The necessity of making a living and pitching in at home with two small children has forced me away from the blog a bit these days.
With all the rhetoric about pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq lately I have been haunted by media images from the conflict these past three years. Pictures of farewells, bombings, Jessica Lynch, beheaded and burned Americans, tortured Iraqis, legless marines, and the censoring of images showing the caskets of dead soliders all come to mind.
At the same time, a lesser know image has become most troublesome for me. This is an image that appeared on the cover of TIME shortly before the start of the war. The picture shows former Secretary of State Colin Powell arguing his case before the United Nation General Assembly in an attempt to persuade the world that Iraq did indeed possess weapons of mass destruction.
In the picture, Powell is holding a small vial containing a cloudy white liquid. This image was a decisive moment in persuading Americans that we should engage Iraq in war. I think many people may have forgotten this picture. No evidence of weapons of mass destruction has emerged from the conflict, so what was that cloudy white sustance in the test tube?
There is always this rising feeling of skepticism that comes along with any attempt to understand the role news imagery plays in the construction of our perception of reality.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines skepticism as “an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object.”
My own skepticism concerning the veracity of news imagery in a digital age has less to do with any act of deception by a photographer and more to do with a sense of how the meaning of images is increasingly becoming co-opted by the power of public relations combined with increasing media consolidation and corporate downsizing.
It appears that so many of the images we consume through the news media are either highly managed photo-ops or they are made based on the preconceived expectations and obligations of media management.
It is not only the fear that the truthfulness of what we see becomes suspect through the ease of digital manipulation, but the irrepressible urge by photographers and editors to conform to an array of predictable visual scenarios in how news is defined for us.
There is no question that our sense of what is real – reality – is mediated for us by a relentless stream of imagery, but what has not be carefully scrutinized is pre-mediated forms of news.
How we define class, race, faith, gender, sexual orientation, politics, and economics is conveniently packaged for us into bytes and bits of pre-mediated visual schemata.
To paraphrase Walter Benjamin’s classic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” our perception of what is true and what is not true depends on the authenticity of our visual encounter with whatever it is we visually encounter.
From the pre-mediated and pre-visualized construction of “image” scenarios, on through to the publication of such scenarios as “news” images, the quality and presence of the experience with reality is diminished.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more noticeable than during the war we are currently witness to.
My skepticism is real. The powerful elite setting the agenda for this nation to egage in and remain at war knows how well mediated images in the media can shape public perception and trust.