Dennis Dunleavy

Explicit and Implicit Bias: Pictures and Trust

 

 

There are several forms of favorable and unfavorable bias affecting public perception of the media in terms of digital manipulation. Here's a chart illustrating the possibilities of explicit and implicit bias in attitudes toward photojournalism.

 

Related articles

Bias and Photo Manipulation: Can you tell when a picture is a fake?

Implicit Bias and Why It Matters to the Field of Political Methodology

Imperfect Cognitions on Implicit Bias

Is There Anything We Can Do to Correct for the Fact That We're All a Little Bit Prejudiced?

Ethics and Public Faith in Journalism Takes a Hit, Again

At a time when public confidence in journalism continues to slip, questionable professional practices or lapses in personal judgment are having as much an impact on the industry as they have on a given individual.

Last month, when, Toledo Blade photographer Allan Detrich digitally altered an image to make it less distracting, his actions, whether intentional or accidental, provide yet even more fuel to the fire of public distrust. Apparently, Detrich's  creative license may prove to extend beyond this one incident.

We now have reached a point in our society when, at times, the media seems determined to abdicate a portion of its commitment to the truth, for expediency.

As a representative of an industry already under intense public scrutiny, Detrich, who recently resigned from the newspaper, now joins a growing list of photojournalists, such as Charlotte Observer photographer Patrick Schneider, Lebanese freelancer Adnan Hajj, and Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski, who have succumbed in recent years to the temptations of digital technology. 

The big question these incidents raise is simple: Why do some photographers feel compelled to manipulate images, while others live with what they get? Getting to the answer, however, is far more complex and may reside actually in a culture, which excels in competition and individualism.

People do not like being lied to. Digital manipulation, the addition or subtraction of contributing or distracting elements in a frame, is a type of fraud and lying.

Jonathan Wallace observes, “The reason that I hate lies is because, like you, I wish to navigate carefully through life, and to do so I must be able to calculate my true position. When you lie to me, you know your position but you have given me false data which obscures mine.”

Journalists have always been moral agents of culture and societal tastes. News content falls within an informational/representational system that changes over time. Journalism has its good times and its bad times throughout history. Within this informational/representational system, however, truth has always remained a core journalistic virtue. Journalists must struggle to obtain and maintain truth in reportage because every situation they encounter is slightly different – always presenting differing degrees of moral complexity. 

The act of altering an image to correct a deficiency may seem innocent enough on the surface, but deeper down the shift from fact to fiction signifies a moral choice that is informed by either ignorance or duplicity.   Regardless of motive or rationale, Detrich’s case should remind us that journalists function to serve the public good through a series of professional and societal expectations and obligations that are imposed upon them.

In this digital age, these expectations and obligations become intensified to the point, where opportunities to make things look better or to get the better of the competition are just too easy.

Ultimately, it seems not to matter how rigorous and vigilant the media is in detecting and ousting those who lie through their photography and reporting. The damage is done -- public faith, once again, is lost. 

The emotional war within: Listening to pictures of pain and suffering

How much of what we know about the human costs of war do we let in to impact us in profound ways?

Although there are remarkable and powerful images of war to remind us of the unthinkable horrors human beings continue to suffer, it appears that for the most part we rarely truly learn from them.

Although we appear fascinated by the sacrifice people endure for a cause, noble or ignoble, most of  the pictures that remind us of those sacrifices seem all about ignored.

The pictures we see of dead and wounded civilians and soliders in times of conflict become social artifacts that may or may not stir our emotions or move us to action.

In recent times, we have seen how Joe Rosenthal's picture of a band of Marines raising a flag on a tiny island in the Pacific could mobilize millions of Americans in the war effort during WWII.

Photo Credit: Joseph Rosenthal/World Wide Photos/AP

 

Later, we have seen how another  image could have just the opposite affect, as Nick Ut's picture of a young girl running naked down a road after she was burned in an aerial attack on her village by the South Vietnamese Air Force, with U.S. support.

 

Photo Credit: Nick Ut/AP

 

Images such as those by Rosenthal and Ut remain embedded in our collective consciousness because of how often they are repeated and recollected in our visual culture. When we speak of patriotism and sacrifice, or, of so-called the "good war", the Iwo Jima flag raising image seems to always come to the forefront of our common discourse. When we speak of atrocities and failed U.S. foreign policy, so too, do we find referencing the incident at Trang Bang, Vietnam, where a little girl and nations were changed forever. 

Recently, a photographer in Southern Illinois has made an image, or a series of images, that should become emblematic of what critics are beginning to call the current quagmire in Iraq. 

  Photo Credit: Nina Berman/Redux

The picture by Nina Berman of Redux, is a wedding portrait of a Marine who had been burned over much of his body. Although badly disfigured from a bomb blast in Iraq, his facial features all but melted away to bone, Ty Ziegel lives to tell his story to the world.

The picture, as simple as a picture can be, makes us want to listen. The picture makes us cry out in empathy, muster hope in the presence of such incredible human spirit and strength, or simply cringe in disgust. In the end, however, it is the couples resolve that makes us want to listen.

In a recent article in Salon.com, photographer Berman suggests, "What makes pictures interesting is that they provide the space for the viewers to contemplate."

Contemplation is a form of listening to our innermost feelings about the things we see.  Contemplation, if given  space,  moves us to act on our feelings. To contemplate the explicit and implicit meaning of Berman's image means to imagine our own lives transformed by war as Ty Ziegel's life has been.

Thomas  Merton, the Trappist monk and writer, once observed that  "True contemplation is inseparable from life and from the dynamism of life--which includes work, creation, production, fruitfulness, and above all love. "

Merton continues:

"Contemplation is not to be thought of as a separate department of life, cut off from all man's other interests and superseding them. It is the very fullness of a fully integrated life. It is the crown of life and all life's activities."

Berman's wedding portrait has received acclaim in photojournalism. In fact, it won top honors in the portrait category of the World Press Photo competition this year. But it is not the picture, as an object or artifact, that should be admired and remembered. What should be contemplated here, first and foremost, is that the judges recognize the saliency and value of the content within the frame.  The space Berman speaks of here moves beyond the rancor of congressional debates and presidential pomposity. The space Berman speaks of  gets to the core of some of the most essential qualities of being human -- love, loyalty, hope, and reconciliation.   Can a picture evoke the "big" ideas expressed here? Apparently so.

How will history remember Ty Ziegel's wedding picture? How could this   unassuming portrait of a wedding couple become the next Iwo Jima or Trang Bang in the collective memory of wars past and present?

What distinguishes the pictures is less a matter of aesthetics and more a more of politics. For the Iwo Jima picture the U.S. government adopted the image as mass marketed it as the embodiment of the "good war." In the case of the Trang Bang picture, the anti-war movement of the 1970s embraced  symbolism of the moment as proof of the so-called "dirty little war."

Pictures, in iconic terms, extend beyond the meaning of occurrences in several ways. Iconic pictures, such as the hooded prisoner of Abu Ghraib, signify ideological bench marks in history -- turning points -- in the cultural  memory of  American society.

It is only through the assimilation of an ideological benchmark image into our visual culture as a form of a larger societal discourse that an iconic permanance can emerge. Although the Berman image has been seen now by ten of thousands of web-watchers, it will not be until we see the picture on billboards, war posters, and TV screens that its status as an iconic image will endure as a product of social consciousness. 

Picturing the human costs of war

Source: AFP/Jim Watson

Since 2003, the War of Terror in Iraq has injured more than 16,500 U.S. soldiers, yet, until recently, little attention has been given to the issue.   

How could such an important story get so buried by the mainstream media? Why does it take a scandal, such as the one the Washington Post reported on recently about conditions Walter Reed Army Medical Center to break through to the public?

Let's face it, pictures of a soldier having a leg amputated  aren't as interesting as those showing the car bomb du jour in Baghdad. Pictures of a Marine learning how to walk again cannot compete with the seemingly endless stream of press conferences announcing the latest strategy for winning the war in Iraq.  More than anything else, however, is the fact that pictures showing the consequences of the conflict gets personal. Every soldier has a story to tell that is unique and very personal. Ultimately, the stories soldiers have to tell reveal the disturbing and honest reality about the conflicts we find ourselves engaged in overseas.   

To tell these stories accurately and honestly news organizations would have had to commit more resources than they normally would on what is typically considered human interest. However, there are exceptions such as Todd Heisler's  Pulitzer Prize winning photo essay on a family's struggle to cope with the death of 2nd Lt. James Cathey or the essay by James Natchwey on soldiers recovering from injuries featured in Time magazine.

Part of the problem may be how news is categorized by news organization into what is perceived as either "hard" or "soft."  The dichotomy  between classifying news as  more salient or relevant in terms of content becomes especially problematic in the case of the injured soldiers story.

Showing how the lives of thousands of injured Americans are dramatically changed by war challenges our preconceptions of what news is.

In other words,  it appears that the mainstream media doesn't get behind a story like this one until there is critical mass. This gets back to the criticism that the media may not tell us what to think, but they do tell us what to think about.

How the injured soldiers story has been typically framed for us as a human interest story rather than as a "hard" news issue, until now, suggests a form of agenda setting. For example, look how long it took for Americans to see images of the flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. Clearly, there is are ideological interests involved in keeping Americans in denial about the very real costs of war. Pictures of injured soldiers  does little to promote a war-time mentality, because they speak truth to power as well as challenge the logic and intelligence of our foreign policy makers.

There is a dramatic  difference between what is perceived as "front" and "back"   stage news stories. In society today, it is easy to miss all of the backstage stories associated with the conflict in Iraq since so much press attention seems to focus how a political administration reacts to specific developments and events from day to day.  In many ways, evaluating how the media uses images from Iraq is like watching a football game on television. 

In summary, what we too often see in visual reportage today is the "effect" without understanding the "cause." 

 

 

 

Tortured realities: The camera phone comes of age

The potential of the camera phone image to speak truth to power cannot be underestimated. As James Fallows observes, "History is driven by ideas and passions, and by unforeseeable events....History is also driven by science and technology."

When technology slams headlong into inhumane and unjustice acts, people begin to take notice. Today, we are on the verge of a digital revolution with the emergence of cell phone technologies -- one that can be seen as a positive force used to promote democracy or one that may eventually be used to destroy it.

Pictures from Abu Ghraib of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners,the  tsunami disaster, the subway bombings in London, the execution of Saddam Hussein, the massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines  in Haditha, and more recently the photographs of Egyptian police torturing suspects suggests the emergence of a hyper-mediated surveillance society.

The motivation to photograph atrocities by the perpetrators, such as in Abu Ghraib prison, Haditha, and in Egypt indicates how people in positions of power and control blindly operate by a code of conduct that is beyond any law -- human or devine. The soldiers and police making these images possess a sense superiority and impunity toward those they deem to be the enemy.  The  pictures they make may be made as evidence, entertain, or propaganda.

When 21-year-old Egytian minibus driver Imad Kabir was hung upside down and sodomized, his torturers recorded the proceedings with a camera phone and then transmitted the video to the Kabir's co- workers as a warning. The pictures eventually made their way onto the Internet and two police offers were jailed in the incident.

Originally conceived as an act of oppression against those opposing the government's authority, the Egyptian camera phone images reveal the often rumored and insidious truth about the mistreatment of prisoners. It is extremely difficult for any government to deny such cases of abuse when the evidence appears so indisputable.

The camera phone images we have seen in recent years are glimpses of a world we have heard about but have seldom seen.  Images of atrocity and abuse, revealing the darkest side of humanity, speak truth to power as history unfolds before our eyes.

The allure of digital photography and its future

The camera's capacity to frame, freeze and fix experience in time has emerged from the basic human desire to shape, authenticate, and rationalize our relationship to the world and our place in it. Today, in a culture bombarded with visually-mediated messages, due in great part to the advance of digital technologies, the allure of creating and possessing increasingly personalized accounts of reality persists. The fundamental characteristics of photography -- the framing, freezing, and fixing  of moments -- has become technologically less challenging and cumbersome in a digital  environment.  The ease and speed in which higher quality images can be made digitally empowers people to move beyond technology to concentrate more on visually storytelling. The challenge now becomes a question of how to interpret all these stories.

Today, anyone with a camera phone or point and shoot digital camera can be a visual storyteller. Advances in digital photography such as liquid lenses, faster buffers, higher resolutions, larger storage capacities, and wireless telephony signify the possibility of democratizing ways of seeing, knowing, and sharing the world with on another. Instead of looking at the advance of digital photography as a threat to privacy, the demise of photojournalism, or even an influence on decreased attention spans, the potential of building communities of observers and the observed emerges. The photograph as an extension of our desire to share, explain, celebrate, expose, explore, and denounce the  human condition is being played out every day on the Internet through sites like Flickr and personal photo blogs.

However, the photograph is also very much a highly redacted and rarefied slice of life -- one in which the photographer's intention sometimes becomes suspect. Even at its very best, the photograph can never replace the array of moral complexities present at the moment of capture. At the same time,  with the increasing advance of digital technologies there appears to be an urgency in questioning the authenticity of the image as well as the credibility of the photographer.

Tom Wheeler in his book, Photo Fact or Photo Fiction, explores this consequence of the digital age.

Wheeler notes:

Larger questions abound. What is the future of photographic credibility and, by extension, the credibility of all visual media, in an age when even amateur shutterbugs have access to increasingly affordable digital cameras...?

Johanna Drucker observes that the possibility of altering images digitally, and by extension reality, does not necessarily radically transform truth. However, what digital technologies have done, according to Drucker, is  actually extend the "possibilities of sustainable disbelief." In other words, what digital photography has introduced into our naive and gullible ways of seeing the world is an increased sense of skepticism and disbelief of the visual. In a hyper-mediated world of instant everything on the Internet, this growing distrust of the visual will have positive  and negative consequences.  For example, since the introduction of the camera phone, we have already seen a knee-jerk crack down on making pictures in public spaces, especially in schools. However, on the positive side, the pervasiveness of the cameras in society represents the possibility for greater transparency in governance, community building and social responsibility.

As Marshall McLuhan contends all forms of media are an extension of self.

“ In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness” (McLuhan, 1951).

The last few weeks have proved to be quite troubling for many observers of the media, especially the field of photojournalism.

The level of public scrutiny now given to images by the general public, especially on the Internet, is unprecedented. Political interests on all sides of the Middle East conflict are holding the social conscious of this nation hostage. Increasingly, audiences are called upon to become more visually literate when interpreting news images. News photography, which at one time maintained at least the perception of validity and truthfulness, is being undermined by a growing throng of disbelievers.

During the first two weeks of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, media coverage has become suspect as cases of photo-digital manipulation, events staged for the camera, and captioning errors come more fully to light.  One blog, Zombietime, encourages readers to consider the importance of understand how images can be manipulated. The site offers tips on identifying four kinds of photographic fraud and lists the Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times as perpetrators.

Zombietime’s analysis of news photography concludes four types of common manipulations:

1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.

2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.

3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.

4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.

The speed and immediacy of the Internet enables critics, on the left and the right of center, to identity, denounce, and defend news imagery that would otherwise go unnoticed by the masses. News organizations are responding to catch and punish any transgressors that undermine the integrity of the Fourth Estate, but they may be too late.   

Dozens of conservative bloggers including, Michelle Malkin, Times Watch, and Little Green Footballs have been relentlessly scouring the Internet to find examples of media manipulation.

A recent analysis of how the media was manipulated after the Israeli bombing of Qana Lebanon illustrates this point brilliantly. In a short video the German news magazine Zapp shows how one rescuer, referred to as the Green Helmet, directs coverage of the events for the international press. Did Hezbollah choreograph the aftermath of the bombing to solicit outrage and sympathy in the Arab world? Many people believe that wide-scale manipulation of the press corps was and continues to be a reality.

Here is a link to a short survey on Photo-Digital Manipulation

 

The big question now is what happens to our historic collective memory if the images we view are continually the subject of disbelief? Will we become a nation of hate-mongering cynics?

For Hardt (1999), “Photographs, like all cultural products, have conditions and contexts that are based on historically determined cultural conventions, forms, beliefs, and perceptions.”

Despite the current uproar concerning the veracity of photojournalistic practices, there is still the question of how these images, manipulated or not, impact foreign policy decision. Is there anyway to truly calculate the impact pictures have on public perception? Was Israel's cease-fire after the bombing of Qana a sign that the government was reacting to outside pressure after millions of people around the world were subjected to pictures of the dead, especially children?

Following how the media covers an issue like the present conflict in the Middle East is a little like watching a tennis match. One side hits the ball and the audience turns its collective head toward where the ball might land. Then, there is the return, and the audience is driven back. This is the way news images are presented to us. One series of pictures showing the news of the day, all of them fairly similar in content.

Washington Post writer Peter Baker (2006) observes, “With each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon, outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against Israel and its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the United States, according to regional specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials.”

This summer our Violence and Visual Culture class at Southern Oregon University tracked the first two weeks of the conflict in four newspapers. Students counted the number, size, placement, source, and characteristics of the content from July 14 through July 31 in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Portland Oregonian, and the Medford Mail Tribune.

Some of the questions we were trying to answer included:

Are there significantly more images showing dead and dying Lebanese civilians than Israeli civilians? If so, why? If there are more pictures of dead Lebanese than Israeli would world outcry change policy?

The content analysis conducted by the class examines only the beginning of the conflict -- a period of time when most the pictorial representations of the destruction in Lebanon and Israel occurred.

A total of 186 images in all four papers, with the lion's share (n=105) depicted in The New York Times. 

Sixty-nine images depicted Lebanese civilians, while only 26 showed Israel civilians. In another area, 40 pictures showed Israel soldiers, while two images of Hezbollah fighters and 2 of Lebanese soldiers were used.

Can any conclusions be drawn from looking at images that play on the emotions of viewers?

 

Here are some data (early and unscrubbed) from the analysis. It would be interesting to have an online conversation about the possible implications of the role of images on public perception and foreign policy.

 

The Optics of This War

Yesterday, the radio program Open Source with Christopher Lydon, jumped into an issue that I have been writing about over the past week -- images and the politics of images as they impinge on public consciousness as well as foreign policy.

Here are some of the questions Lydon poses to his guests , Marc Lynch, Annia Ciezadlo, and James Der Derian about the current Israeli-Lebanese war:

       1. How important are the optics of this war, and who’s managing them better?

       2. What links can we draw from the outcome of the actual fighting to media coverage, public opinion and ultimately diplomacy?

       3. Is Hezbollah’s goal in this conflict territory and a prisoner exchange, or is it sympathy and support, the kind that rushes in from the wider Muslim world as the images from Qana begin to spread?

       4. Children are dying in apartment blocks in Haifa, too; how does Israel win the diplomatic game when it’s fighting to a draw on the ground and losing the war of images?

Each question requires detailed analysis, but  what I would like to point out here is  the notion of visual determinancy and the limitations of photography to  convey the moral complexities of conflict.

Fortunately, an expanding body of literature in the field of images of war may help to more insightfully explicate the issues at hand.

The importance of the optics of this war, or any modern conflict, is increasingly obvious to many observers as well as foreign policy makers.  David Perlmutter, in his book Photojournalism and Foreign Policy, addresses this issue extensively. For Perlmutter, “Sometimes a general ‘CNN effect’ subsuming the flood of imagery and its instantaneousness and vividness is ascribed as being able to influence, affect, or drive foreign policy” (5).

Certainly images from Vietnam, such as the street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner or the naked child fleeing her burning village after a Napalm air strike, contributed to U.S. foreign policy decision following a buildup of public outcry against the war. In addition, China was force to reconsider how it was dealing with the democracy movement at Tiananmen in 1989 following the release of a protestor standing in front of a line of tanks. Further, in1994, pictures showing dead U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by an angry mob became visual determinants in how that conflict was being managed.

The optics of war is driven by the images immediacy, intensity, and intimacy. Anchored by the saliency of headlines, images of war take on an ideological dimension that is often perceived as more forceful than written accounts.

According to Perlmutter:

News photographs are remarkably selective windows on the world. The myriad other vista of reality and events that occur beyond the range of the lens, the eye of the photographer, or the scope of the newscast or newspaper, are ignored.

Not only are images selective windows on the world, they comprise an ideological constellation of meaning that contribute to how we think, feel, and act. Pictures, as representative anecdotes of an event, may help to sum up an event but they may not move us beyond looking.

One explanation in terms of who is managing the optics or war better – Israel or Hezbollah – must explore the emotional and intellectual appeal of the content. Pictures of Israeli artillery firing off salvos against an unseen enemy do not have the same emotional and intellectual appeal as images of dead Lebanese children.

As Sontag contends, "Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. And photographs are a species of alchemy, for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality" (Regarding the Pain of Others, page 81).

The frequency and immediacy of pictures of dead children elicit sympathy as well as outrage from viewers in ways that pictures of Israeli troop movements, artillery, or the distant shots buring buildings in Beirut cannot.

In this case, the repetition and numbers of images depicting the human cost of Israeli air strikes and bombardment allows for Hezbollah to take control in what is becoming a war of images as it is a war of fighting armies.

From an academic perspective, claiming that Hezbollah is winning a propaganda war based on anecdotal evidence is unsatisfactory. What needs to be examined here is a direct relationship or correlation between public opinion and the number, placement, and frequency of such images?

Photography, as a subtractive medium, can restrict our understanding what is happening by constraining our view of reality. When we are bombarded by pictures of dead Lebanese children our visual activity becomes concentrated by the emotional impact of an event framed by the photographer.

At the same time, news organizations visually respond predictably to the stories they put on their front pages. For example, most of Today's Front Page show an overwhelming number of newspapers using cliche hot weather pictures -- mostly people throwing water over their heads.  In the history of modern newspaper design images  reflect the spotlighting or highlighting of one series of events over another. In this instance, the picture may not be the same, but repeatedly the message is.

The majority of these pictures are showing us little other than something we already know, but nevertheless, editors feel obligated to visually represent the moment that otherwise could be said in one word -- HOT. The pictures, in this case, apologize for a lack of news beyond what most people are already experiencing.

Getting back to the problem of analyzing images from the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, I think it is important to remind ourselves of what Sontag observes:

"Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, in not the way war has been regarder throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception" (74).

Considering this perspective, the visual determinancy of the frame contributes in many ways to this expectation -- that peace is the norm, or at least it is something that "ought" to be.

Looking again at the questions:

What links can we draw from the outcome of the actual fighting to media coverage, public opinion and ultimately diplomacy?

To be honest, without actually physically counting the number of images used, and without considering the content, placement, size, caption, and headline, we can conclude very little. All we are left with is an impression or the sense that there is a link between what the images show us and the public's reaction to them.  Our interpretation of an image is fallible, just like any experience -- direct or indirect [thank you Charles for the clarification].

Since this conflict continues to escalate, it become imperative to suspend our inclination to rush to some conclusion in terms of impacting foreign policy. At the same time, clearly Israeli 48-hour cease-fire could be linked to the flood of gore and destruction after killing 56 people in Lebanon.

International condemnation of the attack in this case has given the Israeli government pause in rethinking how it manages its message in the foreign press. This can be seen already by examining the number of stories turning the violence back on Hezbollah's alledged use of civilians as human shield. Unfortunately, we haven't seen any pictures of guerrillas holding civilians gunpoint while they position their rockets against Israeli targets. All we get in the media is fingerpointing on both sides.

At issue is whether we can accept the commonsense viewpoint offer to us from one side or another. Ultimately, without having any visual evidence that this is the case we are left with only words to decide what is right and truthful.

Transcoding Lebanon:Photographic meaning from one form of coded representation to another

More than 100 newspaper front pages across the United States today visually re-presented Sunday's bombing in Lebanon with only a handful of the same images.  At the same time, 150 others newspapers opted not to use pictures to explain the situation.

There are a few pictures that have emerged as emblematic of the incident. An image of a rescue worker removing the body of a child recovered from the rubble of a building hit by an air strike was used prominently on the fronts of  27 newspapers, while  11 newspapers illustrated the violence by using an image of an angry Hezbollah supporter smashing a large glass window at the main United Nations building in Beirut. Other pictures, such as a man grieving near a pile of bodies, or a rescue worker peering out from the rubble were used less frequently.  Why is it that in a sea of images, only a handful embed themselves in our collective memories.

Only a handful of pictures, mostly showing rescues, signified the news today. A few papers ran images of Israeli troops, but most opted for pictures related to the destruction of the apartment building.

The symbolism captured in these images is fallible. Any interpretation is subject to the fallibility of personal beliefs, emotions, and consciousness. Yet, the fact that someone else is mediating my visual experience leaves me skeptical. Only direct experience is infallible and it is up to me to trust what I am seeing as "real."

Despite the attention paid to how images construct reality for us, we remain dependent on them for meaning. Some newspapers choose to illustrate sympathetically, through the victim's eyes. Others choose to take a more oppositional approach -- one that plays upon our fears with images of retribution and anger.

Why do we need images to fix a moment in time and to mark the passage of an event? Deep within the human pysche symbolism is the language of the soul. In order to make sense of the world through symbolism we must consume objects of desire and fear. Within the photograph is the logic of consumption. We are a culture that communicates through the pictures we create and consume. We learn to see ourselves in the frame, even if the people and objects appear foreign to us at first.

Despite the fallibility of receiving messages implicitly and indirectly we are held captive to our imaginations.

Lebanon Burning: What's Next?

The question of “What Next Lebanon?” was answered just hours after editors at the Washington Post wrote the headline and selected a signifying moment to accompany it for Sunday's paper. However, the “what’s next” has already happened – death and more death, mostly civilians, and mostly children.  Fifty-six people.

It is Sunday afternoon and the news reports from Lebanon are increasingly grim. As I write this post, I imagine the photo and news editors at many of the nation’s newspapers shifting through the hundreds of pictures being transmitted back by satellite across the planet. I imagine how one or two pictures will come to signify what is being reported as the bloodiest day in the two-weeks of fighting being Hezbollah and Israel.

But here we are stuck with the larger rhetorical question -- "What next Lebanon?" and its visual referent. More than 60 years ago, Alfred North Whitehead observed that symbolism is fallible, whereas direct experience is infallible. Yet, we cannot escape the symbolism embedded in words and images of war.

Symbolism is fallible because it works within a system of notions. As Whitehead contends, symbolism can induce actions, feelings, emotions, and beliefs about things.

"The human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience."

The photographer is positioned in such a way as to maximize experience so that the symbolism is both explicitly and implicitly caught in a fragment of time. In Lebanon the symbolism of a devasted urban landscape is often juxtaposed in the Western media against the symbolism of Israeli artillery wrapped in smoke. In Lebanon, a lone figure negotiates his or her way through an agonized frame of twisted, smoldering metal. The symbolic, however, is socially and culturally constructed and must therefore be learned to make any sense.

The symbolism of "What Next Lebanon" anchors in our mind an image of the past, present, and future. We read through the literal nature of the picture presented to us to make inferences and associations. This is the way our mind works. We have a catalog of images in our memory banks to draw on -- Kosovo, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, El Salvador, and this latest picture of Lebanon burning no longer surprises or shocks us.

Picturing the Language of Death

It must have been a difficult call. The editors of The Hartford Courant made a gutsy news decision last night before they sent the paper to bed by running a picture that speaks to the horror of what is happening in the Middle East.

All photographs become tools of political interest when they get embroiled in a contest of persauding us to see and know more about the violence we inflict upon one another.

With most U.S. newspapers sticking with less controversial subjects, such as the winner of the Tour de France or Tiger Woods victory at the British Open, what makes a newspaper like The Hartford Courant take the road less traveled?

Anyone wishing to claim senstationalism in this case just to sell a few more newspapers has lost their senses. If anything, displaying such realities on the front page takes a great deal of conviction and fortitude. The editors understand the responsibility of not hiding from the grim facts  facing the foreign policy makers of this country.

For James Elkins, "All seeing is heated. It must always involve force and desire and intent" ( from The Object Stares Back, p. 21).

When I see the grieving faces in the newspaper collage below my eye my senses reel. The images stop me in my tracks and I become caught up in the language of death. Read the headlines: "War Fraught with Risk", "Death from the Sky", or "The Dead Cannot Wait" -- There is an interplay between the visual and textual that cements the signification or meaning-making process. The message is determine to possess us -- make us think -- make us act.  Elkins observes, "Looking is not only active -- it is a form of the desire to possess or be possessed -- but also potentially violent."

Is there violence in the act of seeing violence?

I am a world away -- assaulted by a truth that is beyond comprehension -- and yet I have been cultivated to pictures of the dead and dying through a lifetime of seeing.

Pictures are force worth thinking about

In the war of words that coincides with every foreign conflict, it is the visual impact of images that is remembered most. Our collective memory  is organized by the recognizable, and often stereotypical, depictions of destruction and death.

Chris Hedges national bestselling book, War is a force that gives us meaning , that war creates its own culture. “It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death.”

Hedges understands the attraction of war as an inevitability -- something that adds purpose, reason, and meaning to life. “War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.”

What we see in the scenes of suffering and carnage in the Middle East may be considered an obscenity on one hand. However, the images are also part of a mythmaking process – stream of visual messages sold to us by politicians, generals, historians, filmmakers, writers, and even journalists (Hedges, p. 3).  The mythmakers, according to Hedges, bestow war with qualities such as “excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.”

Pictures of war are all of these things and there is a sickness in them that we have seen many times before. In the continuing crisis in Lebanon, for example, apparently the United States media appears to be presenting a very different picture than its counterparts around the globe. Recently, a few commentators have taken note of the disparities in how the conflict is between covered by the U.S. media than it is by the rest of the world.

Washington Post writer Jefferson Morley has been keeping track of what the rest of the world has been saying about how the Western media’s coverage of the crisis dramatically differs from the rest of the world.

In his analysis, Morley quotes from an article in the Lebanon Daily Star by Marc Sirois criticizing the highly sanitized versions of the news in the Western press. According to Sirois: “The vast majority of Western media reports do not accurately portray the fact that the vast majority of the dead are civilians, most of them women and children….For the most part Western television viewers, newspaper readers, and Web surfers are reading highly sanitized versions of the news, spun in such a way as to dilute the brutality of the Israeli onslaught and especially to ensure that blame is placed squarely on Lebanon in general and Hizbullah in particular.”

What Morley and others seem to want us to think about is how the U.S. media spins a more sanitized version of the news without the audience ever questioning the coverage. 

In his essay, Morley compares recent news reports from U.S. media with those of European news outlets. Apparently, the reportage is pretty skewed and reflects the foreign policy interests of the U.S. in the region.  Morley discovered that while the U.S. media focused predominantly on the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Lebanon this past Wednesday, European news agencies were reporting the increasing number of civilians being killed in the conflict.

Pictures from this past week playing up the evacuation of U.S. families from Lebanon in the news media support this claim.  At the same time, the killing of Lebanese civilians, especially children by Israeli air strikes was downplayed. Morley concludes, “The disparate reaction to Lebanon's civilian casualties may simply reflect the larger beliefs of the societies in which journalists work.”

At this point, we should reconsider what exactly is the work of journalists. Is it a journalist’s job to inculcate readers with particular tastes, values, and ideologies? As a journalist, turned educator, it is impossible to not to think about how news decisions are made. 

Increasingly it is clear to me that the events that shape what is determined to be news are interpreted through a complex array of filters -- personal, social, professional, institutional, cultural, and even political. The importance to journalism, and ultimately public confidence in the press, is that we should be able to recognize and acknowledge our biases and make transparent the processes in which news is gathered and presented.    

Visual hegemony and The New York Times front page

When it comes to understanding how people consume pictures either as news, information, or entertainment we need to think in terms of how social reality is constructed for us by the gatekeepers and agenda setters of the world.

How do we know what something is supposed to represent or mean without some sort of reference to relate it to?

For those fortunate to have the gift of sight, much of our informational system is based on the repetition and recall of images.

In reviewing the front page display of three lead images in The New York Times today there is an interesting example of how social realities are constructed through the use and positioning of images in the news. In this case, viewers are presented with three distinct impressions of the conflict in the Middle East.

However, the signification of the overall message is dependent on how the pictures interact with one another. In another sense, there is a gestalt to the display as each image builds meaning off one another. In other words,  the collective meaning of the three pictures subordinates the power of reading the images individually.

The New York Times editors have a hierarchy of importance in mind when they arrange the picture of a Marine escorting evacuees off a beach above and bigger than two smaller supporting images – one showing Hezbollah fighters and the other depicting a corpse. 

There is symmetry to the arrangement of visual elements here that provides a sense of authority for the narrative. The arrangement of the pictures -- two below and one above --is a structurally semiotic triad of meaning -- icon, index and symbol.

From a semiotic perspective, the combination of these images tells a story through a relationship of signs -- some more symbolic in nature than others. All three images are iconic, but the two images below rely heavily on the juxtaposition of index against symbolism.

The picture of the fighters on the left acts as an index or something that is pointing to the symbolism of the corpse on the right. In other words, this combination of images is a construction with a very pointed message. In this case, the picture of the fighters signifies death, terror, fear, and insecurity in relation to the adjacent corpse. Meanwhile, the picture of the Marine above signifies security, safety, and escape from the two images below. 

No doubt, the editors are carefully constructing a visual narrative for the reader designed to frame the current crisis in a specific way.

There is a visual hegemony to the arrangement of these pictures – one that suggests how viewers are directed to a specific ideology in ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling about events. Antonio Gramsci observed that people are not only subordinated to the will of a dominant group through physical and mental coercion, but also through repeated exposure, cultivation and indoctrination to a set of prevailing values, attitudes, and ideas.

This is what I read through the editor’s selection, scaling, and positioning of images on a page. In some ways, perhaps, my interpretation is a bit too excessive and paranoid. It could be that my reading may be too critical for some in that it suggests that the gatekeepers of information have an agenda and motive for deciding what is news that is not always objective and unbiased.

Then again, for others, thinking about how images construct realities may be well worthwhile considering.

Photojournalism and Propaganda: Are Photo-Ops Fact or Fiction?

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.

Let the victims be seen and known

Yesterday, I wrote about the predictable pattern of images we can expect to see during the early, middle and later stages of modern conflict. As I surveyed the front pages of more than 500 newspapers on the Today's Front Page Website I was struck by the conformity of the image selection and display. 

I am bringing this up again because I was stunned by how only two newspapers chose to empathize with the victims by showing tight detailed pictures of a grieving woman and an injured child.

It should be noted that a majority of U.S. newspapers selected not to use any images from the crisis in the Middle East on the front page. Those that did run chose to focus on wider angle images that serve to provide a context for understanding the destruction.

This brings us to challenging and confounding claim that the media in this country is ultra liberal. Contrary to popular belief, most of the treatment of front page image selection is pretty conservative.

It takes courage for newspapers to select images that put a human face on the front page. Most of us don't want to be reminded of the true cost of war -- civilian deaths.

What is really interesting about how the use of violent imagery plays out incrementally as the war progress is that just as predicted today's coverage is saturated with images of refugees fleeing the conflict.

 

Framing Reality through Calamity

Reality is about coming to terms with human experience. 

Sometimes, it takes a lifetime to make sense of what we see, feel and think about. 

Often, I have have a hard time believing that living in a visual culture such as ours makes visual perception any easier. In fact, I would suggest that since the advancement of optical prosthetics, like cameras, coming to terms with what is “reality” has become actually much more mediated and extenuated.

Marshall McLuhan was a careful observer of the interstice between technology and humanity.

McLuhan understood, that what some people call development and progress, causes alarm for others. He belived that there is a psychic and physical cost of technological innovation and enterprise that is often overlooked in modern times.   

When we privilege one sense over another, are we inadvertently changing the course of our interactions with the world—with how we listen, taste and touch? The demands of modern-day visual encounters, those images we consume through watching television, reading magazines, or surfing the Internet, place us in a situation where we do more looking than actual seeing.

I seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle of thinking about images that injure. At the risk of wearing out my soapbox, I find myself coming back to the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

It has been three years since pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq exposed the public to what turn out to be one of the defining moments of the conflict.

The graphic scenes of humiliation and torture that began to appear in April 2004 subvert any claims to a moral victory in Iraq by U.S. and coalition forces. In addition, images taken during an investigation into a 2005 massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqis in Haditha by U.S. forces show the power of pictures as evidence of violence and suffering.

More than 250 images and nearly two-dozen videos made by guards at the prison are now part of our national collective memory of the war.

Reduced to grainy snapshots depicting the horror and deprivation of prisoners of war, a simple truth reveals how capable we are of inflicting injustice on humanity.

The reality recorded here, of course, is not new in the history of so-called civilization, but it does provide “hard” evidence of our ability to do great harm in the name of all that is good about our country. Perhaps, what these images represent is far more than what they depict. The images signify the mockery of our nation as peaceful, tolerant, and just. 

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

Can images contribute to justice 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, a central narrative in this conflict has been dutifully recorded for prosperity and it’s not a pretty picture.

How can we look at these images of tortured prisoners and see human beings? 

One reading of these images is that they are not pictures of people at all. These are pictures of things. Objects. Once pictured, people are reduced to objects of possession. Those who dare to understand the implications of such images are singed with grief. Something insidiously evil is at work in the world today and we’ve got pictures to prove it. 

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 the insistent bombardment of visually mediated messages depicting suffering and deprivation reduce our capacity to feel?
Sontag observed, “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.”

Writers use frames to organize ideas and concepts into meaningful structures. Take any issue reported in the news today – war, poverty, justice, economics, education, environment – and frames emerge as overarching structures in presenting an opinion.

At the center of an argument, idea, opinion, commentary, analysis, or editorial is a frame – a general abstraction that envelops a wider array of phenomena. Framing is way in which communicators define specific social realities. For Hertog & McLeod (2001), “Some of the most powerful are myths, narratives, and metaphors that resonate within the culture.”

Hertog & McLeod argue that frames have tremendous symbolic power, carry excess meaning, and are widely recognized within a society. For instance, the use of the “horse race” metaphor helps to frame a debate in a political election in terms of winners and losers.   

Brummett (1999) looks to theorist Kenneth Burke’s idea of the “representative anecdote” in terms of understanding how the media frame the news. “Because the audience expects the world to be mediated to them dramatically, and because the media do so by calling up standard, recurrent, culturally ingrained types of dramas, the anecdotal for of the media fits well with Burke’s notion of form as the arousing and satisfying of expectations. We expect newscasts of Presidential election results to be cast into a “horse-race” plot, for instance” (p. 483).

Frames can be thought of as both cognitive and cultural structures used to understand the social world. “Frames provide the unexpressed but shared knowledge of communicators that allows each to engage in discussion that presumes a set of shared assumptions” (Hertog & McLeod, p. 141).

Stephen Reese suggests, “Frames are organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (p. 140).

Words and images combine, sometimes colliding, to frame social reality by linking assigned meanings and concept that universally understood within a culture.  Early this year, the Sago mine disaster illustrated how news story develop through the cognitive and culture structuring of frames. Headlines such as “Miner Miracle”, “Miracle in the Mine”, “ Miracle in West Virginia”, reveal the framing of a phenomenon.  Framing an event as a miracle implies divine and supernatural intervention in the course of human affairs.

Frames appear dependent on mental imagery that is tied to cultural and social constructs. In turn, the frame functions sum up the essence of something. The frame can be considered in terms of  “miracle” a symbolic strategy in the formation of a discourse. The visual and verbal language encompassing the “miracle” frame becomes a persuasive determinant in the construction of how people may process calamity and trauma.

The “miracle” is a dramatic framing of a plot. This is hardly the first time, nor the last, that the media has used the frame of a “miracle” to explain an event. The term has become a master metaphor for passing off anything that cannot be easily understood.

Our Fragile Planet

Today I worked on an illustration about how I feel about the relationship between the earth as an ecosystem and humankind. The original picture was made nearly 20 years ago and shows a man peeling an orange with a machete. I have also wanted to work with this image in some way along with my feelings about the earth. I think people will read different things into this collage, because even in my own mind there are ambiguities as to what I am trying to say with it.

Learning to Read Visual Violence in the World

The tension between us was palpable.  She was sitting across from me, peering over my shoulder as I stretched out on the couch watching the war movie The Three Kings  -- a film about U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf War.

I was enjoying myself, even though the part that she had stepped in on was only the beginning of the carnage.

After a long conspicuous silence, she spoke in a stern sort of motherly type of voice.

“How can you watch that?”

The question, especially the tone of her voice, broke through like ice water on a blistering day.

“What?” I shouted back as a barrage of bullets and bloodied bodies flew across the screen. 

She repeated her question seemingly more perturbed than before.

“How can you watch that?”

I knew exactly what “that” referred to.

Screen violence.

“It’s research,” I said defensively.

“What?” she said.

“Really. I am researching how film and media depict acts of violence,” I said.

“There is a scene here in this movie where a bullet entering a soldier’s body dissolves into a computer generated graphic to animate the impact of metal on flesh,” I continued.

“You should go to bed,” she said ending the conversation.

For me, this interaction reveals a great deal about how violence, even imaginary violence, can impact emotions.  Even more so, the interaction pointed out how differently people perceive representations of pain and suffering.

Since childhood, boys have been conditioned to watch media violence without reflecting on the deeper, more symbolic, meanings of belligerence and aggression. For most of us, making sense out of all those people dying on screen was accomplished with casual aplomb. Films depicting acts of violence were never real and no direct connection to reality. As children we could act out these scene of shooting, stabbing, fighting, and dying with precision and abandoned. We set model airplanes on fire and ripped the arms and legs off G.I. Joes without regard, alarm or any sense of grief.  We mimicked the violence we saw around us not in the real world, but in our heads.

Coming to terms with visual violence in our culture is no easy task. Hundreds of studies have been conducted over the past 50 years examining the impact of visual violence on teenagers. Yet, there remains a call for even more science investigating how visually mediated media affects human behavior.

The active trope of war movies is, on the surface, easy to explicate – action, violence against self and others, and more violence. Narratives are generally developed around a few central characters that find their lives substantively changed during the course of the film due to the violence they have been subjected to.

What do war movies tell us about culture and society?

What role do images of violence play in directing and shaping the realities of young male audiences?

In some ways, war movies seem to be the male equivalents of so-called “chick flicks.” However, instead of hugs and kisses the audience gets thugs and gore. War movies are typically short on the warm and fuzzy feelings found in romantic comedies.

Testosterone flicks derive signification from rationalizing pain and suffering as entertainment. As David Morgan (2002) writes in his essay, “Pain: The unrelieved condition of modernity,”  some of the most fundamental human experiences shaping our “moral and practical orientation to the world” are pain, deprivation and suffering.

Both fictionalized (Hollywood) and factual (MSM news) visual stimuli depicting the pain and suffering of others contributes to how we morally define ourselves in a culture saturated with pictures of violence. Through our capacity for intellectualizing and rationalizing images of violence in the media we risk disentwining ourselves further from reality. At the same time, censoring such images from reaching public consciousness is equally as problematic.

Attached to the underlying themes shown in war movies are subtler more socially complex issues. For example, in the film Jarhead (2005), the narrative is not merely about preparing for war or being at war, but more importantly about defining masculinity and being a “man” at war.  The problem here is, however, “at war”, with whom?

The failure of films such as Jarhead is that they may ultimately be perceived as parodies of other war movies.  In other words, these films are abstractions that may destroy or disrupt our ability to produce deeper meanings. They present in society as fiction without wrestling earnestly with the consequences of substantive themes such as self-identity and violence.

The moral imagination of depicting modern warfare in Iraq is softened by a string of previously represented visual analogies in films such as Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Deer Hunter (1978),  Platoon (1986) or even Rambo: First Blood (1982)?

In the rarefying environment of popular cinema, Jarhead’s violence is codified by imagery already familiar to audiences. In the film, young Marines on the eve of battle gleefully watch the helicopter assault scene from Apocalypse Now, while grunting out Wagner’s classic. Later, one member of the squad receives a videotape of the film The Deer Hunter. Excitedly, he gathers his comrades to watch the film, which quickly turns into a pornographic home movie featuring the squad member’s wife having sex with her neighbor as payback for the Marine’s past sexual transgressions.

It’s like an anonymous post found on a review page for Jarhead suggests:

“Every War Movie is Different. Every War Movie is the Same.”

What we can understand from such comments highlights a pervasive cultural pathology in our appetite or perhaps tolerance for visual violence. 

The visual tropes and analogies employed in contemporary war movies conjure up a way of viewing conflict, internal and external, are inescapably familiar to American audiences. In fact, the recall and repetition of visual cues in contemporary war movies dealing with U.S. intervention in the Middle East rely heavily on imagery already familiar to the viewer.

This is what makes Jarhead an especially interesting film. There is no escaping the “bitter veteran” tropes referencing films such as Coming Home (1978) or Born on the Fourth of July (1989) or the “mentally unhinged soldier” in Full Metal Jacket. In Jarhead, there’s even a scene when two Marine snipers come back to camp to the raucous strains of “The Doors” used throughout Apocalypse Now, only to complain that the music is so “Vietnam” and that they have their own music.

The visual cues of pain and suffering are not placed in films by accident, although they may appear gratuitous. Editors, producers, and directors set the agenda for how far they are willing to go in representing death.

As Valentin Groebner (2004) observes in his book Defaced, “Clearly, when we speak of violence, we are always speaking of imaginations: the images of mutilated and disfigured bodies in the media function as visual stimuli, as effectively orchestrated exoticism” (p. 28).

The violence in Jarhead is made formless and faceless by scenes of charred Iraqis caught in air assaults. There is a clear and disturbing resonance in the blackened line of scorched vehicles and smoldering human remains camp next to. To reflect on the reality of this scene critically now does not speak to the ambivalence I felt when I first encountered the film. 

In many ways, as a culture we are habituated to visual violence to the point where it is accepted as normal. When we remove the faces of our victims or enemies, like in the Jarhead scene, we have stripped people of power.  For as James Elkins (1996) in The Object Stares Back reminds us, the face can be defined as a center of power.  When the face and body is no long recognizable, it loses the power of identity and is no longer a threat to us. This is precisely the way to read Jarhead, yet so many of us dismiss the underlying political messages depicted in such moments.

The Moral Complexities: A Criticism of Mainstream Media

Documentary photojournalist Roger LeMoyne expresses with great clarity the potential of photography in society. In an interview with Christopher Grabowski, LeMoyne criticizes the mainstream media for reducing stories about the human condition to black and white issues.

LeMoyne observes:

In general, the media loves stories that are black and white, they are not very happy dealing with moral complexities, it's hard to tell a good story about murky issues.

It is not hard to see the truth in what LeMoyne has to say. Almost all issues in today's news, from the war on Iraq to the debate over U.S. immigration, present moral complexities that cannot be broken down to simply one right or one wrong. Yet, this is the perception of the typical coverage of these issues in the mainstream issue. At the same time, let's not blame the superficiality of today's news coverage solely on the media. Let's also look at how U.S. culture establishes and maintains the dumbing down of media content. People appear quick to criticize the press on its coverage of major issues, yet fail to look at their own behaviors that often leaves little time for serious issues facing our nation. We are so busy taking care of ourselves that many issues outside of our own personal concerns capture our interest or attention. It is hard work to keep informed on issues involving moral complexities. Often once we become attached to one issue, in the sense of trying to understand it, we become distracted by other concerns. The media feeds our fragmented and discontinuous stream of knowing the world in substantive ways. But let's not blame the media entirely.

The commercial media in this country has been forced to compromise providing audiences with insight and depth on complex stories, such as Katrina or health care, because it finds itself constrained by space (in print) and by time (in broadcast).  Time and space in this country are commodities in which a profit must be turned.

Now, the Internet does make it possible to present morally complex stories in new ways, but it appears that our eyes and ears are already accustomed to and conditioned by a culture of sound bites, photo ops, and leads that bleed.

In its current configuration, mainstream media often unintentionally manages to denigrate and humiliate others when reporting on complex stories. Even our language, as photographers, reduces human beings to "subjects" and "things."

For photojournalists like LeMoyne trying to break through the firewall of black and white reportage is a full-time mission. LeMoyne engages photography as an empathic process -- one that attempts to fully respect the integrity and dignity of those who are willing to open their lives to the world for the causes of justice and reform. Many times issues become a sort of personal crusade not only in the reportage but also in convincing editors that their stories are worthy of publication.  As LeMoyne notes:

It is possible to denigrate and humiliate people with photography. Certainly a lot of people in developing countries are afraid to be humiliated by the media... Dignity is an essential part of being human, and somehow beautiful photographs are more likely to preserve people's dignity than ugly ones. I think there is a value to that.

I try to take the pictures that are resonant of truth of the situation, and that's what's ultimately important. It counts how truthful and how powerful the pictures are.