“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.” Walter Benjamin
Rod Stewart’s crooning got it right: “Every picture tells a story, don’t it.” Thus, war photography is perhaps doubly sanctioned. As we know all too well from seeing and reviewing more than a century and a half of war photographs, the images photographers bring back to our homes and eyes from battlefields and war torn places are riveting and moving. We cannot tear ourselves away from them. Sometimes they take root in our minds forever. Sometimes they change the world.
Their tug is in some ways like a seat at the circus when the trapeze artist misses her grip and comes tumbling down - only in war there are no nets. We peer into the void. And this fascination is more than mere rubbernecking. As the Walter Benjamin quote above suggests, our mortality sits always on our shoulders and directs us to gather and share the stories from the dark side. We have an appetite for them. From humanity’s first story, the Epic of Gilgamesh (2000 BC), through the Iliad and Lord of the Rings, like moths to the porch light we are attracted to stories of war and death. We go there to palpate what it is to be human, mortal and subject to misfortune. We go to sup and taste the end that will be there for each of us in some way on that day unknown and yet to fall. So here are a few thoughts about the special nature of picture stories of war. Like me, you are probably examining a lot of them as we approach the beginning of the third week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There are well developed and still evolving ethical principles around thoughtful and appropriate sharing of war images, and I am grateful for those who work in this field. I am largely ignorant of the best practices there and that is not what I want to speak about here. Also, as so much of the war photography now flowing through social media platforms are crowd sourced and very mildly edited, if at all, ethics in photo sharing seems a little beside the point. See Hans Brinker with his finger in the dike as a tsunami descends on him from behind. If I get sloppy in this writing and tread clumsily on some of the ethics of war photography, I hope my war picture ethicist friends will forgive me, or even better, correct me. I do not want to further confuse an already muddy puddle.
I wrote last week about how our new and rapidly evolving “fully wired” world creates its own special dance floor for pictures. What I am aiming to do here is to consider briefly how a digital photograph from the battlefield shared via social media platforms in this fully wired world constitutes a new kind of storytelling. Last week, I was in a spaces discussion (it’s a Twitter thing) with 20 or so photographers, editors, and curators and aspects of these questions came up as we examined this beautiful, tragic image of Magnum photographer Lorenzo Meloni.
The spaces topic was called “Photography When the World is Watching,” and it was a wide ranging discussion. A question raised by one of the participants, Amit Sharma, stood out for me. How should we feel about the beauty that we find in a photograph that depicts horrible acts and terrible results of war? Despite an excellent and lengthy discussion, it seemed to me we found no satisfactory final answer about what to think, feel or do about it. What to do? How to feel when beauty and horror occupy a single frame? Is it really true as John Keats said that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” and “that is all we know on earth and all we need to know?”
Someone observed that a war photographer is going to take the picture, tell the story and make the report regardless. Should we require that she make a “bad” or “ugly” picture? The question seems to get more serious still as we dig beyond the composition of the image itself, which is just the beginning of the photographer’s responsibility, and then we move into the surroundings of the image’s journey into the world of viewers. In what contexts and for what purposes will the image be shared? One of my favorite photos is Roger Fenton’s famous photograph from 1865. Its title is “The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Crimea, Ukraine” (yes, we have been here before). Despite its title and the fact that it is a war photograph, you might hang that photo in your living room. You and others might not realize it is an image from the aftermath of a war on a bloody battlefield in Crimea. Or you might know this, but find the terror, insanity and bloodiness of war removed far enough that it may be effectively considered in that form. And it is perhaps a bearable and responsible emblem to have on your wall, just as a reminder of where we stand, sad to say, as a species (hopefully) still evolving.
On the other hand Nick Ut’s famous 1972 photo of a naked 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running, screaming down the road; napalmed, her arms spread, and in obvious blinding pain is just too much. She and her neighbors and family wailing and fleeing with soldiers walking seemingly casually behind is unbearable. It could not be exhibited or displayed informally in that way. It requires a sort of sacred consideration that will not tolerate a casual regard. That girl, Pham Thi Kim Phuc, is now known informally and will forever be known as the ‘Napalm Girl’. She survived and has an amazing life and her own story existing well beyond that photograph and the shock waves and ripples it created. Her personal journey is a courageous and remarkable one. And Nick Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for the photograph now called “The Terror of War”. And his career and the story of their journey together since that moment is extraordinary as well. But, I am considering here the story of the photographic image that misfortune brought them together into. In a single image, it is a complete narrative of war spawned human terror and suffering witnessed; what the photographer witnessed, what the witnessed victim suffered ...and those of us who saw and absorbed the photograph at the time, the accused and complicit.
The image itself represents a decisive moment. It is, in the vernacular of older photojournalists, a tough, tough picture. It will always be hard to look at. The photograph and its story first landed - exploded really - into the American psyche on June 11, 1972 in a New York Times page 3 piece of reporting called “The Fire This Time”. It was and remains arguably one of the most impactful war photos in history.
The Nixon tapes reveal that when it appeared in the Times, he discussed it with H. R. Haldeman commenting “I’m wondering if that was fixed.” So white hot was the blowback from the image, the President was contending with it at the level of psychic object incoming - its political ramifications immediately apparent to him. It has been reported that the Times and its editors debated about not releasing it. Not because of the horror it depicted, but because Kim Phuc was naked. If reports of this debate are true, it is ironic that our squeamishness revolved more powerfully around the mores of nudity than injury and violence. To their everlasting credit, the Times published the photo. It was highly, and in my view, very successfully cropped to emphasize the individual suffering of the children and the presence of a soldier. That photograph’s publication occurred 50 years ago this year. It was published just months ahead of Nixon’s crushing defeat of McGovern - the “peacenik” - in November that year.
It would be tempting to say that photograph did very little to bring the war to a close. Certainly, McGovern’s campaign for peace, the ever rising tide of dissent at home, the peace talks and world wide pressure for ending the war had been building for some time and many other factors played a role, but I am not so sure this photograph didn’t hasten or guarantee the war’s end.
I was 18 at the time the photograph was published. I voted that year in the first election ever to allow 18-year-olds the vote. It was the most personally meaningful vote I have ever made for President. It seemed sensible to law makers and the country that if you were old enough to be sent to die in war - you were old enough to vote. In 1969 the government draft, euphemistically and ominously called the Selective Service System (SSS), began a lottery system that made every 19-year-old without exception subject to conscription depending on a chance drawing of their birthday. Nineteen-year-olds were being drafted by the tens of thousands. 1973, my 19th year, and the year I was to run the draft lottery gauntlet, was harrowing for me. Every 19-year- old waited breathlessly to see where their date of birth would be slotted. You wanted your birthdate to come out of the hat last - at least in the back half of the 365. My birthday was in the top 10 pulled out of the hat. Mister top 10 out of 365 - I was certain to be drafted. The year before the conscription numbers had gone as high as the 95th slot in order for the military to have the conscripts their war plans called for. But, as fortune had it, in 1973 the conscription faucets where turned off. The war plans halted. No further conscript soldiers were needed. The US was pulling out. In a real sense, that photograph may have changed my life.
I recall vividly my decision process around that vote, and I was highly aware that Nixon and Kissinger were signaling they would accelerate the Vietnamization of the war - hinting they would end it. And in January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, and we saw the beginning of the end of American involvement in the war finally achieved. It is certainly possible that all this might have happened without Nick Ut’s photograph of the brutal assault Kim Phuc’ endured. But, that photograph’s presence in the hearts and minds of the American people made it very difficult to imagine any further extensions or dawdling toward the end of war. Here is the image as cropped and as it appeared in print.
For images to do their storytelling magic and have this degree of impact they must be seen. The current Russian government gets this, and it shows. Putin’s draconian censorship and disinformation, the blackout of Facebook, his clamping down on any other sources of information or imagery for the Russian people, other than his lying state run media, is very telling. Other signs of this awareness and fear include his recent, rapid “enactment” of criminal “laws” featuring 15 years imprisonment for uttering or disseminating the “wrong stories” is evidence of this fear. And now his street cops are engaging in random stop and frisk “demand scrolling” of the phones of passerby in the streets! All of this is a clear recognition by the current regime that if Russians become aware of the true nature of his actions in Ukraine, carried out in their name, the war would end and his tenure would be up. Putin knows that if Russians saw and understood this truth, he would be forced to end his atrocities in Ukraine and likely face a coup or revolution.
It is noteworthy that in this instance his government cannot even tolerate the slightest whiff of the truth. Ordinarily, the dictator’s disinformation campaigns could spin furiously and froth at the mouth about fake news, doctored images and deep fake videos and control the carefully cultured hive mind of ordinary Russians. But, in this instance, the stakes are too high. He has invaded and is waging war against Russia’s well known neighbors and in many instances family members. And in this fully wired world with the instant and massively crowdsourced imagery that digital and social platforms afford, it is impossible for the government to spin fast enough to cloud, cover or confuse the truth. The truth would set the Russian people free and liberate the Ukrainians from this terrible invasion.
I will end this essay with a photograph and a prayer. Let us consider this image, a photograph by Lynsey Addario, again published by the Times, March 7, 2022, again civilians fleeing death.
Here we see the raw death and naked tragedy of war. A Ukrainian soldier attends a man barely alive and in extremis. Sprawled out behind the man are his wife and two children, now corpses lying just as they fell when struck by mortar fire. Their luggage and civilian clothes attest they were fleeing for their lives and were non-combatants. If only this image and the story it tells could be made available and known to every Russian.
But ordinary Russians will not be allowed to see this picture and see the truth of what is happening under their flag and in their name. So, I must retract or at least modify my earlier assertion that we live now in a fully wired world. As long as tyrants are able to control the stories their people are allowed to see and hear, we will continue to be subject to a bloody and tragic asymmetrical understanding of what it is to be human, what we are doing to each other, and what we might possibly be capable of being for each other. My prayer is for a world where, through technological prowess or international solidarity, the truthful, even painful, stories of what is really happening flow freely; uninterrupted and without distortion. That is the truth and the beauty that is desperately needed now.
Post Scriptum:
Implied in what I’ve written here is my profound respect and gratitude for the photojournalists who work in this realm, but let me make it fully and explicitly expressed. Those brave and talented photographers who place themselves in danger to witness and give us their evidence and visual truth from the killing fields are humanity’s heroes of the first order. Let us make every effort to be worthy of their sacrifices and contributions by bearing witness too and doing all we can to end war, and bring about peace and healing in every small and large way possible with the time and energy allotted to each of us.
The Fire This Time
Thanks, Bill. I've been thinking about this a lot lately — the state of misinformation in the world and the silos we're all living in online. Really glad you're sharing these ideas here.