The Moment Before the Awful Moment
by Matt Blanchard
FEBRUARY 7, 2011 TAGS:
There are no photos of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, no images of the tragic moment. But if you’re like me, you quickly formed a mental picture, an involuntary freeze-frame. You couldn’t help it.
And if you’ve been raised on Western journalism, your mental image probably doesn’t show bodies or bloodshed, but rather the moment just before Jared Loughner pulls the trigger, the last decision point before there’s no turning back.
It’s a trope we see whenever violence and destruction top the news: People about to die. Think of Lee Harvey Oswald in the old photo, flinching in the moment just before Jack Ruby shoots him. Think of Jewish families herded out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Or think even of the Twin Towers, which in our most iconic images will remain forever standing but just about to collapse.
Death is everywhere implied, but the bodies are rarely seen. Why?
In her trenchant new book, About to Die: How news images move the public, journalism expert Barbie Zelizer says it’s not just that we’re squeamish about blood. The media has used what she calls “about-to-die images” to represent all manner of violent and incomprehensible events, from the great Chicago Fire to the shooting of Iranian student Neda Agha-Soltan on the streets of Tehran in 2009. Why? Think of it as a coping mechanism.
About-to-die images freeze the tragic story at its most pregnant moment, so that even when we know the outcome is grim, a silent pause has been created in which we can argue back against the image, fanaticize, sympathize, imagine other outcomes, and generally think things through.
It’s a little like what Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment,” a shutter click in which the infinite possibilities for human action can be seen funneling down to one, irrevocable choice.
But for Zelizer, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, our Bressonian penchant for freezing such moments may be an essential part of our politics. By giving us space for action, the about-to-die image draws us into the action, forcing us to complete the unfinished sequence we’ve been shown, and to relive and re-experience both the real events and what we wished had happened. We’re active participants whether we like it or not.
“The about to die image counteracts the notion that whatever is depicted is over and done,” Zelizer writes, and thus it remains forever “open to spectatorship, debate, conversation, interpretation, contestation, challenge, exchange, ownership.” These tragic images are open, and therefore never really over. That makes them useful symbols, tools and memory devices – the very stuff from which we build our understanding of the world.
Zelizer has built a career at the crossroads of journalism and violence, publishing well-regarded books on the Kennedy assassination, visual culture of the Holocaust, and Sept. 11. She was living in Jerusalem in 2000 when television footage emerged of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed Aldura and his father being shot in the crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian protestors. The image of Aldura and his father became a pan-Arab icon, painted on walls and printed on postage stamps, but it was not of two bloodied bodies but of two terrified living people, apparently about to die.
“Images of people dying and about to die had been lurking in just about every project I’ve undertaken,” Zelizer explains. “It was really only a matter of time before I confronted them head on.”
The result is a book mostly geared to an academic audience. Zelizer’s deepest points about how we viewers perceive journalism are likely to pass over the average reader’s head.
But Zelizer draws distinctions between images of “presumed death,” “possible death” and “certain death” which are enlightening for anyone who watches CNN. She’s also produced an engaging history, with accounts of the best-known about-to-die images and their post-publication trajectories.
For example, few images captured the madness of the Vietnam War more powerfully than Eddie Adams’ photo of General Loan raising his pistol to execute an unarmed North Vietnamese man. It’s a stark and unforgettable vision of cruelty. Yet to his grave, Adams insisted that Loan was actually a good guy; the image had been taken out of context. Loan, meanwhile, ended up running a pizza parlor in Virginia.
Another photographer, Kevin Carter, gained fame with an unforgettable image of a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture during the 1993 famine. But by the following year Carter had committed suicide, tormented by criticism from around the globe that he had not done enough to help the child, a little girl who, ironically, is thought to have survived.
And we learn that the most storied about-to-die image of them all, Robert Capa’s 1936 “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman,” may be more theater than news. The frame shows a white-garbed rifleman falling backwards in a blur, arms thrown back in a Christ-like splay. But examination of Capra’s original film rolls from the Spanish Civil War reveals additional images of a second militiaman “dying” on the very same picturesque spot. Was it a fake?
The book was published before the shootings in Tucson, of course, but Zelizer says she’s noticed an interesting coincidence. Because no photographers were present in that Safeway parking lot, no powerful about-to-die image has emerged from the attack. At the same time, no clear agreement has emerged about what the shooting means.
“It’s interesting that three separate strands of discourse about the shootings – the political vitriol, the question of mental health and the issue of gun control – have all been proliferating pretty independently of each other,” Zelizer told me in an e-mail. “It makes me wonder how debates might have gone differently had there been an about-to-die image on which to focus.”
Matt Blanchard is a freelance writer living in New York City.
And if you’ve been raised on Western journalism, your mental image probably doesn’t show bodies or bloodshed, but rather the moment just before Jared Loughner pulls the trigger, the last decision point before there’s no turning back. It’s a trope we see whenever violence and destruction top the news: People about to die. Think of Lee Harvey Oswald in the old photo, flinching in the moment just before Jack Ruby shoots him. Think of Jewish families herded out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Or think even of the Twin Towers, which in our most iconic images will remain forever standing but just about to collapse.
Death is everywhere implied, but the bodies are rarely seen. Why?
In her trenchant new book, About to Die: How news images move the public, journalism expert Barbie Zelizer says it’s not just that we’re squeamish about blood. The media has used what she calls “about-to-die images” to represent all manner of violent and incomprehensible events, from the great Chicago Fire to the shooting of Iranian student Neda Agha-Soltan on the streets of Tehran in 2009. Why? Think of it as a coping mechanism.
About-to-die images freeze the tragic story at its most pregnant moment, so that even when we know the outcome is grim, a silent pause has been created in which we can argue back against the image, fanaticize, sympathize, imagine other outcomes, and generally think things through.
It’s a little like what Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment,” a shutter click in which the infinite possibilities for human action can be seen funneling down to one, irrevocable choice.
But for Zelizer, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, our Bressonian penchant for freezing such moments may be an essential part of our politics. By giving us space for action, the about-to-die image draws us into the action, forcing us to complete the unfinished sequence we’ve been shown, and to relive and re-experience both the real events and what we wished had happened. We’re active participants whether we like it or not.
“The about to die image counteracts the notion that whatever is depicted is over and done,” Zelizer writes, and thus it remains forever “open to spectatorship, debate, conversation, interpretation, contestation, challenge, exchange, ownership.” These tragic images are open, and therefore never really over. That makes them useful symbols, tools and memory devices – the very stuff from which we build our understanding of the world.
Zelizer has built a career at the crossroads of journalism and violence, publishing well-regarded books on the Kennedy assassination, visual culture of the Holocaust, and Sept. 11. She was living in Jerusalem in 2000 when television footage emerged of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed Aldura and his father being shot in the crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian protestors. The image of Aldura and his father became a pan-Arab icon, painted on walls and printed on postage stamps, but it was not of two bloodied bodies but of two terrified living people, apparently about to die.“Images of people dying and about to die had been lurking in just about every project I’ve undertaken,” Zelizer explains. “It was really only a matter of time before I confronted them head on.”
The result is a book mostly geared to an academic audience. Zelizer’s deepest points about how we viewers perceive journalism are likely to pass over the average reader’s head.
But Zelizer draws distinctions between images of “presumed death,” “possible death” and “certain death” which are enlightening for anyone who watches CNN. She’s also produced an engaging history, with accounts of the best-known about-to-die images and their post-publication trajectories.
For example, few images captured the madness of the Vietnam War more powerfully than Eddie Adams’ photo of General Loan raising his pistol to execute an unarmed North Vietnamese man. It’s a stark and unforgettable vision of cruelty. Yet to his grave, Adams insisted that Loan was actually a good guy; the image had been taken out of context. Loan, meanwhile, ended up running a pizza parlor in Virginia.
Another photographer, Kevin Carter, gained fame with an unforgettable image of a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture during the 1993 famine. But by the following year Carter had committed suicide, tormented by criticism from around the globe that he had not done enough to help the child, a little girl who, ironically, is thought to have survived.
And we learn that the most storied about-to-die image of them all, Robert Capa’s 1936 “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman,” may be more theater than news. The frame shows a white-garbed rifleman falling backwards in a blur, arms thrown back in a Christ-like splay. But examination of Capra’s original film rolls from the Spanish Civil War reveals additional images of a second militiaman “dying” on the very same picturesque spot. Was it a fake?The book was published before the shootings in Tucson, of course, but Zelizer says she’s noticed an interesting coincidence. Because no photographers were present in that Safeway parking lot, no powerful about-to-die image has emerged from the attack. At the same time, no clear agreement has emerged about what the shooting means.
“It’s interesting that three separate strands of discourse about the shootings – the political vitriol, the question of mental health and the issue of gun control – have all been proliferating pretty independently of each other,” Zelizer told me in an e-mail. “It makes me wonder how debates might have gone differently had there been an about-to-die image on which to focus.”
Matt Blanchard is a freelance writer living in New York City.
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