Abstract
Photographic icons are established over time, accruing meaning in the wake of the events they come to symbolize as they are reproduced, recycled, and incorporated as part of a retrospective discourse of wars, catastrophes, and historic events. Select images carry an increasingly heavy burden of representation as the events with which they are associated fade into the past. As part of this process of selection and compression, iconic images inevitably become emblematic markers of popular and taken-for-granted beliefs, what Roland Barthes called “myth” in his 1972 book Mythologies, and even become the objects of their own myths.
In 1999, in a chapter for Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography. I wrote about the thin tissue separating popular (and sometimes professional) myths about the creation and influence of photographic images in the historical record, and the kind of serious historical investigation that often called such myths into question, if not debunking them. Daniel Hallin’s assiduously researched and groundbreaking 1986 book The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam had likewise reexamined the notion that negative media coverage was primarily responsible for turning American opinion against the war effort—that in the minds of many Americans and especially members of the military, the media “lost the war.” His analysis of U.S. newspaper and broadcast news content during the years of American involvement in the war did not support this myth, nor was there evidence that growing public opposition to the war over time was primarily fueled by critical reporting in the media. On the contrary, as others besides Hallin have also noted, public opinion about the war was more directly affected by years of frustration with a lack of clear military success (the sense of Vietnam being a “quagmire”), growing numbers of U.S. military casualties (“the loss of our young men”), the military’s switch to a lottery system so that greater numbers of young middle and upper middle class men were in danger of being drafted, and a growing and increasingly well-organized anti-war movement. Public opinion polling showed that support for the war had already begun to slip as early as 1966, and continued to erode further each subsequent year, even while American media coverage mostly reflected U.S. government narratives concerning the progress of the conflict. Only after public support for the war had more precipitously crumbled, during the period from August 1968 to May 1971, did media coverage become more mixed, with occasionally more critical assessments of the war effort, and sometimes, but not frequently, disturbing images of violence, interspersed with reports explaining and supporting the government’s continuing execution of the war. Of particular note in this regard, as Larry Lichty wrote in a 1973 article “The War We Watched on Television,” was journalists’ predominantly positive support for Nixon’s incremental disengagement policy.
The case of Vietnam is pertinent because, as with widely recognized iconic photographs, the perception and social impact of news reporting, as social theorist Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes, depends heavily upon preexisting fields of social relations, economic and political power, and cultural production. The nature of photographic icons, how they come to be considered iconic, in what spheres they are recognized or exert influence, and their ultimate significance for public discourse and collective memory involve relationships that intersect the fields of journalism, politics, and cultural production. In some cases, the history of an image and its pathway to widespread public recognition are clear and relatively concrete. This is the case for Raising the Flag on Mt. Suribachi, which Joe Rosenthal shot on the island of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. The institutional dissemination and glorification of this photograph can easily be traced, from its national distribution by the Associated Press (AP) and publication by hundreds of newspapers across the United States, to its adoption in the following months in various promotional materials for U.S. Government War Bond drives, its circulation as a U.S. postage stamp, its use as a model for the Marine Corps War Memorial, dedicated in 1954, and its republication in hundreds of books, including illustrated histories of World War II (WWII), books of Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs, and books on the history of photography and photojournalism. This is an image that may have enjoyed a powerful cultural resonance in the post-WWII American imagination in any case, but in fact was institutionally promoted as a visual symbol in multiple media contexts, including as government propaganda. This photograph played its role in national myth building through its ideological valence for journalism, politics, and academia. Promoted and functioning across multiple spheres, what Bourdieu called, in The Field of Cultural Production, “fields” of social activity and power, Rosenthal’s photograph became established as a national ideological symbol.
The process by which other well-known photographs have gained iconic symbolic meanings has not always been so transparent. Of course, the power of images within an ideological field can ebb and flow with shifting historical circumstances, and within differing spheres of circulation and meaning, regardless of their purported status as “icons.” The power of an image as icon does not reside simply in the qualities of the image itself nor does it arise spontaneously as a mystical sort of cultural resonance. Specific networks of image circulation link to particular institutions, social groups, and spheres of discourse and change over time. And as these changes occur, the ideological value of particular images may vary across social fields.
A good example of this is found in Catherine Preston’s 1995 book chapter for Larry Gross’s edited collection, On the Margins of Art Worlds. Preston analyzes the shifting status and reputation of the photographic work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans within institutions of fine art such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When a more formalist and detached “modernist photographic aesthetic” gained currency in the art world of the late 1960s and 1970s, the artistic and cultural value of Lange’s body of work within elite fields of cultural production was downgraded. Even her well-known “Migrant Mother” photograph from 1936, long a widely circulated symbol of Depression era America, saw its standing as a cultural icon partially diminished. Certainly, the Migrant Mother photo continued to circulate as a popular emblem of the Depression. However, its valence was reduced as it came to be more limited to spheres of popular media and was no longer part of the photography canon in art history.
The case of the “Accidental Napalm” photograph, taken June 8, 1972 by Nick Ut near Trảng Bàng during the Vietnam War, also provides a fascinating case of a picture whose meaning and value has evolved in relation to the media fields and rhetorical culture in which it has been interpreted. First in a 2003 article about collective memory of that iconic photograph published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, and then in their 2007 book, Robert Hariman and John Lucaites provide an insightful, in-depth analysis of the complex and shifting layers of social context in which this photograph of a naked girl running down the highway, her skin burned from a napalm attack on her village, has mediated multiple narrative responses and ambivalent moral deliberation. They convincingly argue that responses to this, or other images were not obvious or automatic, but depended on a “structure of public moral response” that had to be constructed. In Bourdieu’s terms, such a constructed moral response emerges from encountering the picture within a journalism field, a field dominated by what Hariman and Lucaites call liberal–individualist narratives, and within a political field, which in 1972 especially invited democratic dissent.
I have always found the case of the “Accidental Napalm” photograph intriguing because the picture is so often proclaimed as “the defining image of the Vietnam War,” and described as representing a turning point in U.S. public opposition to the war. Such claims have always seemed suspect to me, given the fact that the photograph was not taken until June 1972, when U.S. involvement in the war was already winding down and when public support for the war had long ago dwindled. Indeed, the photograph shows the aftermath of a South Vietnamese Army attack in which American troops were no longer involved. Moreover, although the photograph was immediately distributed by the AP and published in many newspapers the next day, it did not attract renewed and expanded attention until being awarded a Pulitzer Prize and being republished by Life Magazine in December of 1972. It did not become one of the most remarked upon photos of the war until it was repeatedly reprinted in retrospective books of Vietnam photography, that is, after the war had ended. In fact, attention to the photograph seems to have peaked after a spate of Vietnam retrospectives in the 1990s.
Hariman and Lucaites identify the longer trajectory of the image and its impact in their book No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. They write, “Thus, the photograph came to provide symbolic representation of the U.S. public’s experience of the Vietnam War” (italics added). And they conclude, “Thus, the iconic photograph is not about informing the public; rather it offers a performance of social relationships that provide a basis for moral comprehension of and response to what is already known.”
Sensitivity to specific networks and time frames of circulation and legitimization, and the implications of those spheres of activity for questions of social influence and power, needs to be a central concern for studies of media imagery. What is most important is not whether a particular visual image qualifies as “iconic,” but rather where, specifically, the image circulates and the kind of work—commercial, artistic, informational, ideological—to which the image contributes. How powerful or effective are particular visual images as part of communication systems and ideological programs? Moreover, the image’s potency may not simply be a factor of its prevalence.
In “The Influence-Network Model of the Photojournalistic Icon,” Damen, Mielczarek, and Perlmutter demonstrate concern for spheres of circulation when they repeatedly refer to the historical power of “elite media” to consecrate visual icons and observe the potential for new more populist digital networks to disrupt the “fixedness” of celebrated images and their meanings. However, their research assumes that levels of popular circulation are an effective measure of iconic achievement, as if frequency and popularity inevitably accrete to cultural potency. They are hopeful that a model for tracking content might potentially “predict the likelihood of an image to become iconic.” Yet this premise is frustrated by the realization that contemporary digital circulation of images is often widespread but short-lived. Their monograph concludes,
[T]he longevity of such iconic images is relatively short, only to be overtaken by other remarkable photographs that come online. What we may be experiencing in the digital era of an iconic image is a trade-off through the iconic image creation process, one that goes from the few metonymic single shots that have lingered in the cultural consciousness for generations to many overnight sensations that fade with time.
This recalls Bourdieu’s observations about the impact of television on the journalism field. In his 1999 review article, “Field Theory in Comparative Context: A New Paradigm for Media Studies,” for Theory and Society, Benson paraphrases Bourdieu:
In contrast to the serious print media, television’s power “rests not in the intrinsic quality of its journalistic product.” Rather its power lies in its wide, nearly universal diffusion, which gives it unparalleled capacity to shape opinion and makes it so highly valued by politicians. In the new commercial television-dominated media regime, the “good journalist” is the one who attracts the biggest audience or readership. This is not to say that the serious press no longer wields influence, nor that the intellectual standards it upheld have disappeared. It is only to say that television has become a competing, and ultimately dominant, consecrating power.
Benson’s point is that television has modified the “circulation of information” within the media field, determining which stories and which kind of stories get picked up and become “media events” and which stories remain on the inside pages or in alternative journals.
In this environment especially, the study of visual images should be approached in terms of the streams of media content of which they are a part and the fields of social relations, cultural capital, and power that direct their circulation. Who is using the images for what purposes? Power does not reside in an image alone but in the prominence of the discourse in which it is embedded and in the power of those furthering that discourse. Identifying widely circulated and/or prominent visual images without analyzing the processes of ideological formation, social interaction and influence with which they articulate, seems a bit like collecting butterflies without studying their ecosystem.
In journalism, liberal–individualist narratives lead to conceptions of the photojournalist as a heroic individual; photographs get treated as a product of a photographer’s resourceful and courageous presence as an eye-witness to extraordinary events. Photojournalism organizations (the National Press Photographers Association, World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Pulitzer Prizes, and the Overseas Press Club) give annual awards to these outstanding photographers, effectively creating pantheons of famous photojournalists and their images that in turn become models and reference points for future photographic production. And news organizations employ and pay photojournalists to deliver images that will garner attention for their news operation, that will go viral, and that hopefully will win prizes. They send photojournalist out in search of “the one image that will define the battle for Iraq,” “the one photo that will encapsulate the refugee crisis in Syria,” a single powerful image that will symbolize the tragedy of children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. So we seek to understand what makes a picture “iconic,” and we attempt to track, compare, and categorize photo icons.
Undoubtedly, valuable things can be learned from an analysis of the properties of exceptional, widely shared, or enduring images, not least of which involve the special roles played by such images for social participation in public culture, the reinforcement of shared mythologies, or the dissemination of ideology. But attempting to identify those pictures that qualify for icon status as a particular form of honorary achievement or working to develop a method for predicting pictures that will achieve such status seems to distract from the more important task of better understanding the routine imaging practices of media institutions and how they relate to ideological fields and power. Quoting Hariman and Lucaites’ 2007 book, Dahmen et al. note that iconic images are part of our public culture that developed historically by using modern communicative media to define the citizen–state relationship. So, Dahmen et al. say, these select images are of “tremendous value” in helping citizens navigate and understand the political and social contexts of complex events.
This statement seems to set the task before us: to determine more clearly the discursive value of selected images and to whose benefit it accrues. Is it, in fact, the case that those images identified as “iconic” offer a “tremendous value” to citizens, helping them to “navigate and understand the political and social contexts of complex events”? What qualities of these images, and what relationships with discursive fields, are beneficial to citizen viewers? Conversely, how might these images promote interests separate from those of ordinary citizens? Might they serve more effectively to bolster existing mythic narratives and the social relations and public culture reflected by them? Don’t we still need to interrogate more thoroughly the potential ideological implications of these designated images and the social and cultural fields in which they operate before coming to conclusions about their civic value? The first step, it seems to me, is to refocus on the specific social and ideological functions played by the visual images in our media systems, both those quotidian and more ephemeral images that continually flash by, and those that are accorded greater prominence or enduring significance.