Dennis Dunleavy

Tortured Reality Redux

Do images make us care more or less?

Something insidiously evil is at work in the world today and we’ve got pictures to prove it. The eyes of a nation, once again, turn toward images of suffering and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Nearly two years after pictures of torture and abuse were made public, we are once again reminded of our capacity to inflict pain on others.

We see the pictures and our insatiable appetite for viewing unimaginable atrocities and brutalities is piqued anew. 

Susie Linfield, in an essay after the release of the first abuse pictures, observes what can only be described as an increasing pathology of shame associated with this scandal.

"The casual brutality of American pop culture-embodied in Internet pornography, video games, rap music, movies, and television shows-has created a generation of moral cretins immune to, or perhaps even delighting in, the horrors of real violence."

Has anything changed in the time since the release of the first set of prison abuse pictures?

Has justice been served? 

A few people are now in jail and forgotten in the eyes of the media. A few people have been demoted in rank and have returned to obscurity.

Through the lens of a camera, the central narrative of the early part of 21st Century is being recorded for prosperity, and it is not a pretty picture.

Can we not take the time to look at these images and see human beings? Do we not see that in some way we are all victims?

Those who dare to understand the implications of such images are singed with grief.

These images – a naked truth revealing how human beings are strapped, bloodied, humiliated, and stripped of dignity – signify a larger tragedy in the cultural pathology of a society saturated with visual messages.  We may look at these pictures and remain unmoved. We may see them but still be blinded by apathy and what can only be called the propaganda of mass distraction.

Does a relentless bombardment of visually mediated messages depicting suffering and deprivation reduce our capacity to feel?

In comparing images showing toilets used as torture chambers to Jackson Pollock's paint-splattered abstract art, Philip Kennicott explains:

"What's powerful, and infinitely sad, about this bloody floor is the silence. Whatever happened in this room, it almost certainly was accompanied by a cacophony of pain. That's gone now. As is anyone involved with what happened there. The garbage on the floor, the opening of a toilet, suggest human beings reduced to refuse. The anonymity of those who may have suffered is absolute."

Susan Sontag understood the power of pictures of deprivation, humilitation and suffering. In her book "Regarding the Pain of Others", she notes, “In a modern life – a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention – it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad."

We must make a study of these images of horror and disgust and carefully place ourselves in the skins of the "other".

We must analyze and evaluate what these images come to signify in a culture that promulgates a value for the sancity of human life and the integrity of self.

We must talk about these pictures with friends over dinner.

We must take these images of suffering into our hearts and minds so that we may contemplate our capacity for the brutality and hatred we inflict upon each other. This is what pictures can do. Pictures can make us feel, but only if we have the capacity for feeling.

 

Cartoon Gets Generals' Goat

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have an interesting way of interpreting taste in art.  This week they fired off a letter to the Washington Post criticizing a cartoon that puts the human costs of the war in Iraq under a microscope.

On Sunday, the Washington Post ran a political cartoon by Tom Toles depicting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld writing a prescription for a  heavily bandaged soldier without arms or legs.

The cartoon got the goat of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who responded with a letter to the editor condemning the cartoon.  Writing for the Joint Chiefs,  General Pace complained that Toles’ cartoon was “beyond tasteless” and  “reprehensible.” Unfortunately, the Joint Chief's comments are unsubstantiated and knee-jerk.  The cartoon is not picking on U.S. soldiers wounded in combat, it takes to task the political interests who put these men and women there.

It is hard to imagine how the Joint Chiefs could have missed the signification of this cartoon.  In art, as in life, there is always a certain tolerance of ambiguity in making sense of anything, but Toles’ message is crystalline. 

Toles’ role as a political cartoonist is to draw attention to abuses of power and social injustices. Toles’ message brings into focus the very human and very high price Americans are paying for this war.

Toles is not responsible for the more than 16, 500 wounded U.S. troops in this war. Toles did not send 2,449 coalition forces to their deaths in Iraq. That honor must be firmly placed on the shoulders of Mr. Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration.

Toles’ drawing uses metaphor, symbolism, overstatement and exaggeration to make an important point  -- one that tosses the government’s flippant “battle-hardened” rhetoric back in its face. The immediacy of political cartoons, with their simple lines, often triumph over words.  I would challenge any opinion writer to articulate Toles' message as concisely and clearly.

When Words and Pictures Work Together

In April of last year, Minnesota-based political cartoonist, Kirk Anderson, created the art above in response to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Anderson's commentary on the outsourcing of torture to foreign security agencies was made nearly a year before the CIA extraordinary rendition story hit the news wires recently. Anderson's work is both prescient and insightful.

Yesterday, while listening to NPR, I heard a story about the CIA's secret program. The story was an interview with New York Times reporter Douglas Jehl's coverage of how an al Qaeda suspect fabricated information about Iraq's links to the militant group in order to avoid being tortured by foreign agencies outsourced by the CIA.

According to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, "extraordinary rendition had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America—including torture."

Anderson's cartoon is a fusion of image and text that expands the boundaries of traditional cartooning by adding photographic elements. The persuasive determinacy of this cartoon is supported by the evidential nature of the photographic images. Not only do the pictures from Abu Ghraib provide a context for understanding the intention of the text in the cartoon balloons, but the images also ground personal opinion in a form of visual truth -- one that presupposes that pictures don't lie. 

The relationship between images and text are interdependent in communicating a cohesive message.  The juxtaposition of Anderson's commentary over the images from Abu Ghraib  produces a more complex reading than if the drawing and text appeared alone.

The signification  or meaning-making that emerges from  the multimodal treatment of typography, photography and line drawing in the cartoons relects complimentary relationship that does not seek to subordinate image over text, or, text over image. Instead, the three distinct representational forms combine to form a new "whole text."

If you want to read more about how image-text relations work, see Radan Martinec and Andrew Salway's essay "A system for image-text relations in new (and old) media" appearing in the October 2005 edition of the journal Visual Communication, pages 337 - 371.

 

You Too Can Become a Presidential Photo Prop

Washington Post Staff Writer Philip Kennicott raises some interesting points when he attempts to understand the power of the presidential photo-op.

In the article Kennicott notes:

"Photographs of the president (any president, since Reagan, at least) are among the most manipulated and crafted images in our society. Are photographers too easily complicit in the crafting of these pictures? Does the natural quest for beauty by photographers make them unwitting propagandists?"

The answers to these question seem so obvious.

Yes and No.

Yes, photographers are too easily manipulated in the hyper-spin world of presidential image making. Photographers are handled by professionals who know how to set up a shot to make their politician look good. It is all about image.

Yes, photographers are susceptible to manipulation by the image-makers, but do they have much of a choice? These sorts of images are less about the photographer's sense of aesthetics and more about how well the presidential image-makers can control the visual outcome of an event. Pictures speak volumes.

If even a president's words fail him, the image coming across the television screen or the photograph on the front page ultimately wins out.

What choice to photographers really have in covering dog and pony shows when all of the elements -- people, location, background, signage, and lighting remain outside of their control?

Kennicott supports this ideas when he writes, "given the ground rules for taking photographs, they [photographers] have little choice. And to intentionally subvert the intended political message is itself an intrusion on straight journalistic truth-telling..."

Often, given the ground rules for taking photographs, they have little choice. And to intentionally subvert the intended political message is itself an intrusion on straight journalistic truth-telling,

If the media complained to the White House that they were feeling manipulated by the way in which presidential photo-ops were being staged they may fear retribution in having their credentials pulled. The media play by the rules of the game, and the presidential image-makers own the rule book. Here's why:

• The presidential image-makers control access to the event and determine who gets in.
• The presidential image-makers tell photographers where to stand to make their pictures.
• The presidential image-makers often herd the media into pens hours before the start of an event for security reasons.
• The presidential image-makers control the angles that photographs can be made from.
• The presidential image-makers control the distance or focal length that photographs are made from.

The visual results of such endeavors for image-makers must be  predictable. That's what they are do -- package and sell messages.

For presidential image-makers, the pseudo-event is far more concerned with the science of winning hearts and minds than it is about creating art.

So, are photographers unwitting propagandists? No. Making these sorts of images is a little like delivering the mail. Photographers shoot, for the most part, what people expect them to shoot.

I wrote about the Photo-Prop/Photo-Op effect last year at about this time, when the New York Times deviated from the norm by running a wide angle shot of President Bush at a press conference. Many of the newspapers, however, selected a wire image that showed a close-up of President Bush with the presidential seal framed nicely behind his head like a halo.

I think these two newspaper front pages do a nice job illustrating how  lens choice combined with a photographer's intentions can frame the meaning of what is mediated for public visual consumption. All to often, media criticism fails to focus on the relationship between framing and  meaning through visual variety, lighting, focal point, and other considerations.

If we are looking for reasons why the public distrusts the media these days perhaps we should step back a bit to consider how the news is socially constructed for us under the pretense of journalistic values such as fairness, balance, accuracy, and objectivity.

The Nights Are Long: Images Shape What I Am and Know

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. 

Bush's One-Sided Conversation: Troops Coached to Answer Questions

President Bush is being criticized today for a carefully choreographed teleconference with  U.S. soldiers in Iraq on the eve of that country's national election. The Associated Press reports that soldiers were coached on how to answer specific questions from the president. According to the report:

Before it began, a Pentagon official coached the troops, telling them the president planned to ask questions on three topics: The overall security in Iraq, how they were preparing for the vote on Saturday and how much progress had been made in the training of Iraqi troops.

Allison Barber, a Pentagon official, said Bush would ask them specifically, "In the last 10 months, what kind of progress have we seen?"

She asked who was prepared to answer the question. "Master Sgt. Lombardo," one said.

After Bush asked just that question, Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo responded: "Over the past 10 months, the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces are improving ... They continue to develop and grow into a sustainable force."

Why is this news?

Every U.S. president, especially since television, has tested the balance between battling for hearts and minds and mediating messages through the media.

The telegeniety of the presidential image is a way of life today in this country. Few people question how powerful images are in the making of a president.

Manipulating public opinion with images and words through the media is a way of life. It is part of doing business in a visually saturated culture.

Does anyone really believe that this is the first time one of Bush's speeches or public appearances was choreographed in order to shape public perception?

The image that the Bush administration wants to send out to the American people is that the president is still in control of the situation in Iraq, despite the seeming mounting pressure to end the war.

How much freedom do soldiers honestly have in answering questions from their commander and chief?

Zero, Zilch, Nada -- Soldiers are hardly set free to express personal concerns and perspectives in front of a national audience. Soldiers do what soldiers do - they carry out orders.

Did the soldiers selected to answer Bush's questions on the teleconference have any choice in the matter?

Were the soldiers performing for the camera and acting from a prearranged script, because that is the way the president wanted it to be?

What's wrong with this picture?

It certainly appears that White House is not particularly interested in deviating from what the message of the day. Further, I don't think the White House wanted any repeats of what happened a few years back when one solider dared to asked a few years back about why their military vehicles were so poorly protected.

For the White House the message has always been about looking strong and determined. Albeit a huge generalization, many people feel that anything short of complete agreement with White House policy is perceived as treasonous and a threat to national security.

There is nothing new about how the White House manufactures consent in this country. Both Democratic and Republican presidents understand how to work a crowd with reporters around. No mystery there.

What is interesting about this latest incident is that now reporters are beginning to feel a little more comfortable turning a critical lens on the Bush administration. In other words, the "media" smells blood and don't want to get caught missing a story that leads to an administration's humiliation or downfall. Ever since Nixon, or even before then, the press has turned newsgathering into a blood sport when there is enough critical mass leaning one way or another.

Naturally, the White House must blame the "media" for any dissent generated from this incident. Naturally,the White House must blame the press for pointing out short-comings that continue to contribute to dividing up this nation into colors -- blue and red -- black and white -- you are either with us or against us.

Naturally, the White House must blame the "liberal" press for seeing through its mediated message making machinery.

Shame on the press.

Shame on the press for giving Americans the information they need to evaluate the blind ambitions of our chosen leaders.

Shame on them.