maandag, maart 21, 2005
Waiting for a Clear Picture To Emerge
After two years and more than 1,500 U.S. casualties in a war that has been perhaps the best documented in history, no single photograph from the hostilities in Iraq has emerged as iconic. Images arrive, vie for our attention and are contradicted or superseded by other more immediate images. The red glare of shock and awe, the orange haze of sandstorms in the early weeks of war, the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, the speech on the deck of an aircraft carrier -- all of these moments, captured in photographs or video, belong to what feels like a prehistory of what we have now, a long grind with continuing destruction and a failing attention span for the daily death toll. Only a few images from the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib have forced themselves repeatedly on our attention, and even those have faded (here) as our attention turns elsewhere and the U.S. government prosecutes a few low-level offenders.
Despite heroic efforts of photojournalists to document the challenges and successes of the long grind of occupation, no one has captured a picture that has anything like the power of Nick Ut's photograph of a naked girl fleeing a napalm strike in Vietnam (could it be published in a "family" newspaper today?) or Joe Rosenthal's image of the flag raised on Iwo Jima. Those images captured -- or helped crystallize -- a consensus about the wars they represented, a consensus that has yet to emerge about the war in Iraq.
The most powerful photographs of war -- Eddie Adams's Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of a Viet Cong prisoner executed on a street, Robert Capa's image of a Republican soldier felled in the Spanish Civil War -- remain ones that show directly the moment of death, the destruction of the body or the mortal remains. By contrast, the metonymic images of this war are becoming thinner, more generic, rather than denser and more intense. They fall into categories -- man weeping, car burning, women running, soldiers patrolling -- without any single image rising above the lot.
Lees meer in de Washington Post.
Despite heroic efforts of photojournalists to document the challenges and successes of the long grind of occupation, no one has captured a picture that has anything like the power of Nick Ut's photograph of a naked girl fleeing a napalm strike in Vietnam (could it be published in a "family" newspaper today?) or Joe Rosenthal's image of the flag raised on Iwo Jima. Those images captured -- or helped crystallize -- a consensus about the wars they represented, a consensus that has yet to emerge about the war in Iraq.
The most powerful photographs of war -- Eddie Adams's Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of a Viet Cong prisoner executed on a street, Robert Capa's image of a Republican soldier felled in the Spanish Civil War -- remain ones that show directly the moment of death, the destruction of the body or the mortal remains. By contrast, the metonymic images of this war are becoming thinner, more generic, rather than denser and more intense. They fall into categories -- man weeping, car burning, women running, soldiers patrolling -- without any single image rising above the lot.
Lees meer in de Washington Post.
# posted by Jan-Edward : 16:45
|
|