Tags
death, journalism, media, media criticism, newspapers, photography
For a media culture that’s saturated with violence and death, we are reluctant to post images of real-life violence and death.
That’s probably why these two news photographs, published in the span of a couple of days, caught my attention:
From the New York Times. Death in Ukraine.
From Huffington Post. Bodies of sherpas killed in a recent avalanche on Mt. Everest, Nepal.
It’s not often that we see images of corpses in newspapers and on television. I call this the hidden face of death, and it takes many forms.
Remember the ban on images of caskets of U.S. military personnel who had been killed in action? The ban was in place for almost 20 years before reversal in 2009. The ban did not negate the fact that our soldiers were dying. With the ban, was it too easy to ignore that fact?
If we don’t see photos of the dead from Ukraine and Nepal, is it too easy to ignore what’s going on there, too? Do images of the dead make violence more real? Maybe too real?
The media used to love images of graphic violence. One of my favorite books is Strange Days, Dangerous Nights by Larry Millett, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press in 2004. The book is a collection of photographs in Twin Cities newspapers from the speed graphic era (1930s-1950s). The result was gritty images of murder, accidents, gore and general mayhem.
Somewhere along the line, it was decided that the public couldn’t handle those types of images. Our front pages and TV screens became sanitized, which reflects our attitudes toward death in our culture as a whole.
If You Have Five Seconds to Spare 
There was a saying I heard in a photojournalism class a long time ago that fits this very well. I’m gonna butcher it here, but it goes something like this: “Viewers can handle a picture of a thousand dead bodies from across the world and a hundred dead bodies from across the country, but can’t handle a picture of one dead body from across the street.”
In essence, people can deal with dead bodies in news photos as long as they are in Nepal and not Nicollet.
That makes sense. It’s probably why those mainstream publications were OK with running photos from Ukraine and Nepal. I suppose there was very little chance that readers would have a personal connection with the person in the photos.
A cynic would say the ban on showing the caskets of dead American military personnel was the government’s attempt to quell dissent. Strange Days, Dangerous Nights sounds like a macabre but fascinating book. I can remember seeing some photos of Tupak Shakur on the slab in the morgue, which changed the way I perceived him.
I think that was a reason behind the ban–if people weren’t confronted with front-page photos of caskets, maybe they would forget the death toll of war.
Do check out that book–it’s wonderful!
I agree that the new sensibility reflects our attitudes toward death; also our denial (in the US) of the reality of violence, here. When I hear Americans talk about the “dangers” of travel abroad, I’m astonished. There’s death and violence right under their noses and they’re oblivious.
Wow–I spilled that out, re-read it and realized … wouldn’t that make a great sentence for teaching the grammar of there/their/they’re? 😉
Nicely done, Tracy 🙂
I think we become desensitized to the level of violence we really do live with every day in our country.