Unseen

There's no photo in this post because I'm talking about images that are withheld from our sight. I was reminded of this by Tom Junod's piece in on the Esquire website, The Falling Man. Many of us will immediately know the picture Junod is talking about. Taken by photographer Richard Drew it ran in newspapers on September 12, 2001, and depicted a man plummeting to earth after having leaped from a soon-to-collapse World Trade Center tower.

That happened to be my first day of work at the University of the Arts, where a friend had gotten me a job teaching Senior Photo Seminar. I brought in every newspaper I could get my hands on that morning, and we spent the class examining the role of photography in understanding what, at the time, was so overwhelming and incomprehensible that we seemed to have no vocabulary for addressing it.

It was at that moment I really appreciated having known George Roeder.

George had been kind enough to serve one of my mentors in my MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the time we met, he was putting together the Visual Critical Studies program that would launch after his untimely death in 2004. He was a great teacher and a great person and I looked forward to our regular meetings. I remember at one point I was studying something that George had been over and he shared his notes; an act of generosity and modeling from which I learned about research and scholarship more than I had learned in any grad seminar.

George's major work was The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II, which described the way photographs of casualties were withheld from public view ans strategically deployed through the media to built up sentiment for the war when necessary. I took away two principles I still teach from working with George: what you don't see is as important as what you do see (if not more), and don't ask what an image means; ask how's being being used.

If we think about the falling man images in those terms, what happens? The media consensus that such images shouldn't be shown (and if they are shown, only on websites that cater to violent or pornographic images) can be seen in light of what else cannot be shown. Controversy has plagued images of the draped coffins of American soldiers, despite the fact that those images in no way revealed the identities of the deceased. We are routinely shown images of dead opponents in war, not to mention photos of civilians that are often used to motivate engagement in conflicts that seem remote to our interests (as we recently saw with the photos of victims of Syrian chemical weapon attacks). But images of our own dead - especially our civilian dead - threaten our resolved and might prompt us to ask why we are fighting in the first place. Therefore, the must be kept out of sights, and if decorum is the means of doing so, then so be it. We live under a tyranny of decorum; my seven year old sin routinely tells us what is 'apprpriate' or 'inappropriate'...

What about meaning and use? Roeder's book was explicit about the usefulness of the images it discussed. They were seen as potent motivators. Photography has long used this claim as a shield against accusations of voyeurism; documenting tragedy isn't just observing it, the photojournalist would have us believe, it is doing something to end it. Like Susan Sontag, I have never bought this ethical hide and seek argument. It is somewhat undermined by Junod's recounting of Richard Drew's efforts to identify the falling man and to confront his family in search of conformation of his theories. In this rather horrible episode we see the true power of images - they motivate all right, and what they bring about can be cruelty in the name of seeking truth.

Junod only brings up Eric Fischl's work in passing in his article, but I was glad to see it referenced. You may recall Fischl was lambasted for a sculpture (Tumbling Woman) he exhibited in 2002. Junod excuses Fischl's actions by saying it was "a matter of timing", and he may be right. Fischl is not an artist known for his tact, and that's okay. But in Junod's essay, he appears to come in primarily to make the case that Drew is an artist (See? We can talk about a bona-fide artist in the context of this photograph and therefore rationalize it). The tactic seems transparent.

As the 50th anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy approaches, I expect we'll see the stills from the Zapruder film that held me in a terrified spell as a child. I was not yet born when that event occurred; I stand in relation to it exactly as my seven year-old son stands in relation to 9/11. But access to the imagery of that historic and tragic moment has always been as easy as getting a hold of a can of soda. Junod spends a good deal of time talking about the way the feelings of families were protected by the concealment of images of those who fell to their death on 9/11. (He even mentions how some people deny the existence of 'jumpers', explaining that "if one calls the New York Medical Examiner's Office to learn its own estimate of how many people might have jumped, one does not get an answer but an admonition: 'We don't like to say they jumped. They didn't jump. Nobody jumped. They were forced out, or blown out.'")

A new generation will discover these images, and will invent a history in which their exclusion makes sense. What will we say when they ask us why they have been hidden? George Roeder's work suggested that all those in power would be able to say is that pictures are powerful and they needed to be used strategically. Pictures are powerful, and power shouldn't be concentrated in too few hands of constrained too tightly, less it becomes uncontrollable.