Prepping for the Next Good War?
Analyzing the New York Times’ “The Pilots Fighting ISIS” Photo Feature
If you’re passionate about photojournalism, I imagine you’ve already seen the bold interactive NYT feature, “The Pilots Fighting ISIS,” published last Wednesday. And if you did, were you also unnerved by the layout and the portraits of the Navy fighter pilots? Was it a bit too Hollywood? Did it seem to hark back to WWII and the idea of “a just war”?
There is something very unsettling for me in these images — a subliminal message within the bold presentation. Not since seeing James Nachtwey’s image of a wounded Contra being moved Christ-like through the Nicaraguan jungle have I felt so much that a presentation may be the harbinger of coming political change.
As some suggest, it’s certainly PR for the military. The piece raises so many questions. Who picked these pilots? Why them? Who set up the access? And where did the idea — in its outsized scale, drama and intimacy — come from? (According to the article, the photographer, Adam Ferguson, is on assignment for The New York Times aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, in the Persian Gulf.)
For some time, I have been trying to grasp how to talk about the other side of the camera: namely how, why and when photos are used and what it says about social, cultural and political pressures on editors. I don’t necessarily mean overt boardroom or editorial meeting decisions as much as what happens when you hang and talk with people in your business.
It is not that this kind of work hasn’t been done before, or wouldn’t have found such a prominent place during the bombing of Libya, for instance. But now, it is suggested the enemy is much more “evil” and, the piece seems to go out of it’s way to re-enforce that idea there exists an “our side”.
These images seem to be about way more than just PR.
During the early years of the Vietnam War (note: I was not in Vietnam either as a soldier or a journalist), coverage was done on the ground as well as the Five o’clock Follies, the weekly press briefing in Saigon. What journalists soon realized was that the Follies bore little resemblance to what was going on in the field. Press began to ignore, or at least minimize, the Follies statements in favor of what they were seeing and hearing on the ground. When they sent these stories back to the desk, especially in the trend setting papers (LA Times, WSJ, NYT, WaPo) the editors didn’t accept what they were hearing. The reason was the editors, political reporters and national reporters had their sources in the Departments of Defense and State, as well as the White House, and those sources said the reporters were wrong.
The coverage only changed when and because the perception of the war and the political/social climate finally changed.
The point here is we all have “trusted” sources and social circles that determine how we see stories and what we accept. If you or I were in a position to affect what runs and how it’s displayed, it would go the same way — our social circles are made up of our work peers and determined by economic strata, background, etc. It is hard to imagine how reporting of the poor/homeless/working class is accomplished in any meaningful way, I might add, by someone making north of six figures, living in a comfortable high-rise with neighbors and social companions who are the elites of whatever endeavor they are in.
In a non-photo context, we can see other instances of disparity between the reporters and the reported. Consider the current political coverage of the recent Labour leadership vote in the United Kingdom. It was and still is accepted dogma that Corbyn was non-electable — first as leader of the Labour Party and now as PM. Even the left-leaning Guardian adopted this position. But the labour party membership voted Corbyn in with a huge majority of 59% in the first round. In this country, Bernie Sanders continues to make inroads on Clinton and yet it is Biden, who is not running (at time of writing), that is seen as Clinton’s most likely threat!
“ISIS has been so undermining and disruptive, the country is close to accepting the idea of a “good war.” And, that’s what this NYT spread is all about.”
So, as to the series at hand: “rah rah” pieces certainly didn’t start with this spread of portraits and there are countless examples far more Hollywood than Ferguson’s actually pretty straight-foreword photo essay. At the same time, though, as has been pointed out at this site many times, photographic meaning is often derived in its use — its framing, the accompanying text, the mood conveyed.
What I think is happening here is this: Iraq, Syria, Libya, they are all represented to US citizens as not particularly “nice” regimes. This framing might be useful, depending on the timing, but as potential threats or outright menaces, these countries are relatively harmless to us.
So the coverage of these players is ambiguous. The tone of the coverage also ebbs and flows. With ISIS, I am reminded of polls in 1964 saying if we didn’t send in the troops to Vietnam, we would see the Communists on the steps of Seattle. Which politicians — with the exceptions of Rand Paul and maybe Sanders and Corbyn — are going to argue there’s a better way than taking the war to ISIS?
ISIS is playing it’s part: killing and destroying, as well as recruiting and threatening … with maximum buzz. And while I don’t think we’re at the threshold yet, ISIS has been so undermining and disruptive, the country is close to accepting the idea of a “good war.” And, that’s what I think this NYT spread is all about.
As for the photos themselves, the men in these images are out of “central casting” (I won’t go into the fact they are all white males, which would lead us into a discussion of race, opportunity, class, etc.). They are “steely eyed” heroes in the mold of WWII Hollywood.
They are all “our boys” from next door. They always say sir and madam. They believe in God and the rightness of “our” way of life. If they go down, they will do so with their ring finger rubbing the image of their wife. They say all the right things: nothing more, nothing less. These photos and text all bring up images of a better time, a time when America knew who she was, when she knew how to act and how to lead and when everyone knew this was God’s land.
To emphasize again: I don’t see this feature as part of a conspiracy to take the country to war, or to give more power to the military industrial complex. It is, though, about a tipping point. If a military stand against ISIS is coming, not one that chips away at the edges but delivers us, across the front pages, to a unified commitment, outsized features like this will have been part of the visual preparations for the nation.
This is an edited version of an article that originally published appeared on Reading The Pictures.
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