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| Adolf Hitler, in a photo taken by his personal photographer, rehearses gestures intended to look spontaneous while listening to a recording of one his speeches (Photo: Hulton Archive/Heinrich Hoffman) |
The furor created by the pictures of captured Taliban prisoners-of-war at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba illustrated the immense power of the image and highlighted its ability to affect people in a way that words rarely do.
Almost a century ago, the documentary photographer Lewis Hine wrote: “While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. It becomes necessary then to see to it that the camera we depend on contracts no bad habits.”
While the camera’s legacy to history is indisputable, it has also been used and abused. Censorship has prevented us from seeing certain photographs, and shifting cultural values have affected decisions to publish contentious images. Spin has sometimes been thrust at us as if it were the Gospel.
Underexposed: “Pictures Can Lie and Liars Can Use Pictures” [published by Vision On in the United Kingdom and forthcoming in the United States as Underexposed: Pictures of the 20th Century They Didn’t Want You to See] is an exhaustive survey of “concealed, banned, and manipulated” photographs, the pictures the world was never meant to see. It investigates photographs that have been banned, doctored, suppressed, or manipulated in order to dupe the viewer.
Colin Jacobson, editor of Underexposed, said it attempts “to broaden the debate about censorship into areas where hidden agendas, be they conscious or subconscious, deliberate or accidental, malign or well-meaning, all work on our perception of the world and our interpretation of what is going on.”
The chapter on spin borrows heavily from Soviet archives. Stalin was well aware of the camera’s capacity to construct an artificial reality and exploited it to the full, frequently airbrushing opponents from party portraits and ordering mass-produced photos of idealized Soviet life.
The regime’s propaganda was so effective that Western sympathizers such as George Bernard Shaw refused to acknowledge that millions were dying of starvation. However, official estimates are that 4 million peasants died in the Ukraine alone.
Control of information, which amounts to censorship, is not the preserve of ruthless dictators. Sixty years before the Russian Revolution, Abraham Lincoln credited a photographer with assisting in his electoral victory by retouching a portrait to shorten his neck and make him appear more youthful.
There was a time when photographers were given unbridled access to war. Famed photojournalist Robert Capa, whose work carried him to numerous global hot spots, coined the famous dictum: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
Margaret Thatcher established a new benchmark of censorship during the Falklands conflict, and it has only tightened up ever since. The United States and other “democratic” governments now exert strict control in order to reassure gullible voters that war has become a squeaky-clean technological masterpiece.
This is why Ken Jarecke’s picture of an Iraqi burnt to a blackened cinder, at the wheel of his vehicle on the road to Basra, caused such a stir. The soldier was one of many massacred by American pilots at the end of the 1991 Gulf War as they were retreating. The Pentagon later admitted that U.S. troops had buried Iraqi soldiers alive.
Jarecke’s image demolished the propaganda that war had at last become a bloodless science: “clean” and “surgical.” In the United States, the picture was suppressed until long after the war was over. In Britain, only The Observer published it.
“No one would touch my photograph,” said Jarecke. “The excuse was that it was too upsetting, that people didn’t want to look at that kind of thing anymore. The truth was that the U.S. press collaborated in keeping silent about the consequences of the Gulf War and who was responsible.”
In a chapter entitled “Recovered Memory,” the viewer is exposed to pictures from the past, which show the camera’s ability to illustrate history. Nhem Ein, official photographer to the Khmer Rouge, took haunting images of Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. He recalled seeing face after face filled with fear and deep sadness: “I knew that I was taking the pictures of innocent people, but I knew that if I said anything, I would be killed.”
Similarly, the photographs from Tiananmen Square, many of which were smuggled out of the country, illustrate how the regime dealt with passive protesters. It was the first major event in communist China to be covered by hordes of Western media. Though China had killed more than a million Tibetans without seriously impairing its international credit, this was because there were no cameras on the spot.
In “Photographs the Public Was Never Meant to See,” Underexposed illustrates occasions when the press has censored material. Bert Hardy’s picture of a suspected opponent of the South Korean regime, who was manacled to others with a chain, in obvious fear of his life, was banned by Edward Hulton, proprietor of the British magazine Picture Post. He refused to publish the hard-hitting report and fired the editor, as he felt it would undermine the anti-communist war effort. It was also rumored that he feared such images would scupper his chances of a knighthood.
Editors were also reluctant to publish the picture of a distraught boy crying over his sister’s body in Saigon. “Killed, alleges the photographer, by U.S. helicopter gunfire,” was how The New York Times hedged its bets. “The Vietcong, of course, did not possess helicopters,” said photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, who took the picture in 1986. Griffiths went on to become president of Magnum Photos. He believes that powerful media conglomerates pose a dangerous threat to photojournalism: “What we get to think and know about the world is in the hands of a very few....A truly informed public is antithetical to the interests of modern consumer capital.”
In the past, photographs were cropped to alter their meaning, miscaptioned, and retouched. “Since those days, faking has enjoyed a quantum leap with the advent of computerized manipulation. Now, with digital cameras, there is no ‘original’ to compare....Fraudulent practice is easy and detection difficult, and photography will never be the same again,” said Griffiths.
There are occasions when the public does not wish to bear witness to anything that challenges the status quo. Some readers were outraged by The Sunday Telegraph’s decision to give photographs of two murdered British soldiers a prominent position in 1988. They were lynched by an IRA mob that attacked them when they blundered into a Republican funeral in Belfast. One reader wrote that the photographs of the slain soldiers greatly distressed her and put her off her “Sunday worship,” “Sunday lunch,” and disturbed her night’s sleep.
Similarly, when an American soldier was murdered in Mogadishu, the editor of Time magazine sanctioned the decision to remove a glimpse of the pilot’s genitals. Since the outcry over the incident, Time has introduced the term “digitally altered composite” into its picture credits to indicate editorial intervention. Is this a euphemism for censorship, or a compassionate attempt to give the soldier some dignity?
It is undoubtedly a form of censorship, according to Larry Price, a juror on the Pulitzer committee and twice winner of the photography prize, who said news pictures should never be altered. “The idea behind a documentary photo is to show life in reality. Altering news photographs is taboo in my world, and there should be no exceptions. You simply cannot alter pictures to make them more palatable.”
According to Price, pictures have the ability to create a lasting impression. “The immediacy of television may have killed off the pure, classic photojournalism, as epitomized by Life magazine, but photographs will always hold their own. Still pictures transcend time.”
While this is true, words are often necessary to convey the true context of a photograph. A picture of Hollywood star Joan Crawford that was taken in 1956 would appear to show an actress totally stoically accepting the advances of a lustful lover. In fact, one of her minders was biting off a piece of loose thread.
Few of us expect much veracity in the world of infotainment. Celebrities regularly demand picture approval. Robert Redford’s press office used to issue instructions as to where his photographs should be retouched—namely “the wrinkled area between his lower lip and chin,” “the veins on his nose,” and “the area around the throat and neck.”
Philip Jones Griffiths is downcast about the photographer’s role. “Today, the photographer is sent off to illustrate the preconceptions, usually misconceptions, of the desk-bound editor—an editor biased not by any knowledge of the subject but by the pressure to conform to the standard view ordained by the powers that be. Any deviation from the ‘party line’ is rejected. We are probably the last generation that will accept the integrity of the photograph.”
Joe Elbert, assistant managing editor of photography at The Washington Post, which has won four Pulitzer photography prizes, refutes this argument. “That is such a cynical point of view,” he said. “The Russians have been painting people out of the May Day parade for years. Is society going to become so suspicious that it no longer believes anything it sees? I really doubt that. But when it comes to trust, the public here in America rank journalists below car salesmen and attorneys. It is up to various publications to maintain their integrity and credibility.”
This presupposes that the public has a real appetite for the truth. Elbert readily admits that even since Sept. 11, the U.S. public is largely not interested in foreign news. With society becoming increasingly depoliticized and infotainment consuming a greater slice of the news cake, even our desire for the truth is debatable.
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