A few days ago, I wrote an article for a German newspaper about THAT Trump picture. Given the typical length of such opinion pieces, there were a few strands that I was only able to allude to. They would benefit from a longer discussion. That’s what I want to be doing here.
By now, you’ve seen THAT picture. And you’re likely to see it again and again, given that it was a propaganda boon for Trump. For those reasons, I’m not going to show it here.
By now, you probably have also come across articles that describe THAT picture as “iconic”. You might also have seen the almost inevitable comparisons to paintings. These comparisons are mostly intellectually embarrassing. And the problem with such discussions is that they treat the picture as an end point, from which various authors mostly derived conclusions based on what they believed was true.
Instead, we should be talking about how we got to THAT picture in the first place. There are some larger problems. THAT picture exists in a photographic tradition that stopped making sense decades ago. Before I will get to that part, I want to briefly outline why THAT picture is so bad.
Trump knew that the same visual journalists he often refers to in his speeches as “enemies” would produce the pictures that would serve him. That’s what they had been doing ever since he first ran for president. And obligingly, oops!, they did it again.
The photographers fell into Trump’s trap, just as the neofascist had anticipated — and so did the viewers who took the raised fist not as a spontaneously used opportunity to create fascist imagery but, instead, as a sign of Trump’s triumph of his will.
After so many years of dealing with that person and his uncanny ability of manipulating the media into amplifying his message people still don’t get it. It’s mind blowing.
After I posted some thoughts about this on Instagram, as could have been predicted some people asked me what I would have said about such a picture if a Democratic party had been attacked. It’s a ludicrous question that probably only makes sense in US newsrooms (the “both sides” force is strong in those ones).
To get to an answer, we simply have to remember one very basic fact: it was Trump who did not accept the outcome of the 2020 election, and it was his supporters, goaded on by him, who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Attempting to maintain a neutral, both-sides approach strikes me as ludicrous, given those basic facts.
Also, if you’re a visual journalist, your job should not entail making propaganda photos for anyone, regardless of who it is in front of the camera. Tellingly, after I said as much in my conversations with members of the news crowd, they asked me whether I think there should have been no pictures from the event. That question is a huge tell. We’ll see below why.
The day after the event in question, an article appeared in The Guardian that was filled with the sadly inevitable self-aggrandizing by the people behind the picture: the photographer and editors. The photograph was described purely in formal terms (composition), whereas any mention of its content (what it actually showed) was missing. It was clear that the people behind the picture had not considered it — or that they thought the content would not be their concern.
They also had not considered what THAT picture might actually do, or whether in the general situation we’re find ourselves in right now THAT picture does the necessary job: allowing introspection and thinking about how to pull back from the political abyss we’re facing.
I would have expected a group of photography professionals to at least consider these aspects. The simple fact that THAT picture would serve as a propaganda photograph for the Trump campaign was either not considered or simply ignored (I don’t know which is worse).
Instead, THAT picture was described as a photographic “jackpot”. I’m assuming part of the thinking behind such an assessment is the possible prize it might win, whether a Pulitzer or whatever else.
But there also is the direct connection to one of the most well known concept in photography, the so-called decisive moment. In a discussion of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s writing, Michael Rubin wrote, “it is true […] that when all those compositional elements align, the thing that you’re photographing can reveal something magical and iconic. But this is a result of the composition.” (emphasis in the original)
Rubin’s is a very important insight: iconic images are iconic to a large extent because of photographic choices. All photographs take very short moments from the unending continuum of time and compress a part of the world into a two-dimensional frame.
But iconic photographs are also iconic because they reveal our desire to have one picture stand for a large, complex event. We need that simple token that, ideally, confirms our beliefs.
Especially iconic photographs heavily aestheticize the moment and, by extension, the event. That aestheticization serves to numbs a viewer’s critical facilities. In that one Walter Benjamin article that most photographers say they read, the writer notes that “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”
Besides the threat of neofascism, we live in a world in which there exist so any crises at the same time that it is very difficult to keep track and even more difficult to understand the stakes. Furthermore, a lot of the crises are complex and interrelated. Climate change, for example, leads to migration. You could try to understand migration — in itself a complex topic — without thinking about climate change, but that would already be a simplification.
The search for iconic photographs is connected to the complexity of the time we live in. If we only had that one photograph that could stand for a complex crisis or event or war! Then…
Well, then what exactly?
To begin with, no photograph could possibly adequately describe a complex event or crisis. Every single one of them focuses instead on some aspect. However large that aspect might, the picture be still excludes many other aspects.
With their aestheticization and the resulting short-circuiting of viewer’s critical facilities, iconic photographs actually become a lot more damaging than regular photographs. Their deception is one of simplicity. Often enough, they merely serve to cushion their viewers’ ideas — instead of challenging them or at least making them think.
We need to understand that the model of the decisive moment, which still underpins visual journalism, originated at a time when the world was radically different. The model probably worked well at a time where the world was the part of your city or village that you were able to traverse and where the larger world arrived at your doorstep in the form of a physical newspaper. It was a world where you mostly had to actively look out for pictures (by buying newspapers, books, etc.).
But that’s not the world we live in any longer. Instead of having to look for pictures, pictures are now looking for us. Our world has become visual — Guy Debord described this in The Society of the Spectacle (Walter Benjamin and his friend Siegfried Kracauer would have immediately understood).
“The spectacle,” Debord wrote, “is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” (my emphasis) Thus, our task now is to select images: what do we or can we or should we pay attention to?
How in such a much changed world decisive-moment style pictures are supposed to play a useful role is a really important question. You often hear photographers complain that their pictures now have to compete with all these other pictures out there.
I would argue that if your idea of photography resolves around decisive moments, then you’re going to have a very hard time. All you can do in that competition is to attempt to out-aestheticize all the other photographers. When you have such a picture, you have your “jackpot”. But again, what exactly do you gain from this?
The world of visual journalism would do a lot better if it finally ditched that approach to picture making — or at the very least realized that there are other ways to communicate something with pictures.
The single-picture approach never worked that well in the first place. Chasing after single, defining pictures simply can only lead to failure in a world of polycrisis. This is not to say that some events might not be served by a single picture. But the majority of important events, wars, and crises are not.
Instead of chasing after iconic pictures, visual journalists have to start considering to what end(s) their pictures need to be made. Merely saying “to report events” is not enough any longer. Merely saying “that’s my job” is not enough any longer.
Visual journalists have to start understanding the roles their photographs play in this world. This includes editors and potentially even writers: what are we trying to do here?
Changing visual journalism away from the decisive-moment approach would be a big challenge for all those involved. But isn’t it actually the job of people who produce and work with photographs in visual journalism to figure this out — for us?
Honestly, though, I’m under no illusion that I will see a sea change in visual journalism in my life time. Too many people are too attached to the model that serves them well.
There have been photographers here and there that have challenged, say, photojournalism. Unfortunately, they have mostly fallen by the wayside, as new generations of photojournalists continue to trod their older heroes’ path.
When I first learned that Robert Capa was killed by a landmine because he had the idea that in order to get good photographs he had to be close to where things happened, I was saddened by the sheer futile waste of this talented man’s life. And it pains me to know that so many young photographers still believe in that old yarn — or in Cartier-Bresson’s decisive-moment caper.
This might be a bold thing to claim in 2024, but I truly believe that photography’s full potential still is unexplored. But we desperately need to step away from those simplistic ideas around the media that so many people are attached to.
Instead, we need to challenge our most basic beliefs around what photographs are and how they can be made to communicate stories, events. In a world inundated with images, trying to create visual gems only produces blips for a day or two at best.
And visual journalists also finally ought to realize that their beloved idea of the disinterested, neutral observer has stopped making sense. Climate change affects all of us. Threats to democracy affect all of us.
In the face of grave danger, acting as if a neutral position were most important isn’t professional. Instead it’s foolish, and it negates our collective shared responsibilities for this world — and for each other.
Contrary to the old caper, democracy does not die in darkness. Instead, it dies in broad daylight, with everything on full view.
Photography, a way of looking, must become a means towards a deeper understanding — and not remain a tool for cheap visuals thrills, based on some outdated ideas by photographers that have long been dead.