Kenneth Jarecke's photo of the charred soldier: The War Photo no one Would Publish
Kenneth Jarecke
Highway of Death
Behind the Camera
With bullets flying everywhere, every minute, the horror of war strikes again. People dying, children being scared out of their mind, what is happening? Starving refugees on the street, civilians getting kicked out of their homes by strangers speaking another language, the lifestyle of a war begins.
The year was 1991. Iraq had just invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait, and the two countries went to war. With all the chaos of a war, and politics, the USA decided to get involved. We sent troops into Iraq, and after that the war got even uglier than it already was.
The Gulf war was a fight that produced many images. Throughout the war, journalists have gone into war zones to give the media a taste of what it looks like. It is dangerous, thrilling, life threatening, and rewarding all at the same time. The risks they take just to show the world the truth, it is both brave and honestly much needed. Without them, people wouldn't know the truth, about what really happens in a war. But what about the ones who don't want us to know the truth? Why do people like the government stop the media from showing the public? The controversy over showing war images to the public during the Gulf war is a heated topic.
So as far as the journalists went, when we sent in troops they followed. Covering all things war, photojournalists served an important job in the war, almost as important as soldiers. They went on tours much like soldiers, and traveled in photographer pools, or groups, to get around to all parts of the war. Their truly main job, in short, was to photograph the war and publish those photos so that the public of America could see what a war looked like. Now obviously there could have been other motivations, and there were, but that was the ultimate goal.
So if your job description is so straightforward, there shouldn't be a problem right? Wrong. Journalists in the field who take graphic photos for the media often get into trouble. Either the government decides that the images should not be shown to the public, or the news company just simply won't publish it. They feel that the image is too horrific for the people to see, but on the other hand it is the end all truth. All the hard/scary work they have done gone to waste. Now they can't make money off of the job.
One of the most famous cases of this not published work during the Gulf War is a photo by Kenneth Jarecke. Jarecke was a great photographer in the Gulf War. Though his work had never been published before the war, he sure had talent. Jarecke talked about his experiences photographing the war in an interview.
"During the air war, photographers had nothing to shoot; we were sent on press junkets here and there inside Saudi Arabia that were arranged by the U.S. military, the Saudis, or the Washington PR Rim retained by the Kuwaitis. Eventually I was assigned to a new pool—a collection of photographers, reporters, and TV crew that had to travel together while supervised by press affairs officers. That was how the Pentagon controlled coverage of the war."
"Then, on February 23, the day before the ground war began, the corps moved 40 Kilometers into Iraq. My pool, which traveled in a Nissan van and a Humvee (an HMMWV, actually, the replacement for the jeep), included a crew from CBS, a writer and two military public affairs officers. Once we started moving, we still weren’t seeing much combat; we’d do “fire missions”—the troops would move to a position and fire howitzers, say—but there was never any counter fire. Still, there was lots of confusion and we had very little time to work."
Jarecke had shot a photo of an Iraqi soldier who had been burned alive, and what was left of him, a charred body still intact. "Then I noticed something: a body lying in the road. We’d passed other bodies on our trip, but I hadn’t stopped to make pictures. There is no reason to make a body picture unless there’s something compelling about the scene. Now I thought what I was seeing was compelling knew they needed the gruesome pictures because otherwise people would think of war as what they see in the movies." When the image made its way back to the states, all if the media refused to show the image, it was too graphic.
"A typical picture-making situation occurred that day," Jarecke had said, "when I made a photograph of a burning Iraqi tank that had been hit by U.S. bombs. I saw smoke as we were driving, and I asked our press officer to take our car out to the right of our convoy so I could make a picture. Ammo was burning and blowing up and the convoy was moving fast. We stopped, I made my shot, and as I turned to get back into the car, the tank I’d been photographing blew up, so I turned and photographed it again. The whole episode took five minutes, tops."
The photograph stirred huge controversy over representation of conflict in the news media. It went unpublished in the US not because of military obstruction, but because of editorial choices. It later became an iconic, lasting image of the war. Media companies just decided it wasn't okay to show. In the case of the Iraqi soldier, the awful photograph ran against the popular myth that the Gulf War was a "video-game war," where people can't even see the horror of the violence happening. Photos being taken totally were showing the horror. It was a graphic image, but it showed the full truth. Some of his great word were, "If we're big enough to fight in a war, we should be big enough to look at it."
Another incident like this was on the "highway of death" in the Gulf War. This event in the war had a mass destruction of vehicles and people. Retreating Iraqis were stopped by US and Canada, and that is when the chaos happened. The wreckage was awful, so bad, and journalists desperately wanted it published. They all went to the scene to try and get the best shots, to show the world that this event was the face of the war. When the images got back to the states, George Bush gave the okay to show them.
In later years after the war, the Pentagon released access policies that drew on press restriction. They felt the need to limit what journalists could show. President Bush was merely continuing the practice used by Reagan when he invaded Grenada in 1983: the military left reporters and photographers behind. The Pentagon had made restrictions so tight, that reporters couldn't even photograph coffins of dead US soldiers coming home. This has been banned for years, and only now are they lifting the ban, and letting reporters shoot only if the family says okay. "I think that foremost in our thinking about issues like this should be the families and giving them choices," Robert Gates said at a news conference at the Pentagon. After all, the ban was made for a respect of privacy. The ban has indeed caused much controversy over the years.
These types of issues happen all the time to journalists. As bad as it is, it is common. These days reporters can't even get close enough to a good story because it is too graphic. They loss business and can't work on what they really came to do. The issue of not publishing graphic photographs reporters have taken is an unfortunate tale, but sadly, its the truth.