Brokering the Power of the Image

[seemslikeadream]

By JAMES KELLY/MANAGING EDITOR



Monday, May. 31, 2004
Looking at dozens of photographs for our D-day special this week, I was struck by how vividly the images caught the chaos of that famous day, a day that claimed the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers. And then I noticed something else: there are very few images that show the casualties. As it turns out, the goriest images were censored, and many pictures of American soldiers killed in combat were not allowed to be shown until later.

How times have changed. Since Gulf War II began, I've looked at thousands of pictures from the battlefront. We've published dozens of them across two-page spreads, including the now famous hospital photograph of Ali, an Iraqi boy who lost both arms in a U.S. bombing. We've never tried to prettify war. Sometimes, however, I saw remarkable images that I felt were too graphic to print in TIME. Case in point: a series of photos taken last spring of U.S. soldiers carefully picking up limbs of dead Iraqis after a battle northwest of Baghdad.



This is not the first time, of course, that TIME editors have weighed the challenge of showing the consequences of war while keeping the sensibilities of our readers in mind. We faced that issue in 1983, when we covered the invasion of Grenada and the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and in 1993, when Somali rebels ambushed U.S. troops and dragged the body of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu. In each case, we ran photographs that upset some readers but refrained from publishing the most brutal ones. We felt that what we presented to our readers did justice to the tragedies, but not in a gratuitous way.

It is not just a matter of when to show the body of a dead American soldier; we've wrestled with what is appropriate to show when covering the carnage in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, when hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were massacred by the Hutu, and during the recent uprising in Haiti, when I viewed photographs of bodies piled up in morgues that were among the most unsettling images I've ever seen. (In that particular case, photographs of the chaos on Port-au-Prince's streets were so vivid that I chose to use them to illustrate the story.)

more
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040531-641132,00.html

[ze_dscherman]

1. "We've never tried to prettify war."

This is an outright, infamous lie. Pictures from Iraq were very, very carefully controlled. No cascets, not dead, wounded or maimed U.S. troops, and certainly not the real gory pictures the Arab world could see.

IMO, the world needs to see the gory details of war, in order to forever shun it. So please Mr. Editor, shut up about sensibilites.

[AlCzervik]

2. But somehow we always manage to show

the atrocities of other countries while ignoring our own. the pictures should be shown in full, people need to see what exactly war is and what it costs. The armchair generals and spin machines would like us all to think that this war is like another john Wayne movie, no wars were like that to begin with. control the pictures and you can keep a lid on the public's outrage but sooner or later it will all come out.

[seemslikeadream]

5. ignoring our own

WITHOUT SANCTUARY


Lynchers often paraded their victim down the main street, through black neighborhoods, and in front of "colored schools" that were in session.

Jesse Washington, seventeen years old, was the chief suspect in the May 8, 1916, murder of Lucy Fryer of Robinson, Texas, on whose farm he worked as a laborer. After the lynching, Washington's corpse was placed in a burlap bag and dragged around City Hall Plaza, through the main streets of Waco, and seven miles to Robinson, where a large black population resided.

His charred corpse was hung for public display in front of a blacksmith shop. The sender of this card, Joe Meyers, an oiler at the Bellmead car department and a Waco resident, marked his photo with a cross (now an ink smudge to left of victim).


This card bears the advertising stamp, "katy electric studio temple texas. h. lippe prop." inscribed in brown ink: "This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe."

Repeated references to eating are found in lynching-related correspondence, such as "coon cooking," "barbecue," and "main fare."
http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html

[teryang]

3. What a pompous ass! n/t

[seemslikeadream]

4. Postcards? Why not?

This is a token of a great day we had in Dallas

Silhouetted corpse of African American Allen Brooks hanging from Elk's Arch, surrounded by spectators. March 3, 1910. Dallas, Texas.

Tinted lithographed postcard. 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.

Printed inscription on border, "LYNCHING SCENE, DALLAS, MARCH 3, 1910". Penciled inscription on border, "All OK and would like to get a post from you. Bill, This was some Raw Bunch."




This postcard, addressed to Dr. J.W.F. Williams, LaFayette, Christian County, Kentucky documents the sentiments of one lunchtime spectator.

"Well John - This is a token of a great day we had in Dallas, March 3, a negro was hung for an assault on a three year old girl. I saw this on my noon hour. I was very much in the bunch. You can see the negro hanging on a telephone pole. "


http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html