The End of Journalism

David Carr:
Show Me the Bodies

FOR war photography, Vietnam remains the bloody yardstick. During the Tet offensive, on Feb. 9, 1968, Time magazine ran a story that was accompanied by photos showing dozens of dead American soldiers stacked like cordwood. The images remind that the dead are both the most patient and affecting of all subjects.

The Iraq war is a very different war, especially as rendered at home. While pictures of Iraqi dead are ubiquitous on television and in print, there are very few images of dead American soldiers. (We are offered pictures of the grievously wounded, but those are depictions of hope and sacrifice in equal measure.) A comprehensive survey done last year by James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times found that in a six-month period in which 559 Americans and Western allies died, almost no pictures were published of the American dead in the mainstream print media.

Not much has changed since then, even though soldiers from all branches continue to perish (although not at same deadly rate as in Vietnam, where more than 1,000 soldiers died in some months in 1968). Is there a taboo, political or otherwise, on the publication of photos of women and men who paid the ultimate price in Iraq?

There is a very real public appetite for unalloyed images of the Iraq war. "The War Tapes," a documentary filmed by National Guardsmen from New Hampshire on convoy security in the deadly Sunni Triangle, won the Tribeca Film Festival's documentary award and has picked up enthusiastic reviews. "Baghdad ER," HBO's gory look inside battlefield medicine, has been seen by 3.5 million viewers and is the cable network's most-watched news documentary in two years.

EVEN the tabloids are looking to the war to sell magazines through what now seem like forbidden images. Shock, a new photo tabloid magazine from Hachette Filipacchi, ran a blood-red battlefield image on its cover and eight pages inside drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. The photos were gruesome, but nothing that was not manifest in the pages of Life, Newsweek and Time during the Vietnam War.

In part because the current administration restricted access to returning coffins from Iraq, conspiracy theorists suggest that a sanitized visual narrative is being constructed for an increasingly unpopular war. But the hardy few Western journalists who are still finding a way to shoot pictures in Iraq say that it is practical, not political, realities that dictate what we see.

A study of 200 American and international journalists covering the Iraq war, done by American University School of Communication in 2004, found that 17 percent of them worked for organizations that would not publish pictures of the dead, and 42 percent had rules discouraging the practice. Absent government censorship, there are a variety of taste issues and commercial considerations — a dead body is never a good adjacency for ads — and a squeamish public aesthetic that can lead to germane but grisly photographs being left on the darkroom floor.

In November 2004, Stefan Zaklin, a photographer for the European Photopress Agency, was embedded with a United States Army company whose captain was shot and killed entering a house in Fallujah. He took a gritty, horrific portrait of the fallen soldier that ran in several European publications, but has only shown up in United States publications in stories about photos that went unpublished.

"There's really no way to know why this image wasn't published at all in the United States," he wrote in the blog Fabrica Forma Fotografia. "Every editor — whether a photo editor or their superior — who made the decision not to publish this picture had a reason. They might all sound different after one listen. But listen again, and you will hear the grinding wheels of the free market turning American journalism into dust."