The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” became popular in the early 1900s, and the photographs widely distributed in newspapers and magazines established the importance of images in America. Life and Look magazines began in 1937 and showcased American “pop culture” and news with large photo spreads of celebrities, politicians, technological advancements, and occasionally, small-town life.
Beginning in the late 1930s, Ansel Adams helped create broad support for the “conservation movement” that pushed for establishing and maintaining national and state parks with his magnificent photos of Yosemite and other natural wonders. The photos of Margaret Bourke White and Dorothea Lange showed the faces of the Depression and the migrant “Okies” and built support for government programs to address the problems. Gordon Parks was one of the first to focus on the Black experience in America as a Life photojournalist in the 1950s and 60s.
But beyond the unequaled beauty of nature and the infinite diversity of humans, photos were also able to document the horrors of war in a way no other medium could, before TV and videos came along. Some photos of World War I show the wasteland of trenches, gas, and barbed wire, but technical advancements made World War II photography and newsreels a central part of the experience for people at home. Photos of raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the horrors of the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bomb explosions are images imprinted in the American psyche for those living at the time and many that came afterwards.
But in Vietnam, photos and videos actually helped change the course of the war. It was, in a phrase widely used, “played out in our living rooms,” with battle scenes shown soon after they occurred, and horrific photos that undercut the narrative of the war favored by the military. At the time, access and subjects for journalists and photographers were not strictly controlled by the military. Photos like that of a naked 9-year-old girl running with other children to escape a napalm attack, the shot-to-the-head execution on a Saigon street of a Viet Cong fighter by the chief of the South Vietnamese police, and the devastation and inhumanity of the My Lai massacre helped turn the American public against the war. Its brutality and pointless nature were obvious in photos that couldn’t be “unseen” by a large portion of the population.
The U.S. military learned its lessons well after Vietnam and soon moved to control the reporting and images of military actions. Under the first Bush presidency in 1991, a ban was put in place, and continuously renewed until 2009, on publishing photographs of flag-draped caskets brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan. The heart-wrenching accumulation of dead bodies would no longer be seen by the American public. Also, reporters and photographers could only be “embedded” with American troops rather than the more dangerous option of independent travel. With members of the press embedded rather than independent, coverage necessarily focused on the military’s actions and point-of-view rather than including civilian stories as well.
The same year, military sources began releasing videos of “smart bomb” attacks that could purportedly land within three feet of a target when released from 20,000 feet. This made the attacks seem pristine, detached, “surgical strikes” that caused little damage to civilians or property. Later, the war’s civilian toll — around 200,000 deaths— would be more accurately described, and the images from Abu Ghraib again showed how war conditions can destroy soldiers’ moral codes.
Today’s images from the war in Ukraine are again worth thousands of words that attempt to describe the grinding terror and cruelty of siege warfare: people executed with hands tied, mounds of civilian body bags, few survivors from a maternity and children’s hospital. Will they be enough to spur the invasion’s supporters or lukewarm opponents into strong efforts to end it? This war is being experienced in the world’s living rooms as well — except in the most important area: Russian itself, where all news and access to information is controlled and censored. This might be a cautionary tale for America as well. A free press has been crucial in establishing guardrails against the undue, and unconstitutional, accumulation of power by one person or branch of government, and in illustrating the effects of government and military actions.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era crime novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on a Saturday. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.