Framing the War in Afgahnistan

"This mandating of what can be seen - a concern with regulating
content - was supplemented by control over the perspective
according to which the action and destruction of war could be
seen at all. By regulating perspective in addition to content, the
state authorities were clearly interested in regulating the
visual modes of participation in the war."
~ Judith Butler. Frames of War, page 65.

Caption (Toronto Star) : US Army flight Medic SGT Patrick Schultz
talks to a wounded US soldier in the rear of a medevac helicopter
while enroute to Kandahar Airfield after he was injured by an
improvised explosive device in Zhari District, Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Photograph © Louie Palu/Zuma Press.

A short while ago Michael Shaw wrote this post at BagNewsNotes.* He pointed out a striking similarity in the work of three terrific photographers - James Nachtwey, Tyler Hicks and Louie Palu - who had recently been embedded with military units in Afghanistan. More to the point, he noted the similarity in the way their respective work framed the ongoing war there.

The folks at PDN report that one of the photographers - Palu - has taken exception to Michael's post. To his credit Michael has updated the post to reiterate what I took to be clear in the first instance - namely that this is not about the intentions of the photographers, but the strategy of the Pentagon and the tone-deafness of the media organizations. That said. Palu has got to be kidding if he thinks that "accepting an embed" is a politically naive decision. think about the practice of embedding journalists: The military are going to send you to see what they choose for you to see. This is part of the "regulating of perspective" of which Butler speaks. And while that need not make any photographer a tool of the military, it does make is especially difficult to present anything resembling an oppositional or critical view of what is happening in Afghanistan.

So, Palu's complaint about the use of individual pictures misses the mark by a wide margin. The same goes for the self-serving - and I would add patronizing - rationalization of his editor quoted in the PDN piece. The problems with embedded reporting are ongoing - they are not, as the editor suggests, something from the past that Michael has simply dredged up. What we are getting is the regulation of perspective, a particular "official" framing, that is meant to limit what we see and how we interpret the war. The fact that photographers and journalists have no choice but to accept embeds if they want to cover the war does nothing to alter that state of affairs.

The images Palu and Nachtwey and Hicks made were taken up by large media organizations and used in ways that they may hardly have intended. But those images, taken from a military-sanctioned perspective, sustain an interpretive frame whether the photographers like it or not. The fact that, as Michael points out, the stories in Time, The New York Times and The Toronto Star are near substitutes for one another is telling in that regard.
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* For the record, I know and like Michael - he runs what I consider to be an invaluable blog. And if you scroll down the comments on this particular post, you'll see that I threw in my two cents early on.

P.S.: Updated 26 January 2011 ~ There is an interesting and helpful post here on this ongoing discussion.

War, Propaganda, Censorship: The Military Reveals the Actual Power Relations "Embedded" in Their Relations to With the News Media

Michael Hastings at the ISAF base in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Photograph © Mikhail Galustov for RollingStone/Redux.

In late June Michael Hastings published this story in Rolling Stone. The picture above accompanied that story which cost a high ranking military officer his job and career. I think Hastings was right to publish the story. To the best of my knowledge, while many commentators questioned the 'propriety' of his doing so, none actually contested the details of what he wrote. Well, it turns out that the military apparently doesn't much want Hastings around any more and has canceled his next scheduled "embed" in Afghanistan. You can read the news here at Mother Jones.*

Is there anyone who is really surprised by this? I'd be surprised if there were. Tit-for-tat, and so forth. What is outrageous is not this decision to kick Hastings to the curb. That is simply authoritarian reflex. Predictable. What is outrageous is that the news media has voluntarily embraced the legitimacy of the entire system of "embedded" reporting. Having done that, they really cannot complain that the military unilaterally dictates the rules of engagement. This episode simply reveals in especially stark form the power relations to which the press has acquiesced.

The press should pride itself on being untrustworthy (which is not the same thing as being dishonest, quite the reverse) when it comes to political and military authorities. In the current context the premium seems to be quite the reverse.
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Update (8/6/2010): More here.

More on Euphemisms and Photographers Embedded With NGOs

Attack plan, Chad-Sudan Border, 2008. Photograph © Stanley Greene.

Yesterday, the Lens blog at The New York Times ran this interview with photojournalist Stanley Greene. Here is an excerpt in which Greene confirms my own sense that a photographer working for this or that humanitarian outfit means she is "embedded" in just the same sense - producing the same sorts of predicaments - as if she were embedded with the military or some corporation.

Q. But do you think that somebody, a young person, could look at your book — there are a lot of beautiful women and a lot of death in your book — and get the wrong idea? Or feel like this is some romantic view of what my life will be like if I follow Stanley Greene?

A. No, I try to deflate that image. When you realize that you have been with these women and you have left them and broken their hearts — and look, let’s be real here. I don’t own an apartment. I don’t own a house. I don’t own a car. I don’t have any stocks and bonds. All I own are my cameras. That’s it. And some cowboy boots.

If you want to be a success financially, please don’t follow this path.

A lot of the stories I did, I financed. I am not a good business person. I didn’t know how to negotiate with a magazine. I just simply said, “Please give me this story, and give me the go-ahead to go do it.” Or in some cases, “If I do it, and I get the pictures and I send it to you, send me money.” And that is the generation I come out of.

I live from hand to mouth. I am one of the founders of Noor. There are three agencies today: there is Magnum, there is Noor and there is VII. I have a lot of respect for VII, but I really think we are the second agency, and we did it in three years. When you say you are a founder and owner of Noor, people expect you to be rich, but we’re not. Because we are really committed to doing what we are doing and we have made sacrifices to make that happen.

And we are going to continue to make sacrifices to allow that to happen. In the end, it isn’t about money. You want to have enough money so that you can go and eat a nice meal, and you can take your family on a fairly reasonable vacation. But then you have another level, where you don’t even think about that — where you just think about the next story. How do we get the money to go do the next story?

Q. Right. But partially because of this, photographers are doing workshops and are doing N.G.O. work. They are finding different ways. They are not out trying to do fresh photo essays that they can sell to magazines. They are putting their energies into other things to make money.

A. I’m glad you brought up N.G.O.’s, because that has become a real game. Like we work for these N.G.O.’s, right? It’s advertising, so that they can raise money and they can continue to do the good that they do. We get all upset if a photographer shoots for Shell or BP. But when we think in terms of photographing for certain nonprofit organizations who have a lot of money, and we become their spokesperson, we start to lose our objectivity.

Q. Right, but what should our role be as photojournalists working for them?

A. We have to be objective; we have to accept that. For example, when I worked for Human Rights Watch, they would take my pictures and sell them to raise money. What I always admired about Corinne Dufka is that she was a great photographer. And she quit and has literally become an investigator for Human Rights Watch. I think we have to be investigators.

Q. So you’re saying that when we are working for N.G.O.’s, we may try and please the people we are working for instead of acting as true journalists?

A. A magazine editor who hires me better understand that I am going to try and show you the truth. Some of my photos were just too hard to look at. But the truth of the matter was the picture of dead Americans in Falluja was going to run against an advertisement and the advertising people said: “No, no, no. Dead American bodies? Uh oh. No, no, no. Burnt lines? No, not like that.” And in the end, Time magazine ran it in Pictures of the Year, you know? It was made for Newsweek, but it ran in Time.

Q. Because it was causing a problem with the editors? Or advertisers?

A. Yeah, but I shot the picture. I certainly didn’t say: “Would the advertisers be upset if I show dead Americans — burnt, being beaten and tossed down the street? And then hung under a bridge and cut down?”

Q. Do we need to see images like that as Americans? There have been almost no images of dead Americans published.

A. We need to see it because it’s reality. We go to the movies, and we look at violence splashed across the screen like spaghetti sauce. If we can’t stomach watching our men and women being killed in these situations, then we shouldn’t send them there to be killed in such gruesome ways. We can’t have it both ways.

You want to sit there comfortably with your newspaper and blueberry muffin, and you don’t want to see pictures that are going to upset your morning. That is the job of a journalist, to upset your morning. The problem with newspapers and magazines folding is that the investigative journalism is going to disappear. And these criminals doing these nasty and dirty things in the world are going to get away with it.

It seems, as well, that Greene grasps quite clearly the usefulness of photography in efforts to help make visible events and things that many would prefer remain out of sight and to hold perpetrators to account. Some might find much of his work stereotypical 'war photography' and consider him an anachronism of sorts. If the alternative is euphemism I know where my sympathies lie.

A Reminder

Namir Noor-Eldeen.
Photograph © Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press.

There is now hubbub, reported in The New York Times for instance, about a newly released video showing American troops in 2007 killing Iraqi civilians from a helicopter hovering over Baghdad. The video is gruesome. The chatter from the Americans is worse. But neither should come as a surprise. Among the victims - and that is the proper word - was a talented young photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen. You can find a remembrance of Noor-Eldeen, along with some of his work, here at The Lede blog.

The post is touching. It also is a reminder. War is shitty. And the young men we send to fight are desensitized by the experience. War is kill or be killed. So we should be surprised not in the least about the crass attitude articulated by the American troops in the video sound track. In fact, this is precisely what you claim to be grateful for when you thank military men and women 'for their service.' If you find the attitude of these young men offensive - and you should - the proper response is to oppose useless military adventures like the BushCo invasion of Iraq. Obama said he'd end the war and instead authorized more troops.

More generally the video is a reminder of why government and the military seek so diligently to control access to information and visual depictions of their activities. On the one hand, they (sincerely, I think) don't want journalists to be in harm's way. On the other hand, our military leaders don't want we regular folks, sitting at home in our comfy chairs, to see the death and destruction and mayhem they are sowing in our name. This video is unique in that it has been released (despite official efforts). There are surely similar videos - well hidden under the military cloak of being 'classified' material - of similar killings. And there just as surely have been many, many other such episodes that were not caught on film. War is shitty. Always. Unavoidably. Unfortunately, it is sometimes unavoidable too. The tragedy here - or should I say crime? - is that our fiasco in Iraq was, and is, totally unnecessary.
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P.S.: There are useful commentaries on all this here at Newsweek and here at The Guardian. Notice that the latter includes the video whereas the U.S. media do not. And note too that the U.S. media can't even bring themselves to spell out the profanities the American personnel use. Are they protecting our delicate sensibilities?
P.S.2: Glenn Greenwald has written a series of very good posts on the episode too [1] [2] [3] [4].