The Impact of War Photography: instrumentalisation or proof for justice?
Image Credit: @vonyrazom on Unsplash
“The Napalm Girl”, photographed by Nick Ut in Vietnam in 1952, had a tremendous impact on public opinion of the Vietnam War by making visible many of the horrors committed in the country. War photography has a power that cannot be neglected - but this also comes with the potential for instrumentalisation by different actors.
When addressing the impact of war photography, the centre must be put on the nature of the photography, or how a photographer functions. When capturing an image, the individual comes with an intention - he chooses a subject. Through the chaos all around him, the war photographer elects an angle to take: a fraction of a millisecond which will be frozen in time. Photography is a particular art because it has a role to play, a life, after being taken. It enters the public space with a message to convey. The reality of a war will always be instrumentalised by a photographer because of the choices he makes.
Photography is instrumentalised at all stages of its life. When an image is taken and shared, it is done for a reason. However, each individual then reads in the image what he wants to. For this reason, what he decides to reveal in his work is important, precisely because he knows his work will have consequences.
The war photographer has a responsibility to document what is happening around him. However controversial it may be, his mission is to be a bystander - albeit an active one, because his work will be seen in the future. Even though his opinion can transpire through his choice of angle, he merely captures something which is already reality.
Some might argue that the photographer should help the subjects of his photography instead of capturing them, but it is this photography that can affect the larger war. Indeed, the ultimate goal of the war photographer is to make a conflict and its atrocities known to the world. When Nick Ut took the picture of a little girl in the Vietnam War, he did it thinking he finally found the image that would put an end to the war. A war photographer is a journalist. He fulfils the need to capture reality during war, as much for the present as for the future. For instance, photographs of war crimes in Kosovo were used by the International court of justice after the war in Yugoslavia to act as proof of the crimes committed by the persons judged.
War photography is also necessary to make a conflict known while it is still active. Nick Ut hoped to stop the war, to provoke the public, and he did. The diffusion of his picture resulted in thousands of people protesting against the war: it showed the action of American soldiers to others internationally. Because of the precise choice of the photographer to capture this moment, the world shifted its perspective.
An image has a power that words don’t: it breaks down the barrier between the person in the picture and the onlooker. When an individual sees a picture, it connects him directly with the subject of the latter. They are suddenly both humans - either one could be in this picture, but one got lucky. The distance made between words and the reader cannot exist between the picture and the viewer.
Because the photographer has a responsibility to the subjects of his pictures and to its viewers, his work is of primary importance for the diffusion of knowledge on a conflict. While photography can be instrumentalised by people seeing or taking the photo, its power remains crucial. For the duration and aftermath of a war, it is necessary that they are taken, so that the stories of the victims can be seen and heard.