In the March 30th New Yorker, there’s a piece called “War Story” by Shauna Lyon, on an exhibit of the work of Eddie Adams, a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer of the Vietnam war. Adams took the famous photograph of the police chief of South Vietnam executing a Vietcong suspect.
Toward the end of the piece, Lyons speaks with Chris Hondros, a photographer who has been to Iraq thirteen times. I thought the following anecdote of Hondros’s was very telling—but of what, I should be able to say but can’t. Of our saturation with images (an observation made so often is it now just cliche)? Our ability always to click away from anything and on to something else? How an image itself may not be enough, but must be answered by something in the culture, a willingness to see that there may have been in Vietnam and isn’t now? Vietnam was the first war to take place in people’s living rooms–this is the phrase we learn in high-school history. So now, if all wars are “in our living rooms” (and yet of course, farther from them than we can imagine), what?
[Hondros] took one photograph, he said, that reminds people of Adams. “It’s a picture of a little girl. It was after a checkpoint shooting with U.S. soldiers. They shot up a car coming toward them, and it turned out it was just an Iraqi family. They killed the parents, who were in the front seat, and the children in the back survived.” Hondros’s picture shows the girl, one of the survivors, crouching at the feet of an American soldier and holding out her hands, which are covered with blood. “It ran all over the world,” he said. “I got a lot of e-mails—‘This picture is going to stop the war, just like Eddie Adams’s picture.’ This was in January, 2005. And that didn’t happen.”