December 17, 2006

All week long the news account filtered out of Iran: a ragtag gathering of "experts" had descended on Teheran, at the invitation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world's leading America-basher and Israel-baiter. The theme of the Iran conference: Was the Holocaust all hype? Was the wholesale extermination of six million European Jews a figment of the Western imagination -- an exaggerated genocide cooked up by nefarious forces in the aftermath of World War II so as to to establish a Jewish state (meaing: an American beachhead) smack in the center of the Arab world?

In one photo published in American newspapers this week, conference attendees could be seen milling in front of a Holocaust photo exhibition. [Go to the link and click on second photo to see the full, horizontal image.] The caption explained that some of the pictures showed concentration camp survivors actually smiling. The implication: Here, in black and white, was visual proof that Dachau wasn't such a drag after all.

The caption and the conference raised several questions that were explored at length in Watching the World Change: Do news picutres in the ever-skeptical Digital Age lose their validity as reliable measures of historical veracity? Have modern-day techniques such as Photoshop placed dangerous manipulative tools in the hands of revisionists, giving Holocaust deniers and 9/11 conspiracy theorists the means and the license to cherry-pick photo "evidence" from Web sites to help bloster their tenuous theses? Have news pictues--long considered relatively objective artifacts by many historians--been rendered moot?

The short answer is "No." News photos are no different than other eyewitness accounts. News photos are biased, influenced by the vagaries of film speed, shutter speed, cropping, elements left out of the frame; by the photojournalist's own aesthetics and politics; by editors' culling and writers' captions; by newcasters' and historians' and viewers' (mis)interpretations. News photos, by their very nature, are subjective records of past events. As such, they have always been misappropriated by revisionists or distorted by propagandists.

It is my firm belief, however, that whatever the news photo's limitations, the fact that there are more and more professional photojournalists roaming the planet, and more and more digital cameras and picture phones in the hands of more and more citizens, world-wide, only increases the chances of our having an historical baseline for future generations to more clearly comprehend atrocities (from the Holoocaust to September 11 to the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the London transit bombings) and therefore better ensure the eventual accountability and punishment of the perpetrators of such actions. News pictures offer a backstop, a safety net, a grounding.

Which brings us back to imagery and the Holocaust. One could argue that if real-time photography and 24/7 newsgathering had been available in the 1930s and 40s, they might have contributed to Adolf Hitler's rise. (Nazi architect Albert Speer once told art critic Robert Hughes, "If Hitler had had television, there would have been no stopping him." The Germans, in fact, had perfected the propaganda film [epitomized by the work of photographer-filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl] and the portable camera, which allowed scores of photographers to cover combat firsthand.)

On the other hand, better cameras in the Allies' hands might have provided here-and-now evidence--objective proof of concentration camps and widespread genocide--that might have forced America and Britain and France and Russia to act more quickly. Cameras during World War II too often recorded not the atrocity itself, but slaughter's aftermath. And Western leaders, even though they had amassed actual evidence of the camps--in the form of aerial photos--were too skeptical, too myopic or too unwilling to respond.

One wishes they had had more news pictures to help them understand the bigger picture.