A reader has suggested that we post about the image below, which is labeled “truthflag” and has provoked a heated argument this week at Flickr.

The Flickr page reports that the photo has been viewed 164,050 times since it was posted on August 7 2006. There is one comment listed from 11 months ago, and 170 more in the last two days. Why the debate has flared now, I don’t know, but I’ll take it as a good sign. The debate turns on a basic question: is this a courageous act of democratic dissent regarding a shameful war, or is the dissent and desecration of the flag a shameful act of cowardice? I think the image is eloquent. Why? Obviously, the uniform speaks volumes. I think it also matters that the flag does not look new; this is not a case of running out to buy a flag for a publicity stunt. Likewise, the words themselves had to written laboriously, and the man’s serious expression communicates an equivalent resolution. This is a considered act by someone who is aware of what it might cost. The setting reinforces this effect: again, this is not a publicity stunt or a big demonstration, but rather someone in his own locale, perhaps a Guard office (you can see the water cooler and sports trophies in the background). His public act is grounded in his private life, and he is willing to take responsibility for his actions. And the message is all about responsibility, deeply so. The desecration of the flag and its soiled look suggest the shame he feels–shame is often experienced as a literal stain. The writing on the flag also overcomes two barriers to public speech: the flag no longer has the fixed meaning of “pure” patriotism, love it or leave it, that is used so often to squelch democratic dissent; and words that would be ignored otherwise acquire rhetorical force. I am reminded of a special news report following Texas v. Johnson, the Supreme Court case that now protects flag burning. Johnson was asked why, instead of burning the flag, he hadn’t simply spoken up to voice his dissent in the legitimate medium of public speech. He replied, “Who would have listened to me?”

Update: I had wondered why debate about this image had flared up. My colleague Eszter Hargittai wondered as well, but she knew how to do something about it. The answer is that it got “dugg”:
http://digg.com/political_opinion/Pic_There_Is_No_Flag_Large_Enough_To_Cover_The_Shame

Those who like to mine comments will find 700+ at the digg page.

 6 Comments

(“New York City celebrating the surrender of Japan. They threw anything and kissed anybody in Times Square.” Lt. Victor Jorgensen, August 14, 1945. National Archives, 80-G-377094.)

War continues to be a major topic of photojournalism and will be one of the topics of continuing interest on this blog, at least until the arrival of perpetual peace. While there are a number of fine studies of war imagery, I happened to ask myself today whether there are, or can be, photographs of peace. Obviously, art history archives are full of images–say, of the lion lying down with the lamb–that signify peace figuratively. Although photographs can acquire figurative and even allegorical meaning, I think that the realism, fragmentation, and other elements of the medium make it more difficult to represent peace. War is force, action, violence, destruction, pain–all things that can be communicated photographically. Peace involves the absence of war and the freedom to experience and enjoy other things, which then become the object of visual interest. If you define peace as necessarily involving sustainability and therefore justice, the problem gets even more complicated.

If you go to the Pictures of World War II at the National Archives Web site, you’ll see that one of the categories is “Victory and Peace.” There are ten photographs available there, and were a space alien to access them, it would have a hard time figuring out what either “victory” or “peace” mean. But those of us on Earth don’t do much better, do we?

This representational problem might be why the Times Square Kiss is an iconic photograph. (The public domain version is shown above.) John and I have much to say about it in No Caption Needed, although it now occurs to me that more could be added about how the image mediates the idea of peace. What I find more interesting, however, is another photo from the same collection, one that you probably haven’t seen before:

“Jubilant American soldier hugs motherly English woman and victory smiles light the faces of happy service men and civilians at Piccadilly Circus, London, celebrating Germany’s unconditional surrender.” Pfc. Melvin Weiss, England, May 7, 1945. National Archives, 111-SC-205398.

I find this to be a poignant image, particularly when compared with the Kiss. (Let’s leave the jokes about American and English eroticism aside for the moment.) Each photo is of a victory celebration in the public square of a great city, with spectators smiling at the camera to cue viewer participation in the scene. But instead of two sexually hot adults clenched in a powerful kiss, in this image we see mom getting a hug from one of the kids. And that’s the point that tears at me: they really are kids. I’m reminded of (and paraphrasing from distant memory) a scene at the beginning of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: angry about the self-satisfied reminiscing by the narrator and his war buddy, the narrator’s wife spits out that they were just kids, children, when they were sent to fight and die. That’s what this photograph reveals so clearly (no caption needed). And so this really is a war photo after all.

 4 Comments

I’ve been teaching a class for the past few years called “Visualizing War.” One of the themes of the course addresses the interaction between documentary and photojournalistic representations of war and fictional representations. Many others have noted how fictional representations tend to mimic or repeat more realist representations, but what might be more interesting is the way in which patterns of circulation create a doubling effect so that at some point photojournalistic representations tend to mimic (or perhaps visually “quote”) fictional representations, and thus to draw some of their power from the popular imaginary. My attention was drawn to an interesting recent example by Michael Shaw (BagNewsNotes), who has started a spirited discussion of Scott Nelson’s imagery of U.S. troops in Baquba that appeared in the New York Times on June 25, 2007. The NYT story features the first image below, captioned “An American soldier carrying shoulder-fired grenades paused to wait for orders during an operation on Saturday in Baquba, Iraq”:

There is much that can be said about this image, but what I want to feature for the moment is the way in which the soldier wears his grenades in a manner that suggests that he is something like a “human bomb,” a point vaguely alluded to by the caption. The visual analogy to a “suicide bomber” is hard to avoid here, though there is perhaps an important difference in that the grenades are in full view, for all to see, even though the soldier remains anonymous.

The NYT story ends with a slide show that includes a number of other pictures from the same campaign, but concludes with the image below:

What is especially notable here are the words written on the head band and, importantly, emphasized in the NYT caption: “During the operation, Specialist Paul Goodyear wore a headband bearing a passage from Psalm 91: ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God, in him will I trust.'” Apparently this Psalm was sewn into the clothing of many U.S. troops during WW II and is worn by many U.S. troops in Iraq. And understandably so given the circumstances. At the same time, however, I can’t help but think about how this image also functions to sacralize an otherwise potentially obscene image (the “human bomb”). And in that context it reminds me ever so much of Private Jackson, the sharpshooter in the movie Saving Private Ryan, who evoked a prayer (Blessed is the Lord) reminiscent of the Old Testament Psalms to guide and sanction his kills, literally to make them sacred. And, of course, his kills were always “clean,” taking place with something like surgical precision, creating no more pain than was necessary to the job at hand, which in WW II was the defeat of evil (with credit to A. Susan Owens for emphasizing the importance of Private Jackson in her essay on “Memory, War and American Identity.”)

My point here is that Scott Nelson’s photography creates a visual narrative of the current War in Iraq that is framed by two images that are reminiscent of a recent and popular fictional narrative of WW II — the “good war.” Reality imitates fiction. And intentional or not, it at least implies a point of connection between the two wars that should be recognizable to many in contemporary U.S. public culture. Or if that last point is too hard of a stretch, at the least there seems to be something of a visual trope here for distinguishing the “good” and “evil” warrior, locating “necessary” and “unavoidable” kills (by sharpshooters then or by the U.S. version of the “human bomber” today) in a sacred register. And it is a trope that we see being worked out in both ficitional and nonfictional contexts, and that should give us some pause as to how the two contexts interact with one another to affect social and public consciousness of things like wars and state sanctioned killing.

 

 2 Comments