Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

AMBIGUOUS POWER OF THE IMAGE

Here I am once again worrying away at how perceptions can be formed and twisted by data that isn’t necessarily reliable.

My problem for the fortnight is this – why can a single and decontextualised image sway opinion and make people adopt partisan positions about complex problems?

I’ll give two examples – one of a faked photograph and one of a perfectly authentic photograph.

In 1936, in the first year of the Spanish Civil War, the Hungarian photo-journalist Endre Friedmann, who had adopted the name “Robert Capa”, took a photograph which, he claimed, showed a Republican Soldier at the moment he was shot dead by a Nationalist sniper. Capa said that he had snapped the image while he was crouching in a nearby trench, that he had raised his camera and clicked the button without even looking through the viewfinder and that he had, by sheer luck, caught this vivid image. The photo became known as The Falling Soldier. It was rapidly reproduced in America’s old “Life” magazine and became iconic. For those who supported the Spanish Republic it was an inspiring image of a man giving his life for a good cause. Since it first appeared, the photo has been reproduced more than almost any other photo of the 20^th century, sculptures have been based on it and murals copied from it.

But there are two problems with Capa’s snap. One is material, the other philosophical.

The material problem is that, as scrupulous and minute research has shown, the photo is almost certainly a fake. There is not just the troubling fact that Capa himself a number of times changed his story about how the image was produced. There is the more important fact that the image appeared in the same roll of film as images of militiamen quite clearly being posed by the photographer – images that came both before and after this iconic image of a man falling down. And, quite damningly, a study of the background has allowed people to pinpoint where exactly the snap was taken – a place far from any combat zone.

Now there was nothing either new or too outrageous about photo-journalists posing images in wartime. In an era when photographers were hardly ever in real combat zones, and where it was fiendishly difficult to take real action shots, it was almost customary for photographers to ask soldiers to pose in a warlike manner either before any combat had been engaged in, or after it was over. For example, after the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 had been crushed, Tommies were quite happy to pose behind a barricade for a photographer, and pretend they were fighting. Thousands of similar images were made in the first half of the 20^th century.

The philosophical problem is the one that really worries me, however. Even if the  image of the Falling Soldier were real, what does it actually tell us about the civil war in which it was taken? Of itself, does it tell us that one side or the other was the more righteous cause? Does it tell us that the man (supposedly) dying was a noble individual motivated by high ideals? Isn’t it obvious to any rational mind that men are killed, heroically or in striking poses or otherwise, on both sides of any war? Of itself, the image proves nothing – only that a large audience was already predisposed to interpret it as an image of singular heroism and idealism. It is completely decontextualised.

Now for the authentic photograph that was definitely not faked. Towards the very end of 2015, the body of a 3-year-old boy washed up on a beach in Turkey. He was Alan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee of Kurdish heritage. His father, with other refugees, was attempting to reach a Greek island and hoped to travel from Europe to Canada – but the un-seaworthy craft in which they were being taken, by people-smugglers, sank, and this little boy was one of those who drowned.

It would take a very hard-hearted person not to be moved by such an image. The death of this child was tragic. The death of this child was avoidable. No wonder that, very quickly, this image “went viral”, was reproduced in nearly every Western newspaper and on every news feed and was (like the Falling Soldier) the subject of art works, posters, and reconstructions as protest.

But again, we have those nagging problems of context. What does the image itself tell us? That a little child has been cruelly drowned. From this, are we to adduce that European attitudes to refugees are cruel and xenophobic (as many of those who used this image in protests would claim)? Or would it be wiser to blame exploitative people-smugglers who take money from desperate refugees, then put them in unsafe vessels? I am not making light of this, because I find this image particularly disturbing, particularly wrenching. Helpless innocence has been killed. But it is still impossible to draw from this image alone a wider political or social message. Of itself, it is a singular thing.

We have all heard the old cynic’s statement that “One death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic”. It has been claimed, truthfully, that images of individuals suffering in wars and other disasters can make those wars and disasters more real to distant consumers of news. We are looking at real people, not statistics. We are engaged with them as fellow human beings. We are moved by their plight. This is claimed as one of the chief purposes of photo-journalism (and now tele-journalism).

I do not quarrel with this, but I still maintain that a single and decontextualised image (or series of images in the case of the little boy) does not of itself convey anything more to us than a general humane response. Who is in the right and who is in the wrong in the circumstances in which the image was taken? The image itself does not tell us.