A war and its images: as photographs and films dealing with the Iraq War become the subject of partisan debate, the author considers their ethical and historical context

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

Postmodernism tells us that any "truth" is shaped, that images have no meaning outside their context, that reality is at best inaccessible and, at worst, nonexistent. From certain perspectives, the Iraq War seems to substantiate these claims. A pair of media documentaries released this summer, Outfoxed, directed by Robert Greenwald, and Control Room, directed by Jehane Noujaim, provide insight into the workings of Fox News and Al Jazeera, respectively. These two television networks have played important roles in shaping opinions on either side of the war. Taken together, the films suggest how the "story" of this conflict has been molded and manipulated to serve different political ends. During a telling scene in Control Room, the press liaison for the U.S. Central Command recounts his dawning realization that Al Jazeera and Fox are equally adept at cherry-picking their stories.

But, paradoxically, this war also resuscitates the very unpostmodern notion that images may serve as bearers of truth. One of the big differences between Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2 has to do with the kinds of images each conflict has produced. In the first Gulf War, information was famously and overtly managed--pictures of dead Americans and dead Iraqis were almost impossible to find in the American media, though they were plentiful in the Arab and European press. Instead, for most Americans, the images that stick in the mind are the endlessly replayed video-gamelike documentation of precision bombing attacks (which in retrospect turned out not to be so precise after all).

This time around, the administration opted for a different press strategy, "embedding" photographers and reporters with troops to give them a ground-level vision of the conflict. Critics argued that embedded journalists were subtly encouraged to identify with their units, and hence with the objectives of the war. But these efforts by the U.S. government to control the media's message were undermined by the flood of unofficial images available on the Web, a medium which barely existed at the time of the first Gulf War. As a result, this war, much longer and messier than the last one, has produced a surfeit of memorable images, some "authorized," some not. These include the near-cinematic spectacle of the initial bombing of Baghdad, the grim pictures of the charred remains of American contract workers hanging from a bridge in Fallujah and the depictions of the humiliations of Iraqi prisoners chained like dogs or pried linked in human pyramids at Abu Ghraib. This time, Americans at home have been treated to graphic images of both the grandeur and the degradations of war.

In Camera Lucida, his groundbreaking book on photography, Roland Barthes insists that the distinguishing mark of the medium is the conviction it engenders that "this was there," that the thing or event depicted was, if only for a fleeting minute, once actually before the camera's eye. Despite our consciousness of how photographic images can be distorted and even invented, this belief in the truth value of photography remains powerful. As such, it has played out on behalf of a number of very differ cut constituencies in this war.

Tales of torture at Abu Ghraib didn't become real, either to the Bush administration or the American public, until digital photographs of the incidents surfaced. Meanwhile, the American military departed from its general policy of not showing corpses when it provided photographs of Saddam's dead sons, before and after they had been stitched up for burial. And from the opposite end of the political spectrum, one of the most effective strategies of Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 is the presentation of footage ignored by the major media--limbless soldiers in an army hospital, the mangled bodies of dead Iraqis and Americans, U.S. soldiers storming Iraqi homes and dragging out terrified suspects as their wives and mothers weep. This is the real story, Moore insists; this is what we have been prevented from seeing.

From the perspective of those involved in visual art, the Iraq War offers a fascinating case study of the ways that images and their absence shape oar understanding of unfolding events. It also casts light on longstanding questions about ethics and photography and about the efficacy of the visual as a tool of social change.

Over the course of the last year and a half, Iraq-related photographic and video images have been employed for a variety of ends. At times, they have been more or less deliberately constructed for public relations purposes. In this category, one would place the coverage of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo up on an aircraft carrier in May 2003, the dismantling of the statue of Saddam Hussein (debate continues over how spontaneous and how widely supported this action was) and Bush's surprise Thanksgiving visit to the troops last year. By contrast, for polemicists like Moore, documentary images from the front operate as testimony, providing us with real, as opposed to managed, evidence of the war's effects on individuals and on the Iraqi and American public. Apparently, the Aim Ghraib torture photographs may have been original ly taken as trophies--in "The Photographs Are Us," her May 23, 2004, article for the New York Times Magazine, Susan Sontag likens them to the lynching photographs that circulated in the U.S. between the 1880s and the 1930s in the form of postcards and souvenir images. Like those pictures, the prison photos offer glimpses of smiling spectators and perpetrators astonishingly unaware of any moral dilemmas the depicted events might pose.