Things to be Concerned About in the Mall Attack Photos from Nairobi (GRAPHIC)

The largest point to make about the Nairobi attack is one that is so obvious, it’s almost impossible to appreciate. Clearly the media wouldn’t be on fire if this massacre had taken place in outdoor market stalls frequented by the poor and the middle class, or some ramshackle mall somewhere in the developing world. Instead however, it’s the upscale mall, that similar to the one you’d see in Beverly Hills or Scarsdale. And if it’s hard for us to appreciate how brilliant this was — just like the school shooting in Newtown trumps dozens on Chicago’s South Side, I’m sure al-Shabab understands and appreciates the connection.

Temples of Western commerce aside, the challenge for American visual media to find a baggage-free way to put its eyes on this dizzying real-time cataclysm only gets more complicated. Given the amount of violence in American movies, one school of thought would be to steer clear of anything that confuses the dramatization of war, soldiers and violence with the real thing. The photo above, on the other hand, appeared in-column in the breaking NYT Lens post beneath a very intense slideshow by Times photographer and Nairobi-resident, Tyler Hicks.  If the caption had made some reference to the poster, if just to acknowledge its enormous weight in the image,  that would be one thing, but here’s how it reads:

Gunshots continued to ring out after nightfall, though the Kenyan authorities did not provide much information about what was happening inside the mall.

It’s the fact we’re forced to silently account for this outsized celluloid (or video game) mashup somewhere and somehow in our brains, while also parsing it out from the real horror, is what’s actually more jarring.

Still another variation of the drama theme involves the depiction of those civilian security personnel. The warning light here involves the risk of blurring the line between editorial photography with powerful associations to violent blockbusters and blaxplotation films.

With the alternately hot and cool lighting, the dramatic profile, the escalator with the bad guys up there somewhere, and, again, the cinematic posters packing the frame, this photo — which also ran on the front page of yesterday’s NYT print edition — might do justice to Tarantino.

And there are at a least a few more themes to be watchful about.

Be it Kenya or Haiti, there is always the danger of fostering an image of ineptitude on the part of local authorities, especially in contrast to the capacities of the white Westerner.

This gives us the tremulousness of the local forces and balloons on the set of Fright Night.

These image are insidious, I should emphasize, because they’re not ubiquitous but mostly, rather, embedded in a larger mix. As a result, they will subtly undermine photos like this one, a shot which is exemplary for the officer’s poise.

Another point. It’s important to make sure there’s no ambiguity between who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy when it comes to black men with guns. The problem with this Reuters image appearing in this Telegraph slideshow has to do with the caption.  It reads:

Kenya’s presidential office said that one of the attackers was arrested on Saturday and died after suffering from bullet wounds.
Picture: Goran Tomasevic /Reuters

You would hope that the readers saw enough of the pictures or read the stories enough to understand that the attackers remained completely invisible  — to the press at least. Otherwise, it’s entirely possible to confuse which side this guy’s on.

Back to the Hollywood theme, another way to understand the danger here has to do with infusing horrific news images with irony.

The mall might be generic but what can’t be underestimated — considering we’re still talking about “the dark continent” — is the domestic readership’s capacity for cultural incomprehension.  I’m sure upscale Africans understand the artifact as an amusement and a throwback — similar to the statue in a mall in San Francisco of a miner panning for gold . Still, I think it’s symbolically tricky in this foreign land, to juxtapose this screaming savagery (and the cammo) with an elephant.

(photo 1-3, 8 : Tyler Hicks/New York Times. photo 4: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters caption: A journalist rescues a woman injured in the shootout. photo 4: Siegfried Modola/Reuters caption: A police officer tries to secure an area inside the Westgate Shopping Centre. The al-Qaida-linked Somali militant group Al Shabaab has claimed responsibility for the deadly attack. photo 5: Goran Tomasevic / Reuters via WAPO caption: A soldier carries a child to safety.)