href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/05/iraq.usa">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/05/iraq.usa.
10 Heidegger’s idea is presented in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1960, originally from 1935).
11 Wieviorka (2006: 101) reports that “one of the recurring themes in both oral and written survivor testimony is of a promise made to a friend or relative who is about to die, a promise to tell the world what happened to them and thus to save them from oblivion – to make death a little less futile. Survival itself is often explained and justified by this will to honor the legacy of those who perished”.
12 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Principles, Vol. II, p. 2563 (all quotations).
[56][57]2. Image Control in the Age of Terror
Louie Palu
The act of witnessing war, violence, documenting them and for what purpose any resulting photographs are used for can determine the outcome of political understanding and decisions on every level affecting a war.1 For example most if not all high-level politicians and civilian diplomats representing countries with western soldiers fighting in Kandahar, Afghanistan where I worked between 2006 and 2010 relied on series of witnesses for their understanding of the conflict. These civilians and policy makers were not allowed beyond a certain sized secure military base cut off from the communities they might be located in. This resulted furthermore in most civilian employees of any government not being permitted anywhere near the true frontlines where their policies may count most because of the high risk of them being targeted by opposing forces. Terrorists and militants in many areas attempt attacking any representative of a foreign government for the high propaganda value some insurgent groups placed on killing western civilians especially representing governments such as the United States and Canada. In addition, they were not allowed on patrols or out on combat operations with soldiers. They relied on journalist’s and soldier’s interpretations and reports on what the war looked and sounded like. The situation on the ground in the war was interpreted for them using still photographs, writing and including some video. However, even the witness is limited by what they can convey by these methods of documentation and representation as details such as the smell of war which includes dead bodies and what all the senses experience including the weather can never be documented as real as the an in person experience.
[58]Fig. 2.1: Screen capture still photograph from video made by the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan as it appears in Louie Palu’s documentary “Kandahar Journals” (76 minutes 2015). 2015 Photo © Louie Palu
Current conflicts like those that involve ISIS (aka ISIL) have become near impossible to photograph by journalists and include environments much too hostile to work in as an independent witness, as ISIS has made it their message within their videos to perform grotesque killings of members of the western media and create their own content. It is now the sophisticated manner in which militant groups such as ISIS create visual content and control what is visually documented that has changed the manner in which we see and don’t see what is going on in the world’s new battlefields.
When I see a photograph, the first thing I do is figure out who took it. But the name of the person who pressed the shutter button is just the first stem: for what purpose was the photograph taken? In printed newspapers and magazines, the photographer’s byline is often more discrete than that of the author of a news article the photograph accompanies. The photographer is identified by fine print in the margin of the page. Next, I turn to the caption: the who, what, when, where, why and how of the image as described there is critical to understanding the photograph as a photograph.
In the years dominated by the printed page, the photograph, its caption if any and the credit were printed on the same sheet of paper. They were inseparable. In the digital age, images are embedded online in social media apps without credit or caption Authorship and context are stripped away, and the viewer is left to make assumptions. Most of the students whom I have spoken[59] to who have come of age in the internet era say they do not look for the author of the photograph or for its caption.
Fig. 2.2: Screen capture still photograph from video made by ISIS of the murder of American Journalist James Foley in 2014.
When photographs are presented as digital files, they are often downloaded without the text containing the photographer’s credit. This has a long-term cost. Archives, libraries and schools end up with photographs whose provenance is lost to time. This exacerbates the long-time practice of newspaper copy editors, who often replace the caption a photographer writes with quotes from the story the photograph accompanies, always over the photographer’s objections. Now many images on social media photographs have no text accompanying the context of the image, they are there to simply “illustrate” the story.
Though non-professional bystanders can sometimes take images that are inarguably newsworthy, this does not, in my view, make them journalists. I’ve always had a problem with the term “citizen journalist”. As a working journalist, I’ve always followed a code of ethics that, among other things, calls for independence and impartiality.2 Professional journalists may fall short of ethical aspirations, but they consider the impact of their images in a way that amateurs might not.
[60]This became clear to me when covering the drug war in Mexico between 2011 and 2013. I came to the realization that all parties with a vested interest in a war zone utilize photography to control what can be seen. Independent witnesses like myself vie over audiences and views of the war. In one month in Mexico, I covered over 100 murders in two cities: Ciudad Juarez and Culiacan. I also spent months of fieldwork covering drug addiction, mental health, and the daily life of Mexicans and Americans affected by the drug war.
First, there were members of the Mexican and American government and business community I spoke to who felt that dwelling on the conflict gave a distorted view and painted a negative image of Mexico–images of thousands of murdered Mexicans in the news didn’t adequately reflect the complexity of reality, in their view. The rise of Mexico’s middle class, for instance, was neglected. Then there were many people on both sides of the border I spoke to who gave an opposite view: every person murdered should be shown in the news, so that the people responsible for their deaths–including those in government–could be held accountable. It became very difficult to reconcile these views when working in the field. How much time should I spend covering murders? They happened every day, but so did the rest of life
Studying images of the Mexican drug war, I categorized their creators in a rough schema:
1. The Government or Corporate Handout
A photograph created and released for free use by the media taken by a photographer working for the government, special interest group such as a agricultural association, or a corporation. These images usually gave an image that painted the government in a positive light or of them arresting criminals and capturing weapons and drugs. The Mexican economy and tourism also figured quite prominently in the high number of images that dominated the conversation away from the drug war.
2. The Photojournalist
Photographs made following straightforward journalistic practices, which in most cases are associated with news media outlets such as Reuters, the Associated Press, or numerous Mexican news outlets. Many organized crime groups found some of the coverage negative and revealed some of their activities resulting over the years in the murder of numerous journalists in Mexico. In some areas of Mexico, such as the state of Tamaulipas, news photography
