Iraq photos & censorship issues

Terrific work, Michael. And the slideshow really puts this issue in historical context. Of course under the US military’s current rules, Capa’s photo of a falling soldier would never have seen the light of day.

just read the article. a really good article that debates a serious and important issue. good work!

Great job on the story, Mike. Well reported and well written. The kicker from Zoriah is powerful: “‘The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing — which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working,’ he said.”

After reading about Zoriah’s experiences here on LS and on his own site a few weeks ago, I tried to encourage contacts at two major national news outlets to look into the story and into the wider issue of how embeds can become “exbeds” when their work displeases the military. Neither one pursued it. Glad you did.

I also commend the Times for republishing the photos in question in that slideshow.

Could you please let us know what sort of reaction you’ve received to your story and to your re-publishing the images, both from military officials and from others?

Michael:

terrific piece. ironically, at the moment im reading tim bissel’s FATHER OF ALL THINGS (about ’nam and his father), and the wave of both the similarities and disimilarities is clausterphobic….

much as to be said about the manifest rules of the embeds, but one wonders too about the role of the editors/publishers…as too the failure on the part of the public to access these images and the written account, especially in this day of nearly universal access vis-a-vis the web…..im happy to see, at least in this instance, the Times hasn’t backed down…

wondering if Alan Chin’s work ever made it to the PE desk at the Times?…Alan, your thoughts…

thanks again Michael…look forward to reading/seeing more of your “dispatches” :))

cheers
Bob

Excellent story and collection of images to illustrate the point, Michael.
This needed to be said and I am glad the Times had the stuff to run the story and the images in “question” Kudos to you all for the research and commitment to the story.
As someone who has been covering the funeral side of the story in the US, it has amazed me the efforts the military has gone through to not allow the media to be there, even in a couple cases where the family offered an invite, usually the only way I go anyhow. It took the mother of the deceased coming over to get the ranking officer on site to allow us through the door of the funeral home in one case. Not quite on the level of what you talk about, but another facet of this story.
Thanks again for writing it and making it happen.
Jeremy

Not really photographs, but some different information than the usual one we can see and read by embedded photojournalists can be found here:
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/
Interesting read also his book..

Well done, Michael. I saw this story when it first came out and meant to comment on it here. I really appreciate the added value of the slide show which I think will be a great resource to instructors in photography, journalism, and mass communication studies.

I, too, saw this when it first came out and have been meaning to make a comment. Although it is unlikely that the Administration’s policies will change, it is nevertheless extremely important that the suppression of information itself has been documented in such a public way. This is a truly important and historic article, and I hope that it will have an impact on policy discussions in the future.

Great work.

During my last (now seemingly long-ago) trip to Iraq for the NYT in 2005, I did photograph some fairly gruesome images of the aftermath of suicide bomb attacks. Some of these photos are viewable in one of my Lightstalkers galleries right here.

In particular, the last picture, of a young suicide bomber’s decapitated head which was all that remained of him after he killed himself and 15 Iraqi policemen; I filed this to my editors and made what I thought was a compelling argument for it to be published: that although it documented extreme violence, it was not sensationalist in presentation, and that it was very important for people to have a real idea of what a suicide bomber looks like: that they are not nameless, faceless robots blowing themselves up, but rather, actual, individual young men (and women), and this was a rare opportunity to actually see the face of one after the fact.

I will not soft-pedal the issue, believe me, the experience of photographing that situation haunted me and would certainly shock (and perhaps offend) many viewers. However, being that the massive suicide bombing campaign was the insurgency’s most potent and powerful weapon, I felt that it should be shown. My editors disagreed, and pointed out that when the NYT ran on its front page the image of the four killed American contractors hanging off of the Falluja Bridge in 2004, that they received an enormous number of negative responses. That was an argument I lost. On other occasions, the NYT did publish images of mine showing civilian and military Iraqi dead.

This debate has raged since the very beginning of photography and its use in documenting war. As a photographer and a believer in free speech and free expression in a democratic society, I feel very strongly that there should be very few limits on what should be published. Fictional, sanitized violence is all over our movie screens and popular culture. The squeamishness in showing the real thing seems to me to be absurd.

Alan:

I am happy you’ve chimed in. One of the reason why I called attention to your work above (and wondered if the Times (or other venues) had had their shot at your pics), is that your pics (including the shot of the head in the body bag) startled me (and i’ve seen my fair shot of pics of dead bodies, mutilated soldiers/civilians, suicide bombers, not to mention death seen in front of my eyes) and I immediately sent links to your work to as many people as I could (here in CA and in the US)…i wanted folks to see the toll, first hand…

It’s ironic that some of the most gruesome and troubling pics from "Nam (including many of the pics from My Lai, though it was years before the massacre was acknowledged/reported) WERE still available to the public…even the pics of the slaughter….one doesn’t even have to think of the iconic pictures like Adams’, Ut’s, Burrows’, etc…i mean, folks can even access pics from the Vietnam War Museum in Ho Chi Min city. Iraq?…a quagmire of emasculated imagery….I am happy that both you and Michael (and others) have raised this…

I find it troubling the stance of the editors/publishers (though not surprising) but more egregious is the (at this point) culpability of the public, in this day and age of access to information (stories and imagery from all sides), to actively refuse to educate itself…i mean, ok, the war that still ranges on in the Sudan is one think, but Iraq….shameful…

thanks for adding your experience and perspective Alan. I appreciate it (and your stories/pics from your time in Iraq) a great deal.

cheers
bob

‘when the NYT ran on its front page the image of the four killed American contractors hanging off of the Falluja Bridge in 2004, that they received an enormous number of negative responses’

I’m sure LIFE and TIME and many other mags got a lot of flack back in the 60s and 70s for there graphic pics of Vietnam War but they still ran them and today we look back on the those images as the heyday of photojournalism. But yet today our movies and tv shows are more graphic than ever but yet we keep being told that the public don’t want graphic images in our papers and mags WTF.

Like Bob said cheers to the photogs like you Alan and Michael who take these pics even if the masses will never see them.

A good related read here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/health/05surg.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc&_r=1

Interesting read, indeed. I’m a strong believer in freedom of speech and that more photographs should be published about war and its consequences (and I’m not talking about the dead bodies, but also about destroyed infrastructure, poverty, refugees, etc.)

When I saw that New York Times article about Zoriah Miller, I looked to follow it up by talking with David Perlmutter, who wrote a couple of books about photography in wartime. It was interesting to get another point of view on the matter. I wrote the following article: http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=bjp_story_news_4918

(NOTE: I’m not trying to plug my publication here, I’m just contributing to the debate).

I don’t think editors and publishers should be blamed. I think the responsibility for the amount of censorship during this war is mainly due to the readers themselves. As Perlmutter told me, people will react to pictures according to their own beliefs, and consequently, people who believe that the press is too negative about this war (especially in the US) will react strongly against pictures being published… and we’ve seen in the past that they can influence advertisers and lead to a loss in revenues and readership for that particular paper. Faced with these possibilities, publishers choose to cave in to the readers, which one can understand even if it should never happen.

Incidentally, just to verify: LIFE ran a full color story of the pics from My Lai, including the shot of the dead and bleeding child next to the parent…and many many other magazines/newspapers ran full stories including some of the most graphic imagery (including dead soldiers and slaughtered children) of the war…I do hold accountable the publishers and their hogtied networks to the public, who ultimately must decide whether or not to be part of the collective refusal to pursue information and facts…

and i just (last night) re-thumbed through the book UNEMBEDDED, a MUST for those interested in Iraq produced by 4 remarkable LS members, my friend Rita Leistner, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

It is absolutely UNFLINCHING!…the public deserves these kinds of books and the public deserves to have the images that photographers and writers like Michael, Alan and all are producing…

for those not familiar:

http://www.unembedded.net/splash.php

running
bob