Friday, December 28, 2007
No snark
Just a link to Wonkette's gallery of images surrounding the Benazir Bhutto assassination. Wonkette asks whether the uncensored photos of the immediate aftermath make it more real for viewers or whether it just desensitizes us to the violence. I tend to think the former and that we are too used to images of fireballs but not the human aftermath. I also notice that there are almost no women in the crowds at the rally or, later, at the funeral. Is that life as usual, that absence of 50% of the population? Bhutto was a polarizing figure partly because she was a woman in power, and I wish there were some discussion of why her countrywomen are not mourning her in public.
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5 comments:
Yes, thanks for this. I had just the other day dropped Wonkette from my RSS reader. Was weary of their relentless cynicism. And here they go totally 180 in this one post at least. Maybe a different, always relentlessly earnest, site couldn't get away with such brutal honesty.
And then the pictures themselves are devastating.
And one thing that also strikes me is that I'd never especially considered the actual mechanics of getting killed by a bomb blast, more specifically in the way that so many of the victims had their very clothing blown away. It's that small detail that to me portrays the victims as so much more vulnerable and human. And makes it all so very sad.
But without anyone ever publishing pictures, I guess, how would I have known?
Yes, to all of that. I've heard that explosions create "marvels of selective destruction," and yet for all the coverage of the event we're curiously squeamish about seeing the reality rather than just the reaction. Wonkette nailed it.
The bizarre news about the new "nooo, she just died of ducking into the edge of the sunroof" line is too strange to believe. It's not truth that's stranger than fiction, it's politics.
It's remarkable how this has really stuck with me, days later. I've been thinking about it off and on really all day today.
One more thing that I think is important, though, and this more tends to support not publishing pictures of the dead. I kinda feel like it's not at all my place to put up such pictures, certainly not on my blog. I feel much too much like I would be exploiting these poor people if I were to do so. Like it's just pornography if I do it.
My brother once on his blog showed a photo, a video capture, of poor Nicholas Berg, of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi holding up Berg's just severed head. I thought it was repulsive and wrong to show that. That it was exploitative. I refused to read his (always crazy right wing) blog for almost a year after that.
I don't know if I'm doing any sort of decent job articulating this. But somewhere there's got to be the right context. My blog maybe isn't the place. But somehow Wonkette, specifically in this case Megan Carpentier, could do it. And did. And did the right thing.
Well, it's hard to argue that intent doesn't provide a context for images. The true-crime gore shots that used to be a staple of yellow journalism are rare now, and rightly so. But while there's a fine line between exploiting the dead and showing the full image, I think that we tend to err much too far on the side of avoiding offense. It can create an oversanitized picture (reiterative, unintentionally) of the world.
In this case, I am glad to be able to link to someone hosting a moderated discussion of how the images are seen and used in the media here and abroad.
Ah. Yes. I think you've got it exactly with intent. Wonkette's intent, and then yours as well, is partly about the pictures qua pictures, but then also an honest portion of just plain sadness at the death and suffering, regardless of who caused it.
My brother's use was explicitly partisan, and therefore exploitative, and that's probably what I fear doing. I think maybe I was closest to comprehending when I called it pornographic, emphasizing the prurient nature maybe, the no-other-redeeming-quality aspect.
Thanks again. I'll shut up about this now.
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