The Power of an Image

Enlarge Image They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Indeed, the earliest forms of communication used were symbol-based, dating back almost thirty thousand years. By comparison, writing as a form of communication only came into existence a mere seven thousand years ago. Although a multitude of people around the world today are able to communicate in written form, images are still a necessary tool of communication for many others. A 2000 study estimated that there are 862 million illiterate adults worldwide, with some seventy percent of those adults living in Sub-Saharan Africa, South and West Asia, and the Arab States and North Africa. For those people without the ability to read or write, images still serve as their primary means of gaining information, giving to visual images the capacity to communicate with those living in even the direst of circumstances.

An image can convey thoughts, ideas, or events to which words alone sometimes cannot do justice. Images can thrill us, like the images sent back to Earth from the Mars Rover missions. They can inspire us, like the photo of the American flag raised over the rubble of the World Trade Center by three New York firefighters on September 11, 2001. They can be heartbreaking, like the image of Oklahoma City firefighter Chris Fields carrying tiny Baylee Almon out of the wreckage of the Oklahoma City bombing. They can incite outrage, like the photos of the stacked bodies of Holocaust victims; they can bring us face to face with the worst inhumanities imaginable. They can bring tears to our eyes, lift our spirits, or sink our hearts. Images are powerful, and with such power must come responsibility for their prudent and thoughtful use.

In the U.S., there has always been a battle between judicious reporting (which often includes the publishing of accompanying photographs) and the public's right to know. The First Amendment guarantees to the press the freedom to pursue its mission. Any suggestion that the press hold off on putting incendiary or inflammatory stories in front of the public is often met with cries of censorship, something no one would dare to suggest. So many times, images have served as catalysts for righting horrible wrongs (has anyone forgotten the images from the Abu Ghraib scandal?) But sometimes, an image is published and creates an unintended effect, and it is that sort of image with which the press should take more care.

For example, there appeared recently in a well-known news magazine an article about U.S. troops in a firefight Qubah, Iraq in late March. One of the images that accompanies the story is of Qubah's residents having identifying numerals written on their hands, while another shows simply a hand with the number written on it clearly visible. The writing of the numbers on the residents' hands, the story and caption explain, is to help U.S. soldiers tell what part of town people were from and whether they were out during lockdown, which sounds perfectly legitimate. But the photo-what an image! The story itself only briefly mentions the assignment of numbers, but the images of the numbered hands and the residents as they receive them take up the bulk of two pages, dwarfing the intended point of the story with images that are starkly reminiscent of Holocaust survivors, their identification numbers standing out on their arms. The similarity is chilling, especially when one notes that in the pictures, it is U.S. soldiers this time assigning the numbers.

Perhaps for many people, particularly those fortunate enough to have received enough education in order to be literate, the pictures within that story may be only sidebars, items of marginal relevance to the story itself. But for those who can't read, or for those people around the world who may only see a picture, the story told in those two stark pictures isn't the firefight in Qubah: the story here is yet another image of a specific group of human beings being reduced, for the second time in world history, to something less than human, to being nothing more than a number. The people shown in those pictures did not appear to be insurgents (although we are all too well aware of how dangerous it can be for the military to make assumptions about what an insurgent or a terrorist should look like); in one photo, it was a group of women and children. The reasoning behind the use of numbers, the need to create a safe environment for our soldiers once the firefight had ended, is not debated here-the issue is that the picture itself conveys a powerful image of a military subduing a group of people and reducing them to a number, removing their very humanity.

Several months ago, the world watched in dismay as the Muslim world rose up in fierce anger over a cartoon depiction that they believed had insulted their faith. It is hard to imagine there would be Americans today who would advocate censorship in any case, but that ferocious backlash, resulting from an image, should have reminded us all that there is a fine line to be walked between freedom of the press and the responsibility that the media bears as our "arbiters of truth". More consideration should be paid to the selection of images that will accompany those articles.

In a report dealing with U.S. soldiers' continuing efforts to fight the insurgents in areas removed from Baghdad, what purpose could there be in choosing images that have so obvious a visual connection to one of the most horrific events in history? Was the visual link between a heartless Nazi tactic and a current U.S. military procedure deliberate? Was is it unintended or not thoroughly thought through? If a picture paints a thousand words, then what was it that this picture was intended to convey, particularly to those without the literacy needed to read the accompanying story?

With images wielding such tremendous power to stir up emotions, to change events, to break our hearts, to inspire us, it is difficult to see a picture of members of our own military writing numbers on a man's neck as he sits surrounded by what appear to be his wife, in tears, and his children. Is the man an insurgent? Is his wife? We don't know-we are forced to rely on the image, which is disturbing in its similarity to the numbered arms of Holocaust survivors. Moving? Absolutely. Poignant? Without a doubt. But necessary? No one would advocate censorship or limiting the freedom of the press we enjoy so thoroughly in this country, but there are times when the responsible parties should take a step back, and look at the images they are sending out with a fresh eye. Long after the words to that article have faded from memory, that image, of U.S. soldiers reducing human beings to numbers, will stick in the mind. Is this the image of the U.S. soldier the magazine intended to convey, or was it incidental? The answer doesn't really matter at this point; that image is out there now and that image is what will endure. This is the power that an image inherently possesses, and as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility-the responsibility to question what even the incidental impact of a visual image may be to the world and to measure whether that gain is worth the cost.