Abstract
David Shields used to read The New York Times until he realized he had a problem. Each day he found himself enchanted by the images of war on the front page. In his words, ‘My attraction to the photographs evolved into a mixture of rapture, bafflement, and repulsion’ (p. 7). Bewildered disgust may seem to be a fitting response to war imagery, but Shields’ ‘repulsion’ did not stem from the content of the photographs (acts of war and human violence), but rather their form (how the Times presented them). Shields’ critique is a noble one but it is not necessarily new. Even for Shields, himself, who in his 2010 book, Reality Hunger, argued that traditional genres do not adequately capture ‘reality’. Even memory belies us. ‘Anything processed by memory’, writes Shields, ‘is fiction’ (p. 257). In War Is Beautiful, Shields focuses his realist frustrations on war reporting.
The book catalogues 64 photos appearing on the cover of The New York Times between January 2002 and October 2013. The images are meant to signify ‘war’ whether depicting a US soldier training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina or the arresting image of a grief-stricken woman mourning the death of a loved one in Lebanon. Shields’ argument, presented in the editorial introduction, is that the Times ‘glorified war through an unrelenting parade of beautiful images whose function is to sanctify the accompanying descriptions of battle, death, destruction, and displacement’ (p. 7). His chief complaint centers on the Times’ use of canonical tropes in their visual reporting. He writes, ‘The Times uses its front-page war photographs to convey that a chaotic world is ultimately under control, encased within amber’ (p. 9). According to Shields, ceci n’est pas une guerre. He believes images of war should include more visible chaos. But it is important to remember that the horrors of war are not synonymous with ‘the realities’ of war.
The images presented in Shields’ collection are, indeed, ‘beautiful’ in the sense that they are professionally composed photographs. Audiences should take this point at face value lest they get caught in a philosophically dense debate over matters of truth and beauty. A preoccupation with whether or not war is beautiful shortchanges opportunities to consider war’s newsworthiness. If war is on the cover of The New York Times every day for more than 10 years, is it still news? War’s banality is more ‘repulsive’ than anything else.
As Shields points out, the Times bills itself as ‘the paper of record’ promising ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ (p. 7). It is worth noting that what qualifies as ‘news’ and ‘fit to print’ has changed dramatically in the last 10 years with social media’s influence on the news ecosystem. Not to mention that the nature of war has changed as well, a point Shields seems to overlook in his analysis. The editorial introduction begins with an historical overview of the Times as a news organization and cultural institution. ‘Throughout its history’, writes Shields, ‘the Times has produced exemplary war journalism, but it has done so by retaining a reciprocal relationship with the administration in power’ (p. 8). In the book’s afterword, David Hickey shares Shields’ complaint by writing, ‘combat photography up through Viet Nam used to be good’ (p. 99). Both authors are unclear about what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘exemplary’ war photography. And both fail to acknowledge how war, itself, does not look the same as it used to. In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker (2011) argues that while the US is involved in more wars than ever before, fewer people get killed in them. Taking American soldiers as a case study, Pinker points out that in Vietnam 58,000 died whereas in the combination of Iraq and Afghanistan fewer than 6,000 were killed. Therefore, the source of Shields’ discontent (echoed by Hickey) may come from a lack of visible violence rather than a lack of war.
On the whole, Shields’ analysis constructively illuminates how the Times war coverage is a trope in and of itself. And further how the Times’ war photography has problematically played a hand in creating and sustaining familiar tropes of war (the combat zone as a masculine playground, for example). Yet Shields’ argument loses momentum in its presentation. The chapters consist of 10 loosely defined aesthetic tropes, each beginning with a vaguely orienting epigraph followed by photographic examples. Chapters one and two are ‘Nature’ and ‘Playground’, respectively. Each includes 6 photographs. Then ‘Fatherhood’ and ‘God’, each with 4 photos, followed by ‘Pietà’ with 5 photos, ‘Painting’ with 10, ‘Movie’ with 12, ‘Beauty’ with 10, ‘Love’ with 5, and ‘Death’ with 2. Because there are so many categories, they tend to overlap and undermine Shields’ case. In addition, readers need to flip to the back of the book in order to read each photo’s original caption to gain some perspective and context.
In the chapter labeled ‘Playground’, for example, Shields includes a photo of a soldier lying on his back in a rubble-filled building. He holds a thin rod of wood that looks almost like a broomstick in front of an open window. On top of the broomstick he placed his helmet and sunglasses to look like a makeshift scarecrow. The label ‘playground’ suggests this soldier is merely teasing a group of neighborhood kids who are waiting outside with a bucket of water balloons. In reality, however, and according to the caption at the back of the book, the soldier is ‘luring a sniper’. It’s hard to imagine ‘play’ if you anticipate a sniper’s bullet blowing the helmet and sunglasses off the stick. But doing so requires readers to engage their moral imagination. Perhaps this could be the problem with the Times’ imagery. It is so familiar, we find ourselves relating to it rather than speculating about it. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, the story is all there, especially with cues from Shields’ labels and epigraphs.
The Pietà chapter opens with an epigraph by Romanian philosopher, EE Cioran that reads: ‘No matter what we say, the end of all sadness is a swoon into divinity’ (quoted on p. 41). As an artistic form, Pietà refers to imagery of the Virgin Mary cradling the lifeless body of Jesus Christ. It is a sorrowful image. The photos Shields includes in this section suitably invoke despair. A Palestinian man carries the dead body of a child after Israelis opened fire in Gaza. A Georgian man weeps over the body of a relative following Russian airstrikes in Gori. And a group of US soldiers huddle over a comrade who stepped on a landmine. It is surprising not to see any female figures in the Pietà section since the art form hinges on the particular grief of Mother Mary. This is an example of how Shields’ presentation undermines his argument. The case is not strong enough for why these images exist in ‘Pietà’ as opposed to ‘Fatherhood’, ‘Death’, ‘God’, or even ‘Love’.
Seeing war – and really seeing it – in a way that makes your chest ache with an urgent breathlessness requires moral imagination. These images, as Shields argues, are beautiful. But their beauty should not preclude their civic productivity. Shields’ response is that he ‘no longer reads the Times’, a point he marks with an asterisk on the book’s cover. Yet the reader is left wondering, what does he read instead? Are there alternatives he recommends? The cover image might suggest an alternative. It is a piece of digital artwork created by a Vietnam veteran, Gary Grayson, called ‘Yellow with Red’. It imitates the American Abstract Expressionist movement, which began in New York City following WWII. This style of artwork rejects representational form. Its prominence on the cover of the book implies Shields’ endorsement. He wants a representation of war beyond conventional formulae. Laudably, he wants war photos to be chaotic and stirring. It can be more difficult, however, for audiences to empathize with something to which they cannot relate. Because this book generates these types of inquires, it is useful to scholars and students interested in visual communication, visual discourse analyses, processes of signification, models of representation, and/or the ethics of captioning in photojournalism.
One final, striking example from Shields’ compilation is an image of a lone and empty chair on a desert landscape with a line of palm trees and sand colored buildings in the background. The platitude of the scene is punctuated by a handful of plastic water bottles dappling the ground around the chair. The caption indicates that the image was taken in August 2005 after Israeli troops and police cleared all but five Gaza settlements. There is no blood. There is no chaos. There is no struggle. Yet this image is haunting. It signifies what the caption elaborates: desertion. The half-empty water bottles are tragically human, signposts for an ongoing narrative. Readers could look at this photograph, as Hickey did, and think of a Dennis Hopper beach scene (p. 99). Or they could engage their moral imagination, and sit with the unsettling thought that the absence of war is not peace.