Page 194 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

VISUAL CULTURE

topic was Lang and Lang’s (1952) investigation of viewer responses to an inci-
dent from the Korean War period, a public ceremony held in Chicago in
honor of General Douglas MacArthur following President Harry Truman’s
decision to remove him from the command of US forces in the war. Employing
research assistants who were trained in the observation and coding of human
behavior, the Langs compared the televised version of the event with what
was actually happening at the event itself. The results indicated that television’s
selective presentation of some incidents and not others created an exaggerated
sense of the public’s degree of enthusiasm for General MacArthur.
The overall point of the Langs’ study – namely, how much difference the
simple process of selection can make to the final impression conveyed by any
photographic medium – goes to the heart of the issues raised by the seeming
veridicality of visual representations. A more recent demonstration of the same
point occurred during the Persian Gulf War, when television images of amaz-
ingly precise ‘smart bombs’ appear to have led many, if not most, viewers to see
the war as a ‘remote, bloodless, pushbutton battle in which only military targets
were assumed destroyed’ (Walker 1992: 84). As it happens, however, subsequent
reports revealed that, ‘of all bombs dropped on Iraq, only seven percent were
so-called smart bombs, and of these at most 70 percent were thought to have
hit their intended targets’ (Lee and Solomon 1990: xx). Moreover, in stark
contrast to the image of a war without human victims, it appears that there
were substantial numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties, especially in the city of
Basra (Walker 1992: 87–8; see also Sifry and Cerf 1991: 336n). In other words,
the selective images of precisely guided smart-bomb strikes may have given
viewers a misleading impression of one of the most serious consequences of the
war.
Selective representation, in the sense in which we have just encountered it in
these examples, is an inherent and unavoidable feature of all photographic
image-making. In that respect, potentially misleading selectivity is arguably a
ubiquitous possibility in any facet of visual culture in which photographic
evidence serves as the guarantor (whether stated or implicit) of objectivity or
truth. And yet, when contemporary visually oriented scholars raise concerns
about abuse of photography’s indexical character, they are much more likely to
focus on relatively more complex forms of potential deception, namely,
unacknowledged staging and digital manipulation of images. Unacknowledged
staging is exemplified by such cases as the news report in which a truck was
rigged with explosives to demonstrate its supposed tendency to detonate in
accidents; or the television commercial in which a car’s body was reinforced
with steel I-beams to demonstrate its supposed ability to withstand the attacks
of a ‘monster truck’ (Messaris 1997: 271–2).
To an even greater extent than is the case with unacknowledged staging,
digital imaging has become a major focus of concerns about the problematic
truth value of photographic images. In fact, as Stephen Prince (1993) has noted,
the emergence of digital techniques for the alteration of images calls into

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