Dennis Dunleavy

Play by play: The social function of news images

Photo Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Pictures have weight -- sometimes they crush. The social function of news images reside not only
in their capacity to inform, but also in their ability to entertain. In our increasingly visual culture, pictures must draw and hold the viewer's attention.  Perhaps it is for this reason that editors believe pictures must be packaged and repackaged for us.

The social function of news images is grounded in the rhetoric of persuasion. Just as a lawyer may seek to sway a jury to his or her side of an argument, a picture, through its variety of visual cues, establishes a context of understanding that shapes perception and constructs a sense of reality.

The analysis:

"Mr. Clemens" -- the subject -- the sign -- in soft-focus foregrounding leads the eye upward to a carefully framed center of Mr. Clemens. 

Pictures, as David Fleming (1996)  eloquently contends, cannot be in and of themselves seen as arguments, but inevitably they seem to be able to cause a few.

The pictures freezes, frames and fixes in our memory a moment in time that can conjure up other memories. With the stoppage of time the persuasive determinacy of the picture emerges. Pictures may be a species of rhetoric, as Susan Sontag (2003) claims, for the very real sense that they appear before us as rational and orderly entities of time.

In this case, Clemens' testimony before Congress on steroid use may bring to mind other high-profile hearings such as in Iran-Contra with Oliver North or Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas'  appointment to the Supreme Court.  The low camera angle is iconic in that it produces  a recognizable perception in which the subject is made to appear larger-than-life.

The camera angle is not trivial or a trick since it modifies our sense of a normal eye-line match. In other words, speaking in terms of grammar, the camera angle acts like an adverb -- it modifies the subject.  Further, the sign, in this case, "Mr. Clemens,"  is indexical and points toward formality, courtesy and solemnity. The gesture is wholly symbolic. Clemens' look away from those questioning him, his raised hand suggesting defense.  In addition, the essential framing of Clemens with his pseudo-archangelic lawyers. The gestures of  Clemens' lawyers speak  louder than words. Here we have the million-dollar pitcher in the proverbial "hot seat" and is million-dollar lawyers act as his intellectual bodyguards.

As mentioned earlier, news images function to both inform and entertain, but the real objective of making pictures is to make us think. Any object in the world, and pictures are objects, that can make us think about bigger ideas and issues can't be all that bad.  We shouldn't have to settle for someone else's interpretation of the world if what is represented only serves to reinforce a status quo. The ultimate objective of a news image should not only be to serve us a preconceived packaged reality, but to wrestle with convention and conscience.

The evidence:

Recently, this point was brought home on the Magnum photo site when Christopher Anderson's bare-bulb approach to photographing presidential candidate Mitt Romney came under fire from some viewers.  Anderson's approach was the "anti-photo op." Tired of making the same stale and banal images that most of the press pack gets of the candidates, Anderson blasted Romney through what appears to be a rain-splattered lens.


Click to go to Magnum's Picture of the Week

In his defense Anderson commented:

These events are rather ridiculous. they are staged and repetitive....It was a conscious decision to flash with this technique. It is as if throwing too much light on it might somehow expose these campaign photo ops for what the really are. The designers of these events want us to make a pretty picture. but a pretty picture to me felt like something that would be false to this event. I almost thought of the flash as being like an xray that would reveal what I really see at an event like this.

Anderson brings up one of the biggest challenges faces photojournalism today -- mediocrity. If news images do not seek to edify they run risk of becoming nothing more than someone else's spin. What we are tasked with here is to understand the relationship between the art of making news pictures and the larger implications of how these pictures function in society.

Pictures, Memories and Emotions

There is little doubt that pictures affect how we not only understand the world around us, but also how we feel about it. I have been wrestling with coming to terms with the relationship between pictures and memory. I think there is a connection between what we see and what we remember. It is the memories that are stirred up by a picture that trigger emotion. In turn, emotion is closely associated with beliefs, values and norms. From our beliefs we begin to act toward something. Since pictures can be emotionally charged objects, the individual processes feelings both subjectively and objectively.

I am thinking of John Moore's image of a man reacting to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. In the image, the man's outward expression of shock and disbelief is carefully framed symmetrically, with a tangle of mangled bodies on the ground behind him. If an image could sum up the emotion of grief, this one would do well. There is little ambiguity about this image, despite attempts by mainstream broadcast media to blur out the bloody bodies.

What memories does this image trigger for us?

Photo Credit: John Moore/Getty Images

Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, observes, "It seems that the appetite for showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked." Memories of the collapse of the World Trade Center and a century of countless images of calamities from around the globe come to mind. Memories, as Sontag suggests, alter the image, according to memory's need to confer emblematic status on things we feel worthy of remembering. The emotions associated with images depicting emotion are complex.  We may feel shame, fear, anxiety, disgust, anger, sadness, and remorse. But there is also another side to emotional control -- one that conjures up relief that such events as the Bhutto assassination do not occur in our neighborhood. There may also be feelings of alienation, disconnection and disbelief. Here we find the image to activate a memory-emotion-belief cycle. This cycle assumes   that for someone to experience an emotional response to an image there must be some value belief system behind it. We feel, because we believe in larger, more abstract and symbolic constructs, than physical pain. Belief systems underpin our emotional responses to the images we see. The norms and values we hold for ourselves and others are constructed by the cultural norms we share. We are taught that violence is wrong, yet wars and killing remain a reality. Images of violence do not seem to deter us. Media, from video games to Hollywood films continue to celebrate the objectification and degradation of the human body and spirit. How, then, could one picture -- such as the one John Moore has made -- move us from the belief that violence is wrong to a call for action?

This is a morally complex question since many people might argue that there is little or no connection between what we see and what we end up doing about what we see. At the same time, I believe that cultural norms are in a state of constant negotiation between the essential self and the social self. If more people took the time to reflect upon the values held closest to the center of who they think they are, the essential self, then, the possibility of changing our social self would emerge. The social self is the outward expression of who we present ourselves to be in our every day life -- who we think other people think we are. If we are truly moved in our essential self by an image to act, then our social self will change.

One way to think about the tensions between the essential and the social self is to consider symbolic behaviors. In Moore's picture, despite cultural, ethnic and religious differences, the symbolic behavior of grief and horror is clear to us. Pictures, as a visual language, transfer  symbolic behaviors across the cultural and linguistic barriers that often divide us. At the same time,  we remain divided and disharmonious species.

Unfortunately, the habitual ways we are conditioned to respond to violent image influences  our capacity to separate reality from fantasy and fiction. Our habituated ways of seeing, understanding, and acting, also impinge on our ability to respond emotionally to images depicting violence and suffering. Pictures are indeed a form of agency, they goad us to think and act out of the feelings that they conjure up for us. But our visual culture has become so saturated with such pictures that the capacity for images of violence to shock is diminished. As Sontag contends:

"Making suffering loom larger; by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to 'care' more; It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention."

We live in a world where sentiment and emotion is exploited by external forces. How much control do we really have over our feelings? From this perspective, images desensitize our capacity for compassion. In this way our memories appear to fail us as we can longer distinguish between  essential experiences and socially constructed realities.

Sell newspapers, pictures, and legs

What do leggy women, newspapers, and sexual attraction have in common?

Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry's leading trade publication, may need a little sensitivity training these days after people concerned with the objectification of women take a look at their latest promotion.

In an announcement for a photo contest, the organization ran an ad (see above) that can read in several different ways. Signification is the process of making sense of the things we see by interrogating the visual cues and associations represented. What we have here are faceless women, sets of legs, and newspapers without pictures.

The image is accompanied by the headline, "Papers without pictures just aren't very sexy." The associations implied suggest a relationship between newspaper photos, women and sex. We can assume that the people who approved such an advertisement were probably male, although it is hard to say with any assurance.

Tears of shame: Shame on us

Photo Credit: Ronald Reagan by David Hume Kennerly/Tear by Tim O'Brien

In today's hyper-mediated world of images, truth has become a casualty of commerce.

It is more important today, it would seem, to sell us an image representing a concocted truth, than it is to make images that honestly portray reality and that earnestly speak truth to power.

Ever since an altered picture of OJ Simpson appeared on the cover of TIME nearly 15 years ago, magazine editors and designers have been continually pushing the boundaries of believability and authenticity.

It's now appears acceptable to use images that once functioned within the context of news as something far more rhetorical in nature.  From a rhetorical perspective, the the Reagan Team image is loaded with meaning. Therefore, the interpretation of the image goes far beyond the literal and moves in the realm of the figurative and symbolic. 

We've seen this over and again when iconic images such as Rosenthal's "Iwo Jima flag raising" and Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" are altered to illustrate a specific idea or concept.

In other words, editors have been extending the meaning of news images for a very long time  by adding and subtracting elements, changing the tone, and most especially altering the context. In this instance, it's interesting to note that the editors credited not only the photographer for the portrait of Reagan (David Hume Kennerly), but also the photographer who made the image of the tear drop (Tim O'Brien) running down Reagan's cheek.

For photographer Patrick Ryan the manipulation does a disservice to a profession that has seeks to maintain its credibility in the eyes of the public.
"I'm insulted and, frankly, disappointed," Ryan write on a post to the National Press Photographers Association list-serve. 

Ryan continues:

"I expected better. Our credibility is being challenged more and more everyday, and Time goes and adds fuel to the fire. If you are going to clearly alter the intent of a photograph, you better label it an illustration or such."

From a sociological perspective, the public's capacity to distinguish between  legitimate and an altered new pictures is unclear. In today's hyper-saturated visual culture people have developed a tolerance for ambiguity between what is real and what it fake. 

As time blurs perception and reality , Reagan's tear may be perceived as authentic by many.  The collage presents Reagan as something other than what we have come to understand through  his media-mediated public persona.

In this sense, TIME, with its altered image, constructs how we think about Reagan. Even lacking verisimilitude, the assemblage of the two distinct visual elements -- Ronald Reagan face and  Ronald Reagan's tear -- is confounding.   

As Ryan contends, "I used to trust the content of images in print, but with the ease of Photoshop, etc., it's harder and harder to believe what I see. Time is supposed to be above that."

Another interesting point concerning this illustration is the placement of the tear.  In the picture, the tear seems to be away from the tear duct.  For example, in this image from "Feed the Children," it is clear that tears begin to well up at the tear duct.

Photo Credit: Feed the Children

The design of the TIME cover is clearly driven by the rationale of aesthetics and persuasive determinacy. It has long been argued that magazine covers do not function primarily as news. Instead, many designers will tell you,   magazine covers are designed to attract attention and sell magazines.

Writing on the same NPPA list-serve thread Gregory David Stempel sums up this issue well when he observes:

"Keep in mind, we have reached a point in our society where the foremost goal of any business (including "the news") is share holder satisfaction. And to that end it appears, anything goes. Just about everyone in the developed economies of this planet have figured out a way to justify almost anything they desire. We have without much hesitation, compromised truth, integrity, ethics, decency and fairness."

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. 

Is this the future of journalism?: Associated Press to collaborate with citizen journalism Website

 

On Friday, the Associated Press announced it will be working with PublicNow.com to expand access to news as it happens. PublicNow has a membership base of more than 60,000 citizen journalists in 140 countries, while the AP remains the world's largest news gathering operation with more than 4,000 employees.

Potentially the partnership could revolutionize mass media by doing away with the boundaries between amateur and professional content production. It will be interesting to see how PublicNow contributors understand and comply with the conventions, standards, and ethics of mainstream journalistic practice.

According to Managing Editor for Multimedia Lou Ferrera:

"In the early stages of the relationship, AP bureaus will work with NowPublic communities in selected locations on ways to enhance regional news coverage. National AP news desks also may tap the network in breaking news situations where citizen contributors may capture critical information and images. NowPublic also will help AP extend its coverage of virtual communities, such as social networks and contributed content sites."

The collaboration, however, seems to signify a trend in the industry to capture competition for content in an already content-saturated media environment. A few months ago, Yahoo and Reuters joined forces by inviting citizen shutterbugs to submit images of breaking news events.

Although the merger of professional and citizen-sourced content is inevitable in an age of instant communication, the road ahead may be a bit bumpy for an industry already struggling to maintain credibility and public trust.

As images and events continue to flood into the newsrooms of AP, Reuters, and other organization from citizen-sources, what is to prevent public relations firms and the government from trying to make propaganda appear more legitimate. If I worked for a company that wanted to get on the news wires to sell a product or brand a name, I would be thinking really hard right now how to take advantage of the collaborative trends.

Already, news seems so saturated with an array of pseudo-events that stretch the definition of what constitutes relevant and significant information. 

Ultimately, wire services and Websites will be challenged to ensure that citizen-sourced media is legitimate and credible. At the same time,  maybe the prevailing public perception of mass media as a trustworthy source of information is so low, that it won't really make much of a difference. 

Michael Tippett founder of PublicNow.com write in a recent post about the Anna Nicole Smith notes that many people are becoming concerned that the news is increasingly sensationalist and celebrity driven.

What really struck home was Tippett's comment on how news has changed in recent years.

"Where news goes wrong is when it goes from being the messenger to being the message. Where people get bored is when news produces celebrity instead of reporting on it."

Intimacy: the highest level of emotional attachment in an image

Photo by Dennis Dunleavy (1995)

What makes some images more emotionally appealing and persuasive than others?

One way of understanding how images evoke feelings is by understanding the concept of intimacy.  Intimate images create a feelings of being, closeness, and belonging.

Although we commonly associate intimacy  with person-to-person relationships, the connections we make with an object, such as a photograph, may have produce similar feelings.

Joe Elbert, picture editor for the Washington Post, once categorized pictures as ranging from "informational" at the lowest end of the scale to "intimate" at the highest. But Elbert doesn't elaborate conclusively on the exact definition of an "intimate" image. "I can't give you a description of an intimate picture; it's something that can be felt," Elbert notes.

What this suggests is viewing, as a highly selective and potentially emotional process, connects the ways of seeing with ways of making things seen though meaning and interpretation.

Viewing assumes people apply perceptual filters to thing seen. This also suggests a state of consciousness. A perceptual filter refers to how personal perceptions and judgments bias our understanding of what we see. In writing about self-esteem and recovery, James Henman contends:

We experience the world through filters that have a profound effect on how we feel. These filters are made up of our underlying assumptions and beliefs about reality, our attitudes toward ourselves and others, our past experiences, our current expectations and how we process all of this information.

The perceptual filters we use to interpret an image may also be deeply connected to the store of memories we call upon when seeing.  In the process of viewing, memories and experiences are recalled and compared to the new object. Ultimately, an intimate image breaks through the barriers of personal prejudice,  and judgment by connecting to memories or universal feelings we hold inside ourselves.

 

Photo by Karla Gachet

Psychologist Joel Bennett observes, "A relationship has meaning when seen and lived in a broader temporal context."

What Bennett suggests here is that people experience time multi-dimensionally through the past, presence, and future. The feelings of intimacy evoked in an image, then, help to provide a broader context in which we experience life.  In this way, the photographer is challenged to create pictures that resonate on a higher level -- one that connects with a viewer's needs and desires beyond a informational context.

What technical, compositional, and content considerations are needed for understanding how intimate images are created?

 

Photo by Dennis Dunleavy (2004)

 

First and foremost, the intensity and direction of light becomes a dynamic factor in evoking feelings in an image. Softer and indirect light may evoke empathy in viewing an image. When we are drawn into a frame through  the use of softer more painterly tones, the possibility of creating stronger connections with the needs, feelings, problems, and views of others emerges.  This does not mean, however, that is not possible to have intimate images with hard and direct light, but the difference may be more the equivalent of a whisper over a shout or scream.

Ultimately, the relationship between the subject and the light captured in a frame becomes increasingly more critical in the ability to produce empathic and intimate images.

 

Photography as ritual: Part 2

The photograph exists in the world as a real object.

The idea that we can hold on to experiences through the fixing of a moment in time as a photograph is compelling. The act of making images is ritualized by patterns of behaviors.

The social functions of a photograph are diverse and numerous. The social function of the photograph  performs a variety of personal and social needs including the need, to inform, evident, validate, entertain, criticize, report, illuminate, or instruct.

Photography can become a ritualized activity because many of the processes that go into the making of a picture appear automatic and second nature.

At the same time, we shouldn't confuse how the term ritual as primarily been connected to religious ceremony. In this context, we are extending the original ideas about ritual to extend to daily life.

Ever since the Kodak One camera in the late 1800s,  the visual behavior associated with making images have become part of every day life – with one hand we reach for a Kleenex to wipe the tears from our eyes, while with the other hand we reach for a camera to record the moment. There is no denying the emotional associations that move us to document moments in time.

For Catherine Bell (1992),  A ritual may be “described as particularly thoughtless action -- routinized, habitual, obsessive, or mimetic-and therefore the purely formal, secondary, and mere physical expression of logically prior ideas.” In photography, ritual refers primarily to those activities that become embedded in all stages of the picture making process including, pre-visualization, interaction with subjects, composition, technical considerations, image capture, and post-production.

Thinking of photography as an activity guided by embedded ritual -- the interaction between photographer and subject, pose, gesture,  shot, another pose, another shot, edit, presentation – all suggests  patterns of behavior that govern expectations and obligations in the process.

Photographic ritual create conditions of knowing and being.

All of the expectations and obligations associated with the making of a picture illustrate the ritualized nature of photography.

When I make a picture, I expect it to come out, be of reasonably high quality, capture a moment that is meaningful to me, and represent what I am looking at accurately. Therefore, there are certain routines I engage in to make sure that my expectations are met.

In terms of obligation, most of what I feel toward my subject comes through the picture I make. I feel obligated to make a picture that the subject will be happy with (this is in a personal context, not necessarily in a photojournalistic context). I feel obligated to build a rapport with the person I am photographing that honors the individual when possible.

Why Scholars Should Blog

It is quite clear that there are risks involved in blogging as a form of scholarship in progress -- risks that are more about exposing ideas not yet fully developed than anything that could pass as rigorous academic discourse at this point.  In academe, the old adage "publish or perish" continues to remain a salient mantra for most.

Professors on tenure-track are often warned about the perils of deviating from antecedent practices and traditions that have fairly strict conventions in terms of who will earn tenure. The value of publishing a letter to the editor, for example, is not given the same weight as publishing research in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal. All of this makes perfect sense, but where do professors who maintain active blogs fit in? Many edubloggers spend many hours maintaining blogs, collecting ideas and material, and responding to comments. What is the value of such practices?

As a former journalist, I justify the risks of blogging about academic ideas with the belief that the rewards of engaging people in a broader and deeper conversation about what we see and how things are made to be see is more far more interesting, relevant, and exciting.

The objective of writing in the moment on a blog is about engaging others -- students, teachers, professionals, and the general public -- in a more or less real-time conversation about the impact of images on society.

Some academics argue that scholarly energies are better served if one spends time researching, writing, and sending off articles to peer-reviewed journals. Again this make sense, but I also believe that there is room for both the ivory tower and the soap box in today's media illiterate world. Not only is there room for blogging from an educational perspective, but there is also a tremendous need to train the general public to move beyond a so-called commonsense viewpoint offered up in the mainstream press today. The commonsense viewpoint, in this case, refers to how so many of us refuse to question "news" as presented as "truth" by much of the mainstream media.

Scholars, with years of academic training behind them, are in a unique position to engage the public inside and outside of the classroom in new ways. Through an educational blog, scholars can provide readers with the intellectual tools required to engage in higher levels of analysis  and discourse.   

This past week has been a case study in how effective educational blogging can be. It has also been a watershed moment in my education as a teacher.
 

As I have engaged in a daily analysis of images from the war between the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel, several readers have commented on my analysis and even questioned my logic. Good for everyone that have been taking the time to engage in this conversation.

Thanks to Charles who has been graciously challenging me to clarify my interpretation of Whitehead's symbolism, as well as to Karin who asks, "How do you suggest that picture editors choose a picture/s to represent this situation?"

The objective of this exercise has always been about helping myself and others to understand the power of the visual in society. More recently, with the conflict raging in the Middle East, I have become more of an activist in terms of visual literacy. The first step of this process has been to engage others in learning to apply a variety of perspectives to the war of images currently being played out across the front pages of our nation's newspapers.

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.

Questioning the "commonsense" of news photographs

In a one-two punch of emotion and despair, the insane and unjust reality of war hit home in yesterday's New York Times. Look carefully at the juxtaposing forces of signification on display in the full-page reproduction, left, and then move in for a closer study of the signified on the right.   

How is it possible to fully understand the power of images? How can one poignant moment compare to another?

In our class Sex, Violence and Visual Culture this summer at Southern Oregon University we have started analyzing images from a social semiotic perspective. Social semiotics can be a useful in evaluating the meanings by questioning "commonsense" views of the world. By understanding what we see, as Jack Solomon observes, commonsense views of the world become "habitual opinions and perspectives of the tribe."

Using this approach, we examine the social and cultural constructions of reality that are presented to us as "commonsense" news. In his book "Signs of the Times," Solomon reminds us that cultures conceal ideologies as something made to appear natural.

Although tempted to understand the potential of seeing as limitless we are still very much constrained by the accumulation of social and cultural taboos, myths, filters, and semiotic codes.

Signs are codes imbued with meaning that help us function in the world. For example, traffic lights are sign systems that convey meaning through colors to organize the chaos of driving down a street – green (go), yellow (warning), red (stop).

Words are signs within a system of language. One person may call Iraqi insurgents “freedom fighters”, while others label them “terrorists”.  Meanings become embedded in our cultural and collective memory through repetition and recall.

There is much to explore in the juxtaposition of the two images on the front of The New York Times in terms of how reality is filtered, screened, and coded for us. The Israeli soldiers grieving for a fallen comrade in the picture above symbolizes more than the death of a combatant. The picture signifies a turning point in the conflict that is supported by headlines and text. We perceive the violence that this image re-presents for us as a cultural barometer – something Solomon contends marks, “the dynamic moment of social history.”

The violence of the conflict becomes filtered through a lens of what "naturally" follows conflict -- death and destruction. Prehaps the commonsense view I am resisting here is that the picture pleads with me to accept the consequences of a war that will not be resolved by the rhetoric of peace accords and cease-fires.

This point of view becomes even more important as my eyes move downward to see a Palestinian man buried a baby. We can see her tiny face framed by the traditional burial shroud. We can see the face of the man lowering the body to rest. The man is wearing a T-shirt with the words (another sign) selling T-Mobile… and we stop to pause for a second. We reflect on the meanings of these images – the dead baby and the man in the T-Mobile shirt.

Now, this is only one possible reading out of many, and this is the point of what happens in the signifying process. What we need to remember is that the meaning of an object does not reside in the object itself but in the interactions and discourse surrounding it. Many people may make little of the connection between how the child died and the man with the T-Mobile shirt. At the same time, others see the coincidence as a strange juxtaposition of contrasting ideas.

How do we learn to teach ourselves to question the “commonsense” view of what we are presented with as news?

The picture presents me with a puzzle of conflicting signifiers -- The dead baby and the T-shirt promoting high technology. I must work to decode the separate meanings and then somehow pull them together to construct a deeper understanding of the unsettling realities. I must work, therefore, to decode the "commonsense" and naturalize view of a world that becomes filtered through a system of signs legitimized as news.

"Globalization is often celebrated as an advance of human freedom in which individuals are ever freer to lead fives of their own choosing. Transnational flows of money, goods, and ideas, it is argued, will accompany an increasingly liberal international order in which individuals can participate in a global economy and culture."

David Singh Grewal, Network Power and Globalization, Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 17, 2003.

Dyadic relationships such as signifier and signified produce meaning as a sign.

Signifer = object
Signified = meaning
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Together, the signifier and the signified produce a sign.

baby in death shroud = signified
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dead baby killed by Israeli forces = signified

Taken together I interpret the meaning of what I see as
Civilian casualities as a sign of conflict.

At the same time, another layer of signification is added to the process as we evaluate the meaning of the man's T-shirt within the context of the conflict.

 

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.

Secular Pictures in a Sectarian War

Can anything come from the knowledge of the terrible suffering streaming into our consciousness from the War on Iraq? Increasingly, the pictures are more real and raw then what we have become used to seeing since the war began in March 2003.

For example, there is a picture made recently by Reuters photojournalist Mahmoud Raouf of a pickup truck carrying a load of battered and bloodied bodies through the streets of Eastern Baghdad.

The gate of the pickup truck is down, exposing the corpses to all who care to see. There are at least three bodies visibly stacked like cord wood tossed akimbo.

There are ropes binding the bodies, twisted limbs, no faces are to be seen – yet, there are hints of horror. The day appears warm and the landscape is soaked in sunshine. The driver of the pickup has his window rolled down; a brown-skinned elbow sticks out -- casually. The truck is following other official vehicles in a convoy. To the right, a procession of older-model cars moving in the opposite lane of traffic appears to have stopped or is moving very slowly. 

Michael Shaw on his BagNewsNotes blog writes:

“Lately, corresponding with the escalation in horror, mainstream media has grown more liberal about depicting corpses. So, what exactly is so distinctive about this picture? It's how profoundly mundane it happens to be.”

Shaw then poses a question:

“What does it take for a police force to transport bodies around in an open flat bed without blankets or even a tarp, the way someone might cart pieces of lumber or plumbing supplies?”

In response, he postulates:

“It involves three things: an unremitting state of shock; a numbing level of depersonalization (probably why the photographer reveals no face -- living or dead); and almost unendurable subjection to the routine.”

What Shaw is getting at here is part of the pathology of war – complete with the sorts of visuals that come with the course of a protracted conflict. We have seen other wars visualized in much the same way. First there is restraint not to offend – we see pictures of troops preparing for combat, lines of refugees, and are inundated with images of the latest technologies of modern warfare. Our minds become primed for the inevitability that death is soon to follow. And we wait.

This is the pathology of war and pathology of a culture that has normalized violence through repeated representations of  pain and suffering.

We have seen the Abu Ghraib prison pictures and beheading of Westerners by Islamic militants, we know what violence looks like in Iraq.

We know that it will take a lot at this point to shock us further. Hauling mutilated human beings around in the back of a pickup in broad daylight serves to confirm the conviction that this is no longer on the surface simply a U.S. – Iraqi war – this is a sectarian conflict in a visually secular world.   

Ashamedly, I feel little emotion in the image of this convoy of death and despair. I feel that the picture was actually meant to be somehow innocuous or harmless in its effect.  As Sontag contends in her book “Regarding the Pain of Others”, “Violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing.”

For Sontag, “The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes….photographs help construct – and revise – our sense of a more distant past...”

There is another, very different type of image to hold up against Raouf’s convoy of death picture. The picture I have in mind is by the preeminent photojournalist, David Burnett, who made an image in Chile during the roundup of students who were taken to a soccer stadium by soldiers following the coup against Salvador Allende in 1973. The picture shows young man looking blankly into Burnett lens. He is framed by the rifle barrels of the soldiers guarding him. Fear is written in the student’s eyes. The man is talking to the camera – “God help us” – his eyes plead. The image is stunningly compassionate. But, as Sontag reminds us, “compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

For three decades Burnett’s picture has haunted me, and I am drawn to ask what became of this young man on that dreadful day?

Why am I stirred by Burnett’s image and feel only callousness for Rauof’s?  We must dig deeper into how we are socially and culturally conditioned to view images of violence. Sontag argues, “Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.”

Is there a consensus today concluding that the continued violence in Iraq will only lead to more violence?

Can we expect to see more truckloads of battered bodies from Iraq?

Why are images of the dead so unreal and images of the living so real for me?

Perhaps John Berger explains it best when he suggests that picturing humans as victims of injustice and brutality is  “"discontinuous with all other moments.” Our inability to grasp the full extent of the suffering of others in any context inhibits our capacity for pity and compassion.

Susie Linfied, in an essay called, “Memuna, Almost Smiling: Looking at a Photograph of Suffering” summarizes the concerns of both Berger and Sontag when she writes:

“Because photographs lack narratives, they lack meaning-especially political and moral meaning, which is contingent on causation. Therefore, these critics claim, photographs of suffering-by freezing a moment of time, by extracting experience from context, by separating the event from its history-actually depoliticize, desensitize, and perhaps even dehumanize us, though their makers surely strive for the opposite.”

When “Violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing”, as Sontag claims, why is it that I am not moved to tears by the images of the dead and the dying coming from Iraq these days? I am alone in feeling desensitized to images of violence and destruction on our culture?   

Perhaps, because in Raouf’s image, along with many others made during the Iraqi conflict, I do not get the sense the compassion of the photographer behind the lens. Often at great risk, these photographers make pictures in attempt to edify and explain, but in return only serve to distance us further from the harsh realities of war.

Beyond the subjectivity of reading representations of violence in the media there is also a deeper and more troubling aspect of the visual at war that must be attended to. In every U.S. foreign conflict for the past half century, the camera has played a significant role in shaping public opinion for or against the war. As this current war has unfolded we have seen mostly what the government has wanted us to see, with the exception of the prisoner abuse photos and the pictures of flag-draped coffins.

Wendy Kozol, in her 2004 article “Domesticating NATO’s War in Kosovo/a” suggest that “When critically examining news coverage of war, we need to confront the often compelling arguments made about the political imperative of visibility.”

Is there some sort of political imperative lurking behind images showing the alarming number of civilian deaths in Iraq since last year’s elections?

How could pictures of sectarian reprisal killings and other acts of violence signify a shift in the way the media has covered this war?

Signs of War

According to the The New York Times the image above is a
sign posted at Camp Nama in Iraq where some "detainees were used as paintball targets."

Beyond the political and human rights issues associated with such a message, I find myself haunted by the possible significations found in the relationship between the words and the abstract forms used in the sign.

The phrase "no blood, no foul" is commonly heard on basketball courts. Now there is a new context to consider.

Drawing on visual semiotics as a theory for decoding how images convey meaning there are some interesting visual cues at work here. In my mind, there is a strong gestalt between the words and the figures.

There is the simplicity of the visual construction here -- the effective use of negative space and the relative distances of the words sliding up and down the sides of the triangle -- that seem to suggest a high level of formal and declarative order.

According to New York Times writers by Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall,  the sign is part of a larger message at Task Force 6-26's top-secret detention facility.

"Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: 'If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it.'"

What are the iconic, indexical, and symbolic levels of meaning conveyed by such visual messages?  Do such messages index or point toward the normalization of attitudes dealing with the treatment of prisoners in Iraq?  In other words, does a sign like this foment the abuse of prisoners by establishing and maintaining what appears to me to an increasingly game-like culture of combat associated with military actions?

It is this last question that intrigues me most here. The transference of first person shooter computer games to military action -- in combat and in play seems to be in evidence here. Paintball moves the virtual reality of the computer shooter games into the real world. By extension, there appears to be a connection between fantasy games and warfare.

A simple analysis of the geometry of the dominant figures in the frame -- the circle within a black triangle -- suggest a sort of reciprocity.  Maybe I am over-reaching  a bit, but reciprocity  from a social psychological perspective refers to in-kind negative and positive responses.

According to Wikipedia:

In social psychology, reciprocity refers to in-kind positive or negative responses of individuals towards the actions of others. Thus positively interpreted actions elicit positive responses and vice versa.... Reciprocal actions are important to social psychology as they can help explain the maintenance of social norms. If a sufficient proportion of the population interprets the breaking a social norm by another as a hostile action and if these people are willing to take (potentially costly) action to punish the rule-breaker then this can maintain the norm in the absence of formal sanctions.

In this case, I am visually interpreting the geometric forms of the circle within the black triangular field as constituting a reciprocal relationship -- one establishing and maintaining a social norm endemic in a "barracks culture."  A denotative or literal reading may lead a viewer to see the circle as a paintball. However, deeper readings may produce more subtle deeply psychological connotative interpretations.