Discussion of Friend's Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11, Lurie's "Falling Persons and National Embodiment: The Reconstruction of Safe Spectatorship in the Photographic Record of 9/11," and Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others starting on February 19, 2007.

I found a few points in David Friend's "Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11" very similar to some of the ideas depicted in the 9/11 documentary that we watched in class.

First, both seemed to be interested in the visuals that "nobody should have to see." This was claimed by one of the Frenchmen (on filming burning bodies) in the documentary as well as some photographers from Friend's book. Instead of capturing the most brutal, personal aspects of the day, many resorted to pictures of the newly devastated buildings/landscape or individual pictures of hope (mother and child) &c. This is not to say, of course, that disturbing pictures from 9/11 do not exist, because they certainly do. But it is to say that, perhaps, the most disturbing pictures were never taken - and that this was a conscious decision on the part of countless photographers/cameramen.

This is the decision that I am compelled to question. We live in a time where there are Holocaust (and other genocide) deniers and it would seem that hard, visual facts might be considered necessary as "proof" of such a tragedy. I suppose the devil's advocate might say that photos can also be tampered with and refuted, so my argument is certainly not airtight. But, for whatever reason, I find that decision to be worthy of some critical discussion. I am also uncomfortable with others deciding what I should and should not (or can and cannot) see.

On another note, I found it interesting that Sontag's book opens with a discussion of Virginia Woolf and Three Guineas, given Stephen Barber's talk at URI (Reader/Writer Series) this past Thursday. I'm not sure how many of you were there: however, if possible, a discussion about Three Guineas, Dr. Barber's lecture, and Sontag's book would be terrific, I think.

The idea that there are certain images we should not see is one that interests me a great deal, if only because I had such a reaction to the documentary as is. I, for one, found the footage in "9-11" dynamic and at times overwhelming (my father being a firefighter I was particularly affected by seeing one of my worst nightmares played out for real). So I have to question whether or not the potential difference inherent in showing more graphic images would be anything other than gratuitous. As it stands now there is already a plethora of images available of people, wounded, leaving the towers. Do we really need to see the remains of those who jumped? Or is it necessary to show people on fire?

To be honest, I don't believe we as a people would react well to graphic/unpleasant photos.

There is one image that particularly stuck with me was that of the fire chaplain being carried out of the tower, already dead. There is something silently shocking about that image, the way his head is slack to the side, the gray pale of his skin, I feel this was shocking in its own right. There was no gore to this picture, but still it reaches into you and grips tightly.

Personally I feel that we have enough "proof" and those people who disagree would exist no matter what. However, I give the greater mass of people a good deal of credit in believing they are not gullible enough to believe something that has been covered in such a complete manner. So yes, I believe there are pictures that should not have been taken and I am thankful. You don't need to be assaulted with unpleasant images to be stirred and affected.

"Something becomes real- to those who are elsewhere, following it as 'news'-by being photographed." (Sontag, 21) This can be a weary understanding of photography's connotative relationship with reality as Sontag discusses a theory of staged discourse in film; that General Loan staged the photograph of the shooting of the Vietcong for the journalists who'd amassed there. It is possible that had the camera's been absent from the infamous execution scene, that it would have taken place differently or not at all. This speaks to the idea that reality is afflicted or impended upon by the needs of photography, for instance, it could be understood that the misconduct of the military personnel at Abu Ghraib was incited and compelled by the presence of cameras. Such that to participate in acts of loud and flamboyant human degradation, such as stacking naked prisoners in a pyramid or posing them carefully in various disgraceful forms, is to stage superfluous events that do not occur in real time, manipulating actuality while offering a "co-spectatorship" to an erroneous occurrence.

"The hunt for more dramatic 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." (Sontag, 23) The hijackers knew that their acts of terror would stand front and center, and by blocking the "world's lens", eclipsed its view answering the call for the dramatic bombardment of their handiwork frame by frame.

Also interesting to consider when evaluating the imagery attached to 9/11: "No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer." (Sontag, 55)

Oh and I thought you guys would be interested in this article that was headlined on CNN a week or two ago, stemming from a topic which we didn't have time to discuss: MYSPACE Memorials. Is the internet our answer to necropolis?:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/15/myspace.mourning.ap/index.html

The interaction between reality and photographs is one that both Friend and Sontag addressed in their texts. In Sontang's "Regarding the Pain of Others", she quoted people's reactions to the events of 9/11, saying that viewing the events on television made the whole experience seem "surreal" or "like a movie", since we are so used to seeing big-budget disaster flicks with similar effects.

On the other hand, Friend in his book "Watching the World Change"; detailed the reactions of photographers who said that they felt the need to take pictures of the crumbling towers to prove that in fact it was real. Sontag also touched on the perception that, in an age where photographers have the ability to heavily manipulate photos, (aka well lit and professional looking) photographs of disaster tend to leave the viewer with the impression that they are not real, whereas unprofessional, badly lit pictures are seen as being more legitimate representations of an event.

With these two perspectives in mind I looked at the pictures published in Friend's "Watching the World Change" specifically the image of a man plummeting out of a tower window, and the image of members of FDNY carrying away the body of Father Judge. Of all the images that I have seen portraying the events of 9/11, these two by far had the most profound, "real" impact on me. They were not good, clean, sharp photos, but rather they were somewhat amateurish, somewhat out of focus, and entirely human. Friend cited that the reasons that photos like these, specifically of the man committing suicide, were not published were because they were thought to be "too real", and that people wouldn't want to see them.

In an age of 24 hour a day news broadcasts, where everything going on of import in the world is brought to our living rooms and where the average American continually demands more and more access to information, why are we still protected, or rather why do we still want to be protected, from these incredibly "real" images? We demand video footage of the war in Iraq, but pictures of mutilated bodies are "too much". We watched, over and over again, images of two planes slamming into the World Trade Center, but images of the smaller scale and more human tragedies that were simultaneously occurring are too painful and real.

How do we reconcile this hypocrisy? We demand to see what is going on the world over through pictures and video footage, but still want to be protected from the horrors that they reveal.

After only a few pages into "Watching the World Change", I read a line that eerily reminded me of myself and of a life-changing decision that I made at 19. My first year of college was at Syracuse University as a journalism major. I enjoyed history and writing, and in high school, I had written a weekly column in a local newspaper. It seemed a logical path to take. However, writing stories for the college paper, I wasn't very happy. I'd had this vision of helping people through writing about their experiences, of being a journalist who would cast light on the "truth", (every journalist's ideal). A year into the program I made a huge realization. I realized I wanted to actually physically help people, in a direct manner, rather than writing about what had happened to them. I transferred to URI, started volunteering at a hospital and decided to switch my major to nursing. The paragraph that reminded me of this personal experience was about Patricia McDonough, the woman who took the picture of the world trade center from inside her apartment. She said, "When I saw the first building come down on all these trucks and ambulances, the situation became something else. I felt immediately needed. I have had a lot of Red Cross training, CPR classes. I have preternatural calm in disasters. I thought, this is New York: what good is another photographer?" (Friend, 5). Not to say IN ANY WAY that the work of journalists and photographers is unimportant- we certainly need people in public communications just as we need people in medicine. I just completely related to her when I read that paragraph.

Another line made me think of our discussion in class, when we talked about the 9/11 attacks as a spectacle, as something that people watched in awe, like it was a Hollywood movie. Dave Brondolo, an aspiring photographer, said, "Others were running away. Photographers were drawn to it." Another photographer's experience: "Despite the danger, Fairbanks felt the urge to continue taping and shot what he calls 'shock and awe' in those around him." (Friend, 10). This was the event of all events to be nearby with a camera. On page 20, another photographer said, "I think it was a photogenic event to an almost unparalleled degree. It had beauty- terrible beauty". Those three statements all took me back to our theory discussions about the symbolism and the power of the images of 9/11, including Virilio's idea of the 9/11 attacks as art and the concept mentioned in class about our attraction for violence and horror.

In response to Jenna's sidenote about Internet memorials- I know some people may think they are weird, but I think they're great. This year, two of my former classmates from high school and one teacher died, but I live in South Kingstown and I couldn't attend all the funerals. Instead I wrote comments on the projo.com guestbooks, which were flooded with messages from people I haven't spoken to in years, people who are now all over the country. We couldn't all physically be there to share our grief but we could leave messages and let the families know how important the deceased were to us.

In response to Julia's question: "How do we reconcile this hypocrisy? We demand to see what is going on the world over through pictures and video footage, but still want to be protected from the horrors that they reveal." I think it has a lot to do with American culture- in the same way that we want to be "protected" from seeing gruesome images, we always felt "protected" because wars of the past occurred on foreign lands. We felt safe on our own soil, until September 11th. People who live in places where the violence of wars or genocides are happening or have happened, like Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Sudan, are used to seeing the horrific and frank pictures of war because it surrounds their everyday lives. Americans in the past have been fortunate that wars didn't happen in their face.

After reading the Susan Sontag book I agreed with most of the points she makes as she references all of the major events and fighting of almost every group on the planet. She begins with referencing the horrors of the First World War and other various accounts of victims of war. She makes an interesting reference to 9/11 as almost a big budget Hollywood disaster or even more unthinkable than one and how the proliferation of technology has made some thing called "our own camera mediated knowledge of war."

She explains this as for the first time Americans saw the horror of war through a lens unlike Europe who saw two major wars on their continent in the span of 25 years. Sontag uses some very interesting terms and describes the camera as the "eye of history" and how governments would only show you heroic photos of soldiers and would not want to show you the true horrors of war.

The wake up call as she states for Americans was the Vietnam reports as a defining medium. Americans watched actual combat occurring in their living rooms for the first time and not sanitized government pictures as in the previous wars. She concludes this book as stating that the horrors of war or the desire to see these pictures is a dark part of human nature and that 9/11 turned these photos and videos into an event that can be possessed. Americans saw an unfiltered view of war for the first time on their home soil.

Having read Sontag, she made some very interesting points. Using Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" as a point of reference to show how long images have been used to show the atrocities of war, Sontag is able to accurately point out that the images shown in print or television do have a pacifistic effect on people. I would agree with her here because any time a horrific image is shown on television, or a story which dictates the horrible results of war, the result is an emotion of regret and sorrow that said events had to occur. However, the effect is nowhere near permanent because, as Sontag uses Woolf in her writings, war never seems to stop. The pacifism shown throughout the country following World War I was merely temporary because not long after it ended, World War II came knocking on the door. Does this mean imagery can dictate a country's course of action? Absolutely not. However, imagery and photography around war can have a startling effect upon people.

When Sontag talked about people's reactions to the World Trade Bombings, they said it resembled something out of a movie, replacing the previously more common-place phrase; it felt like a dream. I am disheartened to know understand that such disasters have become so routine in our culture that they are no longer surreal and we relate these events to movies.

It is an interesting paradox, that people in general want to see pictures of what is happening (in Iraq, for example), but they also want to be protected from images that are too real or graphic.

I know that I, personally, do not want to look. I already have seen too many horrible pictures, and I don't want to see any more. I do, however, think that people should have the right to look - the government should not be allowed to censor photography, such as how they disallowed images of dead American soldiers because it would damage morale.

There are some people who think that war is a terrible thing, no matter what. I am one of those people. But it seems to me that most people do not grasp just how terrible it is; either they don't know, they've been lied to or misled, or they simply do not want to know. I know many people who refuse to look when given the opportunity, because they don't want to have to face the fact that horrible things are happening and that people, many of them innocent, are dying by the thousands, in gruesome ways.

In a sense, I think that if everyone were visually shown the horrors of war, not in a fictional movie with fake blood, but with real life images, many people might be a little less eager to start one.

I know that many people feel strongly that we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys. Period. Sontag makes a lot of points about how the perceived content of an image can be changed simply by altering the caption: but what if all of the captions are removed? Labeling someone "the enemy" or "the bad guy" changes them from a human being into an object. But if, like Woolfe, we look at unlabeled images and think, "this is a dead person, brutally killed in a war," and fully recognize their humanity (for they are human beings, no matter how different from us they are), war can become less of a video-game-like campaign to crush the evil power, and more like the horrible tragedy it is.

To bring this back to 9/11, I find it interesting that not only did the government make decisions about what could be seen and heard (such as by erasing the audio on a tape - what could anyone be saying that the American public shouldn't be allowed to hear?), but the photographers and news networks did as well. It's okay to replay the same clip of an airplane smashing into a building a thousand times, over and over again, but it's not okay to see the worst of it? Were people trying to protect others from the truth? If they were, why did they take pictures at all? It's already clear how horrible it was. Everyone knows what happened. Why is it that people are okay with watching a plane crashing into a building and killing tons of people instantly, but aren't okay with seeing individuals suffer? It's as though everyone wants to keep it impersonal, far away, abstract - they were "people" who died. But in all but the rarest occasions, we don't have to see an individual person.

Perhaps it's just human nature to not be able to deal with the suffering of an individual. People do have empathy, after all. I wonder, though: if someone took a picture of a person who was killed, maybe an American, burned to death or crushed, the body so badly damaged that the person was unidentifiable, and captioned it "terrorist attacker," how would people react to that image? Would the label of "terrorist" make them inhuman, and therefore easier to look at? Or would the fact that a human being died so brutally make it just as difficult?

Perhaps obviously, my post yesterday was written before I had read the bulk of Sontag's "Regarding the Pain of Others." Her text spoke to and answered some of my questions, I think; but, left me with many others.

I was especially interested in Sontag's differentiation between photos and the written word. She says that photos are/can be "both a faithful copy and an interpretation of that reality which literature strives for but never achieves" (Sontag 26). I'm left wondering whether writers actually do strive for both of these things - and, if so, if it has never been accomplished? I'll try to think of some examples to bring up in class tomorrow.

She then later says that photography is one of the only arts where luck and chance play such a large role. (And that they do not in literature.) Again, either I misunderstand Sontag's argument here, or just totally disagree. I am sure that many great writers exist and have existed, yet were never lucky enough/rich enough/connected enough to be noticed/published/read, &c. And also that great literature has happened by chance - such as great memoirs only existing because their authors had experienced exceptional lives?

But even still, Sontag's point is not lost. Photography is a medium that offers what no other art can (a single "shot") yet she states that photographs (unlike literature - in my opinion, at least), will "one day [need] captions, of course. And the misreadings and the misrememberings, and the new ideological uses for the pictures will make their difference" (Sontag 29). For me, this meant that photos would eventually need some sort of written word to still keep their semblance of verisimilitude.

I suppose that even though I thoroughly enjoyed Sontag's work (in fact, I couldn't put it down), I am taking a stand for literature. I guess it's the old-fashioned English student in me. What interested me most in her text was not really the points about photos, but the points about ethics (moral monsters, the concept of good taste, justifications for violence, &c). And I guess that's the Theory student in me.

I just wanted to briefly support Justine's "defense of literature".

Photographs, by their very nature, portray fact, reality, the truth - assuming they are unedited. Literature, in my opinion, was never meant to do this. Rather, I see the purpose of literature as to allow the readers to have access to an emotional experience that they would not have had without. Whether or not the words of the text portray accurately an event like 9/11 is not the point, as long as the reader is left with a very small piece of what it might have felt like to be there and to have experienced that day from a different perspective.

Thus, since I believe that they serve entirely different purposes I think that they are equally valid and important ways of learning about and "experiencing"� an event like 9/11.

As Lurie chose to reiterate, there is a lexicon of images that will allow September 11th to be remembered for generations to come. We are thankful to those who were in New York City that day and felt compelled to become the "Johnny on the Spot". It is a question I was asking myself as I was taking in these readings, would I run to the disaster? I am sure that, as indicated by stories in Friend's book, disposable cameras vendors made a good bit of profit. Is it really just the photographer that feels compelled to run toward the disaster? Could it be a desire for something real? Many must have realized that this event would be the largest they will ever experience.

"It is possible that had the camera's been absent from the infamous execution scene, that it would have taken place differently or not at all. This speaks to the idea that reality is afflicted or impended upon by the needs of photography, for instance, it could be understood that the misconduct of the military personnel at Abu Ghraib was incited and compelled by the presence of cameras." This selection from Jenna reminds me of our discussion in class; how much thought did the terrorists put into the timing of this attack? Creating an event of such magnitude at a time where the world was ready and awake to experience it allows us to understand that they wanted it to play out the way it did. Cameras and all. We know this was not an isolated attack on the Trade Center itself, but rather a call to War for the whole country from an enemy that felt it had no other way of communicating such.

Some images have been censored from our eyes. I'm sure we will get into this more next week, but while we are on the topic of Images and Photographs, I wanted to bring up the lack of images from the Pentagon. There were cameras that captured the explosion, but I still have not seen any showing a plane going in. If they could capture the explosion, shouldn't they be able to also show the plane that caused it? I have heard a lot of misinformation about this, and hopefully we can clean it up next week.

-Drew

I was wondering the same thing as Drew as I was reading Lurie's article... what about the Pentagon?

And then, remember that whole Internet conspiracy theory- when people were talking about the images of the Pentagon that were altered... I can't remember exactly what happened.

Susan Sontag's writing was, after the images in David Friend's book, the most poignant to me. Some of the quotes that affected me were also reiterated in Susan Lurie's article. In reaction to the photos of the capture and execution of an Afghani soldier, Sontag writes, "And the pity and disgust that pictures...inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown (Sontag, 13-14)."

This is quite a pertinent point in this day and age, with wartime photojournalism an everyday occurrence. We are seeing pictures from Baghdad, Basra, and Fallujah almost daily in the New York Times. However, are we really getting the full picture? In this age of Photoshop, were things altered that might be deemed insensitive? This makes me wonder if the famous picture of the South Vietnamese general shooting the Vietcong "rebel" would have been ran in the papers. In today's society, would this picture be deemed as indecent and overly graphic?

Last semester, when I was in France, they had the 5th year anniversary of 9/11. I bought a magazine, Paris Match, which headlined a 20 page spread including photos and testimonies of survivors. After I bought it and was flipping through the pages, there were many photos that I hadn't seen before, such as the photo of the unidentified man jumping headfirst to his death. It was shocking and it made me wonder as to the extent that our government is suppressing photos and videos.

Jillian Connelly

To start off I want to say I think that "Watching the World Change" really showed how incredible it was that there were people with video cameras in hand when the planes crashed into the World Trade Centers, especially into the North Tower. It was because of these people that video taped and photographed the events of September 11 that people all over the world were able to see what really occurred and made it become reality for everyone. It was quoted in "Watching the World Change" by Evan Fairbanks, a videographer who was taping a teleconference, "I was in the right place at the wrong time". This statement in a sense sums up the events of September 11th because many people were in the wrong place during this tragedy but because people such as Fairbanks were there society was able to view the events of this horrific day.

Without people videotaping and taking photographs on this tragic day the world would never have really understood what occurred and how tragic it really was. Many say that maybe we were shown too much right away but that is a personal opinion because now that we can view live news people were informed about the events immediately which is why media really in a way has made it so society is more aware of what is going on and is immediately exposed about the issue that is occurring. One downfall of the media and its exposure on September 11th is that since everything was occurring so fast everyone including newscasters, were unsure of what was actually occurring and rumors began to fly about how many planes were hijacked and what was actually occurring.

Personally the media was a way that my family was informed that our closest family friend was alive which brought a great deal or relief to us. We were unable to reach my dad's best friend who worked for the Port Authority in the World Trade Centers, but while gathered around the television we actually saw him running out of the towers carrying a pregnant woman out. For us the media was a reassurance that someone we knew was actually a survivor of the attacks.

In conclusion media and photography was a major part of September 11 and made the event realistic for the people that were not actually there. It is true that some of the photography that is out there such as people wounded or people jumping out of the buildings, is very graphic, but this is the truth and these events really did occur. Without the media society would never be able to look back at this tragedy and really understand what occurred.