The first really media-savvy war of what could euphemistically be called "the present day" (i.e. during my lifetime...) was Vietnam. Photojournalists were given unprecedented access to the front lines. Reputations were made the hard way by men such as Philip Jones-Griffiths, Tim Page and Don McCullin. They found themselves, as young men, documenting the lives and deaths of other young men, going into battle alongside them in Hueys, armed with a Nikon or a Leica instead of an Armalite, but just as much in harm's way. For a flavour of the lives they led, pick up a copy of "Nam" by Tim Page. Don't just look at the pictures and read the words, feel the rhythm of the book - Page brings those days to life in a very personal way.
The saturation coverage backfired, of course. The US lost the war, not in the paddy fields of the Mekong Delta but in the hearts and minds of the people at home, who were fed, day after day, a diet of the horrors of war; US troops and Viet civilians alike ripped apart by explosive ordnance or flayed alive by napalm.
By the time the Falklands War came around, establishment attitudes, at least in the United Kingdom, had hardened. There was a recognition that open access meant that information could not be controlled; once the genie was out of the bottle it could not be forced back in and the "bad" would be shown alongside the "good". The government of the day were keen to keep things low key. Who can forget Ian McDonald, the MOD spokesman who appeared night after night on the BBC and ITN news, delivering carefully worded briefings in a wooden monotone? The very distances involved helped in the delay and censorship of images of course; if you are on a naval warship in the South Atlantic your options, back in those days, for getting your film back to shore, were strictly limited. It was the Falklands War that ended Don McCullin's career as a war correspondent - he was denied passage to the theatre of war, it is said, because Margaret Thatcher specifically objected to his ability to depict the horror of conflict. McCullin decided not to cover any further wars, but thankfully turned his lens in other directions.
During the Gulf War(s), journalists were "embedded" - a term that first found currency in the Iraq invasion. The military machine embraced those journalists along for the ride, swaddling them so tightly that they were again, stifled. The old saying about holding your friends close and your enemies closer was never more clearly illustrated. Today, in the Afghan conflict, there is no concurrent front-line reporting at all; "news" is stale before it is ever transmitted or printed.
All of this has had two effects; firstly, the coverage of such "events" - if war can be couched in such terms - has, except for a few honourable exceptions, become anodyne and detached - subservient to the establishment. Cartoonish images of smart bombs falling on baddies, interspersed with marginally less cartoonish animations of military advances and deployments replace real, eyewitness accounts and images. The low-tech Panorama sandbox filled with Airfix tanks of the Yom Kippur War has been replaced by the high tech Newsnight computer simulation, but it is just as detached from reality. The detachment serves to make the horror of war seem somehow less real, less threatening. Soon wars will come, like movies in the cinema, with ratings - "contains mild peril and threat" for a "police action" up to "extreme action and scenes of a violent nature" for a full-blown war.
The second, and equally worrying consequence is that photojournalists - indeed any journalists - are no longer seen as impartial observers, their actions of equal benefit to both sides. Rightly or wrongly they are seen as instruments of the state, reporting what they are told, and therefore as much a fair target as anyone else on the battlefield. The net effect is clear - the more photojournalists are seen as being directly in harm's way, the less they will be free to show what is clearly going on.
So can a photographer - can a photograph - ever truly be objective? subtext and message free? Independent of all that is going on?
Peacekeeper or warmonger...?
No.
I have looked at this primarily from the point of view of a war correspondent, because it makes it easier to illustrate the point, but the same principles hold true in other fields too.
Just picking a subject makes it subjective. Pointing your camera in a direction is a conscious decision. The longer you take on composition, the more thought you put into it, the further the eventual photo becomes. Even your choice of exposure - dark or light - and colour - or monochrome - puts your own "spin" on your output. There is no such thing as a "straight record shot" - the narrative that is in your head, conscious or subconscious, comes out when you press the button. The art is to recognise that and to channel it in your work. Every photo tells a story - just make sure it is telling the story you want it to.
Bill
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- All images on this blog are copyright Bill Palmer and may not be reproduced in any format or medium without permission.
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