Images that change minds

Very few photographs change our minds about anything. One that did was Nick Ut's 1972 photograph in Trang Bang, Vietnam, of 9-year-old Kim Phuc, running down a street naked and screaming after her house had been strafed with napalm.

I showed it to my mother in 1973, and all her opinions about the war in Vietnam changed. She became a dove overnight. My mother realized deep in her heart that she was more a mother than a patriot. And there were thousands of mothers like her in America who said, "Photographs don't lie. America must be doing something wrong."

So, in the charged, highly politicized arena of war, one photograph, a photograph that revisualizes the enemy, or ourselves, can change everything.

And the Pentagon knows it.

Nor is it surprising that the disturbing photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison were taken by a shutterbug from the 320th Military Police Battalion clowning around with a cheap digital camera, and not by a professional journalist draped in lenses. Or that the video of Nick Berg's death was just a hand-held home horror movie.

As it turns out, "embedded" professionals are too embedded - embedded in fighting units on whose good-will and expertise their very lives depend; embedded in the Pentagon's need to control the flow of visual information, not only to protect the integrity of covert military operations but also to make sure that the nervous American public isn't frightened or disgusted by the reality of war; and embedded in the economic reality of selling newspapers back home to a readership that is generally happy not to know certain things.

Embeddedness, so it seems, not only means limited access, also it means that the savagery of war must be visualized within an aesthetic that is safe and marketable. The best war photographers in the world, hired by news magazines to cover the war in Iraq, had to settle for the exoticism of Baghdad, visual adventures in firepower, rich desert colors, and textures, the murky beauty of tanks in sandstorms, and the earnest faces of our brave young men. The rather ho-hum, mysterious grandeur of war.