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Securing vision: photography and US foreign policy Liam Kennedy Media Culture Society 2008; 30; 279 DOI: 10.1177/0163443708088788 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mcs.sagepub.com

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Securing vision: photography and US foreign policy Liam Kennedy UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, IRELAND

The photographic image is today an electronic image and its ubiquity feeds the ‘image wars’ of the 21st century that are increasingly mediated by new technologies. The virtual battlefields of images and information have taken on an important role in the production of foreign policy and international relations. At the same time, the expansion of new technologies has produced a global media sphere in which images and information have become ever more difficult to control. The machinery of American public diplomacy, so heavily criticized and reviewed in the wake of 9/11, has struggled to adapt to these new conditions (Kennedy and Lucas, 2005). The difficulty of conducting a war of images is compounded in a global information sphere that can swiftly expose and interrogate contradictions of declared values and apparent policies and actions. And so, management of the field of vision becomes a complex component in the geopolitical stratagems of the war on terror. Geopolitics is itself a category of perspective, a visualized knowledge of global interactions. It has long valorized a perspectivism that operates through assumptions about the faculty of sight to cognitively map the territoriality of global politics. The metaphorics of vision in modern geopolitical thought is often associated with the concept of a ‘worldview’, connoting the strategic politics of global diplomacy and governmentality as issues of visual power and control (Agnew, 1998; O Tuathail, 1994). Today, the geopolitical imperatives of the American worldview operate through assumptions of omnipresence and transparency that attend the visualizations of liberal interventions enacted in foreign lands. These assumptions support a ‘politics of visual abstraction’ that rationalizes perceptions of liberal governance and democratization, and which has been both challenged and enhanced by the

Media, Culture & Society © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore), Vol. 30(3): 279–294 [ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443708088788]


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belief that the electronic image all but erases global distances (Oliver, 2001: 557). It has been challenged as the post-Cold War global order refuses to cohere into a tidy projection of the American worldview. Yet, it has been enhanced as American media provide cognitive maps for that global disorder, imagery that promotes either humanitarian or military forms of ‘intervention’, bringing American aid and order into distant quarters of the world, rendering the geographically opaque regions geopolitically comprehensible, making them visible.1 While the landscape of the contemporary image wars is global, this is not to suggest that there is a dominant visual ideology controlling perceptions of this landscape. If anything, the idea of a dominant visual ideology makes less sense than ever due to the disintegration of discrete categories and genres of visual information in the digital age. There is an ongoing blurring of the boundaries between news and entertainment, between media and public diplomacy, between professional and amateur journalism, and between modes and genres of photographic representation. This blurring of boundaries characterizes the instability of contemporary visual fields and also renders the visualization of US foreign policy a more volatile representation. American photojournalism, which bears a long and complex relationship to the production of national identity and its international extensions, provides a useful focus for analysis of the close yet shifting relationship between visual media and the geopolitical visions of the state. This article will focus on the role of photojournalism in the framing of US foreign policy, sketching the history of this framing and looking in some detail at ways in which the photojournalistic image has mutated in the digital age to both support and challenge the state’s geopolitical visions.

Picturing the American worldview Photojournalism has been instrumentally involved in the visualization of US foreign policy and more broadly the representation of America’s geopolitical visions from the mid-19th century onwards. In part this is due to the historical connection between the evolution of photography and the development of a young nation. The origins of photography in the United States are tied up with the documenting of westward expansion, and with internal and external conflicts that defined the boundaries of the nation and the role of the state. From the 1840s, photographs were used to inform the public about events, people and places in the news, and the roots of modern photojournalism are evident in these uses (Moeller, 1989). As the nation grew – a process that was not organic but determined, political and bloody – photography recorded, documented and celebrated this growth. It developed conventions and frames, a way of seeing that conjoined the democratic and imperial impulses of an emergent American worldview.


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By the end of the 19th century, photography was already well established as the leading medium of national record, and, with the invention of the half-tone process in the mid-1880s, it took on an even more prominent role in the representation of domestic and foreign news as photographs could now be more easily produced and disseminated. With the Spanish-American War, photojournalism became intricately tied up with the projection and representation of American’s foreign policy interests. In the prelude to the war the press supported the Cuban insurgency, presenting an image of America as the defender of freedom. As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, the Spanish-American War was an ‘outlet for expressing aggressive impulses while presenting itself quite truthfully, as an idealistic and humanitarian crusade’ – as such it conjoined the imperial and democratic impulses in America’s geopolitical perspectives (in Moeller, 1989: 30). By and large it did so smoothly, with huge domestic support for this imperial adventure, and photography played an important role in linking this vision of America’s growing will to power to a new landscape of international relations and communication systems. By the end of the 19th century, the foundations of American photojournalism were well established even as new technologies emerged to reshape its international coverage. In the 20th century, the triumph of American modernity on a global scale ushered in an increasingly confident perspective on international affairs, framed by domestic ideals and ideologies. The ‘golden age’ of American photojournalism was from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s, a period in which picture magazines and news magazines came to the fore as the premier conveyors of photojournalistic imagery. Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life magazines, articulated the prominence of this visual interest when he stated the prospectus for Life magazine in the mid-1930s. The purpose of the magazine, Luce proclaimed, was: To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things – machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work – his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed; thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind. (Elson, 1968: 278)

What Luce celebrated and Life so brilliantly illustrated mid-century was an American way of seeing, that is, a way of seeing the world that is visually codified and thematized by the national concerns of the United States. As picture magazines such as Life articulated narratives of national identity, photojournalism took on a leading role in representing the intersections of national and international affairs (Kozol, 1994). Coverage of the Vietnam War is often cited as photojournalism’s last great historical moment of record and relevance. During the war photojournalists moved


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into a more adversary relationship with the military, as they questioned the management of the war, and in the work of many photographers the tensions held within the conjunction of democratic and imperial impulses in the American worldview began to visually erupt. The visual legacies of the Vietnam War are still being played out within American popular culture and the myth that the imagery of the war contributed to defeat has haunted a generation of military and political leaders. The management of news media intensified during the conflicts involving the United States in the 1980s – for example, there were bans on media access to the military invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. The visual reportage of international affairs was also affected by the broad changes in American media production in the 1970s and 1980s as the mass circulation, general interest magazines went out of business and photojournalism lost a key foundation and forum. Television had come to dominate the visualization of US foreign affairs and the golden age of photojournalism was at an end. Documentary and news photography was entering a period when the fracturing of the American worldview would be reflected in the fragmenting of media publics and of visual genres and stylings in American media and popular culture more generally.2 Since the 1970s photojournalism has continued to dwell under a sense of diminished strength and relevance, a poor second to televized ways of seeing. What seemed a litmus test of its status and potential came with the first Gulf War, which was also a major test of the post-Vietnam relations between the military and the media. In preparation for the war, the US government devised a press pooling system based on that introduced by the British military in the Falklands War. The ‘Department of Defense Pool’ ensured that hundreds of reporters relied on the work of a small group, while support was withheld from those who chose to work outside the pool system. But this was not ostensibly a photographer’s war. On the one hand, it was CNN’s war, the first war to be covered live by satellite television feeds. On the other hand, it was a war in which visual production and representation was tightly controlled and choreographed by the American military. In the Gulf War, coverage of the media build-up overshadowed coverage of the short-lived conflict itself and remarkably little of the coverage was from the war zone. As Elihu Katz has noted: ‘the fact is we didn’t see a war at all…. We saw portraits of the technology – advertisements for smart planes, tanks, missiles, and other equipment’ (1992: 8). For many photojournalists, the Gulf War was a major nail in the coffin of documentary photography. Fred Richtin, photo-editor at the New York Times during the war, wrote an article titled ‘The End of Photography as We Have Known It’, in which he observed: Never has ‘spin control’ and ‘photo opportunity’ been so easily embraced in the world, nor so successfully. The tradition of the war photographers … was circumvented and very likely ended with another first – pictures seen from a bomb’s point of view. The world of Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith and Don McCullin begins to fade next to the technological wizardry of a ‘smart’ bomb taking its own images … (1991: 11)



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A significant concomitant of this control of imagery was the near invisibility of bodily violence – during the Gulf War there were very few images of corpses or injured bodies in the American press.3 Richtin’s polemic on ‘the end of photography’ as a documentary medium of warfare has proved premature, but the Gulf War was certainly a turning point in the visualization of US foreign policy. This was due in part to military news management but also to broader determinants of a new technological order in which photojournalism has struggled for relevance. There seems little doubt that, in the digital age, photojournalism has lost its privileged role as the definitive medium of events, understood as moments frozen by the camera. In the last 15 years, the conception of events (already substantially ceded to television) has been supplanted by video and digital image-making and dispersal. During the same period, professional photojournalism was seriously undermined due to budget cuts and the increased media use of agency and stock images. In the 1990s there emerged two huge photo agencies, Getty and Corbis, to cater for the new digital market; in the process they gobbled up the smaller agencies that had supported more independent photojournalism. Not surprisingly, there have been many mournful declarations about the decline or death of photojournalism in this period. But these jeremiads tend too readily to conflate aims and means and lament photojournalism’s loss of status as a privileged medium of national record. Photojournalism is only in ‘decline’ to the degree that it is still perceived as a late modern, pre-digital form of image-making. In truth, it too is mutating in relation to the broader conditions of globalized image warfare sketched above.

Embedded images The advent of digitalization has affected the production and dissemination of war images by American media but the results, within the more mainstream media channels at least, have neither been a more plural nor a more investigative visual repertoire. In the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, American photographers have had the opportunity to be ‘embedded’ with military forces near the front lines, a scenario that led to speculation that photographers would have access to the raw realities of warfare. But, despite the claims of ‘real time’ and spontaneous coverage – all promoting the transparency of the American campaign – photographs from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have been characterized by a narrow range of recurrent motifs and routinized scenarios. Several recent studies of the range of photographic imagery of the Iraq War in American newspapers and magazines show that the great majority of images fall into ‘a highly restricted pattern of depiction limited largely to a discourse of military technological power and response’ (Griffin, 2004: 383). This was perhaps most clearly evident in the early days of the conflict, when a great deal of imagery focused on military hardware and the media reproduced the ‘shock and


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awe’ produced by this hardware. But it has remained the norm of coverage even as the organizing news narratives of the war have become more confused or attenuated in framing the meaning of depicted events. To be sure, the embedded photographers have produced a greater ratio of combat images than in the Gulf War, but this is still a small proportion of overall coverage, and photographs of wounded or dead bodies remain rare.4 Hailed by Donald Rumsfeld as a ‘historic experiment’, the embedded system held initial appeal for American media due to the promise of front line reportage, which was a clear improvement over the pooling system of the Gulf War. The embedded journalists have to sign a contract with rules on what and when they can report, and this includes restrictions on reporting details of military actions and on showing faces of dead or wounded. In return they get close to troops and action and enjoy military protection. Bryan Whitman, Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense for Media Operations, addressing Washington bureau chiefs, stated that: … embedding means living, eating, moving, in combat with the unit that you’re attached to.… I think that you probably agree with us that there is a lot of advantages to having the opportunity to stay with a unit for an extended period of time. To build up the relationships, to build up the trust, to build up the basis of reporting. (in O’Regan, 2003: n.p.)

Some American editors and journalists responded positively to the experiment, claiming the embedded reports have a heightened ‘sense of immediacy and humanity’ (O’Regan, 2003). But others have spoken of distortion and propaganda, highlighting the effects of the intense focus on American military hardware and personnel. As New York Times photographer Vincent Laforet wrote about his experience: My main concern was that I was producing images that were glorifying war too much. These machines of war are awesome and make for stunning images. I was afraid that I was being drawn into producing a public relations essay. (2003: n.p.)

Many photographers have commented on the limitations placed on their reporting by the close connection to American personnel. Rita Leistner, a Canadian photographer comments: … when I was embedded, my story was about the soldiers. This was simple access and location: you report on where you are…. I felt like I was trapped in a heavily armored plastic bubble. I could see Iraq from the back seat of those humvees, but I couldn’t touch it or feel it or interact with it. And it was impossible to have any kind of meaningful contact with Iraqi people while wearing body armor and surrounded by American soldiers. (in Komp, 2006: n.p.)

The close relations with American soldiers not only restricts movement and vision, it also creates a cultural pressure on the embedded journalists not to



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report on events that reflect negatively on the unit they are traveling with. This has been most starkly apparent in instances where embedded photographers have taken pictures of acts of violence, released these and then been either ostracized or removed from the unit.5 The embedded system mirrors and mandates the rationality of perception promoted by the state in its geopolitical visions of a globalized war on terror. It promises ‘real time’ and transparent imagery of life on the front lines of the war, but restricts the visual coverage to comply with ‘security’ requirements and produces an American-centered vision of the conflict. This is not to say the embedded reporters are happily complicit with the system; rather, the system produces a frame that regulates their visual productions.6 This frame, as Judith Butler points out, is always already charged with interpretation: … the mandated visual image produced by embedded reporting, the one that complies with state and defense department requirements, builds an interpretation…. We do not have to have a caption or a narrative at work to understand that a political background is being explicitly formulated and renewed through the frame. In this sense, the frame takes part in the interpretation of the war compelled by the state; it is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself interpreting, actively, even forcibly. (2005: 823)

This is a more general truth of the ways in which the state controls visual productions during wartime and not only a reflection of the embedded system. Writing in Time magazine in April 2003, Joe Klein reproduced a 1943 Life magazine photograph by George Strock of dead American soldiers lying on a beach in Papua New Guinea. Klein asked why there were no such unsettling photographs of the war in Iraq and chastised American media: We are closer to war than ever before – hardly half an hour goes by without some embedded ace breathlessly reporting, in real time, from the front. But the war we are seeing is bowdlerized, PG-rated…. At a moment like this, the media should be an irritant … (2003: n.p.)

Klein’s ire reflects that of many American journalists and photographers but is also somewhat ingenuous if not naïve. The George Strock photograph he reproduces was taken shortly after the American military eased its ban on graphic imagery in the hope this would spur outcry among Americans and lend renewed support to the Pacific campaign (Moeller, 1989: 205–7). In short, the Strock image was very much in line with propaganda needs of the moment and its production in Time magazine was part of the ‘frame’ of interpretation heavily influenced if not simply controlled by the state. However, while it is useful to consider the embedding system as a form of framing it is important to acknowledge (as Butler does not) that there are many other elements contributing to the sanitized imagery of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The restricted visual repertoires, embargoes on images


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of graphic violence and American-centered viewpoint are due to a complex mix of political, editorial and practical considerations. Moises Saman, a photographer with Newsweek, argues that: Americans understand we are at war – but not many people want to see the real consequences, especially when they involve one of your own. I think some publications cater to this sentiment by trying not to anger subscribers and advertisers with harsh ‘in-your-face’ coverage of the true nature of war. (2005: n.p.)

When editors make decisions about the reproduction of images, notions of professional ethics, public accountability, privacy and taste are invoked and sometimes intensely discussed. But these notions are inextricably tied up with political and economic motivations and considerations. Not surprisingly, this area of decision-making has become a target of political backlash as editors are charged with both doing too much and too little to censor war imagery. It is all too easy to generalize about the effects of embedding or the patriotism of American editors, none of which is reducible to a singular government policy, and the very liveliness of the debate among American journalists and photographers about the restrictions placed on their work evidences their own sense of agency. For all the constraints, many American photographers have been producing imaginative work, some of them pushing at the boundaries of the frame even as they work within it. However, very little of this more imaginative and investigative visual journalism has made it into the mainstream media in the United States. The role of digitalization in the photojournalistic coverage of current war imagery is complexly bound up with the framing processes discussed above. On the one hand, digital technology has offered photojournalists a mode of image-making and communication that allows them to work in ‘real time’ and so compete anew with televized image production. There has also been a rush of experiments by major news networks and agencies to harness the new forms of image production to their newsgathering and presentation practices. The use of still images on websites is becoming common, often constructed as visual essays or combined with digital video in multi-media slideshows.7 In such ways, the photojournalistic image is mutating as a digital feature of new forms of news production. On the other hand, the pressure to produce ‘realtime’ imagery often works against the news value of the image as anything other than spot-news content or editorial illustration. The image has even less time than before – time for the photographer’s production, the editor’s selection or the reader’s reflection – and the speed of the process tends to blur or erase context, the back-story. This process is characteristic of the visualization of contemporary wars by the American media and is generally conducive to the mandate for transparency demanded by the American worldview. While digital technology has revolutionized photographic practice, the framing devices of mainstream American media remain very powerful controls on the production of imagery. However, in large part due to the effects



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of new digital technologies, the mainstream is becoming a more volatile and porous sphere, and new sites and uses of visual journalism have emerged to challenge or supplement official modes and messages. Perhaps most significant among these are the internet blog sites that track the mainstream news media. One of many examples is a blog titled crisispictures.org, which first became well known in late 2004, when the assault on Fallujah led to claims and counterclaims about the levels and targets of violence. The site released many striking images of life in the city, it posted many graphic shots and tended to point the finger of blame for civilian suffering at the military. Many of the photographs are far more graphic than are usually carried in newspapers, showing decapitated bodies, dead and bloodied troops, and wounded women and children.8 It shows scenes that are more similar to what Iraqis, and many in the Arab world, see on their satellite news channels. Significantly, many of the images are drawn from the wire services, that is to say they are photographs taken by established photojournalists in Iraq, many of them with American media accreditation, but the images have not been used by the American media – a reminder that not only are the published images filtered but they are a very small number of those submitted. Blogging by both professional and amateur photographers is an erratic business, but it has opened up new possibilities for photojournalism that has not otherwise found outlets in the American media and there are signs that it is starting to shape the menus of mainstream news outlets.

The digital unconscious The visualization of US foreign policy is not only circumscribed by the frames of state and media control, it is also being reshaped by the very proliferation of images of global conflicts and traumas. This proliferation, exacerbated by digitalization and new media, is an extension of one of the defining features of the image (whether analogic or digital), that is, its promiscuity. Whatever the attempt to fix them as representation or evidence, images slip and slide and float in and out of contexts (Buck-Morss, 2004). The promiscuity of the image can cause leaks that escape and challenge even the most powerful of political and media frames of interpretation. The most famous example of such leakage to date is the production and dissemination of images of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib prison. More than 1800 images were digitally produced and many of these have been circulated on the internet, despite early efforts by the government to prohibit their publication and ongoing legal attempts to prevent more being published. The threat this leakage posed to US government and military efforts to control the visualization of the war in Iraq was palpable in Donald Rumsfeld’s comments to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing: ‘People are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photos and passing them off, against


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the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon’ (Plummer, 2004: n.p.). The Abu Ghraib photographs visualized the war on terror as a spectacle of bare life, of bodies stripped of rights and liberties, and positioned the viewer as a complicit audience whose gaze reinforces the terror – as such, they are a visceral reflection of the biopolitical power exercised by the United States in the name of national security. And yet, important as the Abu Ghraib images are to questioning US conduct of the war against terror, they are but one famous example of the visual ‘blowback’ emanating from Iraq and many other areas where visual technologies and techniques crafted in and by the US are being used to question or challenge the authority and activity of US foreign policy (Mirzoeff, 2005). This is also to suggest that the promiscuous image signifies the operations of what Walter Benjamin termed ‘unconscious optics’ in the act of photographic seeing. Writing about photography in 1936, Benjamin observed: ‘It is through photography that we discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the psychic unconscious through psychoanalysis’ (1979: 245). Benjamin perceived the optical unconscious as a dimension of the material world that is normally filtered out by trained ways of seeing, thus remaining invisible, but which can be made visible using techniques of photography and film. The optical unconscious refers us to the supplements of conventionalized ways of seeing or residues of alternative ways of seeing. In the digital age, the convergence of technologies (for example, of the camera and the mobile phone) extends our understanding of the optical unconscious into once hidden or barely visible areas of private and public life, of domestic and foreign environments. It is a perverse extension of what Henry Luce celebrated as the human will ‘to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to’. The perversity resides not only in the extensions of vision but also in the disavowals of the will to see as an extension of knowledge. Following the revelations of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, Donald Rumsfeld famously observed: There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the one’s we don’t know we don’t know. (2002: n.p.)

In a sly critique of this statement Slavoj Zˇ izˇek adds a fourth term: ‘the “unknown knowns”, things that we don’t know that we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself”’. Against Rumsfeld’s list of dangers Zˇ iˇzek argues that the ‘main danger lies in the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values’ (2005: 22). This disavowal is necessary, whatever the visual evidence, for it maintains the identification of values and security that is so important to the promotion of the American worldview.



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Nonetheless, the ‘unknown knowns’ that shadow the making and enactment of US foreign policy can be glimpsed in the visual practices and rhetorics surrounding the war on terror, and these glimpses offer a distorted yet critical mirror of the contemporary American worldview. It is important to add that the optical unconscious of US foreign policy is not simply a question of what is hidden, occluded or overlooked by conventionalized ways of seeing, but also of how these conventions are redistributed by new technologies. An excellent example is the photoblogs posted by serving American soldiers in Iraq. In these sites, much of the content is mundane and everyday from the soldier’s point of view, yet these images suggestively trace the optical unconscious of US foreign policy in the domesticated and institutionalized activities of American soldiers in foreign lands. Certain visual tropes and categories of photograph are apparent. Many images have a touristic focus on smiling soldiers posing in the desert or in front of ancient sites, others centre on military hardware and soldiers on patrol, while others depict soldiers relaxing in barracks. The everydayness of much of the imagery both belies and accentuates the extraordinary conditions being depicted, most apparent in the many images of soldiers whiling away time in barracks playing electronic games, watching DVDs, or playing cards, or posing in their bedrooms, often surrounded by imagery of American popular and pornographic cultures. The images have varied functions; some record army life for friends and family, others are created primarily to share among the unit in the first instance, including imagery of memorials to dead comrades. Few would seem to fit the conventional frames of visual journalism, yet the urge to document and to disseminate the material is strongly expressed by those posting the images. These images have a distinctive visual language, blending the genres of institutional, touristic and war photography into a very new genre of ‘soldiers’ photographs’. This form of visual communication – in real time and communal – is new in the representation of warfare; in earlier wars soldiers took photographs, but these were not immediately shared in the way websites can disseminate images globally. Digicams, cameraphones and photoblogs are the media that have proved visually commensurate to the war in Iraq, though the visual styles and genres produced by these media are mutating at a fast pace, drawing on established forms and melding them into new visual formations. These images should also be understood as part of the widespread interest in voyeuristic and documentary imaging that has millions of people photographing or filming their lives for internet or other media dissemination. This is also to say that, in creating, posing for and disseminating these images, the soldiers are responding to conventions of American visual culture. It is not surprising that the pornographic codes often become explicit, defining in certain instances. There are now many websites devoted to pornographic images relating to the Iraq War and the American military presence there; many stock visual scenarios are enacted in these image repertoires, many of them violent. Perhaps more disturbing and more indicative of the impact of digital media on the representation of war are the images US soldiers are posting of dead and


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mutilated Iraqi bodies. The most famous example to date is a website titled ‘Now That’s Fucked Up’, which has offered US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan free access to its menu of amateur porn in return for their photos of death and violence in war. There are many photos posted on the site, many of them closeup photographs of dead bodies that have been torn apart by weaponry. The webmaster of the site claims that 30,000 US soldiers use the site and defends it as a ‘community’ site representing the ‘soldier’s slant’ on war: ‘This is directly from [the soldiers]. They can take a digital camera and take a picture and send it to me, and that’s the most raw you can get it. I like to see it from their point of view, and I think it’s newsworthy’ (Glaser, 2005: n.p.; see also O’Neill, 2005). The connections between war, violence and porn notwithstanding, I think the webmaster is right and that these soldiers are turning to the web in an attempt to make sense of what they are doing there and justify their presence as the venture gets bogged down – and so, the photographs function as desperate, deadly articulation of their fears and desires. This is also to say they are deeply disturbing depictions of the ‘unknown knowns’ of American culture.9 Not surprisingly, there are constant rumours that the US military will ban camera phones and digital cameras. The Defense Department says it does not plan to ban the devices but the Pentagon has issued directives to commanders in the field to strictly monitor the use of consumer wireless technology and several soldier blogs have been shut down. In Iraq, soldiers already have to register their blogs, but many have access to computers not under military licence and control. One army intelligence officer has suggested that the access troops had off-duty to the web was part of the ‘experiment in expeditionary force theory’represented by Operation Iraqi Freedom and predicted that ‘in the future, military blogging will be severely restricted’, with officers deciding that the experiment was ‘risking much more than they are gaining’ (Military.com, 2005). Perhaps, but Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy coalition director of military operations in Iraq, offers a different view: You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Soldiers have cameras in the battlefield. They have telephones in the battlefield. They have access to internet cafes on the base. At a certain point you just have to trust them to do the right thing. (StockPhoto Talk, 2004: n.p.).

And a junior soldier currently in Iraq comments in an online discussion of the issue: A ban, on digital media? What kind of farce is this? We get packages from Amazon.com, I own a laptop, have two digital cameras and a camcorder. I like to send pictures to my mother of how great this place is … (StockPhoto Talk, 2004: n.p.)

I do not mean to suggest that the soldiers’ photographs and photoblogs provide us with the ‘real’ image of the American military in Iraq, not least because there are very serious issues of attribution and authenticity surrounding this sort of image production. For example, some of the soldiers’ photoblog images reappear under different names and with alternative tags on the



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context of their production; in some cases the soldiers have lifted professional photojournalistic images from the internet and sought to pass them off as their own. Nor do I suggest that exposure to more and more images will guarantee any meaningful knowledge of US foreign policy or sympathy for others – if anything, the war on terror may mark the emergence of the ‘banality of images’ (Mirzoeff, 2005: 67). However, the digitalization of war imagery has introduced a fascinating uncertainty into the rationality of perception that mainstream visual media offer American audiences. And there is no doubt that the internet is playing a role in redesigning and redistributing visual understanding about international relations and US foreign policy, and that it is becoming a central battleground of information and image warfare.

Conclusion Throughout much of the 20th century American photojournalism was a privileged medium for the American worldview. It lost this privileged role in part due to the emergence of new technologies of news communication and in part because its core conventions did not keep pace with changing geopolitical concerns of the US leadership and military. However, the frequent claims that photojournalism is dead are premature. As the American worldview has shape-shifted, so photojournalism has evolved. Today, its status remains somewhat diminished, and yet its mutations in relation to the new technologies of seeing and the new global scenes it represents have provided the photojournalistic image with an afterlife. To be sure, ‘the technological possibilities of the new media are embedded in global relations that are wildly unequal in regard to production capacities and distributive effects’, but there are new formations of image-making and production, facilitated in part by the promiscuity of the image (Buck-Morss, 2004: n.p.). This is not to say that photography has become a more universal language; rather, there are contested ways of seeing, now more intensely contested precisely due to the interconnectivity enabled by new technologies. At the same time, the advent of digital photography, of cameraphones and of photoblogging has introduced new relations between photographers, the medium and the audience – the emerging culture of DIY media and of ‘citizen journalism’ is going to become more and more important in the representation and shaping of the news and the newsworthy. American photojournalism bears a complex relationship to the visual production of national identity and of liberal empire; it both contributes to and questions the militarization of vision, the dehumanization of others and the abstraction of ‘international issues’. It can and does function to support a geopolitical way of seeing that ‘sees’ no contradiction between American humanitarianism and the violent treatment of others. Yet the photojournalistic image can also allow us to glimpse beyond the rationality of perception that binds value and security in the American worldview, to apprehend the


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relations of power and knowledge (including the ‘unknown knowns’) that structure the image world of the American imperium. Notes 1. It is, of course, satellite imagery that most notably metaphorizes desires of omnipresence and transparency in post-Cold War geopolitics. The orbital vantage point of the satellite is a key example of the new configuration of the visuality of warfare, naturalizing a centralized yet dislocated, authoritative yet disengaged perspective, and also contributing to the militarization of the gaze that has been almost ubiquitous in the visual productions of the military-entertainment complex. As such, the orbital vantage point of the satellite marks the horizon of the post-Cold War American worldview, both projecting and meeting the desire for transparency in a world of emerging security threats and chaotic globalization. 2. This was a period when the status of the photographic image itself was under much intellectual and critical scrutiny; it was burdened by formal, ethical and historical questions that contributed to the crumbling authority of its evidentiary forms. Susan Sontag, in her mid-1970s writings on photography, provided what was probably the most challenging and influential critique, arguing that photographs cannot tell us political truths and that the ‘humanistic’ strain in American photography was exhausted (see Sontag, 1977). 3. It was not until after the event that a few, belatedly, began to appear, perhaps the most famous of which was the photograph by Kenneth Jarecke of an Iraqi soldier inside his tank, burnt to near dust (see Jarecke and Cervenka, 1992). 4. While there are pictures of Iraqi dead there are very few images of dead American soldiers. A major survey carried out by the Los Angeles Times found that in a six-month period in which 559 Americans and Western allies died, ‘almost no pictures from the war zone of Americans killed in action’ appeared in the mainstream print media (see Rainey, 2005). 5. There are many examples. One is that of Stefan Zaklin, a photographer with the European Pressphoto Agency who was embedded with a US army company in November 2004 during the siege of Fallujah, when he photographed the body of the unit’s commanding officer, who had been shot dead by insurgents. Zaklin waited until kin had been notified, but despite following the embed rules, ‘the military was furious that [he] sent the images at all’. He was ‘placed under armed guard and told he had violated the rules of propriety’. The image was shown in European newspapers but not in mainstream American press (see Harnden, 2004; Zaklin, 2006). 6. On the significance of framing in media representations of conflict and foreign policy activities, see Entman (2004) and Iyengar and Simon (1994). 7. The Washington Post’s ‘Camera Works’ web section is a leading example (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/index.html). 8. See www.crispictures.org. The site showed the image of the dead American soldier by Stefan Zaklin. 9. Susan Brison (2004), writing on the Abu Ghraib images, reflects on broader ‘similarities between American-style torture and hard-core porn’.

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Liam Kennedy is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He is the author of Susan Sontag (1995) and Race and Urban Space in American Culture (2000). He is co-editor of Urban Space and Representation (1999) and editor of The Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration (2004). He is currently researching a book on photography and international conflict and preparing an edited book on public diplomacy and US foreign policy. Address: Clinton Institute, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland [email: [email protected]]
