John Taylor,
Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War.
Manchester University Press, 1998
ISBN 0-7190-37220
216pp.
£45.00 stg. (cloth)
£15.99 stg. (paper)
(Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press)
Uploaded 12 November 1999
On the evening of 1 March 1991, television viewers in Britain and the United States saw reports of the final fighting in the Gulf War that were remarkable for what those pictures did not show. Several thousand Iraqi troops, fleeing American tanks along the Basra Road near the Kuwaiti border, were incinerated in a rain of cluster bombs dropped from the air. British TV News Pool Reporter Robert Moore described the scene as “apocalyptic.” Linda Pattillo of ABC News reported that the mile and a half wasteland revealed “the total horror of war.” But in both reports, cleared by military censors, the form of only one dead Iraqi could be seen and his hand hid his face in a medium shot. One living Iraqi was being helped by American GI’s onto a litter. He would be evacuated to a field hospital. His dead comrades were spread under blankets in tidy rows along the sandy soil.
John Taylor’s Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War investigates the “vanishing body” in British newspaper coverage of the Gulf War and sees it as characteristic of what he describes as “the polite portrayal of violence, atrocity and war” in the pages of that nation’s press. Taylor, a senior lecturer in the History of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, sees British photojournalism as “an exercise in prurience and reticence” in its effort to balance “propriety and sensation.” He agrees with Susan Sontag’s claim that depicting the horrible through photojournalism creates “ethical reference points” that separate decency and outrage. Taylor’s difficulty with the political economy of British newspapers is that their depiction of catastrophe and war often embraces discretion and civility “in the face of barbarism.”
Taylor deplores “polite discourse” when reporting state killings and sees the “unbelievable cleanliness” of Gulf War reporting as a triumph of bureaucratic censorship over the public’s right to know. “A war without bodies,” he writes, makes “killing seem so impersonal it hardly seems like murder.” The absence of a visible enemy removes horror from war coverage but at a terrible price. It avoids personal responsibility for the killing and reduces war to “a collision of technological forces” that celebrates the superiority of Western military prowess.
“Foreign bodies” pictured in the British press, Taylor maintains, serve as ciphers that confirm the excellence of British order. The physical suffering of the foreign dead portray the “moral and intellectual degradation” of Third World countries, he observes. As narratives, these pictures are read at an emotional distance that encourages non-identification with the “ragged human remains” that appear in the pictures. “News is voyeuristic to its core,” he claims, and photographs of the foreign-other often become a “fertilizer of national sentiment.”
Sal Veder, an Associated Press photographer who won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for his depiction of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, speaks for many in his profession when he says his role is to “record history, not to make it, or manipulate it.” Taylor, who is seeking to develop a history of photographic theory and criticism, sees photographs as memorials that mark the passage of a millennium. He observes that the daily press represents “what-has-been” in line with story-telling conventions that mute “images of horror” to make them “fit for public consumption.” The result is that photographs fail to acquaint their readers with the vulnerability and victimization of others, but instead, “promote indifference by creating distance between members of the human community.” This has led, he believes, to “moral sleep” and “historical amnesia.”
Taylor readily recognizes that the press operates to turn a profit and not to change minds, but nevertheless, he attaches great significance to the potential of pictures to do just that. He rejects Sontag’s view that looking at photographs has “an analgesic effect.” Although we may view pictures of the violated from a position of safety, Taylor argues, we may still be moved by empathy to action. He sees only a “poverty of reader knowlege” emerging from those urging civility in mitigating images of harsh realities and brutal facts.
David Turnley, a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who has spent months in Kosovo, indicates he has struggled to find a way to “humanize” the great tide of Kosovar Albanians forced to flee their homeland. Combining black and white stills with color video he has documented the flight of a single farm family to an uncertain future. His “mission” was to break through the “pain and misery” that he witnessed by making Americans readers and viewers feel it too. At their best, Taylor hopes other photojournalists can serve a similar purpose. Newspapers may be a part of the “industries of distance,” he writes, but that doesn’t mean their photographs must simply serve as entertainment. As texts, these photographs may be the symbols of dashed hopes and reminders of evil in our midst. They may also be opportunities to chronicle deviancy and tragedy, thereby affirming our moral center as a society and civilization. Photographs that glimpse evil and become “galleries of the forbidden” may satisfy or repel, Taylor concludes, but will affirm our connection to community. That makes his book well worth reading and considering.
Bruce J. Evensen