Censorship in Iraq, Anonymous /
Today’s photojournalists in Iraq find themselves faced with new sets of limitations and obstacles. Here is a list of things that are officially prohibited to photograph in Iraq: car bombings, suicide bombings, wounded soldiers without their written consent, memorials for dead soldiers, coffins of dead soldiers, battle-damaged vehicles and Iraqi prisoners. Civilian hospitals and morgues are usually off-limits as well, as are dead American soldiers.
It is almost impossible to comply with the regulation requiring written permission from wounded soldiers. What would our collective photographic history of World War II look like if Robert Capa had been forced to chase stretchers down Omaha Beach on D-Day trying to get releases? What would our history of Vietnam be if Tim Page or Don McCullin carried a clipboard, badgering badly wounded soldiers for signatures at Khe Sahn or Hue?
A PEW Center for Research study of major US newspapers and magazines over a sixmonth period found not one single photo of a US combat death, not even a coffin. As the toll of US soldiers killed in Iraq reached 4000, another Pew study showed 72 percent of Americans knew little about how many troops had been lost. And a third found that coverage of Iraq had shrunk to 3 percent of all news stories. One of the reasons the public has tuned the war out is that they are not seeing enough photographs that connect them to real people who are fighting and dying.
I took photos of dead and wounded soldiers while on patrol south of Baghdad last year. Later, my editors and I spent two days in negotiation with the US military. Originally I was told I would need a signature from a wounded soldier who had been airlifted to Germany. When I pointed out that the man was not identifiable, they placed a new demand; no soldiers anywhere in the photo could be identifiable. Then the demand changed again: no unit badges could be shown.
On the third day my newspaper decided to disregard the Army’s objections and printed the pictures. But we could not publish many of them because editors considered them too bloody or thought they might jeopardize our future access. I argued Americans should see these images. If you’re going to vote for and fund a war that affects 27 million Iraqis, you should at least occasionally look at its reality.
Some say the US government’s measures to control images amounts to censorship; others call it image control. Authorities say it is about soldiers’ privacy. They are concerned about the feelings of the families. Understandably, the military does not want Americans or anyone else to gawk at pictures of their fallen soldiers.
Yet soldiers have signed up to take part in the most public and historic event of the past quarter century. Does the right to privacy apply here? There has been no similar concern about the rights of wounded and dead Iraqis.
Unchallenged, the US government and military officers have imposed increasingly onerous limits on the press. And as they made it harder to work, and as Iraq has gotten more dangerous, photojournalists have trickled away. “It’s too expensive,” we say. “There are too many restrictions, the public is not paying attention.”
So as the press corps shrinks, the military has ramped up an Internet operation to place military video and photos in hometown papers around the US. Soldiers trained in public affairs — propaganda — take the pictures, and thousands have been published. They are free of charge, easily downloaded from a website. Recently, the site offered a photo of a smiling Iraqi woman carrying a box of food provided by the US Army. Increasingly, these images are what the public sees.
Currently, about half a dozen Western photographers work in Iraq at any one time. The last time I checked, I found only four. So we have 27 million Iraqis, 140,000 American soldiers, 3 million refugees, hundreds of thousands dead — and probably about five photojournalists.
Three of America’s four largest newspapers have not had full-time photographers in Iraq in several years. One paper, which serves a readership area in the tens of millions, relies on a former Iraqi wedding photographer shooting part-time. Two of the three large US newsmagazines gave up years ago on keeping a photographer in Iraq. The third weekly, which has kept two photographers rotating through Iraq, recently had its budget slashed.
And some of the best agencies, known around the world for their conflict photographers, have almost completely abandoned Iraq war coverage. They say magazines won’t back their projects. Security and insurance costs are daunting, and many photographers are understandably fatigued by a war in its sixth year.
Europeans publications have similarly cut back on a war too easily written off as American. Yet the conflict has serious ramifications as it redefines relations between Europe and the Middle East, between the Muslim world and the West.
In Vietnam, the photographers kept going back. Larry Burrows, Catherine Leroy, Eddie Adams, Horst Faas and others, including dozens of Vietnamese photographers, stayed on year after year. They provided a crucial counterpoint to often inaccurate statements from official sources. Even today, some conservatives blame the press, and photographers in particular, for “losing” the war by providing graphic images to the world.
However much some might wish it to be, Iraq will never be Vietnam. The dangers and frustrations in Iraq are considerable, as is the low return on investment in time and money. Without a large organization, photographers can barely work.
In Vietnam, long before “embedding,” many of the most powerful pictures came from photographers who lived with American troops. In Iraq too, some important images come out of embeds, such as Chris Hondros’ photo from Tal Afar of the blood-spattered child whose parents had been killed by US troops. He was kicked out of his embed, but he quickly picked up another and continued working. The limitations are real, but some units don’t know, or don’t enforce, embed rules. And then there are images that must be taken for the history books though they might not be publishable now.
Like all stories, Iraq is a story that rewards going back-navigation gets easier with each trip. Relationships are forged, and access improves. More work can be done through the Iraqi military, bypassing the Americans completely. And Baghdad, at least for the moment, has become safer and easier to cover.
With an election coming up, Americans have clear-cut decisions to make about Iraq, and they photographic evidence of reality. They don’t need liberal or conservative photographs, democratic or republican photographs. They need real photographs taken by professional photojournalists-an alternative to the images of happy women carrying food gifts.
As individual photographers, as agencies members, as photo editors, as a community, we can slowly begin to push for more coverage of Iraq. Even if one additional photographer goes to provide evidence, it will help us to bring a dose of reality to the public. If we — the photojournalism community-do not go, we surrender the narrative and the telling of history to the US government.
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