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Still Photographs Capture the War's Real Deal

Sheryl McCarthy

April 3, 2003

Having trouble following the war?

Are you confused by the bombardment of television video tracking every military engagement and incident, by the profusion of correspondents relating their personal experiences, by the prattle of experts analyzing everything to death? Is your brain numbed by endless articles sifting through every conceivable angle on the war and its aftermath? Are you overwhelmed?

If so, take my advice: Look at the still photographs.

Modern war is supposed to be a TV story, war not even being real until the camera crews arrive and start taping what's happening at that moment. But after two weeks of trying to follow this war, I realize that photographs capture it better than anything else. Like the video of the World Trade Center collapsing, watching the same war footage over and over again will eventually imprint the significance of what's happening on our minds. But most TV images are fleeting, gone in a matter of seconds. What one needs is to study them, think about them, and figure out what they mean.

Still photographs allow us to do that. Cultural critic Susan Sontag, who recently wrote a new book about photography, says that photographs have the ability to sum up a war. A single, haunting picture gives us a way of remembering the event that has taken place.

If you only watched the war on television, you'd think it was about awesome weaponry making surgical strikes from a distance and picking off enemy targets like tin cans on a fence. Photographs show a war that's grittier and more messy.

Soldiers sit or lie in their dirt holes, exhausted and resting from the latest skirmish or tensed up and waiting for the next one to begin. Dirt-encrusted tanks crawl through clouds of dust, and a helicopter that has crashed lies disabled on its side. In one particularly telling photo, several American soldiers are engaged in a firefight on a bridge while an Iraqi woman sits on the bridge, caught in the cross fire.

On television I haven't seen much of the physical damage caused by the fighting, just huge explosions that rattle buildings and create clouds of smoke. But in the still photos, I saw the ruins of a bombed-out mosque and Iraqi civilians carrying a wounded man out of a bombed telecommunications center.

Nor is television showing pictures of dead American soldiers: too hard on the families, the TV executives say. Instead, they show videos of flag-draped coffins. But a newspaper photograph shows a dead GI lying on the side of the road, his body covered with a tarp and with only his arm and wristwatch exposed. This is the real deal here.

The war's impact on Iraqis is muted in the TV version. But a newspaper photograph shows an Iraqi girl lying in a hospital with her arm, nose and head bandaged up. Another shows an American soldier treating the broken leg of an Iraqi soldier. The man's braced leg lies in a pool of blood, and he's in such pain that he's crawling toward the camera.

Video of hungry and thirsty Iraqis scrambling to get the water and food packets being handed out by coalition soldiers have aired on television. But the image has more impact when the desperation in the people's faces is frozen on the page. So do the photos of the refugees, squatting in the dirt, their eyes showing anxiety and fear, as they wait to be cleared to move past a checkpoint.

And while we know that women soldiers are fighting in Iraq, it's brought home in the still pictures - a female Marine who's carrying a rifle and is practically dwarfed by all her gear, and a group of women sailors laughing aboard a naval ship on which 10 percent of the crew are women.

We need narrative to understand a war, Sontag says, but the barrage of TV images can actually sap us of the ability to process what's going on. Still photographs, however, have the power to "haunt us." So if you're trying to get a grip on this war, I suggest that you turn off the TV, that you stop reading about it for a day or two, and that you look simply at the photographs. They will help you think about what's going on and about what it's worth in the end.