through back-channel sources to the so-called legitimate media will intensify with the immediacy of the digital format.
As much as digital photography can circumvent traditional channels of information through the actions of concerned citizens, it can also be subsumed by governments to be used as an ideological weapon in a war that seeks not only to crush the enemy military but also psychologically. The British tabloid, The Sun has an article today about the impact the use of its sensational picture.
There is a dangerous precedent being set in the distribution of such images without attributing sources and explaining to the public why the pictures were made in the first place. Images depend on context for relevancy. However, when they lack context, attribution, and clarity of purpose, images can easily slip into the realm of propaganda.
The backlash from the release of humiliating Hussein may offend many people. CBS news reports:
Regardless of any effect the images may have on Iraq's insurgency, they were certain to offend Arab sensibilities and heap more scorn on an American image already tarnished by the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison and allegations by Newsweek, later retracted, about desecration of the Quran at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
As previously stated, however, "digital imagery is
changing the way we see the world, in all of its splendor as well as
all of its horror."
More Stories on the Pictures
Paper Prints More Photos of Saddam in Jail by Bassem Mroue, Associated Press Writer
U.S. Denounces Release of Candid Hussein Photos by David Stout, New York Times Staff Writer