Pictures in the Media: White vs. Brown
The NYT.com ran this Getty Images picture this morning in relation to the Pakistan bombing. I’m not going to post the picture because it not only violates copyright law, but I think it violates media ethics, at least my personal version thereof. Suffice to say, it shows a good deal of blood and body parts covered by blankets.
I can’t think of a time when Americans (or really white people in general) are shown dead in the streets with such nonchalance. Dead brown people are part of the story, whereas dead white people are part of the tragedy. Think, for instance, of how quickly the falling bodies were cut out of the 9/11 footage reels. It was deemed inappropriate to show the victims - but a bombing in a developing country routinely involves coverage of the body parts of the victims.
This is bad practice. If it is inappropriate to show the bodies of victims in America or Western Europe, then it should be equally inappropriate to show the bodies of victimized Pakistanis.
There was a really interesting article in the Chicago Tribune yesterday - which I’ll probably write about tomorrow - talking about the neglect of the world to the horrible situation in the Congo. One of the reasons for this, as suggested by one interviewee, is that Darfur yields better (read: more stark) images of suffering.
We like suffering in our news, yet we would scream to high heavens were the bodies of the Virginia Tech victims shown.
Different standards. Given the power of images, there shouldn’t be any.
Update: I found the image as the first in the NYT’s slideshow, though it’s not directly linked to the story anymore.
Sphere: Related Content
December 24th, 2007 at 5:26 am
http://www.pulitzer.org/year/1996/spot-news-photography/works/ff-640-med.jpg
uh, I don’t think so. This one won the pulitzer. Perhaps we should be more concerned about stopping bombings in brown places than equitable photo opportunites.
December 24th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Sorry, but that little girl was alive when the picture was taken. She subsequently died, but she was on her way to hospital when Porter took the photo.
And if you scour the web for photographs of dead white Americans, I’m sure you’ll manage to find some. My point, however, is that the thought given to running photos of foreign and/or brown dead bodies is less than that given to photos of Americans and/or whites.
Extrapolating from that - if the West (or America or whatever) viewed people in the developing world as ‘people like us’ rather than ‘people to which things happen’ photographs like this would appear less frequently and the concern about stopping bombings would be greater.
As it stands, the attitude is that this is what happens in the developing world, therefore pictures detailing it are approved with ease and the world goes on. The standards over images are, I would argue, part of a larger category of thought about the developing world.