Page 346 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Paparazz and Photograph c Eth cs |

the attention of the public and political leaders. They seek to bring home the
“truth” of war. Many assert that visual documentation carries authority and cred-
ibility; we believe what we see, and when real suffering is brought to our atten-
tion, we cannot ignore it and we will take action to stop it. These somewhat more
sophisticated pronouncements are other ways of assigning truth to the old ad-
ages “the camera never lies” and “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But if the
camera never lies, we must ask what kind of truth it tells and what information is
contained in its message.
The photograph is a powerful emotive, but as a single image, or even a collec-
tion, the information contained there is limited. We can feel shock or sorrow for
those pictured as they lay dead or suffering, but the image cannot reveal what
has happened to them. A graphic image of a dead body does not explain events
that took place before or after the death, nor can it tell us who did the killing. It
offers no political context, much less an analysis.
One example of this type of imagery is the news photographs of the civil war
that took place during the 1980s in the Central American country of El Salva-
dor. The United States supported the Salvadoran security forces, and the often-
bloody conflict was depicted in the U.S. press. News photographs often showed
gruesome piles of dead bodies and even severed heads in city morgues, individ-
uals thrown along the side of the road, or being dug out of shallow graves. Most
often such bodies were unable to be identified, and they remained anonymous
with no personal history. When bodies are presented in this way, viewers cannot
respond to the people they once were. There is little humanity left in a lifeless
cadaver featured in a magazine layout.

Hopelessness

Both John Berger and Susan Sontag have written eloquently about what we
can know from photographs of horror and what range of emotional response
is possible. As a passive spectator looking at such pictures of the dead, the im-
pression is one of finality, even disgust. The act exists in the past by the time it
reaches the eyes of the magazine reader. There is nothing to be done at pres-
ent. Such images proclaim forcefully that the worst has already happened. Such
brutal images stand in contrast to another way of presenting the dead: showing
them when they were alive. One example from that period of a more humane
treatment was a picture on the June 6, 1983 cover of Newsweek magazine, which
featured the first American adviser killed in El Salvador. It is altogether differ-
ent from the Salvadoran cadavers. The Newsweek cover photo of Lt. Cmdr. Al-
bert Schaufelberger, III, is very specific. His name is spelled out in full, and the
photograph was taken when he was very much alive. Standing at a dignified
three-quarter pose in uniform, the aura of his humanity and individuality is
still present. The bold print announces, “Central America, The First Casualty.”
Identified as the first casualty, we can only assume that the pictures of corpses
printed for three years before the one American’s death seem not to have been
considered with the same humanity.