the censorship of war photography takes many forms

The last war where photographers had any real freedom to shoot was  the one in Vietnam.  The Iraq war was never a war where the visual media had  the freedom they had in Vietnam.

Besides the official clampdown on images of  wounded and dead American soldiers  there was I remember the censorship on the use of photos shot by the soldiers themselves. All done in the guise of protecting  the Privacy of the soldiers . Silences and Censorship take many forms.

Photographers’ Oral History of the Iraq War

By DEXTER FILKINS

As the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war’s start approaches, Lens highlights “Photojournalists on War,” an oral history of the conflict as recounted by those who documented it from the front lines. The book, published this month by the University of Texas Press, was written by Michael Kamber, who covered the war for eight years for The New York Times.

Among the 39 photojournalists in the book are Andrea Bruce, Carolyn Cole, Stanley Greene, Tyler Hicks, Chris Hondros, Yuri Kozyrev, Khalid Mohammed and Joao Silva.

The following essay is from Dexter Filkins’s introduction. Mr. Filkins covered the Iraq war extensively as a correspondent for The New York Times and was based in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker.

But as the war went bad, and photographers and reporters came to rely on the embedding program to get to the vast stretches of Iraq where they could no longer go on their own, the military began to clamp down. The heart of the military’s efforts concerned the photographing of dead or wounded soldiers. In the beginning, not unreasonably, military officers wanted the publication of a photo of a dead solider to await the notification of his family. This, like other such restrictions, was not met with protest from photographers.

But as the war ground on, the rules tightened more. In practice, photographing a dead American soldier — under any circumstances — was out of the question. Any journalist hoping to photograph a wounded soldier needed his permission. It’s not hard to see the absurdity in the wounded-soldier rule: It was difficult to get a soldier’s permission before he had suffered his injury, and nearly impossible after. What soldier would sign a document giving someone the right to photograph him in the event of, say, his limbs being blown off? The result: images of dead and wounded Americans all but disappeared from the news pages in the United States. You will read the frustrations of the photographers in the pages ahead. But whatever the motivations behind the military’s restrictions — to spare the families of the fallen some pain, for instance — their effect was to cast a sanitized gloss over the war in Iraq, and to help deprive the American people of a fuller knowledge of the realities of the war that their fellow citizens were fighting. In a country whose bedrock principles hold that war can be waged only by consent of the people, such restrictions were troubling indeed.

There is a deeper angst that runs through the pages here: the precipitous drop, over the course of the conflict in Iraq, in the number of photographers assigned to cover the war at all. In the beginning of the war, in March 2003, hundreds of photographers came to cover it. By the war’s end, in 2011, there were never more than a half dozen. Part of this decline could be explained by war fatigue; as the conflict wore on, more and more Americans simply tuned out, and editors and publishers responded in kind. Part of the decline, too, was explained by the Pentagon’s growing restrictions on photographing the American military; why spend thousands of dollars to send photographers to Iraq when they are not allowed to shoot anything anyway?

But the overarching reason, as any photographer will tell you, is that budgets of newspapers and magazines all over America shrank so fast that all but the biggest institutions decided that photographing the war in Iraq was not something they could any longer afford. Photojournalism is today an embattled profession. When you read the testimonials here and peruse these stunning photographs, you may find yourself wondering whether the war in Iraq, for the men and the women with cameras, was the last of its kind.

Rita LeistnerAn Iraqi suspect in an early-morning roadside attack on a United States convoy was “bagged and tied” by American soldiers. He lay waiting on the lawn of a neighbor’s house while the soldiers discussed their next move. Balad, Iraq. July 16, 2003.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/photographers-oral-history-of-the-iraq-war/