remains impossible.
[61]3. Independent Photographers, Known to Some as Citizen Journalists
If you search for the Mexican drug war online, you will find hundreds of images of murders circulating on blogs and elsewhere. Some photographs have been taken by police officers or soldiers, or by individuals who simply arrive at the murder scene before the authorities and take a picture with a mobile phone. Some sites have writing; some don’t. Some combine their own content, while others mix it or copy and paste the work of professional journalists with theirs. Many individuals who operate these sites use pseudonyms, due to the level of violence and threat against the lives of journalists in Mexico. Many of the images I have seen from these sources are very graphic, usually too gruesome to publish and have no credit or context to the photograph. One such blog I followed is Borderland Beat. It was useful for me, but also very unreliable, because I never knew who had taken the photographs they were showing or why.
4. Organized Crime Groups and Drug Cartels
Narcotraffickers follow in the tradition as many armed groups in the past such as the Irish Republican Army in using photography and video to communicate their ideas and to project their message and power. However, the Narcos have developed the use of something unique called a Narcomanta, which is usually a large sheet or banner with their message painted or printed on it, hung in a public place. This is a new development. Narcomantas are generally only text – a photograph isn’t printed on the banner.
Narcomantas have two lives – the first in the world where they hang, and the second when they are photographed by news photographers or the public, and circulate again, as a photograph of a set up scene with a written message made to be photographed. Sometimes narcomantas are laid on top of bodies, or in some cases affixed to a fence or wall above piles of bodies or body parts. They typically have written messages against competing cartels or government figures. This practice has to some extent replaced the traditional use of graffiti by street gangs or organized crime.
Whereas graffiti was location specific, Narcomantas can be placed anywhere to suit the message or amount of people walking or driving down a road to see it.
[62]Fig. 2.3: “Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002”. DoD photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy.
Drug traffickers are not only killing photojournalists, but they are competing with them in trying to dominate what the public does or does not see through the use of visual devices.
Narcomantas are not sophisticated in their production values. Their force, such as it is, comes from the stark brutality of the message they convey. But other groups, such as Islamic terrorists in the Mideast, ISIS/ISIL in particular, have also coopted the techniques of photo and video journalists. The videos ISIS creates of executions use traditional and classical forms of composition, color and design. They use filters, silhouettes, lighting and romanticized scenes[63] where the militants perform for the camera to spread their ideology. They took the orange jumpsuit first used by the American military and used it to clothe hostages. Many of their videos are so brutal that screen captures of less graphic segments of their videos are created as still photographs by news media for publishing.
The first photograph I ever saw of detainees from Guantanamo Bay was of a group of detainees in orange jumpsuits with U.S. soldiers standing over them in a fenced off area. The first time I remember seeing an image (which was a frame capture as a still photograph from a video) of a member of ISIS acted as an aesthetic mirror to the Guantanamo image but in reverse as an image with a American journalist in an orange jumpsuit on his knees and a member of ISIS standing over them before killing him. The photograph as a symbol of power and the color orange have been used as a visual response to the U.S. Government’s hand out photograph. I have been to the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay where the infamous detention center is based several times on media tours organized by the U.S. Department of Defense. The manner in which photographs are taken is highly controlled. In response to this I created a concept publication, one which I have shared with numerous students in classrooms as an exercise in image control, censorship and editing. As an ongoing exploration of the subject of image control I wrote the following instructions on the rear of publication for any students who interact with the publication:
GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review is a concept publication; it has no headlines, competing articles or advertising. It is an editing project, which uses photographs taken by Louie Palu at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay where detainees captured after the attacks of September 11, 2001 are being held. These photographs were taken while on several media tours organized by the U.S. Department of Defense between 2007-2010. The tours and access to take photographs is strictly managed and controlled by U.S. military officials. Photographs can only be taken with a digital camera.
At the end of each day of photography at the detention center, an official from the U.S. Department of Defense conducts an “Operational Security Review”. This is a process in which digital photographs deemed to have classified content or imagery that does not follow the guidelines for media coverage of the detention center are deleted from the photographer’s memory cards. The only traces that remain of the deleted images are file numbers listed on an official Department of Defense form given to the photographer. These forms have also been included in this publication. This publication can be dismantled and re-edited to your view of what you think the story should look like. It is also an exhibition that can be displayed anywhere you choose without the formality of a gallery or museum.
GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review is the second publication in a series exploring image control in the media. The first, “Mira Mexico”, examines the Mexican drug war and the optics of drug-related violence. The goal of both projects is to position the[64] user/viewer as editor, curator or censor. The central question of this project is, “who controls what you see?”
The response by many of the students who have attended my lecture and participate in this exercise in editing the GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review concept newspaper always respond with shock and sometimes anger when they read about the deleting of images after every day of photography. However, what I ask them and what I confronted myself about is we all control what people see and don’t see even in journalism.
In my profession as a photojournalist, we edit photographs. I might take 500 photographs on an assignment and only select 15 of them to submit to my editor at a newspaper, which publishes one of them. What happens to the 499 images the newspaper didn’t print? How is the newspaper’s process of selection distinct from the government censors?
We have entered an age where learning visual literacy is as important an exercise as it is to read words. Millions of images are produced everyday. Learning to understand who produced them and for what purpose is more crucial than ever as people’s ideas of what is real and what is not. Photographs influence how we think about this world socially and politically. So the question I constantly ask myself and try to imagine is what are we are and are not seeing and or understanding in this new world visual order?3
1 This essay is derived from a series of lectures on the relationship between editing and censorship in war photography. The lectures were delivered from 2014-2016 at George Mason University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Toronto, the Center of Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the Ethics of Storytelling conference hosted by Turku University in Finland.
2 I follow the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics, which can be found online at
