Entries Tagged 'born yesterday' ↓

This is causing an uproar:

I report. You decide whether it is, as the Obama campaign noted, “tasteless and offensive” or whether those Obama folks aren’t awfully thin-skinned.

Hey! Even Andrew Sullivan agrees with me:

I thought it was quite funny myself. This was obviously intended ironically, and it’s not exactly Parade magazine.

The term “fauxtography” was coined after the events in Qana, Lebanon, this past summer. It’s a disturbing concept and an even more disturbing new reality. I just came upon a picture that illustrates (better than a thousand words) how the fauxtography sausage is made—and how hungry is the appetite for that sausage:

(via LGF)

Jeroen Oerlemans, The Netherlands, Panos Pictures. Paramedics show the dead body of a baby to the press after Israeli bombing of Qana, Lebanon, 30 July 2006

Of course, war photography doesn’t have to be so extravagantly manipulated [[scroll down for the head-on version]] in order to raise controversy. When Mathew Brady exhibited some of his photographs during the American Civil War, it had the opposite effect of what he hoped: the public was shocked and turned off.

[[ I will save the subject of contemporary war photography for another day (though you can see an example of it Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses images as an enhancement to his rhetoric on his blog. And why not? I do it, too. I tend toward the satirical whereas Sullivan tends toward the shiv-to-the-kidney. What can I say? All is fair in love and war—every war: remember Johnny Got His Gun?

That’s the first thing I thought of when I clicked on the link Sullivan sent me to. Dalton Trumbo’s searing, graphic anti-war novel was published in 1939, on the long eve of our entry into World War II, and republished as we sank into the jungles of Vietnam. Everything old is new again. Unless you can pull off the Born Yesterday (TM) dodge or the Who Knew? (TM) defense, on the theory that Every Day Is Groundhog Day (TM) ]].

Stepping back into another era, I can attest to the power of a couple of Vietnam War photographs (and a lot of the era’s extremely successful homefront propaganda, as for example, this, but that’s also a subject for another day).

When the photo below was published in 1972, it caused a sensation. It seared the conscience and delivered a message in a way that the continuous loop of jungle-warfare scenes on nightly TV did not; if anything, those news reports deadened us to the war. With arresting photos like this, the feeling in the air was palpable. We thought we could sense the rest of the country tipping over to join us in anti-war territory. And still Nixon was re-elected.

In 1996, Charles Paul Freund wrote about “Vietnam’s Most Harrowing Photo” and the double-edged sword that is war photography:

Kim, 9 years old in 1972, had taken shelter with others in a pagoda when the American military ordered the South Vietnamese air force to attack her village of Trang Bang because it had been infiltrated by enemy forces. The pagoda was hit, killing, among others, two of Kim’s brothers. Terrified survivors streamed onto the highway, where photographer Ut snapped them. Kim is naked, screaming in fear and agony, in the center of the image.

Breaking the fourth wall behind that scene, Freund notes:

[Photographer] Ut’s was not the only camera present; the sequence exists on film as well. Because it is more dreadful physically, the film is less potent emotionally. … [T]he filmed sequence closes out the event, and gives viewers an opportunity to shrug it off. Ut’s photo is of a crowded highway winding eternally through hell, and it won’t let you go.

Indeed.

[T]he picture ran on front pages throughout America. Benjamin Spock, who chose the photo to speak for him in the 1994 exhibition “Talking Pictures,” certainly echoed many of its viewers when he wrote simply, “[I]t horrified me,” and credited it with confirming his opposition to the war.

And it worked for the North Vietnamese, too:

The image was, of course, an important piece of atrocity propaganda for the North Vietnamese, who were themselves responsible for significant suffering both before and after they attained power. Like all such atrocity material, it undermined the morale of the side responsible for the pain it depicted.

Yes, and that’s why this kind of propaganda is such an effective weapon in asymmetric warfare. However, Freund makes another crucial point:

But the political manipulation of imagery doesn’t delegitimize its content. The pain here is only too real.

Indeed—in the Vietnam photograph Freund is describing, that’s true. And that’s also what makes it distinct from the example of fauxtography I’ve been discussing, which is staged atrocity propaganda. The effect is immediate. We stop and look. We are shocked and horrified. And that is all. For: the baby is dead, all right, but we feel nothing. And not just because there are dozens of photographers in the breaking-the-fourth-wall version of the photo above.

It’s because there is a difference between authenticity and, well, faux-ness. See for example this “original” photo from the series taken at Qana:

(via EUReferendum)

compared to this, which won the World Press Photo of the Year and which was not staged but which is rich with meaning—the awful authenticity of glitter and doom living side by side in Beirut in the summer of 2006:

Spencer Platt, USA, Getty Images

Young Lebanese drive through devastated neighborhood of South Beirut, 15 August