The war in Iraq now has its own iconic images. But they are far different from the defining images of other wars. Journalist Eddie Adams’ photograph of a Saigon street execution defined the Vietnam War. Journalist Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag-raising photo marked World War II. Now we have amateur photos of Lynndie R. England and her band of brothers (and sisters) at the Abu Ghraib prison.
With the digital camera, anybody can be a documentarian. You can record every day in the life of your granddaughter or record the Abu Ghraib night shift. It’s easy. The new cameras focus for us, shoot in low light and can be instantly edited.
And it’s easy to share pictures. Most of Robert Capa’s film of Omaha Beach burned up in a lab accident, but the digital images from Abu Ghraib have multiplied like a virus, e-mailed around the globe.
They will be with us forever.
Just as Erich Maria Remarque brought home the reality of World War I with words in “All’s Quiet on the Western Front,” GIs are now bringing home the reality of modern war with photographs.
Digital cameras are even more ubiquitous than Humvees in America’s newest theater of war. Naked prisoners, leashes and hoods, cigarettes dangling from the mouths of grinning guards. The picture is not pretty.
Unlike photos showing the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue or the ship-shape commander in chief announcing “mission accomplished” on the deck of an aircraft carrier, these prison photographs offer incriminating evidence of a conflict gone wrong.
For the war in Iraq, the Bush administration devised the idea of embedded journalism. Put reporters and photographers in the heart of the action, they figured, and they’ll help depict the sacrifice that our troops are making. The idea almost worked.
Little did they imagine what might happen if the true embeds, the soldiers themselves, had cameras.
So the government, which is sworn to protect free speech, is faced with an equally daunting issue: free pictures.
“We’re functioning with peacetime constraints, with legal requirements, in a wartime situation in the Information Age,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained, “where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.”
The “people” are his employees.
The Bush administration should realize that the pixels are already out of the bag. Governments, no matter how powerful, can no longer hold back the tide of digital imagery.
So why do pictures matter?
Why do photographs, in particular, have the uncanny ability to move us?
The simple answer is that we believe them. Despite how easy it is to manipulate photographic imagery, most of us consider photos to be real. On one level, we know that photos are simply magic–miniature two-dimensional representations of life.
And sometimes–as in the 2003 altered photo of Iraqi refugees for the Los Angeles Times–we know that pictures are intentional hoaxes. But generally, in photos we trust. Wrote philosopher Susan Sontag: Photographs are evidence.
They are precious too. They capture moments in time and freeze them in place. The world constantly changes. People and things move. Light shifts. So every photograph has added value because it stands for something that is no longer with us.
And photographs are packed with information. They are filled with layers and layers of shade, content, form, shape and color. If you’ve ever stood in a darkroom and watched the birth of a print in wet chemicals, you would swear you are watching a miracle. And in this age, even our least-expensive digital cameras gather megapixels of digital data at every click–more information than most novels.
Scientists have spent a lot of time trying to understand how our brain deals with words and pictures. We have no final answers, but here is what we know.
Words and pictures enter our brain in different locations–words apparently arrive in our left-brain hemisphere and pictures arrive in the right. If you can read, words are both visual and auditory. Letters blend together in our mind until they form words, which then must be immediately checked by opening our mental dictionary. The process sounds complicated, but we have opened that dictionary so many times it becomes automatic. So automatic, in fact, that words give us hardly any pause.
Written stories come to us linearly, word by word by word, and we don’t fully process them until we have digested a bunch of words. You are not likely processing these words as you read them. Instead, you will wait until the end of the sentence, the end of the paragraph, the end of the story.
We drift over words, but we spend time looking at pictures. We wonder what came moments before the picture and what came moments after.
Remarkably, our mind processes pictures whole. Our brain scans them, from edge to edge, and then we ask ourselves what the picture shows and means before we fully process the information. Because our brains give pictures more attention, they become more memorable and more fixed in our minds than do words.
“We are visual animals,” said Dr. Barry Gordon, founder of the Johns Hopkins Memory Clinic and author of “Intelligent Memory.” “We have relied on our vision since we lived in trees.”
People have enormous visual processing capacity in their brains, Gordon said, far more advanced than any replicated on a computer. “It is still an unsolved problem how to get a robot to navigate through a room,” he said. “If we saw a 12-month-old baby having trouble avoiding toys in her way, we’d be concerned. But this is still beyond most supercomputers.”
So now, we have a new force in the world–photographs taken by amateurs. The digital camera has become a part of our lives. We are bombarded daily by commercials showing us how easy it is to use cell phone cameras. We see locker room signs prohibiting the use of cameras. So does that make the rest of the world a gargantuan photo opportunity? The answer apparently is yes.
The problem, of course, is the false sense of knowledge that photographs impart. When we see a photograph, we feel that we were there. No need to read the Taguba report, we tell ourselves, because we’ve seen the photographs and we know what happened.
But photographs, like words, don’t tell the whole story.
Eddie Adams has said that his Saigon execution photograph, which helped galvanize opposition to the Vietnam War, was always misunderstood. Nguyen Ngog Loan, the police general who executed the Viet Cong prisoner, was justified, according to Adams, in time of war.
Joe Rosenthal has spent much of his life defending the veracity of his Iwo Jima photo. Turns out the flag planting was the second atop Mt. Suribachi, several hours after the victory.
Time will tell the impact of the Abu Ghraib prison photographs. Will they hasten a withdrawal? Will they help topple the administration?
Sometimes, technology has a sneaky way of undoing presidents. The tape recorder undid President Richard Nixon; DNA science undid President Bill Clinton. Now the digital camera might undo President Bush.
