Images Matter – Honest Images Matter Most
Susan Moeller, writing in the Washington Post, reminds us why images are important in wartime. She begins by explaining the sheer power of what is arguably the most famous photograph taken in the Second World War, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima:
Countless publications duplicated the image. It was reproduced on a postage stamp, made into a statue, copied on untold numbers of commemorative items and turned into a Hollywood movie plot. Joe Rosenthal's photograph not only gave Americans back home an image of what was happening on the front lines, it persuasively argued that Americans were winning.
Rosenthal died last Sunday at the age of 94. When I interviewed him in the mid-1980s for a book I wrote on American war photography, he argued that he had no problem with his photograph being adopted as the icon of the war. What mattered, he said, is that the essential truth that his image captured had not been altered. World War II was the "good war." And Americans were the liberators. (Emphasis added).
Moeller goes on to describe the history of imagery in wartime. Of course such images are enormously powerful and enormously influential on public opinion. That is why it is vital the images be honest.
Images are powerful indicators of victory and defeat. The war on terrorism and the shooting wars in Iraq and Lebanon are increasingly being played out through images in print, on television and online. Blogs post photos of an angry President Bush and juxtapose them with those of a smiling Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader. Cable news programs show pictures of bleeding civilians in the streets of Iraq, which reverberate ominously after video images of British police patrolling Heathrow airport.
It's tempting to think that it's only in our brave new age of digital cameras and video phones, of 24-hour news channels and satellite uplinks, that images have mattered as much as they do — that because we can see more images from literally anywhere in real time, images somehow have gained in power relative to the humble word. It's not true.
Moeller's point is that images have become intrinsic to military strategy. Quite true. The manipulation of the imagery is where problems arise. People like David Perlmutter and the late Joe Rosenthal (I think Moeller, too) get that fundamental fact. People like Greg Mitchell do not.
