Shooting Afghans

The twenty-first century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan experienced and experience the most media coverage of any conflict in American history. Take for instance the famous picture of a statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down by marines as a crowd of Iraqis looks on. This image made the rounds of television media and government as proof that the Iraqis saw U.S. troops as liberators. Later revelations exposed that the toppling did not come at behest of the Iraqis and that much of the crowd in the photo came from the press staying at the nearby Palestine Hotel. 1 Television news, taken in by the story, replayed it incessantly while removing the context by making comparisons to iconic events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. The photo did not lie, but its usage became propaganda to push forth a narrative that an administration desperately needed the public to believe. This image, and the aftermath, clearly displays the dangers inherent in the irresponsible use of photography without context. While the image did not necessarily get staged, the lack of context and availability of journalists along with twenty-four hour news changed the meaning of the event for the audience. Iconic images often run into issues with interpretation due to their power in presentation. On the other hand vernacular images by soldiers, never published, and not seen outside their circle of family and friends allows for a more intricate view of their war and their response to it and building the foundation for a broader understanding of the experiences of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Since its invention in the mid-nineteenth century, photography has existed in a symbiotic relationship with conflict in which the camera has served both humanitarian and militaristic impulses. On the one hand, Mark Twain’s ‘incorruptible Kodak’—‘the only witness ... I [King Leopold II] couldn’t bribe’—casts the camera as a redemptive check on violent excess. On the other, its use on the battlefield for target acquisition—and particularly its elision with flight—reveals its utility as a military technology. In-between there lies a more ambiguous use for photography in conflict settings: its deployment for psychological effect.

CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne, 2002

2003

Susan Sontag, like the Italian writer Umberto Eco, is among the few present day cultural critics whose influence resonates, in part through their novels, beyond the intellectual press and university libraries. In 1977 Sontag published On Photography, an extended essay looking at the role of photography in the West, which went on to become her most celebrated book. Its publication came at the close of the Vietnam war, which brought documentary photography, via the media, to the breakfast tables and television screens of America and Europe. The book’s importance lay in the way it developed its readers’ relationship with the photographic image by introducing an accessible language in which to discuss the increasing torrent of images around us. Sontag took discussion of photography out of the specialist realm into that of the everyday. Now, in Regarding the Pain of Others, the author returns to the nature of the photographic image in the West; to re-evaluate and reconsider some of her o...

Bagh-e Nazar, 2020

Problem Statement: There are unknown capacities in a photograph that is far closer to what happened in reality than to literary and historical narratives. If the spatial knowledge of photography and their interpretation enhanced civilization, hidden facts behind the photograph could partially attain. The Iran-Iraq War is one of the critical events in Iranian society, with the numerous non-professional pictures that can help read the events and occurrences of the war. Research Objective: The Iran-Iraq War is one of the critical events in Iranian society numerous non-professional photographs of which can help to give an objective reading of what has happened because primarily the field of science and in this research, the science of history deals with actual matters. Overall, this research intended to assess the narration and reliability of remnant photographs of these events in the compilation of history by examining the role and position of non-professional photography in the Iran-Iraq war. A turn of events made the site of “Valfajr Moghadamati” operation a holy place; a holiness in the formation and proof of the truth of which, non-professional photographs played a significant role more than any other technology. Research method: This research is based on a critical discourse analysis method with a Fairclough‏ approach (in particular) which limits the term discourse to sign systems such as text and image, and by taking photographs as text, presents a specific and unique narrative of “Valfajr Moghadamati”. Conclusion: In the collection of studied photographs, the “other” or the Ba’ath enemy did not have a significant presence. In these photographs, there was a view of friendship and social relations that was fundamentally different from the anti-enemy discourse as the prevailing discourse in in-war societies. There is no need for an anti-enemy dialogue. The Ashura behaviors have made this ritual event into an event that has produced a different narrative than the government’s story.

The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2015

Some of the most celebrated and well-known photographs in existence are of war. When we think of ‘war photography’, we tend to recall a small number of iconic images which have endured in the public imagination. By contrast, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the most mediatised conflicts in history, and yet from the vast corpus of imagery produced, arguably none have come to define these wars in the public imagination. Why? Following an established belief in the negative impact of media coverage during the Vietnam War, accounts of the media in war position the objectives of the military and the media as incompatible. They typically adopt a simplistic understanding of the sources of photographic effect which draws a straight line between the event—of which the photograph is considered an unproblematic trace—and its political impact. Such an approach cannot fully account for the vagaries of the news photograph as a political vessel. The media policy put in place for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequently introduced in Afghanistan marked the beginning of a more experimental approach to media- military relations characterised by synergy rather than opposition, and one in which the photograph—as a vessel of political communication—operated primarily as a connotative symbol rather than as a denotative index of particular events. By combining elements of Cultural Studies literature with empirical data, this dissertation seeks to ask what War Studies can learn from understanding the role and functioning of the image in war and finds that the field of vision remained firmly sublimated to established political discourse which resonates more closely with American national mythology than it does with particular news events.

Following research on depictions of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, this article discusses the nature of US news- magazine photo coverage of the ‘War on Terrorism’ in Afghanistan and the military invasion of Iraq. The analysis suggests that news-magazine photographs primarily serve established narrative themes within official discourse: that published photographs most often offer prompts for prevailing government versions of events and rarely contribute independent, new or unique visual information. Despite claims of ‘live’ and spontaneous coverage, photographs from Afghanistan and Iraq, like those from the Gulf War in 1991, are characterized by a narrow range of predictable, recurrent motifs. Repetitive images of the mustering and deployment of the American military arsenal overshadow any fuller or more complex range of depiction. And when dominant news narratives, such as the fall of the Taliban or the fall of Baghdad, came to a close, photographic coverage of continuing events in Afghanistan and Iraq fell off sharply.