I'm curious about the unspoken assumption, running through many of the posts in this thread, that access to images of the Iraq, taken with benefit of Coalition protection, will provide the average American citizen the information required to make the correct assessment about the war.
Is that not a fair characterization?
And yet, I suspect that the numbers of American citizens who do not understand that war is a brutal, terrible, and awful thing is much less than 100%. So I am immediately suspicious of the idea that these kinds of photos have all that much informational value - just as many have been incredulous at Christopher Hitchens recent pronouncement that waterboarding is indeed torture. I think these photos aren't intended to inform, really, but to shock.
Frankly, images of carnage in Iraq are not hard to come by - now. That wasn't true before 2003, when CNN "embedded" itself with the Hussein regime and voluntarily censored not just its output, but where it looked for stories at all. You won't find much material evidence of life for the average Iraqi under Hussein in the Western press.
This is important, for it is not possible to evaluate ethical responses to war without understanding alternative courses of action. So again, what "truth" is being told about Iraq in photos that document rent flesh and broken bodies?
Not that there isn't truth there, mind you. Absolutely there is. It's a truth that has been documented since well before photography became journalistically viable. Goya's illustrations of Napolean's peninsular war, collectively called "
Disasters of War," presage photographic collections such as Ernst Friedrich's World War One collection called "
War Against War."
These works and many others today comprise a documentary corpus of the grim visage of war that has never been more accessible. Indeed, the very idea of censorship in Iraq has its ironic undertones, since no other war in history has been as well documented as this, with such free and instant access. Not to say that censorship doesn't exist, of course, and it plainly has in Miller's case.
But what does that mean?
It does not mean that Americans do not have access to ghoulish images of the war, even of Coalition dead. Important information voters need to voice their opinion of the prosecution of the war has not been curtailed by Miller's absence. Miller has had his voice stilled for the time being. He is no longer in a position to leverage access to the front into his anti-war message. An anti-war message, by the way, which blamed the Coalition explicitly for facilitating an attack against Iraqis to whom the Coalition was ceding authority.
Perhaps it is too "sterile" for Miller simply to describe the facts. And if we allow ourselves to think that close ups of mutilated corpses is in any meaningful way
factual - that is, contingent with events as they actually happened - then we must return to the pretense that the camera simply records without any directive or motive and that nothing exists outside its frame.
Far from changing the world through his photography, Zoriah Miller wants to subborn photography through his politics, to its great detriment.
