Every picture tells someone's story
By Hans Durrer
On August 19, the online version of the International Herald Tribune (IHT)
published a short piece about a fire in the vacant (since September 11, 2001)
Deutsche Bank building at Ground Zero in New York City. The piece started like
this:
People looked up, as they did that day in September, in awe and
in horror. They clustered in groups, holding cell phones to their ears and
cameras to their eyes as a plume of smoke hovered
over Lower Manhattan once again. The multiple-alarm fire broke out Saturday in
the vacant Deutsche Bank skyscraper at Ground Zero, killing two firefighters
and injuring at least five others in the relic of the September 11 attacks that
was being dismantled.
It was more than the sight that reminded some of the September 11 terrorist
attacks nearly six years ago. It was the sounds and the smell: breaking glass
clanking its way down a burning skyscraper, a helicopter's whir somewhere
above, an acrid, noxious scent filling the streets.
Some people were reminded of September 11? That is, not least given the
location of the Deutsche Bank building near Ground Zero, of course
understandable, yet to allude to it as excessively as these first few
paragraphs do seems not only odd but unnecessary.
After all, this month's fire had absolutely nothing to do with September 11. So
why repeatedly mention it? Is anybody reminded of the repeated attempts of the
George W Bush administration - sorry, of the Bush government (these people
clearly do not administer, they govern) - to link the attacks on the twin
towers of New York's World Trade Center to Iraq? It may seem needless to say -
though I'm not always sure - somewhat unlikely that the political agenda of the
IHT and of the Bush government should be the same. So, what about money? The
magic-formula September 11, after all, will surely sell newspapers.
This is a useful reminder: "In addition to increasing government spending after
[September 11], Bush asked Americans to go shopping, and they did - bringing an
economy shattered by the attacks back to full speed within a few years,"
reported CNN on September 11, 2006 ("9/11 trauma persists five years later").
It wasn't so much the IHT article that caught my attention, it was a photo (a
slide show with nine shots could be found on the website) by Josh Haner of the
New York Times that showed a man holding the US flag. Its caption read: "Paul
Isaac of Brooklyn, an auxiliary firefighter who worked on 9/11, holds a flag in
support of those at the scene."
What
one reads into photographs is inevitably personal. Such reading depends on
one's upbringing, culture, interests, gender, and preferences as well as
dislikes; it is also subject to one's moods. Being Swiss, I've never really
understood (emotionally, that is) Americans' love for their flag (this love
exists in all cultures, I know, but the man in this picture holds a US flag,
and it is to this picture I'm referring), and so it was with utter
incomprehension that I looked at this photo.
Why would a flag, in this situation, symbolize support? Not that I doubt that
this man thinks that it does, and not that I doubt that quite a few people will
interpret the picture this way. But really, to hold a flag when a fire breaks
out does seems quite a stretch, doesn't it? However, that is actually not my
concern here; my concern is that such a photo is published in the context of a
blaze that otherwise seems just an ordinary blaze. In other words, a picture
that seems to symbolize resolve in the face of an attack on the sovereignty of
a nation does not at all belong in this context.
But hey, you might say, this man meant to hold his flag in this context, he
meant to show support, and it is not up to you to tell him what to do or how to
do it. The photojournalist's task is to record pictures of what happens. That's
it. But to show this photo with an article that uses the magic-formula
September 11 so often that one comes away with thinking about September 11 and
not about an ordinary fire is not only misleading, it is irresponsible.
The August 20 New York Times again evoked September 11. One of the headlines on
the front page read: "Scarred on September 11, a firehouse mourns again". So it
is not only the Bush government that is profiting from deliberately made-up
September 11 connections, the mass media (the headline of the blaze article of
the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, August 19, read: "Manhattan blaze recalls
9/11") are doing exactly the same.
The issue here is a bit bigger than that of showing pictures in context while
at the same time providing us with adequate information so that we can
understand what we are looking at, the issue is "prop-agenda", as British
musician Brian Eno once put it. By this he meant the kind of propaganda that
hardly ever gets mentioned.
"Its greatest triumph is," Eno wrote in an article for The Observer in 2004,
"that we generally don't notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists. We
watch the democratic process taking place - heated debates in which we feel we
could have a voice - and think that, because we have 'free' media, it would be
hard for the government to get away with anything very devious without someone
calling them on it ... It isn't just propaganda anymore, it's 'prop-agenda'.
It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think
about."
This control is as much exercised by the media as it is by governments.
Hans Durrer has degrees in law, journalism studies, and applied
linguistics, from universities in Switzerland, Wales and Australia. He has
lived in Southeast Asia, and worked in Southern Africa, Argentina, China,
Switzerland and Turkey. He is the author of Ways of Perception: On
Visual and Intercultural Communication (White Lotus Press, Bangkok, 2006).
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