Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Final Reflection

“All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions…alter the caption: alter the use of these deaths.”
~Susan Sontag, Looking at War, 2002

                For my final reflection, I have decided to look into the meaning of photojournalism and how archivists mean to capture the original journalistic context a single photograph was placed.  The question I seek to answer is whether or not the catalog record of a digital repository properly reflects the photojournalist aspects of an image?


The photograph I have chosen for this study is Nick Ut’s iconic photograph of children fleeing the village of Trảng Bàng in Vietnam. I chose this image for three main reasons:
                Firstly, because it is an excellent example of war photography during the Vietnam War. The means by which war was documented shifted during the Vietnam War and it became the norm for newspapers to publish war photographs which would have previously been suppressed due to their shocking details.[1] The Vietnam War was not popular with the American public and photojournalism was a powerful means to shock people with the true horrors of war.
                Secondly, because I believe this photograph connects with Susan Sontag’s quote from “Looking at War” more than any other war photograph I can think of. She states, “All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions…alter the caption: alter the use of these deaths.”[2] The captions and news articles built around this photograph really do matter as many Americans, who were against the war, just look at the horrors captured in the image, are told Vietnam War, assume the panicked Vietnamese children are running from the calm soldiers who must be American, and come to the false conclusion that the United States must have dropped napalm on the village. If truth behind this image is not captured in the archival record with the photograph, if the original caption is altered, than the meaning behind the photograph changes; therefore the true reason those who died, whose deaths were captured on film, are altered.  
                My final reason for choosing this photograph is because of its reputation and status. Sontag claims that this photograph “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.”[3] Ut’s photograph appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States after the original event, won the Pulitzer prize in 1973, has appeared many times since then in the media discussing the now famous girl in the center of the image, and will forever be one of those photographs teachers shows to their students when discussing the Vietnam War. It is a photograph that has prints existing in many photographic repositories across the country, with the original negative owned by the Associated Press.

About Photojournalism
                Photojournalism has had more influence on public thinking and opinion than any other genre today. This form of photography grew out of a documentary tradition that sought to provide proof that something in life existed or took place.[4] While documentary photographers seek to show meaning through an accumulation of images, a photojournalist needs only one shot, a single moment frozen in time, to create an iconic image that will forever represent a moment in history. Both the writer Susan Sontag and the art critic John Berger claim that photographs replace memory.   Sontag has said that photographs “provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past.”[5]           

Nick Ut’s Iconic Photograph

The Event
                In 1972, the United States had begun withdrawing troops from Vietnam, a fact which can be seen in the U.S. troop levels. At its peak, in 1968 the United States had 536,100 troops, 156,800 in 1971, and in 1972 the levels of troops had been reduced to 24,200.[6]
                On June 8th 1972 a battle was taking place between the South Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong and representatives from the Associated Press positioned themselves on the outskirts of Trảng Bàng, a small village in South Vietnam, to record the events of the day.[7] Included among the AP representatives was Vietnamese photographer Hyung Cong “Nick” Ut who on that day photographed the iconic and Pulitzer Prize winning image that many Americans associate in their memory with the Vietnam War, even though American soldiers did not partake in this attack.
                The events on June 8th 1972 leading up to Ut’s camera capturing that image are as follows: South Vietnamese fighter planes were flying overhead aiming their weapons at the Viet Cong positions, when the canisters filled with napalm dropped from the planes they missed their targets, instead the canisters exploded above a road on the borders of Trảng Bàng, moments later a group of adults and children emerged through oily smoke, some badly burnt, and proceeded down the street towards the AP representatives.[8] It was at this moment that Ut positioned himself in the middle of the road and took his shot capturing the children and soldiers fleeing the village who appear to be running towards the camera—towards the viewer as they look at the image.
                “The genius of the photograph is that it is both panoramic and immediate, historical and personal.”[9] Ut’s photograph captured not only a historical event but an emotion as well; an emotion that resonates inside the viewer’s eye that registers into shock as they look upon the suffering children and the soldiers who appear to be undisturbed by the events unraveling around them. John Berger says that photographs of agony seize the viewer; “The most literal adjective that could be applied to them is arresting.”[10] By this, Berger is explaining that the viewer is engulfed by the moment captured on film of someone’s suffering.

In the News
                It is ironic that many Americans associate in their memory Ut’s iconic photograph of children fleeing the napalm attack with the United States’ war in Vietnam, considering the fact that American troops did not take part in the battle at Trảng Bàng. However, when you consider that this image was plastered on the front page newspapers and the story of the little girl, who is seen running naked in Ut’s photograph, has been followed by the media throughout her lifetime, it makes sense that Americans know this photograph well and connect the image and the event it captures with the Vietnam War. Berger explains that a picture of war shown by the media becomes “evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody.”[11] Through this statement it can be read that it does not matter who dropped the napalm, or who was responsible for the attack, and it does not matter if the attack was accidental or intended. What matters is the evidence of agony that the photograph captured; a moment of human suffering.
                I have two examples from June 9th 1972, when Ut’s photograph appeared on the pages of major American newspapers: the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
The New York Times

·         Title of accompanying article: “South Vietnamese Drop Napalm on Own Troops”
·         Caption: “ACCIDENTAL NAPALM ATTACK: South Vietnamese children and soldiers fleeing Trangbang on Route 1 after a South Vietnamese Skyraider dropped bomb. The girl at center has torn off burning clothes. Details on Page 9.”
Chicago Tribune

·         Title of accompanying article: “Innocents Bombed: Napalm Victims in Agony”
·         Caption: “Terrified children flee down Route 1 after napalm bomb landed in friendly territory, amid soldiers and civilians. Girl at center ripped off her burning clothes.”
                Both newspapers surround Ut’s photograph with information about the event captured. They state what happened before the photograph was taken in order to fully inform the viewer on what they are seeing. The titles of the articles and the captions placed below the photographs describe the image.

In the Archives
                What are the most important aspects of the image that should be documented in the photograph’s catalog record? Is it the caption, as Sontag argues with her quote “alter the caption: alter the use of these deaths”[12] —if you do not preserve the photojournalistic aspects of these war photographs and the actual historical events, are you changing the meaning of deaths that were captured on film? Or is it the evidence of human suffering that truly matters as Berger pointed out by saying “the picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody[13]? Or can it be a combination of the two? Particularly in the case of Ut’s photograph which is an example of photojournalism that has become an iconic image, I feel that both Sontag and Berger are correct. It is important to capture both the historical fact behind the photograph and the evidence of agony in order to fully maintain the photograph’s power of evoking emotion.
                The examples of this image’s record in photographic archives and the accompanying metadata I have chosen to look at come from the Library of Congress, and Artstor.
Library of Congress

A copy of Ut’s photograph resides in the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Department in the Warren Coville Collection of Iconic Photojournalism Images. The metadata attached to the digital surrogate of the photograph correctly states the historical events that occurred and have even maintained the importance of the girl in the center of the image, a feature of the image that is mentioned in both the New York Times and Chicago Tribune captions of the photo.
Artstor

The data captured in Artsotr’s record for this photograph comes from the University of California, San Diego. This metadata that is lacking a complete description of the image; it does not document the emotions shown in this photograph, nor does it capture the history behind it. Just by seeing the metadata, one could deduce that the photograph is of children, has something to do with the Vietnam War and napalm bombs. It could be the data attached to any photograph taken at this event by Nick Ut, rather than the data attached to an iconic photograph.

Conclusion
                By examining how Nick Ut’s photograph was originally published in newspapers and comparing it to the information documented in this photograph’s catalog records at two different repositories, you can see how well, or how poorly, the aspects of a photojournalism image are preserved in  an archives. While Artstor’s data is lacking any true description that would link the record to this particular photograph, the Library of Congress has fully captured the historical information attached to this photograph; however, both of these records fail to describe the emotions that this photograph both shows and evokes from its viewers.



[1] John Berger, “Photographs of Agony,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 37.
[2] Susan Sontag, “Looking at War,” The New Yorker (December 9, 2002): 86.
[3] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 18.
[4] Guy Baxter, “Historical Photograph: Record, Information Source, Object, Resource,” Art Libraries Journal 28, 2 (2003), 2.
[5] Sontag, On Photography 4.
[6] “Vietnam War Allied Troop Levels 1960-73,” The American War Library.  http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm.
[7] Guy Westwell, “Accidental Napalm Attack and Hegemonic Visions of America's War in Vietnam,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 5 (December 2011): 407-408.
[8] Ibid, 408.
[9] Frank Cossa, Photojournalism and the “War at Home” 10.
[10] Berger, 38.
[11] Ibid, 40.
[12] Sontag, “Looking at War,” 86.
[13] Berger, 40. 

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