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Afterimages
Photography and U.S. Foreign Policy
By Liam Kennedy The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-33743-2
CHAPTER 1
Compassion and Critique: Vietnam
The collapse of French colonial power in Vietnam in the mid-1950s held only fitful interest for American news media but it did attract the attention of a number of photojournalists looking for the next big international story. The emergence of photo agencies such as Magnum and the competition for stories of conflict meant that a number of photographers were roaming the globe for such imagery. Two of the most famous war photographers of the period made their way to Vietnam. In May 1953, David Douglas Duncan photographed the French cause unsympathetically, showing lazing French officers and an army mostly made up of foreign mercenaries. In his text, he derided "inept French colonialism" and wrote: "It was now nearly over. The cause was bankrupt from the start." When Duncan's report appeared in Life, it annoyed the U.S. State Department and enraged the editor of the magazine, Henry Luce. Robert Capa went to Vietnam a year later, partly because he was responding to the challenge of competition with Duncan, and he died there on May 25, 1954 when he stepped on a landmine while accompanying a column of French and Vietnamese infantry in the Red River Delta. Duncan and Capa's imagery empathized with the Vietnamese but did little to clarify what was at issue for Americans or to secure strong public interest in the U.S. role in the region.
With increased aid to Vietnam at the end of 1961, including the assignment of combat support units, the media became interested in Vietnam as a war story and increased their coverage and their resources accordingly. The increased investment demanded much more intensive coverage, not only analysis of trends and conditions but also and especially spot news, focused on events. The key sources for much of the news content were the American mission in Saigon and South Vietnamese officials representing President Diem's views, but journalists very soon saw the disparities between these statements and the evidence around them. As has been well documented, they began to draw on other sources, especially lower-level U.S. advisers and military personnel who were frustrated with the conduct of the war. The New York Times's David Halberstam wrote that "the closer one gets to the actual contact level of this war, the farther one gets from official optimism." The relationship between the American mission and the American press began to disintegrate as the latter questioned the merits of the Diem regime, the quality of South Vietnamese military forces, and even the American mission's efforts at news management.
This was the beginning of what has been commonly described as the "adversarial" relationship between the military and the press in Vietnam. Richard Nixon would later claim that "this was the first war in our history during which our media were more friendly to our enemies than to our allies." Such claims have taken on the aura of historical truth and have helped perpetuate a powerful myth — that the American media undermined American morale and contributed to the loss of the Vietnam War. The work of several historians shows that this is a half-truth at best, as the great majority of American press supported the war and were committed to the national security consensus. However, there were differences within the journalistic ranks, with younger journalists in particular more likely to question the management of the war even as they supported more general aims (and continued to frame their dissent within an American point of view). While few of them were politicized by the war, many became disillusioned, and this was reflected in their coverage. There was considerable freedom for such questioning as there was only very limited censorship for much of the war and the press had unprecedented access to the military and the theaters of conflict. The result was "a goldfish bowl atmosphere" that gave a general impression of transparency (and illusion of insight) and attracted Western correspondents in great numbers.
And yet, for all the open access, there was a general incoherence in the organization and progress of the war that tested journalistic talents and conventions to interpret its meanings and contributed to the shakiness of its framing. Flows of images reinforced the perception of a war without clear battle lines or coherent strategy, while military and political claims of a justifiable and winnable war were slowly undermined by imagery that shaped public knowledge if not understanding about the war. The idea that the war was resistant to conventional forms of journalistic interpretation has been voiced by many commentators during the war and since. Malcolm Browne, who reported on the war for the New York Times, noted: "Viet Nam does not lend itself well to numerical reporting, or even to the kind of simple, narrative statement required of the average newspaper lead. There are too many uncertainties, too many shades of gray, too many dangers of applying English-language clichés to a situation that cannot be described by clichés." The media historian Phillip Knightley describes the Vietnam conflict as "a war with no identifiable enemy, no simply explained cause, no clearly designated villain, no front line ... a war with complicated political issues and in which the correspondent had regularly to try to make sense out of a whirl of experience and ghastly sights. ... No one correspondent could hope to get a broad, general experience of it all; all that most correspondents succeeded in doing was obtaining a limited, spotty experience. It was a complex war, equally difficult to understand and convey in all its ramifications." The ramifications of these difficulties have been commented on for print journalism, and the emergence of "new journalism" has been identified as a response to this crisis of interpretation. How did photojournalism respond?
If we consider the broader contours of the media coverage of the Vietnam War, it would appear that news photography had an increasingly retrograde role as it was overtaken by television in the depiction of the war. The Korean War was the last major conflict that most Americans viewed primarily through photographs in print; by 1962 over 80 percent of American homes had television and, by 1968, over 60 percent of Americans looked to television for news on the war. Vietnam would come to be thought of as the first "television war," and there are many who argued that in bringing the war to American living rooms it was instrumental in turning American public opinion against the war. However, the statistics do not tell us about the conditions of visual news production and its effects. Photojournalism did not quite cede the ground of news representation to television. Rather, these mediums existed in a relationship of mutual influence. Together, they constructed a visual grammar for looking at Vietnam. At the same time, and partly in response to the challenge of television, photojournalism evolved certain techniques that emphasized its capacity to document decisive moments and that were commensurate to the nature of the conflict in Vietnam.
Photography played a key role in framing the war for the American public not least because for much of the conflict the technology of the still camera was much better suited to the terrain and the style of warfare being conducted. Television equipment in the field remained large and cumbersome until the early 1970s. As with other forms of media coverage, the volume and focus of photographic coverage was largely determined by the particular conditions of this war — the technologies, the tactics, and the territory — and by the shifting course of the war in relation to American public opinion. The numbers of photographers fluctuated, from only two in 1962 — Horst Faas and Larry Burrows — to more than one hundred by 1969, and then fell away dramatically in the early 1970s. Some photographers were full-time staffers with news agencies such as Associated Press and United Press International and news magazines such as Life, Time, and Newsweek, but many more were freelancers who turned up in Vietnam hoping to have their work taken up by one of the major agencies or papers. Not all were professionally trained, yet press passes were easy to obtain, and with a pass the photographer would receive support from the American military to move relatively safely as he or she covered the war. The large numbers of photographers and the relative autonomy they enjoyed contributed to a new political economy of war imagery that emerged in relation to the Vietnam War, one that was very immediately responsive to and regulated by the American and other Western markets' large appetites for steady diets of war imagery.
A great deal of this imagery focused on spot news and dramatic action, prerequisites to meet the demand and deadlines from the daily and weekly papers and magazines. This material was not without aesthetic or documentary merit. Rather, these were tailored to the representation of distinctive forms of combat activities and terrains and to the technologies of movement and violence. The result over time was that the published imagery repeatedly presented similar scenarios, motifs, tropes, and points of view: helicopters taking off or landing; troops springing from helicopters and fanning out on foot; troops on patrol through paddy fields and wading across rivers. The helicopter became a key icon in this imagery, with point of view shots of terrain from helicopters being common. Indeed, the cameras rendered the helicopter (on which the photographers were very often dependent for their own movements and war coverage) the ubiquitous motif of the war, one adapted by cinema at war's end. The result was an increasingly stylized and often distanced perspective on the war, finding its mise-en-scène in the framing of American men and machinery against inhospitable terrain. The absence of the North Vietnamese in so much of this photography was a fitting visual reflection of a war of insurgency, with no clearly defined frontline or enemy.
The effects of photography on public opinion remain as difficult to determine as those of written journalism and television. To the extent that it played a role in turning public opinion against the war, this should be seen as an incremental effect of the flows of daily photographic coverage over the long term of the war. Military and political claims of a justifiable and winnable war were slowly undermined by imagery that shaped public skepticism if not understanding about the war. It may be that the cumulative effects of such imagery over twelve years had a more profound impact on the American public than it is possible to measure. Just as significant was the impact of photography in reinforcing and making graphic particular moments of the war that fed the growing disillusionment of the American public (fig. 1.1). Barry Zorthian, who was in charge of media relations in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon from 1964 to 1968, later reflected on the impact of news photography on policy and opinion:
I would note the impact on the first day of Tet, with perhaps as much effect in Washington as T.V., of the front page of The Washington Post, which was dominated by photos of the brand new American embassy attacked and semi-destroyed, as well as the impact of the continuation of that fighting in Saigon and in Hue — the two points at which the press was most visible and most active. The impact of the one such as the shooting of a Vietnamese prisoner by a Vietnamese general, and the incredibly bloody and gory cover of Life showing a tank carrier covered with dead American marines which circulated approximately ten million copies throughout the United States, was immense. The anxiety, desire, and intensity of the media focusing on the most dramatic, seeking the greatest impact, dismissing the subtleties, the qualifications, and the limitations required, gave what was essentially a distorted impression and a misreading of Tet. That situation finally led to deterioration of public support and to an impact on President Johnson and others that affected their political decisions.
Zorthian's judgment on the coverage of Tet notwithstanding, his comments suggest that still news imagery of the Vietnam War played a significant role in visually dramatizing the failings of the American mission in Vietnam.
A corollary of this is that photojournalism not only complemented television coverage of the war but also served distinctive documentary functions, especially as it maintained a power to frame decisive moments. In a war of confusing patterns and resistant to conventional forms of interpretation, it often proved to be the still photograph rather than the moving image that framed and defined moments of insight and brought some clarity to the scenery of confusion. Often, it did so by turning the moments into symbols, transcending the local context to address more universal human concerns. This was the case with the most iconic images of the war, and it is striking how potent these were and remain, displacing written and televisual journalism in popular memory of the war. Malcolm Browne, a reporter for the Associated Press, who took the iconic image of the Buddhist monk Quang Duc fatally setting himself on fire on a Saigon street in 1963, notes that "millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis, but the pictures carried an incomparable impact."
While collectively news photography from Vietnam constituted a potent archive of a new kind of photography suited to a new kind of war and produced imagery that challenged the ideology and course of the American mission, a great deal of the work was produced as spot news imagery within a conventionalized form of professional practice. There were notable exceptions though — photographers who worked more self-consciously to push the boundaries of photojournalistic practice. George Russell has suggested that this more adventurous photojournalism represented the mainstream of news photography coverage of Vietnam: "News photography surrendered its pre-eminent place as a mover of mass public opinion in Vietnam. It also discovered — or rediscovered — a different kind of emotional intensity, based on what television could not do. Television did not linger well, nor could it amplify an emotional effect by passing and repassing across the same subject from subtly different angles. That kind of television news was simply boring. In Vietnam, therefore, photography took on a kind of meditative authority, in lengthy, often ferociously pointed essays on the devastation and pointlessness of the conflict." Russell overstates the case: most news photographers had neither the time nor the inclination to produce meditative visual essays on the conflict, particularly not those meeting daily deadlines. In Malcolm Browne's view, "No newsman can afford to think about history. He has to have something to put on the wire machine." Browne adds: "Journalistic photographs certainly have no point of view in them because there is no time or energy for point of view in this kind of photography." Browne's view was shared by many news photographers covering Vietnam; it was a component of their sense of professionalism. Photographers, like all accredited press in Vietnam, worked with a consciousness of professional commitments and pressures that delimited reflective or critical perspectives on the war effort. They knew the expectations of their editors and beyond that of media executives and owners and of the public, all of which contributed to the framing of the war in broader terms.
However, there were a number of photographers who did move to produce a more "meditative" form of photojournalism, an afterimagery of conflicts and contexts. I am thinking here of photographers such as Larry Burrows, Philip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullin, Catherine Leroy, Kyoichi Sawada, and Henri Huet. In Vietnam, photographers had opportunities to develop a fresh visual awareness about war and its representations, especially those who stayed for long periods or who came with investigative intent. Within the mass visual coverage of this war were examples of this new awareness, the work of photographers reflexively attuned to the style and ethos of their work as a subjective register of their relation to the war. I will focus here on the work of two such photographers, Larry Burrows and Philip Jones Griffiths, who differ greatly in style and motivation, yet have each produced remarkable documentary chronicles of the conflict and influential templates for future photojournalistic treatments of the United States at war.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Afterimages by Liam Kennedy. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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