On Violence

Nice post with deep truths in it. ^^

Photographs do say something, and I think they’re also telling the truth of the very moment they are taken. The truth could be as simple as the first photo, where I as a viewer might put it as “There’s a seemingly dead man lying beside the rocks.” Whether the scene was purely created by the photographer or not, the truth remains that the photograph is saying it was what it “saw” through its lens. The lying aspect of a photograph, I guess, would be in the surrounding circumstance and the functional state of the camera itself at the time the photo was taken.

Also, “lies” could happen when our sense of sight and own definition of what we saw interpret it in some way different from what it actually was.

For instance, in the second photo, I need to see a bigger version of the photo to find out whether the man was executed indeed or not. The caption could be misleading, “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon” but we often take journalists’ words as plain social truth, so I guess that must be right.

But without the caption and larger, clearer copy of the photo, I as a viewer might think that the man with the gun was threatening the poor civilian with a gun…and he might have pulled the trigger afterward or hit his head with the gun…I wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t want to know. What I know is that the scene in that photo is really terrifying and cruel. But then again, maybe the civilian must have done something grave in the past—like killed a fellow civilian or ravished a child, a girl or a woman, or been involved in the murder of a family…

You know what I find fascinating about modern journalism is the amount of self censorship that goes into it nowadays.

The military doesn´t like for photos such as this photo from Vietnam (which is one of the most famous photos in the world) to get out, and generally large mainstream media outlets such as Reuters, AP, network telivision etc. won´t air / publish them when they do get ahold of them. I´ve been told that most combat photojournalists have a large portfolio of work that may not usually catch somebody in the act as above, but show the bloody after affects of combat, and most of it will never be published or shown to the American public at large because of the impact it could have. Thank god for the internet, if there is a hope for this not to be a “video game” war for the American public its through sites like Live Leak and the like.

In one sense while not providng actual context neither one of these pictures actually lie. The picture above actually is somebody who died in the Civil War regardless of the aesthetics surrounding the corpse. Regardless of what Nguyen Van Lem actually did, what General Loan did is no better or worse than an insurgent beheading an American soldier out of anger.

hey, thanks for the awesome comments. I really liked this post and I’m glad to see it got a response.

The photos themselves don’t lie, the camera reproduces what is in front of it. Everyone knows this. But camera men can’t, or don’t, reveal how and what they did to take that picture. It isn’t an outright lie as much as a lie of omission.

On the same level, the pictures omit the context behind the photo, but Chris nailed it on the head: both pictures are images of violence, the context is what we put on the images to make them palatable.

I GOT STUNNED BY THE SECOND IMAGE HERE.
I WISH IT WAS STAGED.

-Nhoel of http://keywordspeak.com

I agree that there is of course context. But to say that a picture lies? In the second photo General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed an unarmed man. That’s the truth. In context, he’s a murderer/terrorist. The context doesn’t change the truth of the picture. Whether the man was innocent or not doesn’t change what is portrayed. Context only attempts to make it acceptable.

As for who the General was before and after the picture according to the photographer; I think that’s a powerful state about how combat affects a soldier.

First, its good that no one made the easiest joke about a picture being worth a thousand words.

Second, I think people forget about how influential photographs are compared to sound bites and how much more influential than good reporting. Photos capture brief moments that, like the two above, are emotionally powerful. And yes, they can lie either by being patently untrue, doctored, or completely misdirecting, and thus still untrue.