The Flash Of Early Warring
The best news images from Iraqi are the ones that prefigure the direction of a story days or even weeks before someone puts words to it. If you read the NYTimes this Sunday, you would have noticed references (in several places) to a potential Iraqi “civil war.” However, I’d...
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Oh, Death
This shot, from the NYTimes two Friday’s ago, was the second prominent image of murdered Iraqi bodies on the front page that week. Whatever other things the photo editors had in mind, it seemed they were initiating a new level of disclosure for human corpses. At the same time,...
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Fort Knocks (Or, “Your House Is My House” — Part II)
I took a little heat a week and a half ago for raising the issue of the way U.S. troops were treating homes and property in Fallujah (Original post). While presenting an image of a couple soldiers sleeping in an occupied home, I asked what was appropriate in terms...
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A Symbolic Look at the Iraqi Army: Who’s Watching Who?
Lately, I’ve been reading through the literature on the semiotics of news photographs. Among a long list of criteria by which to analyze a news photo, one consideration involves the extent to which subjects actually pose for the camera. This shot in yesterday’s NYTimes is a strange one. The...
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LATimes Fallujah Coverage: A Cup Overwhelmingly Half Full
Following up on my entry yesterday about the L.A. Times Fallujah coverage, I can report to you that the paper’s “Pollyanna” complex continues. In this morning’s edition, LATimes Staff Writer Patrick J. McDonnell gives a repeat performance with another pro-Administration propaganda piece. The subject of this article (“This Time,...
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Your House Is My House
Something has been nagging at me as I look at pictures of the Fallujah operation. I always feel a little uncomfortable about the occupation of Iraqi homes and mosques for U.S. military operations. I remember a shot I saw last week of three marines in the living room of...
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Bush’s Crusade (Or: Aren’t the Metaphor’s Getting a Little Obvious?)
I wish this was a joke. According to Yahoo News: US Marines of the 1st Division dressed as gladiators try to control a horse and stage a chariot race reminiscent of the Charlton Heston movie–complete with confiscated Iraqi horses at their base outside Fallujah, Iraq, Saturday, Nov. 6 ,...
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Mosqued Gunman
In an example of how art presages life, I had become interested lately in how much the war ( at least, the images of it) had begun to focus more tightly around Iraq’s mosques. As is my process, I had been grabbing off images and articles and putting together...
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I’ll See Your Marlboro Man, And I’ll Raise You One
Here’s an update on the LA Times pr campaign to turn an unwilling Marine Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller into a poster boy (see previous post). In a defensive action this past weekend, the NYTimes responded by offering up their own cigarette smoking GI (Lance Cpl. Michael Pristavec, below)....
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