Staging War Photographs

The New Yorker cover is a war conspiracy theory brought to life. One of the most famous patriotic pictures of American history: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” (1945) by Joe Rosenthal. The four men carry the American flag up the mountain of rubble, declaring victory in Japan in World War II. However, the twist in the cover is that the famous image is staged in a photo studio. The four men are lit perfectly, set in front of a green screen, and candidly pose on a man-made platform fashioned with styrofoam rubble as the photographer takes the shot.

The cover responds to Susan Sontag’s brief idea of staging war photographs on the scene of the war in order to elicit a specific emotion from the civilians back home. Sontag writes: “The hunt for more dramatic—as they’re often described—images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value”. In another section of “Looking at War”, Sontag explains that “… in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism or good business sense”. The more dramatic the image is, the more impactful it can be; this idea has taken war photography to a new level. Photography is used in order to skew the truth about what really goes on in war. Although the staging of war photographs is not as literal as staging the scene in a photo studio, it proves the notion that photographs can be deceiving, yet also convey some truth. So what is the lie and what is the truth in a photograph? The lie is that the photographers intentionally take certain aspects of the scene out of the frame, showing only a small portion of the surrounding scene. On the other hand, the truth is that the photographers take small pieces of the whole truth and pick one or two to show the world.

The idea behind this New Yorker cover is largely inspired by the United States government conspiracy theories. The people behind these theories make ridiculous accusations that nearly every major event is constructed by the government, such as the Holocaust, the first American moon landing, and Pearl Harbor. These people claim that the media coverage is staged in a studio with extensive props, actors, sound effects, and visual effects. As a response to these conspiracy theories, my New Yorker cover mocks the belief that all photographs or video coverage of any major event is staged. The cover also proves that photographers do censor photographs in order to gain strong reactions in response.

Is Art Compassionate or Sympathetic?

Can art be sympathetic and compassionate, exploitative and manipulating, or both? In Susan Sontag’s “Looking at War”, she questions the morality of taking images of the dead. She writes that “the first justification for the brutally legible pictures of a field of dead soldiers [is] the simple duty to record… ‘The camera is the eye of history’”. If the photographs are shot under the context for the purpose of recording, then the message behind the photographs are purely exploitative and manipulative. From a completely humanistic point of view, the people taking these photographs are objectifying the deceased and removing them of their stories and their names. The photographers also neglect to ask permission from the families, let alone notify them about the deceased. However, because they are taken for historical documentation, the morality changes entirely, making it normal to take pictures of dead bodies without permission.

In response to Sontag, my New Yorker cover depicts the souls of the dead in different colored pencils. Some figures have faces on them, while most of them do not. This represents the anonymity of the deceased in war, and the morality of taking a photograph of a dead person for the sake of documentation. It is a criticization of our confused morals: why it’s acceptable to take a picture of a dead person without permission when it’s not acceptable to take a picture of someone alive without permission.

The End of the Holland Tunnel

For the third New Yorker cover, I decided to show a small part of my journey of transitioning to New York City. Since I’ve lived in New Jersey my whole life, I’ve always had New York City in my grasp; after all, it was only a 30 minute drive away (without traffic), or a 40 minute train ride. Although, interestingly enough, all of my experiences revisiting the city had been a new journey; all completely different from the last. The only constants that remained were the three ways I entered: Penn Station, Lincoln Tunnel, and Holland Tunnel.

When I was younger, New York City terrified me. Ever since the attack on 9/11, my family refused to go into the city; it wasn’t until I was about seven or eight that my family decided it was time to revisit the city. Returning to New York City was kind of like discovering a new place. The meatpacking district had changed into a trendy hipster area, stores that we used to frequent had shut down, and more of Manhattan had become noticeably gentrified. The city had become foreign and seemed as if it was designed to make any outsider confused. People usually refer to New York as “the concrete jungle”, so I thought that I should make that my cover. A jungle seems to change all the time with its new sprouts, new species, and new temperatures just like New York changes.

Bibliography:

Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War.” The New Yorker, December 9, 2002.