Do photojournalists intentionally set out to stir up controversy and debate by making pictures that may later offend viewers?
This is the substance of a question raised by a reader this morning about a recent news photograph showing Israeli children signing bombs as “gifts” to explode over Lebanon. [NOTE: In addition to the news image mentioned above, the website linked here contains graphic images of violence].
The simplest answer to this question, from a photojournalist’s perspective, would be NO. Photojournalists do not set out to stir up debate on grounds that he or she adheres to the fundamentals of factualism as the basis for proscribed professional conduct. Photojournalists conceive of themselves as eyewitnesses not propagandists. Photojournalists conceive of themselves as reporters not as patsies for publicists.
That's one viewpoint. Now, how about another perspective?
However, this does not mean that photojournalists cannot be exploited or used to prime audiences or sell ideologies.
In this case, what the photojournalists recorded presumably was a fact. There was a group of Israeli children gathered to write hate messages on bombs to be used in the escalating conflict in Lebanon.
Is this news? By most journalistic standards this activity would be considered as newsworthy as any other type of staged event. The only criticism I have here – something that I have encountered many times in my own career – is that many photojournalists forget about how the event is “staged” for the camera before hand. Many photojournalists, myself included, tend to get caught up with “getting the picture” and do not generally indulge in evaluating the moral complexities or consequences of a particular event unfolding before them and for them.
In this case, we don’t know if the photographers just happened to come along at the time when the children gathered to sign the bombs or if someone had arranged for the journalists to be there. My strongest instincts suggest the latter may be the case.
Let’s face it, the media are constantly being used to propagandize a particular ideology in order to gain and maintain power. The visual message, especially when children are involved, is extremely persuasive. Could you imagine how much a newspaper or television station would charge a government or political group to run a full-page advertisement to sell the same message to the public? And that’s if the news organization would even agree to run such a highly political statement in the first place.
However, if the idea reaches us as “news”, the political message is buried under the auspices of legitimate news reportage. Valentin Groebner, in his recent book, Defaced: The visual culture of violence in the Late Middle Ages, argues, “an image is always an inner picture of the mind of the beholder” (p. 34).
For Groebner, with me looking again at the picture of the children signing bombs, “violence against others cannot be grasped directly but is only conveyed via its depiction.” In this scene, the audience is being primed for the violence to come in a value added sort of way. Is this image of the children a picture of violence as we are used to conceiving of them? Indirectly and subconsciously, the image very much signifies violence and destruction in our minds. We know what is to come, and the children are playing a part in it.
The picture is a photo-op. Obviously; the media, in this case, did not appear to be all that concerned with the implications of how others might react to seeing the children writing on bombs. After all, this is not how the media operates.
Despite the heavy burden of reporting truthfully, photojournalism, or craft and art of making images appear as news, has always been a very effective way for governments, armies, groups, or individuals to get a “hot button” topic out to the public.
News pictures distributed through credible sources legitimize social and political activity.
We have historical precedent to look to when it comes to bomb graffiti.
In 1998, the mainstream press circulated a picture showing a picture of a missile covered with graffiti to be used against Iraq. On the side of the missile, one soldier wrote, “Here’s a Ramadan present.”
Similar to the current image of children writing on bombs, this picture is a message designed to instill fear and terror in the hearts and minds of others. The images remind us how removed we have become from our capacity to hate and destroy one another. The pictures, used by the media in this way, are signs of ritualized activity associated with making violence against other human beings seem normal. In another sense, the image makes something as impersonal as a bomb become much more personal. In other words, a picture of children signing bombs makes something typically invisible highly visible. We can attach all sorts “wrongs” to the intent of pictures from a moral perspective, but does this in some way implicate the people who make images?
Are photojournalists complicit in stirring up controversy and debate in times of conflict by allowing themselves to cover activities that are clearly created to foment violence? In this sense, they may well be. Photojournalists are after all, part of an informational system that requires the public to believe that what they report is free from overt political interest and patronage. Photojournalists are the visual errand boys and girls that deliver highly stylized, very effective, and often, very persuasive views of the world around us.