# Great read here. Warning graphic.



## manny212 (Aug 8, 2014)

The War Photo No One Would Publish - The Atlantic


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## dennybeall (Aug 8, 2014)

Young people today have grown up on horror films and graphic computer games. The era of "shocking" photos has passed.


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## manny212 (Aug 8, 2014)

dennybeall said:


> Young people today have grown up on horror films and graphic computer games. The era of "shocking" photos has passed.




Agreed , and I myself to a point have been desensitized , but man these hit home. The guy trying with all his might to escape only to be burned . WOW


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## Derrel (Aug 8, 2014)

SEE THE IMAGE here, smaller, but in color: Gulf War, Iraqi casualty, Nasiriyah, Iraq, March, 1991 | Contact Press Images


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## hamlet (Aug 9, 2014)

This bring back memories. I can say that when you experience such harsh realities in life, it changes who you are in a real way when the inhumanity is at your door step. I'm still trying to fix my fragmented psyche from years past, one decent human being at a time.


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## JoeW (Aug 9, 2014)

Yeah, it's a powerful photo.  I'd read that story and that account and emailed it to a friend.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that young people today see horror movies and aren't thrown by stuff like this.  What I do think is that people think b/c they've done first person shooter games and some movies, that they "know" what war is like.  BS.  I remember being on a panel discussing media coverage of war with a guy who was a Vietnam veteran and his response to someone who claimed that they knew what war was like b/c they'd seen movies was (and I'm roughly paraphrasing):  "to say that you've seen a war movie like 'Saving Private Ryan' so you know what it's like is like a virgin watching a porn film and saying that's the same as actually having sex."

There's actually a tremendous amount of censorship that occurs with regard to this stuff.  Obama took a tremendous amount of heat, primarily from the right, for finally allowing the media to take pictures of caskets returning to Dover AFB.  It's still a general unofficial rule that you don't display photos of dead Americans (okay to show dead hajis or allies).  Just recently, the NYT (and others) censored pictures of MH-17 (the one that went down over the Ukraine) to avoid showing some of the more graphic scenes of dead bodies in the wreckage....the nature of the disaster meant many of the bodies were partially or completely nude, there were bodies still strapped in to seats that littered the wheat and sunflower field that the crash area was in, lots of body parts (from hands on down to smaller pieces) and editors have pretty much refused to publicly display those.  9-11...there were a host of pictures taken by PJs that editors wouldn't display.  Many felt that the "Falling Man" series taken by Richard Drew of the AP is still regarded as obscene by many and the family of the man identified in that photo has consistent cursed the media for seeking to determine who it was in the photo.  Photos of bodies once they'd hit the ground, or various body parts....those were rarely published (at least here in the States).

I think part of what is missing from what is otherwise a very good and compelling article is an explanation how this photo was taken during the implementation of the "embed" program (and how this affected the censorship).  The embed program was an effort by the US Military to provide far more access than was available in Panama and Grenada but still control what was being shot and avoid the Vietnam era of nearly complete freedom for photographers.  There was an effort during the war to minimize the cost and graphic depiction of death.  So while the US has tended to censor photos of our own dead or carnage, we generally are more open when it involves the dead of other nations.  In this case Ken Jarecke's photo was of a dead Iraqi.  There were many examples of dead Iraqis, especially along Highway 80, but they didn't see wide distribution b/c it made the war more graphic.


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## The_Traveler (Aug 9, 2014)

I agree with Joe W and think there is an additional issue.

Many things that are important, necessary, natural and inevitable are also painful to see and seeing the reality has an impact all of out proportion to its real importance because we, as a group, are not used to being confronted with these kinds of things.
If you have ever seen an autopsy, you'll know that.  My first sight of dead bodies was after a plane crash and the bodies had floated for 7 days before being picked up. That was in 1989 and the sight remains with me still.

I will give two more pertinent examples.

Several weeks ago, I had treatment for a pre-malignant condition on my face, ears and scalp. It was excruciatingly painful and honestly disgusting to see. I stayed in the house for two weeks until the initial ulceration had subsided and people could look at me and not just recoil in fear and disgust (more than they usually do).  
When I went back to my dermatologist I asked him why he hadn't warned me just how much of an ordeal it was going to be and he said that it was possible that it wouldn't be that bad and he also didn't want to scare me off. 

In retrospect, I'm glad I went through the treatment, rather than let the malignancies develop, but if I had known in advance, ?
Here is a link to a picture of part of it. I post a link rather than the picture because...................... Lew Lorton Photography | BlogImages2 | P7121355

The second example is a bit more generalizable. That picture of an Iraqi driver burnt to a crisp has an impact but it really tells you nothing. He could have a great guy pressed into service who leaves behind a wife and 5 children or he could have been a torturer who had left a trail of mutilated bodies behind him. The picture is, if tv courtrooms can be believed, too prejudicial to be part of what we think and what use to decide.


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## JoeW (Aug 9, 2014)

Lew, lots of good points.  There are editorial decisions about excluding stuff b/c it's not relevant or prejudicial in some manner.   But ultimately, what a photojournalist is able to say is "I was there.  I saw that.  Here's the proof."  So when the pictures provide that, they should be publicized.

I think the value of the Jarecke photo of the burned Iraqi is that it truly hits home what carnage and panic there was on Highway-80 leaving Kuwait City.  You see a bunch of burned vehicles and it doesn't hit home....maybe people left them there and they got burned up.  And there was pretty much no accurate sense of the carnage other then photos of vehicles.  But publishing stuff just for tittiliation or b/c you can or b/c it stretches the boundaries of what people have seen...there's no valid journalistic reason for pushing that edge of the envelope.

And Lew, as for your photo.....I just assumed you'd recently gotten back from an Irish wedding.


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## The_Traveler (Aug 9, 2014)

JoeW said:


> Lew, lots of good points.  There are editorial decisions about excluding stuff b/c it's not relevant or prejudicial in some manner.   But ultimately, what a photojournalist is able to say is "I was there.  I saw that.  Here's the proof."  So when the pictures provide that, they should be publicized.
> 
> I think the value of the Jarecke photo of the burned Iraqi is that it truly hits home what carnage and panic there was on Highway-80 leaving Kuwait City.  You see a bunch of burned vehicles and it doesn't hit home....maybe people left them there and they got burned up.  And there was pretty much no accurate sense of the carnage other then photos of vehicles.  But publishing stuff just for tittiliation or b/c you can or b/c it stretches the boundaries of what people have seen...there's no valid journalistic reason for pushing that edge of the envelope.
> 
> And Lew, as for your photo.....I just assumed you'd recently gotten back from an Irish wedding.



This discussion would unfortunately get political and so I must leave it, saying only that PJs can be unfairly biased in their portrayal of reality - and it won't show in the picture.

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/graphics-programs-photo-gallery/366743-nsfw-but-not-usual-way.html#post3295853


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## Derrel (Aug 9, 2014)

I thought the takeway from the article was that the US military bombed and strafed the chit out of a convoy of "thousands of" men in vehicles and basically exterminated the soldiers who were in full retreat, and the media in the US didn't show a single damned body. I VIVIDLY recall the operation, and watching it on TV, and all the prior images of "smart bombs" wiping out buildings, with the real feeling of war stripped away. The utter chicken-**** nature of the coverage and reporting decisions the major US media editors made is appalling. I studied journalism at the university level, and the way the USA's newspaper and news magazine editors backed away from the entire war was really shocking. Growing up as a kid, I saw Vietnam war coverage that showed what it was like...bad,bad stuff...guys shot to hell, medics with bloody hands, GI's heartbroken over dead comrades, airlifts of guys who were way bad off...all sorts of print and TV news images were sent directly to the American public, but the Gulf War was presented to the American public as if it was all "shock and awe" and then "roll, baby, roll." I think the editors really dropped the ball on this photo, as well as on the other shots of the "Highway to Hell". I'm not sure what the consensus is, or even if there is any consensus on repeated air-strikes, .50 caliber machine gun fire, Apache Helicopter gunships blasted the crap out of a convoy of soldiers stuck in, as the article described it, " a massive traffic jam"as they fled in full retreat...I mean, I really do not know what the consensus is as far as what military commanders are supposed to do as far as slaughtering "thousands" of men in a single motorized column, with 20mm cannon rounds blowing the tires off vehicles at the front of the road, creating a huge traffic back-up, then strafing the crap out of the column until every single guy was dead,dead,dead.

What we as USA citizens watching this war on TV heard was that there were *a lot of guys who fled, deserters, who were captured.*  The "angle" we were NEVER told was how the US military shot those fish in a barrel, and the guys who fled realized their lives were not worth a single .50 cal machine gun burst or single 20mm cannon round...but strafing a truck full of 25 guys was actually worth pulling the trigger on and burning a few primers...we got a very,very slanted view of this specific operation through US media sources.


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## The_Traveler (Aug 9, 2014)

Derrel said:


> What we as USA citizens watching this war on TV heard was that there were *a lot of guys who fled, deserters, who were captured.*  The "angle" we were NEVER told was how the US military shot those fish in a barrel, and the guys who fled realized their lives were not worth a single .50 cal machine gun burst or single 20mm cannon round...but strafing a truck full of 25 guys was actually worth pulling the trigger on and burning a few primers...we got a very,very slanted view of this specific operation through US media sources.



History is written by the winners.
And if someone picks up a gun, there is no guarantee that a unicorn will come and sprinkle fairy dust to melt the barrel and end it all.
The object of any battle is to make everything so damn unpleasant for the opposition that they won't try it again.
The goal of any commander is to fight an uneven fight so that his side wins and doesn't take casualties.

I was in a Vietnamese village where the village chief, his wife and family had been hanged with wire for the sin of letting a US medical team set up shop there and give care. 

War isn't nice and people who back away and want to give up when things are ugly forget that generally the bad guys don't care.


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## ristretto (Aug 9, 2014)

That photo WAS published at the time, i remember it. And it's a color photo - they show it as a B&W here. Gulf War 1 IIRC, 1991 - a convoy of vehicles retreating north from Kuwait, back into Iraq.


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## ristretto (Aug 9, 2014)

JoeW said:


> Lew, lots of good points.  There are editorial decisions about excluding stuff b/c it's not relevant or prejudicial in some manner.   But ultimately, what a photojournalist is able to say is "I was there.  I saw that.  Here's the proof."  So when the pictures provide that, they should be publicized.


Magnum: Phillip Jones-Griffiths - great coverage of 'Urgent Fury'/Grenada in 1983 (for Time Magazine?) They never printed any of it apart form one image of a helicopter landing.
http://puntito131.puntopressllc.net...ads/2013/11/grenadaUSmarinesStreet.jpg?68cbda

Magnum Photos Photographer Portfolio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Grenada


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## robbins.photo (Aug 9, 2014)

manny212 said:


> The War Photo No One Would Publish - The Atlantic



Read through it.. a few interesting items here, thing that struck me though was how he was whining about being challenged.  Duh.  Those guys are responsible for your safety and they'll be in some serious hot water if you do something stupid and trigger a mine or an IED or wander off far enough to get yourself into serious trouble.  Instead of whining about the guys in uniform who kept your keester alive over there maybe you could show a little gratitude.

I won't comment on most of the rest as I can't figure out a way to do that and not spark a political debate - but I will raise one item as food for thought.

Imagine how the public would have reacted during World War II if they had actually seen unedited pictures of the aftermath of events like Iwo Jima, Operation Overlord (The Battle of Normandy), or Dresden.  If they had, would we have finished the job and defeated Hitler?  Or would those images have caused us to stop and allowed him to remain in power?

Like I said, not looking for a political debate here - just something to seriously consider.  Truth is war is a very ugly business - always has been.


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## JoeW (Aug 9, 2014)

Hey Lew, no intention on my part to make this political.

I think there are a couple of assumptions that are part of this issue.  One is that the photo either makes no impact or it does (i.e.: there is little/no value to the photo....it's just a grisly photo of a dead enemy).  The second is that by showing carnage like this  (and as others have noted...other battlefields or horrific results), it might have led to the USA getting cold feet.

What I think is that when we (as a country) are bought in to a war, we will fight it.  I may be naive about that. And that includes if graphic coverage is public.  I do think Lew makes a terrific point about perception and editorial decisions.  As photojournalists (and by extension,other visual media like TV), we cover stuff where sight matters.   That's a big part of the reason why the S&L crisis during the 80's never got much traction and understanding with the public--other than showing a shuttered building, how do you convey the nature of that crisis visually?  Well, you can't do it very well.  So as a result, papers and TV stations tended not to cover it.  

It's going on right now in Gaza.  IDF and Hamas are waging a PR war, both using very sophisticated means.  Israel's is probably smoother.  But Hamas has the advantage of lots of visual imagery that a media source will jump at.   To be specific, I can sit through a briefing by IDF intel officers about rocket trajectories indicating that they're coming from specific sites or neighborhoods that are then being targeted.  Or I can go take pictures of bloody parents holding kids.  I'm not trying to argue one side or the other, only that in a visual medium, images trump.

I do think that the US military made a significant effort to downplay the obvious examples of human carnage in Desert Storm.  Yes, plenty of examples of dead vehicles, tanks that had "cooked up" and discarded gear.  Plenty of pictures of POWs.  None of these photos (including a very powerful one by Chris Hondros of a burned hand with a wedding band) were "censored" in the sense that they were banned.  They just didn't get widespread coverage and weren't released in a timely fashion.  So Derrel is spot-on with this point.  

I do think that as a smaller percentage of the US population has a "shirt in the game" b/c so few of our citizens serve in the military, we're less informed about what this is like.  We tend to think that people go in to combat and can shoot the guns out of the bad guy's hands, that there are clear good guys and bad guys, that death is just like going to sleep, that friendly fire is rare, that most people who attempt to surrender end up as POWs, that most wounds are flesh wounds and a whole lot of other nonsense.  So coverage of this sort can be both shocking (despite the video game/horror movie experiences) but also critically informative.

So as to the two assumptions I pointed out initially, I think that while not all carnage and graphic death is critical to see, I think editors are too quick to censor on the grounds of sensibility.  The job of the media is to inform and attempt to show what we know to be true.  Not to worry if someone will lose their breakfast when they look at the front page.  I don't know how much impact it is but I'd like to think that by seeing such graphic carnage, we're a bit more realistic about warfare (rather than treating it as a movie or video game).  And as to whether or not it would keep us from "finishing" a war...if we make the case for a war and inform the public, I think there is less chance of them being horrified and wanting to walk away.  Maybe if Americans had seen pictures of burned sailors at Pearl Harbor (US policy was to show no pictures of dead Americans until the Buna Beach shows showed up from New Guinea), then carnage from Iwo or Tarawa or Omaha wouldn't have such impact.  And again, I think the point isn't showing carnage for carnage sake.  It's about giving people a sense of what it's like or what's going on with a conflict.


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## cgw (Aug 10, 2014)

Suspect we'll be seeing more censored photos during the course of the WWI centennial. It's nothing new.


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## The_Traveler (Aug 10, 2014)

JoeW said:


> It's going on right now in Gaza.  IDF and Hamas are waging a PR war, both using very sophisticated means.  Israel's is probably smoother.  But Hamas has the advantage of lots of visual imagery that a media source will jump at.   To be specific, I can sit through a briefing by IDF intel officers about rocket trajectories indicating that they're coming from specific sites or neighborhoods that are then being targeted.  Or I can go take pictures of bloody parents holding kids.  I'm not trying to argue one side or the other, only that in a visual medium, images trump.



Images, like smells, hit us somewhere down below the intellectual level, where we react in a visceral sense.

I mentioned somewhere before that the first dead bodies I saw had been floating in a lukewarm ocean for a week before they were recovered. The sight and the smell were so awful that it was 3 hours before I could go into the autopsy suite. I would go up the elevator, get to the floor and then turn and walk downstairs immediately. The only way I was able to persist in being in the room was to keep my head tilted back a bit so I really couldn't see the bodies until, millimeter by millimeter, I forced myself to look. 

Seeing the twisted remains of what we know was once a person is destructive to our own sense of immortality; it's the total opposite of how we feel when seeing a baby with all those small, unblemished working parts.  When we see a baby or child killed, we react without thinking. 
In war and politics (which is war by another means) thinking is always the most important thing to do.


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