In “War is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamor of Armed Conflict” American writer David Shields contends that the New York Times (NYT), one of the most august newspapers in the world, has been complicit in promoting war through the conflict images it publishes on its front page.
Shields frames his argument through analysing 1000 photographs from the Iraq and Afghanistan incursions that have appeared on the front page of the NYT since October 1997 when the paper first began publishing colour images on page one. In “War is Beautiful” he codifies these images into ten chapters – Nature, Playground, Father, God, Pietà, Painting, Movie, Beauty, Love and Death – claiming images easily slot into each of these categories.
In the same way an image needs a caption to be fully understood, it’s necessary to look at the definition of each of the chapters as outlined in the book to grasp Shields motivation. Only then does the proposition become clear.
“Nature: military action becomes a habitat, the preserve of masculine desire for war.
Playground: war is the playground that authorizes the male psyche to exercise its passions. It’s also the dangerous arena into which the Times sends its employees to win awards and promote its brands.
Father: Within another culture the American warrior is presented as protection and relief from chaos.
God: The military commands the globe.
Pietà: War death = Christ’s death on the cross. The process of removing the body from the cross and battlefield is sacred. Mourning is always muted and respectful. Hysterical grief is banned.
Painting: War stuns the senses to the point that its portrait needs to be painted over and over.
Movie: The positing of action heroes, video games and special effects in cinematic stills…Technology and art erase the body’s grotesque disfigurement and death.
Beauty: Portraits of the other: the occupied and displaced, mostly women and children, beauties seeking salvation. Male sacrifice is consecrated in these faces.
Love: Proximity to death, which marks the separation between military and civilian life is unmistakably erotic. Like sex, war is a force that gives us meaning.
Death: The machine rolls on; the war dead incarnate the immortal epic.”
In explaining these categories Shields says, “It is almost as if the Times has a very limited repertoire in which they say ‘okay you guys we need a photo today of war as movie’. I must have found 70 photos which comported to war as outtakes from glorious war movies and I could have done the whole book as war is cinematic, war as movie”.
“In my analysis very few, if any, front page A1 pictures since October of 1997 have conveyed anything of the horror, the cost, the consequence of war. To me as many as 700 of those photographs I analysed can be read as beautified and sanctified, glamourised and glorified war.”
The exercise has clearly been painful for Shields who for decades was an avid supporter of the paper. He says he feels like the NYT has let him down and that he has been duped. On the one hand the paper has conveyed scepticism about the war through its editorials, and on the other it is has used photography to actively support war. “For over 20 years I’d get up every morning and read the paper, but I began to realise I was consuming war porn. Basically these images were hiding in plain sight, ostensibly covering war, but they were actively promoting it and that seemed to me extremely insidious”.
Shields acknowledges that photography has been used as a tool of propaganda for more than a century. “Yes of course media and government have been in complicated conversation, but there is a famous American phrase which is ‘journalism is supposed to afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted’. I think the Times pretends to subscribe to journalism as the Fourth Estate, and in American fantasy there’s this idea of journalism being a crucial antagonist against the government”.
Had the images in question been published in a right-wing paper there would be no argument to mount says Shields. “I found myself truly baffled wondering what these pictures are doing on the front page of the Times when they seem to me to belong on the front page of the New York Post or USA Today or some other Murdoch megaphone”.
He continues. “It’s almost as if all of these images, all of these photographers and photo editors have become comfortable with a stylised gesture toward war, but never a real grappling with the war. Real journalism is supposed to upset readers, but these photographs are pure wallpaper, they’re almost screensavers in which people just glance and go ‘oh yeah that’s someone’s tank and it’s a sunset, and there’s a fireball and it’s kind of pretty. Okay now let’s move onto the rest of the website or the paper’. I say it is almost like the New York Times is selling this idea of war not being hell, but war being heck, or not even heck, war is heaven. I haven’t ever served in war or been in a theatre of war, but this is a complete fiction that obviously the Times is selling for economic, cultural and political reasons”.
When images are taken out of context, as is often the situation with front-page photographs, the narrative can be lost. This is a source of frustration for photojournalists who having taken multiple images of an event, know that a publication will choose only one to run on the front page. Often this photograph is the most sensational or aesthetically pleasing depending on the message to be conveyed.
In years gone by the NYT led the world in its brazen coverage of conflicts such as the Vietnam War. When the Eddie Adams photograph of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the national police, shooting Vietcong officer Nguyen Van Lem, came down the wire on 1st February 1968 John G. Morris was the paper’s picture editor. He made the decision to run the image on the front page of the paper, a move that was echoed by other newspapers around the world. This image is now considered one of that war’s most iconic, but Shields contends the NYT of today would never allow a photograph of such brutality to appear on its front page.
This is the crux of Shields argument. That the NYT has rescinded its role as the Fourth Estate and is in league with those it is meant to keep honest. Although the publication of the Adams photograph also had political connotations and one could argue that is the case with every iconic image, Shields’ concerns raise interesting questions in relation to future readings of history and the role of the visual news archive.
Shields acknowledges, and praises, the sacrifices that many photojournalists make, but he says the aesthetic of many of these images make them “immediately forgettable. They are so beautifully composed and so strikingly absent of any human viscera that the net affect is that you immediately process it as beautiful, you process it as war and process it as essentially harmless. I’d go even farther and say these pictures make us almost worship war, these pictures amount to a kind of, to me, military recruitment poster. At the very least they make war seem glorious I think”.
In the Introduction to the book Shields quotes President Lyndon B. Johnson who said about the Vietnam War, “I can’t fight this war without the support of the New York Times”. Shields follows LBJ’s quote with his own: “A Times war photograph is worth a thousand mirrors.” Expanding on this he says, “I was trying to make the point that these pictures carry an immense amount of refraction and reverberation. I don’t think readers of the Times can say if you don’t like the pictures too bad. I think these pictures set the political and cultural agenda for America, for the English speaking world, for journalism, for participatory democracy”.
He continues. “There was a famous case during the Reagan Administration when the TV show 60 Minutes ran a supposedly revelatory documentary piece on the Reagan Administration’s manipulation of visuals. 60 minutes compared the reality of things to the Reagan visuals. Later the Reagan Administration called 60 minutes and said thank you for the 15-minute commercial because no one pays attention to the actual words, all people pay attention to are the images. I thought that was such a cautionary parable. The Times might run statistics for the American soldiers who died that particular day, but what really enters peoples reptilian brain are these incredible sanctifying, glorifying, glamorising, beautifying and desensitising images”.
Images can be beautifully composed and lit and still convey an important message, but the homogenisation of imagery is also a concern. Due to its popularity photography is being mooted as the new world language, but the proliferation of images being uploaded and shared conceals the trend that puts forward a narrower view of the world. We may believe there are more images than ever circulating in cyberspace, but many of the mainstream news services run the same, or similar images, which are then repurposed and shared on social media platforms. While Shields does not address the idea of homogenisation specifically, the images in his book point to a common aesthetic emerging in conflict photography.
In conclusion Shields says, “I do think it’s a crucial part of being an assertive citizen in western capitalist democracy to read against the proliferation of images. I think it is unlikely that any of us is going to turn off the flood of images that are on the web or whatever, but if you could be an aggressively intelligent and deconstructionist viewer you are half way toward an educated public”.
“It’s not so much that the Times let us down, but that we all let ourselves down. I should have been more sceptical early on, it took me an unconscionably long time to realise how war was being sold to me under the guise of journalism. These pictures gain immense cultural traction and people might agree with the book or disagree, but the ripple affects of these pictures is gigantic.”
About David Shields
David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of 20 books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than 30 publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), and Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Forthcoming are Flip-Side (powerHouse, 2016) and Other People (Knopf, 2017). The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into 20 languages.
BOOK
War is Beautiful
David Shields
powerHouse Books
Hardcover, 11.25 x 9 inches
112 pages
http://www.powerhousebooks.com
