Abstract
In About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Barbie Zelizer develops a rich and compelling argument about the functions and consequences of impending death photographs in contemporary journalism. In this visual trope, the camera focuses with anticipation on an impending event or outcome, freezing a moment and opening it up to the speculative possibilities of the viewer’s imagination and emotions. Included within this trope are images of people falling or jumping to their deaths, of assassinations, violent suppression of protesters, tsunami devastation, military targets, and campaigns of genocide. Death is news, whether local, national, or global, and whether the result of accident, natural forces, or human design. But picturing death, the already dead, is often problematic, posing ethical, political, commercial, and aesthetic challenges. Images of impending death implicate us in the most consequential phenomenon in human experience, whether they focus on the intimacy of a single life about to be extinguished or reveal the spectacular scope of carnage or devastation.
At the heart of this project, Zelizer questions the longstanding assumption that visual representation is a mere adjunct to the written word, a supplement to the power of language to describe in detail and explicate complexity. Her success in this project is demonstrating how news images serve purposes far beyond information relay. But this is not a struggle of more-or-less between the word and the image. Rather, as Zelizer argues, the image takes on special significance and power in matters that are contested, murky, unresolved, or discomfiting. Particularly when news covers tragedy, disaster, and atrocity, events are often remembered more for the visual image that freezes a moment, than for the text that describes, unpacks, and elucidates the complex issues that comprise the story. As the subtitle of Zelizer’s book suggests, images may have less to do with informing readers about events than with moving readers, with shaping readers’ impressions and feelings about those events, and about themselves in relation to those events. This is the subjunctive voice of the visual and the domain of the ‘about-to-die’ image. In contrast to the indicative voice that describes the world ‘as is’, the voice of the impending death image is motivated by ‘as if’.
Regardless of its scope or source, the ‘about-to-die’ image freezes a moment immediately prior to death, or a moment in which death might have occurred, or might yet occur. It is the disjuncture between what is depicted and what can be understood from the depiction – what might yet be, what still could be, what could not possibly have happened. The impending death image ‘works by coaxing people to suspend disbelief, deferring knowledge of where the depiction leads long enough to respond to a scene that shows less information than is known’ (p. 24).
Zelizer organizes impending death images into three categories: Presumed Death, which suggests death through a compromised inanimate landscape; Possible Death, which shows specific individuals in grave circumstances of bodily harm or frailty; and Certain Death, in which death’s inevitability is inscribed in the image or pronounced in accompanying text. Each category has its distinctive and recognizable semiotic structure, and each stands in a distinct relationship to written text, whether through caption, headline, or related story.
Importantly, Zelizer uses these categories to demonstrate how changes in visual representation of a story reflect shifting sentiments towards the subject matter itself. Early on, and only briefly, American news media visually represented the 9/11 attacks through still images of falling – or jumping – bodies. Video sequences of people plummeting towards the ground were deemed too traumatizing. That judgment soon extended to still images as well. But within that space of representational flux, viewers were confronted with images of bodies frozen in free fall. Zelizer poses an important question, and articulates the challenges facing journalists and editors: How can the photograph make the horrific presentable in ways that the moving image cannot? Should about-to-die images such as those from 9/11 be shown, even if the horrific is somehow mitigated by the freeze frame? How are editors and publishers to decide whether and when readers should be shielded from the full force and enormity of human horror and from evidence of the human capacity for atrocity, and whether and when the profession of journalism has a moral and political obligation to lead its readers to face the abyss, the prospect of abjection? Images of the burning towers have come to signify the human horrors of that day, affording American public consciousness the emotional insulation of the long lens at great distance, a hallmark of Presumed Death’s semiotic structure.
One of the strengths of About to Die is the richness of the extensive case studies with which Zelizer works. One of those cases concerns images of 12-year-old Mohammed Aldura and his father, trapped in crossfire during the Intifada in the Gaza Strip in September 2000. Video taken by French television documented that both father and son were shot, and that the young Mohammed was killed. Still images grabbed from that video were appropriated for both advocacy and vilification. Circulated and recirculated in print and broadcast news outlets, as well as on the internet, these select few images showed the adolescent frozen in time, moments before his death, trapped, or perhaps spared, in the subjunctive space of the ‘as if’. The openness of this impending death image enabled different news organizations around the globe to move diverse publics in a range of competing and conflicting ways. Zelizer writes:
The image refracted the complexity of a political conflict through the body of an individual about to die and provided a memorable and heart-rending loading of a complicated foreign battle onto the terrified face and body of a young child and his father. (p. 197)
This case, along with many others in Zelizer’s book, enables us to see how the practice of journalism is deeply interwoven with the construction of collective identities and with the constitution of cultural memory.
About to Die is an exemplary work. As a scholar of journalism, Barbie Zelizer not only demonstrates how the selection and circulation of images to represent tragic or horrific events shapes public understanding, but through a series of longitudinal studies of stories constructed through the visual, provides compelling evidence of how journalism is deeply implicated in the construction of cultural memory and collective identity, for better or for worse.