Codes of Exposure

Abstract

The earthquake in Haiti returned images of the body to the front pages of American newspapers. Three days after the January 12, 2010, disaster leveled much of Port-au-Prince and cast an already desperate nation deeper into the mires of misery, the Washington Post ran an image by staff photographer Carol Guzy, showing a man emerging from a thin gap in the rubble. Next to him a schoolgirl is seen from behind, apparently bent over and kneeling. A first, cursory reading of the image suggests that perhaps she is praying. A second glance makes it obvious that the head and upper torso of Ruth, a student at the Ecole St. Gerard, have been crushed by a slab of falling concrete. The New York Times ran photographs equally gruesome, including one of a man's body laid out on a makeshift stretcher, covered in a thin layer of chalk dust. Photographers working for the BBC and for wire and stock companies chronicled the crisis in the usual categories of disaster imagery: broken buildings, tent cities, looting, and the obligatory small dramas of search and rescue. But the wounded, the suffering, and the dead body took on surprising prominence, not just in the images emerging from Haiti, but in the photographs that made it through the filters of taste and editorial reticence at mainstream news organizations. After almost a decade of in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which graphic images of the wounded and dead were often deemed too politically volatile for most audiences, the Haitian earthquake allowed a return of the raw. Images that made suffering both tactile and terrifying burst through conventions of caution and rattled a language of synecdoche and substitution that had formed during news coverage of the war on terror. Something about Haiti made it permissible to display human suffering without the usual fears of exploiting the victim and alienating the reader. The images of Haiti contrasted strongly with images from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries, such as Israel, where the United States has a deep emotional and political engagement. Newspapers have always debated the line between informing readers and protecting them from graphic images. News coverage over much of the last decade has reflected the politicization of war, and the line between documentary zeal and pragmatic self-censorship has moved solidly in the direction of showing less. Two forces were in play: the desire of the U.S. government and its military leaders to limit images that might undermine support for war, and the decline in newspaper circulation and revenue, which made many news organizations ever more alert to reader complaints. The internet, with its limitless circulation of violent images--beheading videos, executions, mob violence--also acted as a pressure valve when editors considered how much was necessary to show in the interest of truth. Readers can find the harder stuff online, if they want to, was a common line of argument. What emerged was a language of synecdoche that largely removed human beings from scenes of carnage. Blood on the sidewalk stood in for bleeding bodies. Empty shells of cars and buses along with destroyed buildings became standard substitutes for the wounded or dead. When seen at all, the body was shrouded or partially obscured. If the body was that of an American soldier or civilian contractor, the standards were even stricter, the invisibility all but absolute. Journalist Ted Koppel, in 2003, summed up the prevailing standards: We don't show the faces of the dead. We don't show the faces of the wounded, especially in this time of satellite television. We don't want to be in a position where we on television are notifying the next of kin. But I think you do show bodies, shooting them in as responsible a fashion as possible. (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This language of substitution looked backward, past periods of relative candor in the display of imagery, to some of the earliest images ever made. …