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[56][57]2. Image Control in the Age of Terror

Louie Palu

The act of witnessing war, violence, documenting them and for what purpose any resulting photographs are used for can determine the outcome of political understanding and decisions on every level affecting a war.¹ For example most if not all high-level politicians and civilian diplomats representing countries with western soldiers fighting in Kandahar, Afghanistan where I worked between 2006 and 2010 relied on series of witnesses for their understanding of the conflict. These civilians and policy makers were not allowed beyond a certain sized secure military base cut off from the communities they might be located in. This resulted furthermore in most civilian employees of any government not being permitted anywhere near the true frontlines where their policies may count most because of the high risk of them being targeted by opposing forces. Terrorists and militants in many areas attempt attacking any representative of a foreign government for the high propaganda value some insurgent groups placed on killing western civilians especially representing governments such as the United States and Canada. In addition, they were not allowed on patrols or out on combat operations with soldiers. They relied on journalist’s and soldier’s interpretations and reports on what the war looked and sounded like. The situation on the ground in the war was interpreted for them using still photographs, writing and including some video. However, even the witness is limited by what they can convey by these methods of documentation and representation as details such as the smell of war which includes dead bodies and what all the senses experience including the weather can never be documented as real as the an in person experience.

[58]Fig. 2.1: Screen capture still photograph from video made by the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan as it appears in Louie Palu’s documentary “Kandahar Journals” (76 minutes 2015). 2015 Photo © Louie Palu

Current conflicts like those that involve ISIS (aka ISIL) have become near impossible to photograph by journalists and include environments much too hostile to work in as an independent witness, as ISIS has made it their message within their videos to perform grotesque killings of members of the western media and create their own content. It is now the sophisticated manner in which militant groups such as ISIS create visual content and control what is visually documented that has changed the manner in which we see and don’t see what is going on in the world’s new battlefields.

When I see a photograph, the first thing I do is figure out who took it. But the name of the person who pressed the shutter button is just the first stem: for what purpose was the photograph taken? In printed newspapers and magazines, the photographer’s byline is often more discrete than that of the author of a news article the photograph accompanies. The photographer is identified by fine print in the margin of the page. Next, I turn to the caption: the who, what, when, where, why and how of the image as described there is critical to understanding the photograph as a photograph.

In the years dominated by the printed page, the photograph, its caption if any and the credit were printed on the same sheet of paper. They were inseparable. In the digital age, images are embedded online in social media apps without credit or caption Authorship and context are stripped away, and the viewer is left to make assumptions. Most of the students whom I have spoken[59] to who have come of age in the internet era say they do not look for the author of the photograph or for its caption.

Fig. 2.2: Screen capture still photograph from video made by ISIS of the murder of American Journalist James Foley in 2014.

When photographs are presented as digital files, they are often downloaded without the text containing the photographer’s credit. This has a long-term cost. Archives, libraries and schools end up with photographs whose provenance is lost to time. This exacerbates the long-time practice of newspaper copy editors, who often replace the caption a photographer writes with quotes from the story the photograph accompanies, always over the photographer’s objections. Now many images on social media photographs have no text accompanying the context of the image, they are there to simply “illustrate” the story.

Though non-professional bystanders can sometimes take images that are inarguably newsworthy, this does not, in my view, make them journalists. I’ve always had a problem with the term “citizen journalist”. As a working journalist, I’ve always followed a code of ethics that, among other things, calls for independence and impartiality.² Professional journalists may fall short of ethical aspirations, but they consider the impact of their images in a way that amateurs might not.

[60]This became clear to me when covering the drug war in Mexico between 2011 and 2013. I came to the realization that all parties with a vested interest in a war zone utilize photography to control what can be seen. Independent witnesses like myself vie over audiences and views of the war. In one month in Mexico, I covered over 100 murders in two cities: Ciudad Juarez and Culiacan. I also spent months of fieldwork covering drug addiction, mental health, and the daily life of Mexicans and Americans affected by the drug war.

First, there were members of the Mexican and American government and business community I spoke to who felt that dwelling on the conflict gave a distorted view and painted a negative image of Mexico–images of thousands of murdered Mexicans in the news didn’t adequately reflect the complexity of reality, in their view. The rise of Mexico’s middle class, for instance, was neglected. Then there were many people on both sides of the border I spoke to who gave an opposite view: every person murdered should be shown in the news, so that the people responsible for their deaths–including those in government–could be held accountable. It became very difficult to reconcile these views when working in the field. How much time should I spend covering murders? They happened every day, but so did the rest of life

Studying images of the Mexican drug war, I categorized their creators in a rough schema:

1. The Government or Corporate Handout

A photograph created and released for free use by the media taken by a photographer working for the government, special interest group such as a agricultural association, or a corporation. These images usually gave an image that painted the government in a positive light or of them arresting criminals and capturing weapons and drugs. The Mexican economy and tourism also figured quite prominently in the high number of images that dominated the conversation away from the drug war.

2. The Photojournalist

Photographs made following straightforward journalistic practices, which in most cases are associated with news media outlets such as Reuters, the Associated Press, or numerous Mexican news outlets. Many organized crime groups found some of the coverage negative and revealed some of their activities resulting over the years in the murder of numerous journalists in Mexico. In some areas of Mexico, such as the state of Tamaulipas, news photography of anything drug-related was and remains impossible.

[61]3. Independent Photographers, Known to Some as Citizen Journalists

If you search for the Mexican drug war online, you will find hundreds of images of murders circulating on blogs and elsewhere. Some photographs have been taken by police officers or soldiers, or by individuals who simply arrive at the murder scene before the authorities and take a picture with a mobile phone. Some sites have writing; some don’t. Some combine their own content, while others mix it or copy and paste the work of professional journalists with theirs. Many individuals who operate these sites use pseudonyms, due to the level of violence and threat against the lives of journalists in Mexico. Many of the images I have seen from these sources are very graphic, usually too gruesome to publish and have no credit or context to the photograph. One such blog I followed is Borderland Beat. It was useful for me, but also very unreliable, because I never knew who had taken the photographs they were showing or why.

4. Organized Crime Groups and Drug Cartels

Narcotraffickers follow in the tradition as many armed groups in the past such as the Irish Republican Army in using photography and video to communicate their ideas and to project their message and power. However, the Narcos have developed the use of something unique called a Narcomanta, which is usually a large sheet or banner with their message painted or printed on it, hung in a public place. This is a new development. Narcomantas are generally only text – a photograph isn’t printed on the banner.

Narcomantas have two lives – the first in the world where they hang, and the second when they are photographed by news photographers or the public, and circulate again, as a photograph of a set up scene with a written message made to be photographed. Sometimes narcomantas are laid on top of bodies, or in some cases affixed to a fence or wall above piles of bodies or body parts. They typically have written messages against competing cartels or government figures. This practice has to some extent replaced the traditional use of graffiti by street gangs or organized crime.

Whereas graffiti was location specific, Narcomantas can be placed anywhere to suit the message or amount of people walking or driving down a road to see it.

[62]Fig. 2.3: “Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002”. DoD photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy.

Drug traffickers are not only killing photojournalists, but they are competing with them in trying to dominate what the public does or does not see through the use of visual devices.

Narcomantas are not sophisticated in their production values. Their force, such as it is, comes from the stark brutality of the message they convey. But other groups, such as Islamic terrorists in the Mideast, ISIS/ISIL in particular, have also coopted the techniques of photo and video journalists. The videos ISIS creates of executions use traditional and classical forms of composition, color and design. They use filters, silhouettes, lighting and romanticized scenes[63] where the militants perform for the camera to spread their ideology. They took the orange jumpsuit first used by the American military and used it to clothe hostages. Many of their videos are so brutal that screen captures of less graphic segments of their videos are created as still photographs by news media for publishing.

The first photograph I ever saw of detainees from Guantanamo Bay was of a group of detainees in orange jumpsuits with U.S. soldiers standing over them in a fenced off area. The first time I remember seeing an image (which was a frame capture as a still photograph from a video) of a member of ISIS acted as an aesthetic mirror to the Guantanamo image but in reverse as an image with a American journalist in an orange jumpsuit on his knees and a member of ISIS standing over them before killing him. The photograph as a symbol of power and the color orange have been used as a visual response to the U.S. Government’s hand out photograph. I have been to the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay where the infamous detention center is based several times on media tours organized by the U.S. Department of Defense. The manner in which photographs are taken is highly controlled. In response to this I created a concept publication, one which I have shared with numerous students in classrooms as an exercise in image control, censorship and editing. As an ongoing exploration of the subject of image control I wrote the following instructions on the rear of publication for any students who interact with the publication:

GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review is a concept publication; it has no headlines, competing articles or advertising. It is an editing project, which uses photographs taken by Louie Palu at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay where detainees captured after the attacks of September 11, 2001 are being held. These photographs were taken while on several media tours organized by the U.S. Department of Defense between 2007-2010. The tours and access to take photographs is strictly managed and controlled by U.S. military officials. Photographs can only be taken with a digital camera.

At the end of each day of photography at the detention center, an official from the U.S. Department of Defense conducts an “Operational Security Review”. This is a process in which digital photographs deemed to have classified content or imagery that does not follow the guidelines for media coverage of the detention center are deleted from the photographer’s memory cards. The only traces that remain of the deleted images are file numbers listed on an official Department of Defense form given to the photographer. These forms have also been included in this publication. This publication can be dismantled and re-edited to your view of what you think the story should look like. It is also an exhibition that can be displayed anywhere you choose without the formality of a gallery or museum.

GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review is the second publication in a series exploring image control in the media. The first, “Mira Mexico”, examines the Mexican drug war and the optics of drug-related violence. The goal of both projects is to position the[64] user/viewer as editor, curator or censor. The central question of this project is, “who controls what you see?”

The response by many of the students who have attended my lecture and participate in this exercise in editing the GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review concept newspaper always respond with shock and sometimes anger when they read about the deleting of images after every day of photography. However, what I ask them and what I confronted myself about is we all control what people see and don’t see even in journalism.

In my profession as a photojournalist, we edit photographs. I might take 500 photographs on an assignment and only select 15 of them to submit to my editor at a newspaper, which publishes one of them. What happens to the 499 images the newspaper didn’t print? How is the newspaper’s process of selection distinct from the government censors?

We have entered an age where learning visual literacy is as important an exercise as it is to read words. Millions of images are produced everyday. Learning to understand who produced them and for what purpose is more crucial than ever as people’s ideas of what is real and what is not. Photographs influence how we think about this world socially and politically. So the question I constantly ask myself and try to imagine is what are we are and are not seeing and or understanding in this new world visual order?³

¹ This essay is derived from a series of lectures on the relationship between editing and censorship in war photography. The lectures were delivered from 2014-2016 at George Mason University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Toronto, the Center of Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the Ethics of Storytelling conference hosted by Turku University in Finland.

² I follow the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics, which can be found online at https:/nppa.org/code_of_ethics.

³ Editors’ note: for a sample of Louie Palu’s work, see the plate section (plates 1–9).