Where Are the Images of War?

Two years ago this week, the Iraqi War began. I remember this time vividly, as I would stumble home from my thesis carrel late at night after hours of mind-numbing reading, writing, and editing. When I would get home at 2 in the morning, I would make myself some dinner and then curl up on the couch and watch the unfolding coverage of the invasion. I was alone in my house, and practically alone on campus (it was spring break), with only the soft voice of Anderson Cooper to tell me what was going on in the outside world.

Night after night, I would watch the images sent back from Iraq over choppy satellite feeds as I unwound from a day thesis-stress. In the beginning, I was enthralled with the images, but slowly, they began blurring together, as one shot after another flickered across the screen. Now two years later, I couldn't possibly begin to count how many pictures and video clips I have absorbed. Still those images of the first days have stayed with me, as memories of my own life if nothing more meaningful.

Recently, I have been struck more and more of the uncaptivating nature of the published photographs depicting the conflict. They seem to offer little to add to the conflicting reports of progress or distress that I read about Iraq. Sunday's Post really brought it to my mind when it published Waiting for a Clear Picture To Emerge by Philip Kennicott. Where are the images that capture the mind of the public? Since photographers began documenting conflicts with the American Civil War, images have been the most powerful medium for conveying conflicts, and yet today,

"We like to tell ourselves that suggesting can be more powerful than showing,
that the same poetic concentration that occurs in linguistic metonymy also
applies in the photographic kind. If nothing else, it deflects the argument that
by not showing the graphic truth of the war, journalists are shirking their
responsibility to full coverage. If the tastefully allusive image is, like
poetic metonymy, more powerful than the straightforward image, then no essential
truth has been shaded or suppressed.

But it's not clear that this is
true. The most powerful photographs of war -- Eddie Adams's Pulitzer-prize
winning photograph of a Viet Cong prisoner executed on a street, Robert Capa's
image of a Republican soldier felled in the Spanish Civil War -- remain ones
that show directly the moment of death, the destruction of the body or the
mortal remains. By contrast, the metonymic images of this war are becoming
thinner, more generic, rather than denser and more intense. They fall into
categories -- man weeping, car burning, women running, soldiers patrolling --
without any single image rising above the lot."

Today however, we just don't have any images of the Iraq War that are as powerful as Nick Ut's Napalm Strike, Rosenthal's Raising the Flag over Iwo Jima, or Capa's image from the Spanish Civil War, and I wonder why. Is it because we as American's don't yet share an understanding of what this war means to our society? Or are newspapers too concerned about FCC fines to publish images that might be considered too graphic? Or do we just need to wait a little longer to find the image that will crystallize our understanding of this conflict?