war photography. - the waning after vietnam.

War photographs do make a difference. They did in Vietnam. They were not allowed to,  after that.  

My  search for photographs of the Vietnam (after reading the review of new book  by Nick Turse )  led me to this rather interesting look at  War photography. The waning of it after Vietnam. 




Modern wars are remembered in images, from Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier during the Spanish Civil War to Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima during WWII, to the more recent pictures in Iraq of prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Stephanie Sinclair’s photo of a dead Iraqi girl. These are images so powerful that the seer will forever remember the moment she first encountered them. They transcend being worth a thousand words; they are concrete facts of war that are impossible to ignore or dismiss. But on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the war in which images had the greatest impact on public opinion is still Vietnam.

One harrowing photograph, popularly known as Napalm Girl, was taken by AP photographer,Nick Ut on June 8, 1972, in the small village of Trang Bang and published through the AP to newspapers worldwide. Ut’s picture shows Kim Phuc, aged nine, running down an empty road, burned by napalm, naked in a group of clothed children, helpless next to armed soldiers. But what is the legacy of that photo, or of any of the recent wartime pictures of Afghanistan or Iraq? Do they have a strong enough impact to raise a call to action? Or has society become desensitized, avoiding that which causes moral discomfort, or, more chillingly, have we become aesthetic consumers of such imagery?





The most recent pictures to bring similar public outcry were of humiliation and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Politicians said it was an isolated incident, an unintended consequence of the war. Since then, additional photos of abuse both in Afghanistan and Iraq have come to light. Congress voted to keep those new photos from the public, citing their indecency. Historically, governments have wanted portrayals of war to create public support for the sacrifices of a country’s soldiers. But Vietnam reversed those expectations. Although Americans had already had a steady exposure to disturbing images of the war, fromMalcolm Browne’s 1963 picture of the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, to Eddie Adams’ 1968 picture of General Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner during the Tet Offensive, Kim Phuc’s picture was disturbing in a different way: AP headquarters at first rejected the photo for the indecency of frontal nudity, rather than focusing on the bigger indecency of children being burned alive. Ut and head of the department, Horst Fass, argued that napalm had burned off her clothes and refused to crop the photo. Finally an exception was made because of the news value of the story. In audiotapes of conversations with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, President Nixon speculated if the photo was real or if it had been fixed. Nick Ut later wrote: “The horror of the Vietnam war recorded by me did not have to be fixed.”



Catherine Leroy, an award-winning photojournalist who covered Vietnam, said in an interview with PDN: “We were not subjected to censorship. It was unprecedented, and it will never be repeated again. We have now entered ‘the brave new world’ where disinformation and censorship are being implemented and access reduced to photo opportunities.” If you search the internet, you will find eloquent pictorial essays on the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but we are not bombarded with them by newspapers, magazines, and television news as during Vietnam. One has to go look for it. Admittedly, this is a thing most would prefer to look away from rather than look at, afraid of what one might find and what that might call on one to do.


Although the Chicago Tribune ran Stephanie Sinclair’s photo of the dead Iraqi girl, some worried that it was too graphic, and a compromise was reached to include a story on the legacy of cluster bombs with it. According to an interview with Sinclair on Salon.com: “I found that the Iraqi civilian story was really hard to get published in U.S. publications. And I worked for many. I don’t know why. I think they’re looking at their readership and they think their readers want to know about American troops, since they can relate to them more. They think that’s what the audience wants.”


http://www.themillions.com/2010/04/legacy-of-a-photo.html



This is a war the Bush administration does not want Americans to see. From the beginning, the U.S. government has attempted to censor information about the Iraq war, prohibiting photographs of the coffins of U.S. troops returning home and refusing as a matter of policy to keep track of the number of Iraqis who have been killed.

Governments keep war hidden because it is hideous. To allow citizens to see its reality — the shattered bodies, the wounded children, the incomprehensible mayhem — is to risk eroding popular support for it. This is particularly true with wars that have less than overwhelming popular support to begin with. In the case of Vietnam, battlefield images played an important role in turning the tide of public opinion. And in Iraq, a war whose official justification has turned out to be false, and which a majority of the American people now believe to have been a mistake, the administration would prefer that these grim images never be seen.

But the media is also responsible for sanitizing the Iraq war, at times rendering it almost invisible. Most American publications have been reluctant to run graphic war images. 

Editors in the States are reluctant to run graphic photographs. There are various reasons for this. Perhaps the most important is taste: Many publications think graphic images are just too disturbing. Business considerations doubtless also play a role, although few editors would admit that; graphic images upset some readers and can scare off advertisers. (Salon pulled all advertising, except house ads, off the pages of this gallery.) And there are political considerations: Supporters of the war often accuse the media of playing up bad news at the expense of more positive developments. To run images of corpses is to risk being criticized of antiwar bias.

There is no way for any journalist, whether reporter or photographer, to capture the multifaceted reality of Iraq. But all of the journalists I have spoken to who have worked in Iraq say that the blandly optimistic pronouncements made by the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq are completely false. A picture of a dead child only represents a fragment of the truth about Iraq — but it is one that we do not have the right to ignore. We believe we have an ethical responsibility to those who have been killed or wounded, whether Iraqis, Americans or those of other nationalities, not to simply pretend that their fate never happened.To face the bitter truth of war is painful. But it is better than hiding one’s eyes.

Photo by MARCO DI LAURO/Getty
A U.S. Marine from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, next to the dead body of a suspected insurgent during the ground offensive Nov. 9, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq.

Photo by STEPHANIE SINCLAIR/Chicago Tribune
A mosque employee prepares the body of Lamiamh Ali, 6. Four siblings were playing outside their home in Baghdad when a U.S. cluster bomb exploded. Two of the children died that day and their brother died later as a result of his injuries. Photo taken April 26, 2003

Photo by WATHIQ KHUZAIE/Getty
An injured Iraqi man asks for help at the scene of a car bomb, on June 14, 2004, in Baghdad. A car bomb exploded at rush hour as three civilian sport utility vehicles — the kind favored by Western contractors — passed by one of Baghdad’s most heavily trafficked squares. Dozens were wounded in the blast.

Photo by MITCHELL PROTHERO/ WpN
Ali Abbas, 6, cries in pain from wounds sustained in fighting between U.S. troops and fighters loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Sept. 5, 2004. “I want the American people to see the face of the terrorists they fight,” said his father, Abbas.

Photo by EPA/STEFAN ZAKLIN/Landov
A U.S. soldier lies dead on the kitchen floor of a house used as a base by insurgent fighters in Fallujah, on Saturday, Nov. 13, 2004. The soldier was shot and killed by insurgent fighters when he entered the room. Two other U.S. military personnel were wounded by the insurgents, who escaped.

Photo by EPA/MOHAMMED MESSARA/Landov
Iraqis carry the dead body of a baby killed during U.S. airstrikes against the western city of Fallujah on Thursday, Sept. 9, 2004. At least five Iraqis were killed during the overnight bombardment.

Photo by KARIM SAHIB/Getty
Iraqi soldiers and policemen gather near the remains of an alleged suicide bomber, who blew himself up inside a restaurant in Baghdad on June 19, 2005. Ten Iraqis, including five policemen, died in the attack, an interior ministry source said.

Photo by AP Photo/JOHN MOORE
Army Chaplain Capt. Daoud Agbere, right, a Muslim cleric, prays for an American soldier after he was pronounced dead upon arrival at a military hospital in Baghdad, on Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, despite the efforts of Army Nurse supervisor Patrick McAndrew, left, to revive him. The soldier was fatally wounded in a Baghdad firefight with insurgents.

Photo by GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD/Getty
A critically wounded Iraqi civilian lies next to a dead civilian on Sept. 12, 2004, in Haifa Street, in Baghdad. After a U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle was attacked and disabled by a car bomb, a crowd of Iraqi civilians gathered around, including three Arab journalists. A U.S. helicopter then fired a missile into the crowd, killing 13 civilians — including a TV journalist who had just signed off on his report — and wounding as many as 100. Controversy persists over why the helicopter fired: The U.S. military first claimed it was a routine operation to destroy the vehicle, then that the helicopter had come under small-arms fire. Eyewitnesses disputed that claim.

Photo by GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD/Getty
In a photograph taken minutes later, the wounded Iraqi civilian has collapsed. The Bradley fighting vehicle burns in the background.

Photo by BENJAMIN LOWY/Corbis
The unattended bodies of unclaimed Iraqi dead, killed as violence and insecurity lay siege to Baghdad, lie on the floor of a Baghdad hospital morgue, on July 21, 2003.