How could a remarkably powerful image not possibly work its way into the visual vocabulary of pictures we consider to be iconic?
Is Ty Ziegel's wedding portrait, made by Nina Berman, too disturbing for most Americans to contemplate? How could we deny this image a place in the history of war photography?
Terrie's recent comment about this picture raises our discussion to a new level.
"I recoil from this photo. I feel as if I've paid admission to a freak show, as if I am taking advantage of someone else's misfortune. I sent the link to some friends in a discussion group which formed to talk about our stand against the war. if anyone looked it, they haven't admitted it. Or perhaps they haven't had words to describe their reactions. The silence is deafening."
Without sounding too academic, I'd like to try and describe how I believe images, such as Berman's, can speak truth to power if they are allowed to.
All culturally meaningful images documenting American military intervention abroad require evaluation as mechanisms of social integration, knowledge and power in society.
When the power of a picture's meaning extends beyond its original occurence, as Berman's image clearly does, we begin to label it as iconic or meta because we can trace the rhetorical action of its significance back to specific historic events.
In 20 or 200 years, maybe people will look at this picture and be reminded not of a war in the Middle East where thousands of U.S. soliders were killed and seriously wounded, but that some of those involved in the conflict were remarkable for their fortitude and courage under and after shooting stopped. Maybe in the future, people will look at this picture from the war on Iraq and view it with more clarity than we can today.
What is important to remember about this, and all images, is that it is not the object itself where meaning resides, it is in how people come to interpret the picture.
The symbolic interaction that occurs between people about what an image means eventually leads to it becoming embedded in our collective memory as iconic. For Ty Zeigel and his family, this picture is a wedding portrait -- part of the ritual of committing one's life to another human being through the sacrament of marriage.
However, for the tens of thousands that are venturing onto the Internet to view it, the picture carries the weight of politics and personal values along with it.
When the Berman picture takes on such extenuated meaning, it becomes a construct of ideology -- be it pro-war or anti-war. Within our visual culture, iconic images have common characteristics, one of which is how pictures become susceptibile to a society’s moral and political value system.
This appears to very much be the case in the Berman picture as it intensifies, facilitates, identifies, implements, and reaffirms the rights and wrongs of society.