The War Photo No One Would Publish. When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. More than 250,000 Syrians have lost their lives in four-and-a-half years of armed conflict, which began with anti-government protests before escalating into a full. Imperial War Museums is a leading authority on conflict and its impact. Visit one of our five locations, research our collections and read real stories of modern war.
The War Photo No One Would Publish. The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him.
Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes. On February 2. 8, 1. Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid- retreat death, the soldier had had a name. He’d fought in Saddam Hussein’s army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans.
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War is a state of armed conflict between societies. It is generally characterized by extreme aggression, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular. Former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more — are ending up in the armories of local police departments, often with.
Or he might have been an unlucky young man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad. Jarecke took the picture just before a ceasefire officially ended Operation Desert Storm—the U.
S.- led military action that drove Saddam Hussein and his troops out of Kuwait, which they had annexed and occupied the previous August. The image and its anonymous subject might have come to symbolize the Gulf War.
Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices. It’s hard to calculate the consequences of a photograph’s absence. But sanitized images of warfare, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf argues, make it “easier … to accept bloodless language†such as 1. The Vietnam War, in contrast, was notable for its catalog of chilling and iconic war photography. Some images, like Ron Haeberle’s pictures of the My Lai massacre, were initially kept from the public, but other violent images—Nick Ut’s scene of child napalm victims and Eddie Adams’s photo of a Vietcong man’s execution—won Pulitzer Prizes and had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the war. Not every gruesome photo reveals an important truth about conflict and combat.
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Last month, The New York Times decided—for valid ethical reasons—to remove images of dead passengers from an online story about Flight MH- 1. Ukraine and replace them with photos of mechanical wreckage. Sometimes though, omitting an image means shielding the public from the messy, imprecise consequences of a war—making the coverage incomplete, and even deceptive.
In the case of the charred Iraqi soldier, the hypnotizing and awful photograph ran against the popular myth of the Gulf War as a “video- game warâ€â€”a conflict made humane through precision bombing and night- vision equipment. By deciding not to publish it, Time magazine and the Associated Press denied the public the opportunity to confront this unknown enemy and consider his excruciating final moments. The image was not entirely lost. The Observer in the United Kingdom and Libération in France both published it after the American media refused. Many months later, the photo also appeared in American Photo, where it stoked some controversy, but came too late to have a significant impact. All of this surprised the photographer, who had assumed the media would be only too happy to challenge the popular narrative of a clean, uncomplicated war. When you have an image that disproves that myth,†he says today, “then you think it’s going to be widely published.â€â€œHe was fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned up,†Jarecke says of the man he photographed.
He was trying to get out of that truck.â€â€œLet me say up front that I don’t like the press,†one Air Force officer declared, starting a January 1. The military’s bitterness toward the media was in no small part a legacy of the Vietnam coverage decades before. By the time the Gulf War started, the Pentagon had developed access policies that drew on press restrictions used in the U.
S. wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1. Under this so- called “pool†system, the military grouped print, TV, and radio reporters together with cameramen and photojournalists and sent these small teams on orchestrated press junkets, supervised by Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) who kept a close watch on their charges. By the time Operation Desert Storm began in mid- January 1. Kenneth Jarecke had decided he no longer wanted to be a combat photographer—a profession, he says, that “dominates your life.†But after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1. Jarecke developed a low opinion of the photojournalism coming out of Desert Shield, the pre- war operation to build up troops and equipment in the Gulf. It was one picture after another of a sunset with camels and a tank,†he says.
War was approaching and Jarecke says he saw a clear need for a different kind of coverage. He felt he could fill that void. After the U. N.’s January 1. Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait came and went, Jarecke, now certain he should go, convinced Time magazine to send him to Saudi Arabia.
He packed up his cameras and shipped out from Andrews Air Force Base on January 1. Iraq. Out in the field with the troops, Jarecke recalls, “anybody could challenge you,†however absurdly and without reason. He remembers straying 3. PAO and having a soldier bark at him, “What are you doing?†Jarecke retorted, “What do you mean what am I doing?â€Recounting the scene two decades later, Jarecke still sounds exasperated. Some first lieutenant telling me, you know, where I’m gonna stand. In the middle of the desert.â€â€œIt was one picture after another of a sunset with camels and a tank.â€As the war picked up in early February, PAOs accompanied Jarecke and several other journalists as they attached to the Army XVIII Airborne Corps and spent two weeks at the Saudi- Iraqi border doing next to nothing.
That didn’t mean nothing was happening—just that they lacked access to the action. During the same period, military photojournalist Lee Corkran was embedding with the U. S. Air Force’s 6. Tactical Fighter Squadron in Doha, Qatar, and capturing their aerial bombing campaigns.
He was there to take pictures for the Pentagon to use as it saw fit—not primarily for media use. In his images, pilots look over their shoulders to check on other planes. Bombs hang off the jets’ wings, their sharp- edged darkness contrasting with the soft colors of the clouds and desert below. In the distance, the curvature of the earth is visible. On missions, Corkran’s plane would often flip upside down at high speed as the pilots dodged missiles, leaving silvery streaks in the sky. Gravitational forces multiplied the weight of his cameras—so much so that if he had ever needed to eject from the plane, his equipment could have snapped his neck. This was the air war that comprised most of the combat mission in the Gulf that winter.
The scenes Corkran witnessed weren’t just off- limits to Jarecke; they were also invisible to viewers in the United States, despite the rise of 2. Gulf War television coverage, as Ken Burns wrote at the time, felt cinematic and often sensational, with “distracting theatrics†and “pounding new theme music,†as if “the war itself might be a wholly owned subsidiary of television.â€Some of the most widely seen images of the air war were shot not by photographers, but rather by unmanned cameras attached to planes and laser- guided bombs. Grainy shots and video footage of the roofs of targeted buildings, moments before impact, became a visual signature of a war that was deeply associated with phrases like “smart bombs†and “surgical strike.†The images were taken at an altitude that erased the human presence on the ground. They were black- and- white shots, some with bluish or greenish casts. One from February 1. In The Eye of Desert Storm by the now- defunct Sygma photo agency, showed a bridge that was being used as an Iraqi supply route.
In another, black plumes of smoke from French bombs blanketed an Iraqi Republican Guard base like ink blots. None of them looked especially violent. The hardware- focused coverage of the war removed the empathy that Jarecke says is crucial in photography, particularly photography that’s meant to document death and violence. A photographer without empathy,†he remarks, “is just taking up space that could be better used.â€The burned- out truck, surrounded by corpses, on the “Highway of Deathâ€In late February, during the war’s final hours, Jarecke and the rest of his press pool drove across the desert, each of them taking turns behind the wheel. They had been awake for several days straight.
We had no idea where we were. We were in a convoy,†Jarecke recalls. He dozed off. When he woke up, they had parked and the sun was about to rise. It was almost 6 o’clock in the morning. The group received word that a ceasefire was a few hours away, and Jarecke remembers another member of his pool cajoling the press officer into abandoning the convoy and heading toward Kuwait City.       The group figured they were in southern Iraq, somewhere in the desert about 7.
Kuwait City. They began driving toward Kuwait, hitting Highway 8 and stopping to take pictures and record video footage. They came upon a jarring scene: burned- out Iraqi military convoys and incinerated corpses. Jarecke sat in the truck, alone with Patrick Hermanson, a public affairs officer.
He moved to get out of the vehicle with his cameras. Hermanson found the idea of photographing the scene distasteful. When I asked him about the conversation, he recalled asking Jarecke, “What do you need to take a picture of that for?†Implicit in his question was a judgment: There was something dishonorable about photographing the dead.“I’m not interested in it either,†Jarecke recalls replying.