Dennis Dunleavy

Sportsshooter Website Features commentaries on digital manipulation

Two weeks ago, I was asked to contribute an article to Sportsshooter, an online community of photojournalists and students interested in sports photography and other matters in the field. Thanks to Kim Komenich of the San Francisco Chronicle and Robert Hanashiro of USA today to allowing me to write more about photo manipulation in terms of what I have been finding on my survey. There are more than a dozen commentaries available on the site and it's exciting to see this level of engagement and concern.  Here's what I sent to Sportshooter:

Digital Manipulation: 'I believe the hiring of freelancers, in this case, may be partially responsible for the mess we now find ourselves in as professionals.'


In the weeks following revelations of digitally altered news photographs from the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, a great deal of criticism has been aimed at the practice of photojournalism.
 
Those who believe that photojournalism has failed in its mission to fairly and accurately report world events in this instance may feel justified, but is the profession doomed? Can public trust and credibility ever be restored, or was it ever there to begin with?
 
For the purposes of argument I would like to suggest that discussions involving the credibility and believability of photojournalism must be expanded beyond the blogospheric banter of manipulating images in Photoshop.
 
For many scholars, as well as professionals, this conversation remains important, but there is also a need to include other factors negatively influencing public attitudes toward the media in general and toward photojournalism specifically.
 
Photojournalists, in my opinion, must help educate the public to understand an array of complexities comprising visual reportage including, photo manipulation, subject/photographer interaction, as well as the socio-economic pressures facing the media today.
 
For decades, photojournalism has been challenged by the way in which technologies impinge on professional practices and conduct. Beyond technological considerations, however, there are a host of other ideological and sociological factors confronting professionals today. Not only should we be concerned with altering images, but we also must consider how easily photojournalists seem to be exploited by political and business interests.
 
In an on-going survey, conducted for my Weblog, respondents (n=421) reveal a variety of attitudes toward photojournalism.
 
Although not representative of any particular group, the survey calls attention to several concerns that have not completely surfaced in the current debate. Despite the focus on post-production alterations---adding and removing objects, darkening skies, etc., there are other issues involved in the creation of news content that deserve greater reflection as well as public attention.
 
For example, early in the debate, I wrote about how Western news services have become overly dependent on non-western-trained photojournalists for images.
 
Needless to say, this idea did not win much sympathy with professionals who believed that I should just stick to focusing on digital manipulation and not go deeper into the structural issues plaguing the media today.
 
For the sake of this argument, I would like to persist a bit further with this issue since I believe the hiring of freelancers, in this case, may be partially responsible for the mess we now find ourselves in as professionals.
 
Not all professional photographers share the same ideals and values.
 
Specifically, the practice of hiring of freelancers who have access to Hezbollah controlled areas in the conflict were not held up to the same level of ethical or professional scrutiny as their Western competitors. In the race to acquire images with the most impact, wire services put themselves into a difficult, but often very cost-effective, position of paying freelancers who may have political connections and biases.
 
The practice of hiring "in-country" freelancers for images that big news organizations find difficult to obtain for an array of reasons has been going on since the Vietnam War.
 
However, with the immediacy of the digital camera and the ability to transmit pictures instantly, conventional methods of editing and oversight have been set aside. At least this is what we are told was the case in at least two photo-manipulation cases. The practice of hiring freelancers in war zones makes sense to big cost-conscious news sources. Without being overly callous here, in-country freelancers are also seem incredibly disposable when compared to the life of a Western journalist. This is not necessarily a criticism of the individuals who risk their lives daily to provide the West with fresh reportage, but more of an indictment of commonplace business practices used by an industry obsessed with getting images, video, sound, and information on the cheap.
 
While we should condemn photojournalists, in the case of the Lebanese conflict, who mislead the public through poorly executed Photoshop skills; we must also look beyond individual behavior so that we can understand the social, political, economic structures embedded within corporate news organizations that are enabling this sort of behavior. Of course, it is much easier to condemn an individual for an indiscretion than it is to seek to change an entire industry.
 
About the Survey
 
Some of the more interesting findings on the survey to date suggest that a majority of respondents (83 percent) believe they have seen digitally altered pictures in the news within the past five years. More than 95 percent of people surveyed believe that adding or removing objects from a picture is a form of manipulating reality. At the same time, only 55 percent feel that changing the color of the sky to make a picture appear more realistic is a manipulation.
 
Interestingly, nearly 78 percent of respondents confided that a lot more photographers than most people believe have manipulated images in terms of altering content or changing the tone of the picture to make it more dramatic. This revelation, for me, suggests that the people who took the survey have may have become more cynical with the profession then in the past. This same group (88 percent) also revealed that they think news pictures can and do influence foreign policy decisions.
 
When asked if the general public doesn't care if a photographer alters an image to make it more dramatic, more than 70 percent disagreed. Respondents think the public does care if pictures are altered.
 
One of the more surprising results coming out of this study relates to whether people think photo-ops arranged for the media are a form of manipulation. In this small survey, 41 percent (n=131) agree, while another 27 percent (n=81) strongly agree. This means that neatly 70 percent of respondents feel that pictures that are managed and staged for the media are forms of manipulation.
 
Being a person that attempts to connect the dots whenever possible, it seems pretty clear to me now that definitions concerning forms of photographic manipulation need to be expanded upon and clarified by news organizations, professional groups, and the public as well.
 
Without considering the complexities involved in the visual practice of photojournalism that include but are not limited to pre-visualization, image capture, and post-production processes, public confidence in the profession may be impossible to regain in the near future.

Click here to take the survey

For Latest Results on the survey click here.

The characteristics of Photojournalism and ways of seeing the world

The photojournalist’s eye is informed by a principle often defined as the decisive moment. Photographer and artist Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the term "decisive moment" to describe the convergence of critical visual elements in time and space.

As Bresson suggests:

Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture, is a whole story in itself. But this rarely happens.The elements which, together, can strike sparks out of a subject, are often scattered -- either in terms of time and space -- and bringing them together by force is 'stage management,' and, I feel, cheating.

Bresson leaves us much to reflect on in the above passage. For Bresson, the world was about movement, and the photographer's work is to move with the world. However, Bresson was writing and photographing at a time when the techniques of visual reportage were still young and impressionable.

Today, in a world that seems overburdened with visual cliches and not-so-subtle visual anecdotes, much of the meaning of Bresson's decisive moment in photojournalism seems to have become rarefied and denuded of power.

With our collective appetite for "the moment", many news images seem to reduce events down to the equivalent of sound bites. How is the "decisive moment", as a visual phenomenon able to inform the viewer beyond the deft capture of an essence that is nothing more than a mnemonic device?

According to Wikipedia, "Sound bites are a natural consequence of people placing ever greater emphasis on summarizing ever-increasing amounts of information in their lives."

Unfortunately, many photojournalists develop the decisive moment as a  form of visual practice that often becomes formulaic. The decisive moment, in much of photojournalism, appears to be chiefly governed by an individual’s ability to anticipate and react to what is placed before lens.

For this reason, some critics of photojournalism contend that much of the practice is little more than craft, because  much of what is recorded is predicated on the capture of a decisive moment – the peak, climatic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event.

As Bresson reminds us:

"Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes the precise and transitory instant... We cannot develop and print a memory."

In some ways what is most striking about the recent criticisms against photojournalism, particularly in tems of the coverage of the wars in the Middle East is that there is a profound lack of understanding of the field's historic development as well as its sociological qualities in the emergence of media consumption.

It would be silly to apologize for what is happening in photojournalism today as a craft or occupational group, but it is important to point out that the fundamental motivations driving visual behavior have not and probably will not change.

God Bless The Altered States of Reality

What do news diva Katie Couric (above) and a model posing for a picture (below) from one of the latest in a long line of point-and-shoot digital cameras have in common?


The reality is that both images have been altered significantly. We are looking at different forms of manipulation. Both pictures have been digitally altered. The surprise here is that the alterations of the picture showing the model was actually done inside the camera.

Couric's image was manipulated in post-production process to make her look thinner. Couric is in good company. Other celebs such as Oprah Winfry, Martha Stewart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kate Winslet have also gotten the Photoshop slim fast treatment during the past few years.

This is the way our culture operates -- women are suppose to appear as waifish as paper plates otherwise men will not find them attractive. Men, on the other hand, are support to look manly -- tough yet intelligent.

When was the last time someone the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly had a little Photoshop tummy tuck?

Now, with Hewlett Packard's slimming feature everyone can be just like Katie, after Photoshop of course.

In HP's latest sales pitch for its digital cameras there is a series of step by step slides that takes the viewer through the simplicity of the "slimming" feature. Losing weight has never been easier or as surreal.

So, what do Couric and the HP ad hand have in common?

To begin with these two examples illustrate the pervasive nature of image manipulation has become in our culture. Why should anyone care if a news image is altered if they have already have the capacity to mess with just about any picture, inside and outside of the camera?

With the ability to alter reality in an instance with the touch of a button -- the digital camera requires no skill in altering a person's appearance -- I am reminded of the French theorist Jean Baudrilliard's classic work on the notion of simulacra. The term simulacra refers to an unsatisfactory imitation of reality – something where only a copy of something exists. There is no original.

Society has arrived at the age of the simulacrum --  a time where the image, according to Baudrillard:

        Is the reflection of a basic reality.

        Masks and perverts a basic reality.

        Masks the absence of a basic reality.

Bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

Once stripped of its original truth, the sign and the reality it is imbued it with have no equivalence. This imbroglio -- this inability to distinguish fact from fiction -- bears down on us with tremendous force.

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.

Sophie has a cold: How much photoshop is too much photoshop?

Sophie has a cold. You might not know it from this image, but Sophie has a very runny nose. Thanks to the power of photoshop it took less than 60 seconds to remove the unsligthly mess from under the child's nose.

Less than a minute to make Sophie appear normal. I am not going to let this get to my head -- but talk about the power to change reality.

What harm can come from wiping off a little nasal mucus?

As a parent this sort of slight of hand would be perfectly acceptable. I want my child to look good -- I want her to feel and look healthy.

However, as a photojournalist I am conflictive. I wouldn't mind the child looking healthy, but altering reality is misleading.

It's all about context.

If the picture were to be used in a newspaper -- my policy would be hands-off the picture. I think a majority of U.S. photojournalists would agree with me here. At the same time, I also wonder if industry standards are being forced to change by the ubiquity of the tools.

I wonder,though if acceptable levels of digital alteration are coming more relaxed.

It has been nearly five years since Jennifer Greer and Joseph Gosen published their study on assessing levels of photo digital manipulation and media credibility was published in Visual Communication Quarterly. The article traces the history of digital manipulation as well as explores the “effect that different levels of photo manipulation have on public attitudes toward the credibility of a photography, photography in general, and the news media.

Greer and Gosen found that the levels of alteration do affect credibility. The more obvious the manipulation, therefore, the less credible the news picture becomes. The authors caution, however, that rampant digital manipulation along with increased media criticism of photojournalism impacts both the public’s perception of photojournalism as a force for accurate and balance visual reportage as well as overall distrust in the media.

“Results showed that readers/viewers do make distinctions about levels of alteration and, while alteration may be justified in some circumstances, the public might take issue with the alteration if it goes too far.

Just because one digitally altered photograph had no significant impact [in the study] does not mean that this pattern would hold true after media consumers were exposed to many cases of digital alteration.”

Fast-forwarding five years from the date of this study to reflect on what is happening today in the media is revealing and quite troubling.

Eric Boehlert,  writing on the Huffington Post, explains that some conservative factions have used the recent photo manipulation scandal as a war-cry to rally the media-hating troops.

Boehlert notes:

Obsessed with proving that all MSM (mainstream media) reporting from Iraq and the Middle East is biased in favor of Islamic terrorists and therefore American news consumers aren't getting the 'truth' about either region, LGF (Little Green Footballs) has been at the center of an on-going crusade to de-legitimize the press. (Conservative media critics are out to destroy the press; liberal critics want to make it better, stronger.) To the warbloggers, journalists are terrorists. Or as one LGF headline put it, "The Media Are The Enemy."

At first, some critics believed that outing the media on its coverage of the war between Hezbollah and Israel was a positive thing. Now we are learning about the politics behind crusade. 

Ultimately, it comes down to the consumer of images to fully acknowledge how the media works for and against people. As Greer and Gosen remind us:

Photojournalists, as well as the reading/viewing public, already benefit from the power of faster, more efficient methods of visual reportage. However, if left in careless hands, this powerful tool potentially can damage the credibility of photography and media.

Unfortunately, this prescient passage has already come to pass too quickly -- not only because of careless and unethical image handling and irresponsible editing --  but also because ideologues (on the left and on the right) seek to capitalize on an already vulnerable and weak-kneed media to push an agenda. 

An undeniable truth: The Internet is keeping journalism honest

In writing about last week's photoshop debacle at Reuters, the Los Angeles Times hits the nail on the head. Ironically, this comes from a newspaper who had to deal with one of its own fabricating reality by combining two pictures to make a so-called better one.

In the article, Tim Rutten makes the point that "one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere...." is "...the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody's benefit."

Rutten suggests that instead of waiting for right-wing bloggers to pounch, news operations need to a better job monitoring and policing the images coming out of conflict zones.

This might seem like a no-brainer of an idea, but it also makes good sense considering the impact a photo manipulated image or a staged event can have on a publication.

In addition, Rutten says something that has concerned me for more than 15 years -- outsourcing content to less than reputable sources.

Rutten contends, after running through the gamut of possible explanations for the manipulations, that this:

"brings us to the most troubling of the possible explanations for these fraudulent photos, which is that some of the photojournalists involved are either intimidated by or sympathetic to the Hezbollah terrorists. It's a possibility fraught with harsh implications, but it needs to be examined thoroughly and openly."

Now, let's see if publications get the message.

Open season on photojournalism: Critics have a field day

It's open season on photojournalism these days, and critics are having a field day destroying the integrity of a profession grounded in truth-telling and ethical behavior.

No matter the degree of the infraction, photojournalism, and by association, mass media, is feeling the heat.

Jim Lewis’ scathing critique of photojournalism in Slate.com holds newsgathering organizations to task for the recent spate of problems -- problems ranging from digital manipulation to the staging of news pictures. 

It’s not that these issues have never existed before, but the frequency of the transgressions have placed a profession, photojournalism, under great scrutiny.

The problem with Lewis’ self-indulgent photobash is that he spends a lot of time repeating what others have been saying for some time now. His language is vindictive, which may lead a lot of photojournalists to flat out dismiss his arguments.

Nevertheless, it is worth spending a little time reflecting on some of Lewis’ ideas.

Lewis notes:

It’s beginning to look as if every major institution that prints photos has printed doctored or manipulated photos: Time and Newsweek, the New York Times and USA Today, Harvard University and Science magazine, and the 2004 Bush campaign…. all of them undermine the public's trust in the reality of photographs. And so much the better, because that trust is badly misplaced.

What, after all, do we believe when we believe that a photograph is true?

Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, examines the question: “Who are the ‘WE’” at which pictures are aimed.

This is what comes to mind when Lewis frames the "we" perspective in his analysis.

When it comes to looking at pictures depicting the suffering and pain of others, Sontag reminds us, the “WE” should never be taken for granted (p.7).

There seems to be no denying that the notion of a collective “WE” has changed from the days of our fathers, grandfathers, and forefathers.

For many, the idea of a united “WE” seems inextricably bound to the creation of an US and a THEM. The photographs and words seen and read in newspapers and magazines reaffirm a “WE” that attempts to create the illusion of consensus (Sontag, p.6).

What appears so bothersome to many observers about the recent photo manipulation of burning buildings in Beirut is that manufacture of the “WE” was so poorly executed.

Why did the photographer feel compelled to make the damage appear worse than it was? 

Perhaps the photographer, Adnan Hajj, believed that making the damage appear worse is what his patrons (be it Reuters or Hezbollah) wanted the viewers to see?  This is the imaginary "WE" that operates in the background of human consciousness.

Hajj’s manipulations are failed attempts at constructing a societal “WE”. He just did it really poorly.

The pictures were manipulated to emphasize the US against THEM commonsense viewpoint. The pictures are meant to agitate and solicit empathy, but they are also reiterate mythology (David and Goliath), or peddle an underdog ideology.

Hajj’s picture threatened to pull the curtain back on the ways people perceive the conflict just like TOTO in exposing the all-too-humanness of the less than all-powerful Wizard of Oz.

Bloggers, just like little TOTO, pulled the curtain back on the vulnerability of constructing and peddling one particular truth about the conflict. 

In the political endgames that come with all war, any visual truth  must be suspect, be it by the photographer or a government with an ideology to sell.

The camera may mimic reality but it is the photographer and the viewer that must negotiate the truth that emerges.

The “WE” that is constructed as an image of this war is but part of a larger pretense – something that goads the audience to believe in one view of the experience -- one perspective of reality -- one carefully crafted truth. 

Lewis’ question – “What, after all, do we believe when we believe that a photograph is true?”

Lewis’ question is a taunt -- a wordsmith's turn of a phrase.

Ultimately, there is no such animal as a photographic truth. 

Horrible things happen in the world everyday and there are photographers who record them, but the truth is only believable if we use to make it so.   

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.

 

Photoshop: Propagandist's tool of choice

The Washington Times jumped on the Reuters bashing bandwagon this morning with an editorial criticizing the news agency for not noticing the obvious retouching of an image this week from Lebanon.

The editorial claims:

The important point here is that Mr. Hajj was doctoring his work for propaganda purposes. Part of Hezbollah's strategy is to outlast Israel until world opinion says the conflict has gone on long enough and it's time to quit with no punishment of the terrorists. As the terrorists in Iraq have figured out, one way to do that is by encouraging or playing up the inevitable civilian casualties. Hezbollah militants hide in Lebanese homes, while Hezbollah sympathizers in the media document the "disproportionate" Israeli military response to rockets fired from "peaceful" battery sites.

If you believe what The Washington Times is saying here, it looks like Reuters not only hired a photographer with poor photoshop skills, but that he is also Hezbollah sympathizer. 

The Times is using it's soapbox to make assertions and draw feable conclusions without any real evidence to support its claim. That's what opinions are, substantiated and biased accounts of some event, person, or thing.

According to Editor & Publisher, Gary Hershorn, a picture editor for Reuters,  believes that the freelancer Adnan Hajj did not manipulate the images for political purposes, but to only "make them better."

This is not the first time Hershorn has had to deal with questions of media bias. In September 2005, Mr. Hershorn edited an image of President Bush writing a note during a UN meeting.  By enlarging the image, the editor was scrunitized for publicizing a very human moment in the life of a very public figure.  With Hershorn's edit the content of the note became clear:
"I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible."

Although it would be difficult to say that Hershorn's focus on bringing the president's message into the public sphere, the Lebanonese issue doesn't seem to be making life any easier for the agency, especially in a world that already distrusts the media to a great extent.

Hershorn's defense of Hajj [the photographer in question] seems to steal a page out of the defensive public relations strategy book -- deflect, denounce, and deny.

Not only had Hajj manipulated the smoke coming from burning buildings in Beruit, but blogger Rusty Shackleford discovered the photog added a few extra flares fired from an Israel jet as well. Furthermore, conservative critics have accused Hajj and others of playing along with a Hezbollah propaganda scheme by staging the dramatic rescue of children in Beruit a last week.

To its credit Reuters is trying to respond to all the pressure it has been getting from its critics with what ever good graces it can muster. Editing policies have been tightened, the photographer fired, and all his pictures removed from circulation. Reuter's public apology and its attempts to not repeat the mistakes of the past week are commendable. In the end, transparency is the best defense against distrust and Reuters appears to be taking the initiative in this case.

At the same time, concerns over the ease in which the media can be manipulated by Hezbollah, Israel, or any other interest holder in the Middle East must remain in the public spotlight.

Cloning Lebanon in Context

Here is the photo that has led to a storm of controversy in mass media world, especially in the blogosphere.

According to the BBC, "The news agency Reuters has withdrawn from sale 920 pictures taken by a photographer [adnan hajj],after finding he had doctored two images taken in Lebanon."

Click here to take a survey on photo manipulation.

Despite the reaction and response to the recent manipulation of a Reuters image, many people are missing an important issue.

Over the past few decades the MSM has come to depend on outsourcing many of its most dangerous reporting assignments to in-country freelancers -- people who take far more risks, are paid less, far less educated, and far more likely to be treated like disposable commodities than their Western colleagues.

The big picture issue here is more about the political-economics of doing business in times of war, than it is about one person's journalistic integrity. Let's get this straight. 

One of the most important issues facing the media today is credibility, yet Western wire services continue to utilize labor practices that exploit people.

Shouldn't wire services and the editors who work for them be held as equally accountable to the public as the photographer?

What needs to be discussed here is the reality that our wire services  exploit freelancers who end up assuming all the risk of working in extremely dangerous situations. Consider for a moment the number of Iraqi journalists, many of them working for Western news agencies, that have died in the past four years. In-country photojournalists, be it in Iraq or Lebanon, risk their lives every day so that we can be better informed.

The reality of the situation is that these freelancers are typically paid far less than Western photojournalists, become targets of political reprisals, and are rarely covered by any sort of health insurance policy.

In this case, even if the freelancer is fired and all his or her pictures removed from circulation, the wire services will inevitably hire another freelancer with the same language, cultural, and technological skills to take his place.

Firing the freelancer is a knee-jerk, sort of "cover our butts", reaction to a even more insidious situation that has been overlooked in the industry for decades. Outsourcing what is the equivalent of photo-mercenaries in order to save money and Western lives.

Freelancers need the same training, pay, educational opportunities, and health coverage as any other human being needs in this sort of situation. However, all of this costs money, and the bottom line in the news business these days is pretty much do news fast and do news cheap.

The message that Reuters is sending to the public by firing the freelancer is that they can be counted on to take care of individuals who make them look bad. I feel a deep sense of sadness for the freelancer who probably didn't even know that he was doing anything wrong in the first place.

What needs to the discussed here is the bigger and meatier issue of  how the wire services out source the most dangerous and difficult assignment to freelancers who are more or less treated like a disposable commodity.

Even though Reuters publicly apologized for the picture that got out, where were editors who cleared the image for distribution?  In this case, a first-grader could have done a better cloning job on the image, and at the end of the day it is the editors, not just the photographer, that have failed us. What we need now is an honest discussion about the use of in-country hires and freelancers by media giant who exploit them in order to feed the beast that our insatiable appetite for images in this country has become.

We should not, in this case, be shooting the messenger (the freelancer), but rather the companies that fail to educate their content providers in understanding the importance of balanced, fair-minded, and ethical visual practices.

Myths and Realities: The challenge of understanding what a picture means

Sometimes our ways of looking at things become so familiar to us that we miss the bigger picture.

 

In class, we discussed a content analysis we had started earlier in the week, which evaluates the impact of images on foreign policy in the Israeli-Lebanese conflict.

As a way of explaining the nature of content categories, I went Online to compare pictures on two Websites. The first Website selected was Al Jazeera and the second was Fox News. Both sites offer photo slideshows of the conflict and gave us a chance to deliberate about content categories.

Some of the categories we developed included civilians, soldiers, structural damage, location, focal length, and other dimensions. 

What we discovered in the process of physically counting the size, placement, location, and content of each image from the newspapers was that many of our early assumptions and perceptions were false. But, more about that later.

I am fascinated with how we might make meanings from the two images above.

The top picture from the Al Jazeera Website shows an Israeli tank on the move with a stop sign in the foreground. The bottom image, from Fox News, shows a bombed out building in Beirut with another stop sign in the foreground.

What meanings could be given to having stop signs foregrounding the primary signifiers – the tank or the buildings? Could the stop signs merely be convenient visual elements to help make the pictures more aesthetic or could we read a bit of the photographer's personal opinion in the frame?  If the latter is true, are there any implications in understanding photographic veracity?

First and foremost, there are many possible readings to any picture.

If we take the commonsense viewpoint the content in these two frames are simply what they represent – A tank approaching an intersection with a stop sign or a stop sign in an urban center with rubble in the background.

From the commonsense viewpoint we rely on the literal meaning of what is signified, and we do not read any more into the frame than what it tells us denotatively. The commonsense viewpoint allows us to avoid thinking about the photographer’s motivations and opinions. After all, if the pictures were to read from a political viewpoint, then, they would probably belong on the opinion page and not considered straight news.

Moving beyond the commonsense viewpoint, we might arrive at something more oppositional and controversial.

From the perspective of the Arab world, the stop sign and the tank may signify a demand, plea, or suggestion. “Stop the tanks.”

From the perspective of the Western world, the stop sign and the building also connote a similar message. “Stop the bombing.”

What makes the relationship between the signifier and signified in news imagery more salient are the words that anchor meaning to the pictures in the form of captions. Without the textual interpretations captured in cutlines, we are left to our devices to make sense of the scenes. However, when we read what the pictures represent for the journalists who assign primary readings to them, everything changes.

In this week’s Newsweek magazine, Evan Thomas and Andrew Romano look at how myths are made in our culture. Myths, the writers argue, are not about lies, but more about narratives and stories that explain realities.

“Myths are a peculiar hybrid of truth and falsehood, resentments and ambitions, dreams and dread. We all have personal myths running through our heads, and some chapters would withstand fact checking while others would fail miserably.”

How do images contribute to the human proclivities of mythmaking?

I am inclined to believe that images, especially news images, play a very important role in creating and maintaining myths in a visually dominant culture. Because pictures play upon our emotions as well as our reason, it seems only natural to suspect a link between how some images may build meaning that go far beyond the original occurrence. 

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.

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.

Doctor, Doctor: Another tale from the darkside of digital photo manipulation in photojournalism

Award-winning Charlotte Observer photojournalist Patrick Schneider has been fired.

Today, Rick Thames, the paper’s editor, dashed off an apology for his readership, while summarily firing Schneider with a curt one-line dismissal.

According to Thames:

In the original photo, the sky in the photo was brownish-gray. Enhanced with photo-editing software, the sky became a deep red and the sun took on a more distinct halo.

Thames’ action is as much about saving face in an industry plagued by public distrust than it is about cleaning house.  Given Schneider’s history with prior questions about manipulating pictures, Thames didn’t have much of a choice – the incident just gave him an opportunity to stand on the pretense of upholding journalistic integrity.

Just about the only thing a newspaper has left to court readers is the sense that what gets published is reported as accurately as possible.

Schneider’s predicament is less about misleading readers and more about misjudging editorial oversight.

This isn’t the first time Schneider has gotten into hot water for doctoring pictures. In 2003, the North Carolina Press Photographers Association (NCPPA) stripped Schneider of several awards he won for news pictures after the organization had determined excessive adjustments were made to the backgrounds of images.

Thames’ reaction to this current incident is one based primarily on fear.

The chief concern here is one of maintaining a perception in the public’s eye that journalism is somehow bias-free, and those that break from proscribed norms will be punished.

It is interesting to reflect on just how limited our understanding of what counts for journalistic ethics in this country. Editors use a rather narrow definition that applies mostly to the practice of constructing and correcting images. What the public isn’t privileged to is how assignments are conceived, what constitutes news, and how news is constructed for us.   

Editors are conspicuously sensitive when it comes to the altering of pictures in Photoshop, but hardly raise an eyebrow when the pictures produced are actually sophisticated visual constructions, i.e., photo-ops,  that push a particular agenda. Isn’t a “grip and grin” or “shin plaster” picture a type of manipulation as well -- be it the grand opening of a local hardware store or the kick off of some governor’s race?

Photographers are constantly being manipulated by political and economic interests, yet the only time they risk getting fired is when they refuse to cater to the overbearing demands of a public relations flack.

The big question now is whether or not the punishment fits the crime.  Unfortunately for Schneider, the editors may be applying antecedent conventions to a medium that is constantly changing. The guidelines for what is acceptable in terms of post-production processes were drawn from previous practices that may no longer be all together relevant in an age of the seamless digital workflow.

What was Schneider up to when he adjusted the colors to reflect what he thought he saw through his lens? Tweaking the color to enhance the narrative qualities of images may be thought of as something akin to how a writer may use an adverb in a news story. Adverbs are generally those descriptive “ly” words that can get writers into trouble for injecting personal opinion.

What Schneider was doing to his image was adding a few “ly” words to a frame that may not have been as lively as it could have been. Where were the editors before the picture was published? Shouldn't they also be held accountable for letting the picture slip through the fact-checking process. Was Schneider's sky a misrepresented fact or a metaphoric device?

The editors believe that Mr. Schneider's manipulation of the image was in violation of the newspaper's policy on accurately reporting the news. Do using adverbs in a news story change the accuracy of a story? Not always, but they often do express the writer’s personal opinion.

What is clear to me is that the editor, not the photographer, has the ultimate power as judge and jury when it comes to determining what is real or not real in the newsroom. Somehow Schneider, by adjusting the color of the sky, allowed his opinion to creep into his re-presentation or interpretation of a news event just like a writer may have the urge to fatten up a thought with a few extra adverbs or descriptive adjectives.

Apparently, the editors in Charlotte are serious about holding feet to the fire when it comes to hyperbolic and excessive expression – textual and visual.

In this case, Thames may feel that he is protecting the interests of the newspaper by dumping a photographer who stepped a little too carelessly across the slippery ethical morass of news judgment, but then again, he may have only won a skirmish, not the war. Instead of firing Schneider, maybe the newspaper should invest in a little re-education, sort of like what you have to go through when you get a speeding ticket. Nevertheless, what is clear is that Schneider pushed the limits, and his luck, just a little too far this time.

For more on this story see:

Editor & Publisher

Metafilter Community Weblog

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.

Southern Oregon University and Blogging at the Fair

Aspyn Gillin, 11, chills out in front of some large fans at the Toys for the Home display at the Jackson County Fair Sunday where temperatures are expected to reach 112 degrees later today.

It's incredibly hot at the Jackson County Fair today -- literally. Our university is giving demonstrations on blogging, podcasting, and other webbish stuff throughout the day.

Lots of people are finding there way out of the heat and coming into our tent, which has terrific air conditioning. Lashes the clown wears an ice pack on her back, but has been hanging out making animal balloons in from of our table for the past hour or so.

Across the table is a Qwest booth and a video game display with rows of machines and young boys playing Battleground 2.

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.

Pictures that Stick

It is a curiosity that in a world that is literally bombarded with visual images, the front pages of many newspapers in the U.S. are fairly consistent in displaying nearly the same pictures. When it comes to representing the "big" international news events in terms of the thousands of images that are produced daily typically a couple of images seem to be played over and over again on front pages.

We saw this happen yesterday when a majority of newspapers opted to run one or two of the same pictures covering the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Beirut. The two most iconic images used yesterday stand out because they are more or less benign in terms of the conflict. The media turns its lens away from the bombing of the past week to focus on what it thinks Americans need to know. The bombings persists yet the recounts the major news of the day through an iconization of events in one or two pictures.

The pictures displayed across the front pages clearly possess emotional and aesthetic qualities, but are they truthful to the complexities facing the Middle East at this moment in time. Where are the images from Afghanistan and Iraq?

Looking at the pictures above, the first of the two most used images shows children dressed in flight helmets. In what appears a theatrical moment the children are prepared to escorted out the country. No matter what, editors know that pictures of children and animals always  evoke the strongest emotional responses from viewers.

In the second image, a shilouette of soliders loadinng a cargo plan is backlight by the setting sun. This image works because of its graphic, rather than its emotional appeal.

In terms of cultural hegemony, it is fascinating to take notice of the fact that so many newspapers across the country seem to single-mindedly select pretty much the same image to represents the "big" news of the day. 

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.

 

Public Journalism in the Classroom

The following article was written at the end of the quarter and is reposted here because I feel it speaks to the power of blogging and internet education. The essay was also recently linked to Robin Good's terrific blog called Teaching and Learning Online.

I am also extremely proud of our students for the work they did trying to understand the complexities of public journalism and blogging.

Here's my story:

Recently, our Public Journalism class at Southern Oregon University produced a number of insightful works on its blog "Student Matters". The issues covered ranged from popular entertainment to politics. Overall, the project was a welcome and exciting exploration into the brave new world of Internet communication.

Unceremoniously, we approached “blogging” and its environs the “Blogosphere” with a good bit of trepidation. As a first of its kind experiment on the SOU campus, our goal was relatively simple –Open up a conversation on campus about issues that matter to students.

This is what blogging does, for better or worse.

Blogging opens up to the world conversations between students and teachers, students and students, and community and students.

Stephen Downes in the online magazine Educause Review defines educational blogging as a form of personal publishing.   

A blog, therefore, is and has always been more than the online equivalent of a personal journal. Though consisting of regular (and often dated) updates, the blog adds to the form of the diary by incorporating the best features of hypertext: the capacity to link to new and useful resources. But a blog is also characterized by its reflection of a personal style, and this style may be reflected in either the writing or the selection of links passed along to readers.

Blogs are the core of what has come to be called personal publishing in an increasingly hyper-staurated world of information.

We explored the potentialities of public journalism through blogging about our college campus in both theory and practice. We took what we learned from listening to others in the community that have come before us. We followed the discourse about blogging and how it can affect change. 

Ultimately, we created the Student Matters blog as an online journal and a space to explore the principles of community-based learning.

Essentially, community-based learning signifies proactive engagement in problem solving. In this case, students determined that our community was on campus and that it would generate a sufficient number of issues worthy of reporting. Some of these issues included, the Higher One banking system, the search for a new university president, residence hall and health center policies, free speech on campus, and other matters students deal with while enrolled in college.

Writing assignments were divided into three categories: journalistic reportage, opinion and commentary and arts and entertainment reviews. Right from the start, the biggest obstacle in this class centered around learning how people define “public journalism.”

In the emerging world of Internet communication, especially in the Blogosphere, we quickly discovered that there are more questions raised by the activity than there were answers. Everyone seems to define public journalism differently.

At the heart of the issues of surrounding public journalism, also known as participatory or citizen journalism, resides a tension.

Cynthia Care, a student who investigated community-building and sustainability issues, comments, “Today there is a conflict between corporate interests and the accessibility of communication, information and knowledge via the Internet.” The very public nature of blogging, one that is inherently more personal in tone than practiced by traditional “objective” or “impartial” journalists, produces a dialect of incredulity.

Jerry Clarkson eloquently explains the problem with blogging and public journalism is mostly one of perception. As Clarkson argues:   

“Public journalists tend to more activist in their approach. While this activism role might   appear to create a biased approach and therefore foster trust issues, I believe that it works in reverse. Once we acknowledge our biases those reading our critiques can understand our frame of the story and accept the honesty with which we approach it.”

Care observes that the oft-noted public frustration with corporate media as provided the impetus for public journalism.

In her essay, “The Internet as a Tool for Common Good,” Care examines the historical context between private and public interests. She explores the notion of “the commons” as a “set of inherited gifts” that everyone has access to. Historically, these “inherited gifts” were assigned to natural resources, but later included social and cultural gift. It is this second set of “gift” (cultural and social) that the writer notes as “gifts” of language, art, science, and now, the Internet. For Care, and many others, the Internet has become a social and cultural commons, “an inexpensive forum for public expression, which is easily accessible to independent voices.”

Tensions or conflicts between public and private forms of expression and reportage are rooted in how people perceive one form over another.

Matt Gemmell, a photojournalism major, defines public journalism as “any news produced by someone other than a professional journalist.” Now, the user is faced with the challenge of choice.

During the quarter, students analyzed online stories from the local newspapers to find that feedback forms on the Internet allow readers to correct inconsistencies and incongruities of the account.

In one story about a motorcycle accident in front of the University, comments about the story ranged from eyewitness accounts to the incident that were not reported in the newspapers, as well as a correction posted by the sister of the motorcyclist. In this way, readers could hold the newspaper more accountable on the Internet than they could in the antecedent traditional print format.

Jeremiah Page sums up the phenomenon by contending, “People can hold the journalist responsible for accuracy, bias, conventions, and relevancy. Instead of simply learning about something and being told about an event we can be part of the solution. This is revolutionary!”
Gemmell points out further by claiming that, “public journalism is redefining the way we think of tradition journalism.”

For Page, “Public journalism takes journalism into a completely new sphere that has never been possible before. Public journalism has transformed the recipient into a potential participant.”

Donald Lind, a gradating journalism major, believes, “Today’s media is easy to dismiss as untrustworthy. But today’s technology can challenge the press like never before.”

At the same time, William Hastings found that the notion of public journalism promulgates controversy. “I feel that we are ‘feeling’ our way through the many [implications] the Internet can have for journalism, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

One of the analytical frameworks used to explicate blogging in the course was Robert Putnam’s idea of “social capital”, which builds upon Metcalfe’s law of the Internet. Metcalfe, who is credited with developing the Ethernet, believes the number of possible linkages between users of the Internet grows as the square of the number of linkages increases. Moreover, Metcalfe’s law states that the community value of a network of users grows as the square number increases.

Imagine the blogosphere as an enormous shopping mall with millions of rental shops. Every time the user selects one shop to browse in they are immediately connected,

indirectly and directly, to all of the others. For Hastings, “Ultimately, public journalism [on the Internet] allows us to connect to one another. This is a central process in making change and broadening … perspective.”

Interconnectivity and social networking, something that is inherently part of the blogosphere, presented itself several times during the quarter.

For example, after a student posted a rather pointed criticism of the financial Higher One banking system, one of the corporation’s founders responded to the blog. In a surprising act of transparency, the executive apologized for any problems the student may have had and encouraged him to follow up if he hadn’t been taken care of soon. Interestingly, other students began posted comments and complaints about the banking service to the site.

Although the students’ comments were in no way journalistic in any traditional sense, the posting could certainly give way to more investigative reportage in the future. Perhaps, this is what the executive understands. That if he were to let even the most seemingly innocuous and obscure  blog posts to go unanswered more disgruntlement may emerge.

On the other hand, perhaps the executive’s concerns were genuine and sincere, and that his intentions were socially and corporately responsible. In some respects, the Internet brings journalism back to a time when writer felt free to lash out at corporations and governments – back to a time of Nellie Bly, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and I.F. Stone.

As Lind contends, “Instant access to the world has allowed citizens to take apart news stories that might have been universally accepted a decade ago.” The dynamic and interactive agency of blogging suggests how the Internet makes older ways of gathering and using information obsolete.

Students learned about their own work through the study of Marshall McLuhan’s four laws of the media, which claim that newer technologies extend media and make them stronger, reverses some of the older media’s characteristics, generates new forms of communication and media, and finally, enhances qualities of media.

The reality many of us are coming to terms with now is that the future is already here and waiting for us to join in the larger conversation that public journalism promotes. As Eric Hidle points out, “With new technology comes the obsolescent of old mediums.” In his research Hidle discovered that nearly three of every four Americans now have access to the Internet.

Along with the growth of the Internet comes social networking Websites, such as MySpace, Friendster, Live Journal, Friendzy, Tribe, FriendSurfer, PeepsNation, Emode, and others, that continue to command increasingly larger audiences. In fact social networking websites have risen 47 percent over the past year and online news sites have risen accordingly with them. Hidle’s research of bloggers at Southern Oregon University is significant.   

To put it simply: people are online, they are connected and they are informed.    To compare the current state of our student body with the world would be unfair.  Students at Southern Oregon University are technologically far ahead of the standard citizen.

Every student enrolled in SOU has access to the internet through local computer labs. And, as of June 13, 2006 1,309 students are registered to Southern’s facebook.com  network and 1,873 students are registered to Southern’s MySpace.com network.

This is approximately 40 percent of the student body networked with each other. It can also be reasonably estimated that many students registered with such sites do not belong to Southern’s groups but do network with other members who are enrolled in the school.

For educators as well as students, it is important to consider the obvious implications of such statistics.

Teaching and learning is changing with the Internet. Students are by and large vastly more digitally literate than many of their instructors. This is a generation that was born to and came of age online. The Internet and technology, in many cases, appears second nature for most.

Therefore, setting learning outcomes and educational objective must be concomitant with student behavior. We have entered a brave new world of learning where students are increasingly producing creative and intellectual content for the masses. At this point, there is an imperative in education to meet students, our future journalists, where they live – online in cyberspace.

Not only is this important to the current state of higher education in this country, but this directly applies to incoming students. In a study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project, more than 57 percent of the teenagers presently using the Internet have created personal content in the form of blogs, podcasts, videologs, and photoblogs.

The study reveals “About 21 million or 87 percent of those ages 12-17 are active on the Internet. “The results highlight that this is a generation comfortable with content-creating technology. Teens are eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider Internet population,” the report concludes. 

Journalism Mini-Camp for High School Students

Ashland High School teacher Bill Gabriel works along side his students at the first annual journalism mini-camp at Southern Oregon University Monday. The high school is starting up its student newspaper this fall after a long absence.

The workshop is four-days long and covers some of the fundamentals of putting together a  student newspaper, including photojournalism and page design. At this point we have been concentrating on understanding the importance of a free press in society and the responsibilities many journalists feel entrusted with. In class today, for instance, we discussed the roles and relationships a campus newspaper should develop with the larger community.

Summer Jam

Sunday afternoon at the Black Sheep is a place where local musicians gather for a lively session of celtic music.

Professor William Greene is among the large group of musicians who play celtic music at the pub every Sunday. For me, listening to live celtic music, or any music for that matter, is always a treat. What I enjoy most about watching and photographing musicians is that they appear so consumed and lost in what they love to do -- play music.

In many ways, this has always been the same sort of feeling I have when I am making images. It is easy to lose track of time when you have trained yourself over the years to focus on detail and light. The slightest gesture, action, change in light can make such a huge difference.  These pictures  were made in color, but transforming them into black & white provides more of the feeling and tone of what I was feeling when I made them.

Professor William Greene, chair of the Master's in Teaching program at Southern Oregon University playing the fiddle.

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.

Order and Chaos on Display: An Analysis of Front-Page News Images

I've been exploring the implications of how distinct meanings are constructed through the treatment, placement, and positioning of front-page news images.

The placement and positioning of front-page news images  constitute part of a larger system of human visual activity that operates as an extension of humanity’s instinctual need for surveillance and expression.

Here are two front-pages that create two very different sets of meanings about an event using the same photograph.

Central to the concerns examined here are how news photographs communicate the cultural, political, and ideological frames of socially constructed realities at various levels of the news making process, from photojournalists to publishers.

According to Julianne Newton in her book The Burden of Visual Truth, a news photograph,  “Enters the public consciousness under the guise of the authority of the press: This is true. This is what happened. This is what the situation looked like…. The context has been one of assumed truth” (p. 89). 

By examining the treatment of various versions of identical media images on the front-pages of national newspapers it may be possible to construct a schema which illustrates the intersections among power and knowledge, which shapes public opinion, reinforces or resists dominant ideologies, and conveys societal and cultural values, tastes, attitudes, and beliefs of our times. 

A critical analysis of media images and their impact of society is central to understanding the visual culture in which we live. The treatment of front-page news imagery not only shapes public perception of significant events, but also mirrors a publication’s economic interest, and at times, its political agenda.

The image was made by Reuters photojournalist Sean Bean on April 17, 2000. Shortly after, Bean's picture appeared prominently on newspaper front-pages including, The New York Times and USA Today. 

In the image, a young white male wearing and American flag T-shirt is being restrained by an African-American police officer. Produced during one of several days of protest, the image constitutes a decisive moment  signifying an array of tensions. Ideologically, the image symbolizes the escalation of violence encountered at similar protests in the United States and around the world by people expressing concern over what they refer to as a trend toward the corporate domination of human and natural resources around the world.

The questions raised here reflect an interest in how representations of events constitute persuasive reflections of power and knowledge in society. In this case:

How do levels of signification produced by the positioning and placement of front-page news images construct divergent perceptions of the same news event?

How does the treatment and display of front-page images reflect the dominant political and economic concerns of editors and owners?

In the New York Times, the anti-globalization protest photograph is oriented vertically above the fold of the front-page in what appears to be a full-frame version of the original. However, the USA Today image, appearing again above the fold, is cropped tightly as a square, omitting the ancillary information provided in the Times’ version.

Levels of signification change with the inclusion and exclusion of visual cues available in the frame. In this case, what is seen in the New York Times’ version, such as one gas-masked individual running in the background or the strain and arch of the protestor’s body has he is lifted off the ground by the police officer, is critical to inferring meaning.

The officer’s actions and the reactions of the protestors produce a compelling image, which appeals to the intellectual and emotional imagination of the viewer. There is a narrative in the frame which unfolds as the police officer subdues the demonstrator with his baton, the grimace of the young man, and the powerless of a young demonstrator attempting to stop the violent arrest—the image contains all the elements of drama including rising, climax, and falling action. 

At the same time, the image’s cropping in USA Today, reduces the viewer’s ability to see beyond the most dramatic aspects of the conflict. Close-up and intense, the drama of the confrontation between the police officer and the protestor is brought to center stage. The image signifies a tension of the first order. The composition frames a dance of bodies in a moment of intense struggle is cropped to suggest the power of authority over the transgressions of youthful protest. 

As the gateway to understanding the events of the day a front-page news image carries with it a verisimilitude of authority and factuality. The value of the image is concomitant with what the gatekeepers (photographers, reporters, editors, and publishers) of a given publication perceive to be consistent with the conventions news value and use.

Front-page news images provide visual cues that constitute our loci of common knowledge—one that shapes our consciousness and conscience in resisting or legitimizing the status quo. Embedded within front-page news images reside levels of signification which carry the underlying cultural and political codes of meaning for a society.

Front-page images signify an informational/representational system that is based on a complex and sometimes arbitrary arrangement of moral concerns, economic interests, political predispositions, cultural relevancies, and social issues. The propriety and hierarchy of the front-page, taken in sum, contributes to a reader’s common stock of knowledge—aesthetically, intellectually, and emotionally. The moral agency of a newspaper’s use of images on the front-page transmits and reinforces the symbolic environment of prescriptive values and norms within society.

However, when analyzed holistically, the front-page image is a structurally homogenizing and persuasive force—which cannot only normalize public discourse, but also affect social change.

Visual reportage, then, is positioned within the cultural and social practices of our times. From an ideological perspective, however, the hegemonic role of the positioning and placement of front-page news images presumes the authority of a social institution that reflects and reinforces the interests and ideas of a society’s dominant group. Front-page news photographs provide a complex matrix of ideologically encoded meaning in which the viewer’s social reality is constructed for them. New images, especially those selected as significant enough for the front-page, provide a central core of visually experiencing the world in which we live.

The power of the image resides in movement, in this case, with the center of action focused on a confrontation between a police officer and a protestor. The officer’s actions and subsequent reactions produce a compelling image, which appeals to the intellectual and emotional imagination of the viewer. There is a narrative in the frame which unfolds as the police officer subdues the demonstrator with his baton, the grimace of the young man, and the powerless of a young demonstrator attempting to stop the violent arrest—the image contains all the elements of drama including rising, climax, and falling action.

There are many ways of evaluating how placement, positioning, and cropping of news images contribute to how they are consumed by readers.  One context may attempt to prove the “transcendent relationship” among signifiers and what is eventually signified. Another approach may examine the role of media as establishing notions of deviance and conformity within society, or what I suggest maybe the normalizing of an “ideological other.”

The signifiers of protest, i.e., the physical appearance of the protestors and the police offer, the confrontation, the crowd (as seen in The New York Times’ version), or the caption used to explain the event, present a complex matrix of meaning. Complicating the interpretative process is the fact that the image may be understood as indexical, iconic, and symbolic at the same time. In other words, the image cannot be read linearly as in the syntax of a text. Instead, the viewer moves back and forth constructing an individualized grammar of meaning from both text and image.  In the process of viewing, the manifestation of power and knowledge becomes consecrated through the media as history.   

The relationship news images occupy with other informational elements on the front-page, such as captions, masthead, teasers, texts, headlines, or graphics, as well as how an audience scans and then mediates the meaning of all this content, presents interpretative challenges for practitioners and theorists alike.

For example, one concern may be how to account for the edifying function of an image, while embracing a strategy that recognizes how it also serves the primal needs of human activity. In this configuration, imagery is grounded not only in representation, but as Newton suggests, as “An integrated cultural/physiological system…that is more primal in the sense of being core than it is symbolic, and that is evolutionary in nature” (p. 118).

The placement and positioning of front-page news images  constitute part of a larger system of human visual activity that operates as an extension of humanity’s instinctual need for surveillance and expression.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality suggest, “knowledge of everyday life is structured in terms of relevances.”  In this case, the notion of relevances may help to illuminate how media often frame events for the public. Questions appropriate to this issue include how does the media construct relevances for readers? And how the events deemed relevant to my everyday life, intersect with the people I meet in the grocery store, at school, or on the street?

Although the design of newspaper page may be considered too functionalist and pedestrian to discuss it does provide an entry point for discussing emotional, cultural, political, social, and intellectual issues attached to how they construct a common stock of knowledge, reinforce a dominant ideology, or foment change.

In writing about art history, David Freedberg articulates concerns that may not be limited to the fine arts. In his analysis, Freedberg suggests that one obstacle standing in the way of understanding how people respond to imagery and learning from history is “our reluctance to reinstate emotion as a part of cognition.  In other words, Freedberg argues that critics and historians often omit feelings and emotions from the cognition aspects of learning from what they see.

As Freedberg claims, “We have seen and learned too much; we cannot see with old eyes. History does not give us that possibility—and so the question still remains whether we have any other resource for grasping the power that is constrained by context, event, and idiosyncrasy” (431).

From a semiotic perspective, how an image is cropped, positioned, and juxtaposed by a caption, text, or headline determines the inferential properties of signification. Despite the temptation to account for differences in positioning and placement by assuming that the treatment of the image simply reflects the desired tone and appearance of newspaper management based on marketing decisions and audience appeal limits the scope of how imagery influences the public’s perception of the meaning of news.

Newton suggests that “The reality of mass communication is that content is influenced by personal, political, social, economic, and ownership forces, even though we would like to believe in journalism for journalism’s sake” (p. 79).

The management of content, in this case the positioning and placement of the anti-globalization protest image, is illustrative of some of these forces. For example, in the New York Times the viewer is provided a greater number of signifiers in which to abduce and infer meaning—a treatment that is consistent with the newspaper’s philosophical approach to edifying presentation of news. For Philip Gefter, front-page editor for The New York Times, image selection is “driven by the mix of stories, and the mix of stories is a result of—well, an impenetrable calculus” (Vienne, 2001, p. 22).  This mathematics, however, produces a fairly predictable or formulaic relationship between a dominant image and other front-page design elements. 

According to Gefter, “The top picture is often given over to the most important news of the day. Short of that, it refers to a story inside the paper. Occasionally, it’s a stand-alone picture depicting something of public interest or it’s good enough to deserve top billing on its own visual merits…”

For Caroline Brothers (1977), “Meaning inheres not in the photograph itself, but in the relationship between the photograph and the matrix of culturally specific beliefs and assumptions to which it refers to” (p.23). 

Evaluating and comparing USA Today’s treatment of the protest image against the positioning and placement in the New York Times support this perspective. The tight cropping in USA Today demonstrates how signification can shift given the elimination of background elements as provided in the New York Times.

What, then, are the political, cultural, and economic forces influencing the decisions behind the selecting, positioning, and placing of this powerful image?

The meaning of a news photograph is contingent upon its relationship with the social and cultural practices of journalism and aestheticism. Furthermore, according to Batchen (1997), meaning is “dependent on the context in which that photograph finds itself at any given moment” (p. 6). This moment, however, is embedded within an ideological matrix that must be dealt with before any true meaning can be inferred. 

Teaching Online Journalism

Mindy McAdams from the University of Florida is doing some great work in the area of Online journalism.

McAdams' educational blog "Teaching Online Journalism" is well worth the time it takes to cyberhop over there.

Mindy's latest post, features a note about Richard Koci Hernandez's work with online visual storytelling.

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.

My High School Life: A photo essay by Kara Lewis

A 19-year-old student, Kara Lewis, just graduated from Southern Oregon University with a degree in photojournalism. Kara quit high school at 16, passed the GED, and entered university. Kara was also diagnosed with Graves Disease, a type of autoimmune disease that causes over-activity of the thyroid gland.View the Slideshow

As her final project, kara returned to Ashland High School to document life and to see what she had been missing by leaving so early.

I think Kara's personality comes out nicely in the interview I did with her to accompany this slideshow. She is a determined soul passionate about photojournalism and humanity.

Learning How to Teach on the Blogosphere

This Spring, our Public Journalism class at Southern Oregon University produced a number of insightful works on our blog "Student Matters". The issues covered ranged from popular entertainment to politics. Overall, the project was a welcome and exciting exploration into the brave new world of Internet communication.

Unceremoniously, we approached “blogging” and its environs the “Blogosphere” with a good bit of trepidation. As a first of its kind experiment on the SOU campus, our goal was relatively simple –Open up a conversation on campus about issues that matter to students.

This is what blogging does, for better or worse.

Blogging opens up to the world conversations between students and teachers, students and students, and community and students.

Stephen Downes in the online magazine Educause Review defines educational blogging as a form of personal publishing.   

A blog, therefore, is and has always been more than the online equivalent of a personal journal. Though consisting of regular (and often dated) updates, the blog adds to the form of the diary by incorporating the best features of hypertext: the capacity to link to new and useful resources. But a blog is also characterized by its reflection of a personal style, and this style may be reflected in either the writing or the selection of links passed along to readers.

Blogs are the core of what has come to be called personal publishing in an increasingly hyper-staurated world of information.

We explored the potentialities of public journalism through blogging about our college campus in both theory and practice. We took what we learned from listening to others in the community that have come before us. We followed the discourse about blogging and how it can affect change. 

Ultimately, we created the Student Matters blog as an online journal and a space to explore the principles of community-based learning.

Essentially, community-based learning signifies proactive engagement in problem solving. In this case, students determined that our community was on campus and that it would generate a sufficient number of issues worthy of reporting. Some of these issues included, the Higher One banking system, the search for a new university president, residence hall and health center policies, free speech on campus, and other matters students deal with while enrolled in college.

Writing assignments were divided into three categories: journalistic reportage, opinion and commentary and arts and entertainment reviews. Right from the start, the biggest obstacle in this class centered around learning how people define “public journalism.”

In the emerging world of Internet communication, especially in the Blogosphere, we quickly discovered that there are more questions raised by the activity than there were answers. Everyone seems to define public journalism differently.

At the heart of the issues of surrounding public journalism, also known as participatory or citizen journalism, resides a tension.

Cynthia Care, a student who investigated community-building and sustainability issues, comments, “Today there is a conflict between corporate interests and the accessibility of communication, information and knowledge via the Internet.” The very public nature of blogging, one that is inherently more personal in tone than practiced by traditional “objective” or “impartial” journalists, produces a dialect of incredulity.

Jerry Clarkson eloquently explains the problem with blogging and public journalism is mostly one of perception. As Clarkson argues:   

“Public journalists tend to more activist in their approach. While this activism role might   appear to create a biased approach and therefore foster trust issues, I believe that it works in reverse. Once we acknowledge our biases those reading our critiques can understand our frame of the story and accept the honesty with which we approach it.”

Care observes that the oft-noted public frustration with corporate media as provided the impetus for public journalism.

In her essay, “The Internet as a Tool for Common Good,” Care examines the historical context between private and public interests. She explores the notion of “the commons” as a “set of inherited gifts” that everyone has access to. Historically, these “inherited gifts” were assigned to natural resources, but later included social and cultural gift. It is this second set of “gift” (cultural and social) that the writer notes as “gifts” of language, art, science, and now, the Internet. For Care, and many others, the Internet has become a social and cultural commons, “an inexpensive forum for public expression, which is easily accessible to independent voices.”

Tensions or conflicts between public and private forms of expression and reportage are rooted in how people perceive one form over another.

Matt Gemmell, a photojournalism major, defines public journalism as “any news produced by someone other than a professional journalist.” Now, the user is faced with the challenge of choice.

During the quarter, students analyzed online stories from the local newspapers to find that feedback forms on the Internet allow readers to correct inconsistencies and incongruities of the account.

In one story about a motorcycle accident in front of the University, comments about the story ranged from eyewitness accounts to the incident that were not reported in the newspapers, as well as a correction posted by the sister of the motorcyclist. In this way, readers could hold the newspaper more accountable on the Internet than they could in the antecedent traditional print format.

Jeremiah Page sums up the phenomenon by contending, “People can hold the journalist responsible for accuracy, bias, conventions, and relevancy. Instead of simply learning about something and being told about an event we can be part of the solution. This is revolutionary!”
Gemmell points out further by claiming that, “public journalism is redefining the way we think of tradition journalism.”

For Page, “Public journalism takes journalism into a completely new sphere that has never been possible before. Public journalism has transformed the recipient into a potential participant.”

Donald Lind, a gradating journalism major, believes, “Today’s media is easy to dismiss as untrustworthy. But today’s technology can challenge the press like never before.”

At the same time, William Hastings found that the notion of public journalism promulgates controversy. “I feel that we are ‘feeling’ our way through the many [implications] the Internet can have for journalism, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

One of the analytical frameworks used to explicate blogging in the course was Robert Putnam’s idea of “social capital”, which builds upon Metcalfe’s law of the Internet. Metcalfe, who is credited with developing the Ethernet, believes the number of possible linkages between users of the Internet grows as the square of the number of linkages increases. Moreover, Metcalfe’s law states that the community value of a network of users grows as the square number increases.

Imagine the blogosphere as an enormous shopping mall with millions of rental shops. Every time the user selects one shop to browse in they are immediately connected,

indirectly and directly, to all of the others. For Hastings, “Ultimately, public journalism [on the Internet] allows us to connect to one another. This is a central process in making change and broadening … perspective.”

Interconnectivity and social networking, something that is inherently part of the blogosphere, presented itself several times during the quarter.

For example, after a student posted a rather pointed criticism of the financial Higher One banking system, one of the corporation’s founders responded to the blog. In a surprising act of transparency, the executive apologized for any problems the student may have had and encouraged him to follow up if he hadn’t been taken care of soon. Interestingly, other students began posted comments and complaints about the banking service to the site.

Although the students’ comments were in no way journalistic in any traditional sense, the posting could certainly give way to more investigative reportage in the future. Perhaps, this is what the executive understands. That if he were to let even the most seemingly innocuous and obscure  blog posts to go unanswered more disgruntlement may emerge.

On the other hand, perhaps the executive’s concerns were genuine and sincere, and that his intentions were socially and corporately responsible. In some respects, the Internet brings journalism back to a time when writer felt free to lash out at corporations and governments – back to a time of Nellie Bly, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and I.F. Stone.

As Lind contends, “Instant access to the world has allowed citizens to take apart news stories that might have been universally accepted a decade ago.” The dynamic and interactive agency of blogging suggests how the Internet makes older ways of gathering and using information obsolete.

Students learned about their own work through the study of Marshall McLuhan’s four laws of the media, which claim that newer technologies extend media and make them stronger, reverses some of the older media’s characteristics, generates new forms of communication and media, and finally, enhances qualities of media.

The reality many of us are coming to terms with now is that the future is already here and waiting for us to join in the larger conversation that public journalism promotes. As Eric Hidle points out, “With new technology comes the obsolescent of old mediums.” In his research Hidle discovered that nearly three of every four Americans now have access to the Internet.

Along with the growth of the Internet comes social networking Websites, such as MySpace, Friendster, Live Journal, Friendzy, Tribe, FriendSurfer, PeepsNation, Emode, and others, that continue to command increasingly larger audiences. In fact social networking websites have risen 47 percent over the past year and online news sites have risen accordingly with them. Hidle’s research of bloggers at Southern Oregon University is significant.   

To put it simply: people are online, they are connected and they are informed.    To compare the current state of our student body with the world would be unfair.  Students at Southern Oregon University are technologically far ahead of the standard citizen.

Every student enrolled in SOU has access to the internet through local computer labs. And, as of June 13, 2006 1,309 students are registered to Southern’s facebook.com  network and 1,873 students are registered to Southern’s MySpace.com network.

This is approximately 40 percent of the student body networked with each other. It can also be reasonably estimated that many students registered with such sites do not belong to Southern’s groups but do network with other members who are enrolled in the school.

For educators as well as students, it is important to consider the obvious implications of such statistics.

Teaching and learning is changing with the Internet. Students are by and large vastly more digitally literate than many of their instructors. This is a generation that was born to and came of age online. The Internet and technology, in many cases, appears second nature for most.

Therefore, setting learning outcomes and educational objective must be concomitant with student behavior. We have entered a brave new world of learning where students are increasingly producing creative and intellectual content for the masses. At this point, there is an imperative in education to meet students, our future journalists, where they live – online in cyberspace.

Not only is this important to the current state of higher education in this country, but this directly applies to incoming students. In a study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project, more than 57 percent of the teenagers presently using the Internet have created personal content in the form of blogs, podcasts, videologs, and photoblogs.

The study reveals “About 21 million or 87 percent of those ages 12-17 are active on the Internet. “The results highlight that this is a generation comfortable with content-creating technology. Teens are eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider Internet population,” the report concludes. 

The Future of Photojournalism

Today, a transformation is taking shape. Within the next 10 years, the demand for photojournalists with experience and knowledge of video, audio, design, writing, along with basic digital camera skills will be the norm, not the exception.

In today’s competitive and changing field, photojournalists must be able to communicate well, edit with deliberation and sophistication, and maintain positive interpersonal relationships in the newsroom and beyond.

How we envision the future of photojournalism depends on whether we are talking about photojournalism as an occupational group with specific sales markets to target, or as an artistic genre and style of visual storytelling. 

As an occupation, there is little doubt that the playing field has been leveled by digital technologies. Pictures are not only easier to produce, but with the Internet they are also easier to share. In fact, digital photography, especially the use of camera phones by average unskilled citizen shutterbugs, could be having the same effect the Kodak One camera had on the itinerant portrait photographer business in the early 1890s. The Kodak put a lot of photographers out of business, but it also created an unprecedented potential for future generations of image-makers and image consumers.

From an artistic, stylistic, and aesthetic perspective the future of photojournalism has never looked better. Photojournalism education has found its niche in the academy and produces many outstanding young photographers every year. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, visual storytelling is flourishing on the Internet though the growth of Websites such as Flickr, Zoto, Smugmug, Scrapblog, and Snapfish. Granted, we may not be talking about talent like Cartier-Bresson or W. Eugene Smith on the Internet, but many of the images on these Websites demonstrate strong photojournalistic characteristics. Many of the images are candid, raw, snaps of life that tell stories about the human condition.

Like the best photojournalism, there are people uploading images to Flickr and Snapfish that can make us cry, laugh, or think about the world in new ways. 

The future of photojournalism both as an occupation as well as a means of personal expression necessitates a more humanistic and empathic style of visual practice and reportage. While markets for paparazzi pictures will continue to sustain our prurient interests, it is important to remember why people take images in the first place – to fix memories in time.

Photojournalism is an approach to photography that empowers people to record life as it happens, not just as people want it to happen. Consider the demand for photojournalistic style wedding images as evidence that people are weary of cheesecake pictures or Aunt Greta’s fake smile in every shot.

Since the 1980s photojournalism has been at a crossroads. Digital technologies do impinge on the routines, rituals, traditions, and behaviors of photojournalists. Digital technologies do require a variety of skill-sets that could not have been imagined a half-century ago. The photojournalist of the future will understand the ethical responsibilities that come with electronic digital manipulation.

The photojournalist of the future will also know computerized pagination processes, web design, audio and video, and digital workflow systems. In many ways the future of photojournalism, through digital technologies, extends our capacity for seeing and making things seen in new and exciting ways. At the same time, we must be also take into consideration that digital technologies may represent an increased liability for photojournalists – one that continues to wrestle with issues of credibility, truthfulness, and sensitivity in a world hyper-saturated with images.

Images as Evidence

Front page coverage heralding  al-Zarqawi's death on a few tabloid newspapers yesterday was predictable. The bloodied face of the militant was significant in that it helps to redirect some of the criticism against the U.S. military engagement in Iraq. Pictures have been used for political propaganda since the invention of the halftone printing process in the 1880s.

Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) observes, "Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings" (p.86).

Consider the The New York Post's use of inflammatory commentary superimposed over the dead face Abu Masub al-Zarqawi. As close to a supermarket table as so-called legitimate media may get, the Post's use of the text-bubbled "Warm up the Virgins" coming from al-Zarqawi's battered face signifies our insatiable fascination with death and sex. The reference to virgins on the cover refers to the beliefs some extremists hold that if an individual dies a martyr they will be met by 40 virgins in the afterlife.

Here the media plays a role in constructing a reality that extends beyond the image. The language aims to offend deeply by connecting death to sexual activity. The juxtaposition of the text bubble coming from the dead man's mouth calling for "virgins" may be perceived not as a object of contemplation but as one of gallows humor and prurient interest.

Again as Sontag notes, "An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen" (Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 105).

In this case, American audiences are generally shielded from images of the dead. But in this case, the dead was the "enemy" -- he was not just another human being. Therefore, how we use his image and how often it is seen, dead or alive, is part of constructing a pathology of hatred and fear in the audience's mind.

Imagine viewing a full-size front page picture of a U.S. Marine killed in action with a text bubble added to suggest a final thought or desire.  Readers would  burn down the newspaper. Even the idea of suggesting that such an image would ever make the front page of newspaper seems so wrong. Nevertheless, picturing the death of an individual who has been demonized as evil incarnate appears reasonable for a government set on winning the public relations war in the American press.

There were actually a variety of the death image released to the media -- one picture showing the bloodied and swollen face and another image after the body had been cleaned up. In this instance, the pentagon provided two versions for public consumption.

Alexandra Fuche of the BBC reports in "Parading the Dead" that showing  the bodies of dead in Iraq is "controversial on religious grounds, as Muslim tradition requires corpses to be buried as quickly as possible."

Using imagery of pain and death in order to make a point or prove something to one group may provoke excitement and a blacklash of violence from other groups. There is a price to be paid for from the visual propaganda used on both sides of this conflict. Whether it is a video showing Islamic extremists beheading hostages, or pictures of dead sectarian leaders, the of such imagery can only escalate tensions.

   

Copyright Issues for Photographers

Lots of people seem to be a little fuzzy on what copyright means in this country.

Dave Johnson of the Washington Post provides a pretty clear description of the law and some of the issues facing photographers today. The article, "Your Photos, Your Rights, and the Law" is a good read if you want to get started clearing out those cobwebs in terms of what is legal.

Is war photography and other visual violence necessary?

It’s been more than a decade since I last looked at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s classic work “Flow” but finding it again on a bookshelf was an invitation to reflect on the role of photography in society. Although Csikszentmihalyi focuses on the psychology of optimal experience, I have always read his work through a photographic filter.

When thinking about happiness, or what makes people happy, Csikszentmihalyi reminds us “the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind.” Yet we spend our lifetimes in search of happiness against all odds, natural and human.

Photography came about in history partly as a way to compensate for the failings of human memory as well as a way to fix our imaginations in space and time.

We hold up mental pictures to remind ourselves of things. We hold up, in our mind’s eye, two pictures. One picture shows us as things once were and the other picture reveals all things hoped for. The mental pictures of our world we hold up for ourselves are not entirely real. These mental images are mediated by our hopes and fears – constructed for us by the media.

We are bombarded with visually mediated messages in society today that may attempt to construct feelings of order and stability for us.  We are comforted with the illusion that photographs may bring a sense of calm and control over the chaos that is all around us. The pictures, even the most troubling and violent ones, act to bring about a sense of knowing and being there.

Last week, Annie asked a provocative question that I continue to struggle with. The thesis of her reports postulates: “Is war photography and other visual violence necessary?”

Intuitively, I want to respond with an absolute yes. We need images to shock us into the present and to remind us of all past injustices and sufferings in the world.

Images of war are critical in building shaping public consciousness.

Images from past conflicts such as Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag-raising contributed to the U.S. war effort in the Pacific during WWII. At the same time, decades later, Nick Ut’s picture of a young girl fleeing a napalm attack in Viet Nam and John Filo’s image at Kent State helped to turn the tide of public opinion against continued U.S. foreign intervention in the region.

Do images from our present war, especially the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, help to foment discontent as in past conflicts?

Yes. In fact, the U.S. military is now bracing itself for another scandal involving atrocities in Iraq – atrocities that have been caught on videotape by an Iraqi journalism student. According to USA Today, “Pentagon investigators believe Marines committed unprovoked murder in the deaths of about two dozen people at Haditha in November.”

Do we need visual proof to validate such claims? Yes, not only do we need pictures, but we need them to be from a reliable source.

Annie's question becomes even more important in society today.

The idea of asking the question of whether war photography is necessary speaks to a bigger issue – one suggesting that war images no longer function in the same ways as they have in the past.

Perhaps images of violence have become such a normal part of our visual diet that they no longer move us. Perhaps these images no longer feed our worst imaginable fears, because we have seen them all before – another war, another picture of death and violence.

If true, then, we as a society are moving insidiously closer away from an enlightened civilization and more toward a new Dark Age.

Pictures of war, even though they may longer have the same impact and those in the past, still need to be taken so that they will become part of our collective memory, history, and remain in our consciousness.

The Need For Truth and Compassion

Photo Credit: The Washington Post

Perhaps it is in our best interest to remain silent on matters of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

After all, this is old news now and we don’t need to be reminded of the violence of suffered by Iraqis in the custody U.S. troops. However, the release of yet more pictures, videos and testimonies of prisoner abuse makes turning away from this reality increasingly difficult.

Last week, the Washington Post obtained more images, specifically videos and testimonies from detainees and Abu Ghraib – an investigation that should propel this story back into the realm of public discourse.

Scott Higham and Joe Stephens report in, “New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge Abu Ghraib Detainees' Statements Describe Sexual Humiliation And Savage Beatings,” that the testimonies help to explain many of the already iconic images released more than two years ago to the American public.

“The statements provide the most detailed picture yet of what took place on the cellblock. Some of the detainees described being abused as punishment or discipline after they were caught fighting or with a prohibited item. Some said they were pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers.”

Even after learning about the extent of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, there seems to be only minimal coverage on the issue in the mainstream media. Other matters, such as immigration reform and the deployment of the National Guard along the U.S.-Mexican border appear to preoccupy much of the reportage. Interestingly, a Google search for news reportage under the heading of Abu Ghraib reveals more than 5, 000 posts between May 19  and April 22.

However, a Technorati search of the Blogosphere provides more than 88,000 hits, many of them just a few days old. What this suggests, something that is speculative at best is that bloggers are actively more passionate about generating and maintaining public discourse about the abuse scandal than the mainstream media is.

In January 2006, Bruce Jackson complains in the political newsletter “Counterpunch” how the reality of the war in Iraq has been squelched by mainstream media’s comfort level with sensitive and controversial images. “The daily press and evening news are so attuned to our sensitivity or sensibility they just don't want to offend us,” Jackson notes. 

In other words, much of the mainstream media fail to fulfill their role in society by arbitrating what can and cannot be seen. The press becomes censored not only by the government but also by itself because of the possibility that the images may be too much to bear for the average person.

Now, people are turning to alternative sources such as blogs and Web sites to see these graphic and disturbing images.

How can we find the truth in a world so bombarded with questionable information? If the mainstream media does not tell us what we need to know because they are afraid of offending us and bloggers and Web sites  tell us more than we want to know, where is the balance?