In her book Transforming Images: How Photography Complicates the Picture, Barbara Savedoff suggests that in order to understand photography the viewer must understand how the subject matter in the image is transformed by the process of rendering the world through a lens. Photographs, she argues, "Can make strange the familiar sights and objects of our world, although this is not usually how we think of them....Photographs transform their subjects. They have the power to make even the most familiar objects appear strange, the most chaotic events appear structured, or the most mundane items appear burdened with meaning" (p.2).
There is an article in the September 5 issue of Newsweek that, in my mind, makes the familiar seem strange. The article concerns the fate of a U.S. Marine who earned distinction in 2004 for collecting the human remains of more than 184 dead soldiers in Iraq as a mortician. Now, the Marine, Sgt. Daniel Cotnoir, is on trial for attempted murder after firing a shotgun into a crowd to silence some noisy neighbors outside his home in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
In a recent interview, author Salman Rushdie, who was sentenced to death in 1989 by Ayatullah Khomeini for his writings, contends, "It seems to me that the nature of true tragedy is when something is so badly broken that with the best will in the world, you can't put it back together again and what was broken has to stay broken." In my mind, Cotnoir's story reminds me of how badly broken our world is.
The images used to illustrate the Cotnoir story in Newsweek support Rushdie's definition of tragedy. Set off against a black background above the headline, "Walking Among the Dead", the insignia of the Marine's First Mortuary Affairs Company is loaded with symbolism. The insignia depicts a skull and crossbones arrangement on a blood red identification tag. The familiar shape of the crossbones, however, is a cross composed of a shovel and gun. The signification of the three visual elements, skull, gun and shovel leads to a tension of mental images and associations.
To the right, split by the double-truck layout of the page, there are four more images: Cotnoir's handcuffed court appearance, the funeral home where he worked as a civilian, a copy of an article acclaiming his accomplishments as Marine of the Year, and finally, a military escort carrying the flag-draped coffin of a dead US solider.
There is something "broken", to use Rushdie's term, about the juxtaposition of these images. Even before reading the story, the reader is goaded by the visual cues commanding more than 50 percent of the space on the pages. The representational system in which news photography is embedded into the context of storytelling in the mainstream media implicitly and explicitly carries with it the ideologies of the designers and editors.
In the conveyance of a complex story such as Cotnoir's, editors and designers look for visuals that lend support to the reportage's thematic focus. In the selection of images chosen for this report, how are readers lead to an inevitable conclusion?
The theme of tragedy in such presentation is normalized or made familiar for the reader, but it is also made strange. The reader must not accept such visual re-presentations as a form of truth-telling because the process as been contorted by the cliche conventions acquired in packaging the news. Without considering the "whole story" concerning Cotnoir's situation--one which led the former soldier to shoot into a crowd of "late-night partyers"-- the reader's perspective is prematurely biased by the imagery on the page. The images, in this context, foreshorten and reduce the larger issues dwelling beneath the surface of the story. Not only are we confronted with the disturbing reality of soldiers returning from combat, but also the subtext here suggesting ethnic tensions between peoples.
Cotnoir's journey from battlefield hero to disturbed veteran raises the very real human costs of international conflict. The images accompanying Cotnoir's story may on the surface attempt to be emblematic of the soldier's struggle back to normalcy, but in reality they merely suggest the predictable nature of news -- one which is packaged and framed for us like visual sound bites. In other words, the pictures we see transform the familiar and burden us with the daunting task of unraveling and decoding the deeper meanings hidden within the body of the story.