Images from Iraq – the Unseen War

This call for another warning: there are pictures you might not want to see, some almost as horrible as the images I described last week. The context is different though; this time the publisher is not a porn site but a publisher who wants to open a debate. The heading is “The Photos Washington Doesn’t Want You to See.” The question is how much of the real war we want delivered to our breakfast table and, if hiding the horrors make us ignorant of the realities of the war.

The article from Salon.com is cross-published by Spiegel Online (link above) and Salon’s small gallery is free of advertising. Paid subscription or day-pass is not required to access this content.

It is a sanitized war we are studying on a daily basis. “Almost no photographs of the 1,868 U.S. troops who have been killed to date in Iraq have appeared in U.S. publications.” And we haven’t seen the now published picture of a dead Iraqi baby either. It is a question of ethics first of all: no one wants to learn about a relative’s death from the news. Neither do battling soldiers want a photographer taking shots of a wounded or recently killed companion.

As this article informs us, it is also a matter of logistics: There are very few photographers in Iraq: "… maybe a dozen or two Western photographers in Iraq, in addition to … stringers, who do most of the work for newswires.” It is unlikely they will be on the scene when violence erupts.