Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint. Aldrin photographed his bootprint about an hour into their lunar extra-vehicular activity on July 20, 1969, as part of investigations into the soil mechanics of the lunar surface. This photo would later become synonymous with humankind’s venture into space.
Many historical events of recent times can be associated with an iconic image. An image as a pars pro toto that summarizes complex developments in a concentrated manner and ultimately says more than the proverbial 1,000 words. We all know such images and have them stored in the personal archives of our minds. That is where, for example, the image of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, is stored. There we also find the pictures of concentration camp inmates, emaciated to the bone, who were liberated by the Allies. Or the picture of the naked Vietnamese girl Kim Phúc, who fled from an American napalm attack in 1972. Or the plane piloted by terrorists that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Or when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989... These are images that are deeply engraved in our memory, ones that we can never get rid of, and that still trigger strong emotions in the viewer today.
A few weeks ago, Russian soldiers fired a missile that hit the Kramatorsk train station in eastern Ukraine. The station was filled with women and children who wanted to flee the war by train, together with their husbands and fathers who were seeing them off at the station. After the explosion of the rocket, the picture was one of horror: death and destruction, blood, torn luggage and shredded bodies – and in between, a small, blood-soaked stuffed horse that must have belonged to a child.
The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989. From the night of November 9th until the morning of November 11th, a reveling crowd occupied the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate
This image moves and agitates the viewer. It shocks, enrages and urges action. And today, action often means sharing the image on social media and spreading it further.
The little blood-soaked stuffed horse at the Kramatorsk train station developed its impact the moment a photographer’s attention was drawn to it. It suddenly unleashed its immense power: Vladimir Putin, Russia, the Russian army and all the supporters of the war in Ukraine are from now until all eternity marked as cynical, unscrupulous murderers of innocent children. The stuffed horse of Kramatorsk – from now on it is Putin’s mark of Cain and drags him down into the darkest caves of history. A place where the American commander-inchief of the napalm bombers stationed in Vietnam, Hitler, or the Islamist terrorists who murdered around 3000 people on a sunny September morning in New York also find themselves.
Plumes of smoke billow from the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, after a Boeing 767 hits each tower during the September 11 attacks.
New York, NY, September 13, 2001, Urban Search and Rescue teams inspect the wreckage at the World Trade Center.
Photographer Nick Ut, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his image of the “Napalm Girl", describes the message of his photograph as follows: “This photo showed the world what the war in Vietnam was all about. People, regardless of nationality or language, could understand and empathize with the tragedy... The picture could not have been more real to me and to many others. It was as authentic as the war itself.” And again, the image developed tremendous power, ultimately contributing to the American withdrawal from Vietnam.
William J.T. Mitchel is a professor of art history at the University of Chicago and researches pictorial phenomena in the intermedial realm. He coined the term “pictorial turn”, i.e. the turn of our society from language to image. He claims that with the attack on the World Trade Center this pictorial turn has entered a new phase: “The destruction of the World Trade Center in New York has provided us with the most memorable image of the 21st century so far. It is, along with the mushroom cloud, the most important symbol of war and terror of our time.“ (“Terror the Clones – The War of Images 2001 – 2004).
Consequences of the bombing of the children’s hospital and maternity hospital in Mariupol, March 9, 2022
Professor Gerhard Paul from the Institute for History and its Didactics at the University of Flensburg explains the basics of an emotionally charged image, using the photograph of the fleeing “Napalm Girl” Kim Phúc: “The image ultimately evokes a synesthetic perception. This is understood as the evocation of a certain sensory impression through the stimulation of another sensory organ. Here, the visual gesture figure creates the acoustic imagination of screams and cries for help. Although the viewer does not hear the children’s cries, he is able to imagine them concretely, which additionally involves him in the pictorial event. With the smoke in the background, further noise sounds such as the crash of explosions and blazing fire are evoked in the viewer. At the same time, the smoke creates an imaginary pictorial space outside the image itself; it suggests the existence of a bomber plane or a greater danger in general.”
We look at the picture and are suddenly caught up with all our senses in the event we are looking at. The picture literally pulls us in, emotions flood our body. Emotions now determine our actions and our decisions. Ratio no longer plays a role. Research shows that decisions based on a visual foundation are emotion-driven.
This is precisely the insight that lawyers make use of in courtrooms, where a jury decides on the guilt or innocence of the accused.
In the U.S., for example, Professor Richard K. Sherwin of New York Law School is researching the influence of visual communication tools on court proceedings. In his “Visual Persuasion Project,” the author of the book “When the Law Goes Pop” examines how certain images stored in the subconscious can be retrieved in the minds of jury members in order to influence them accordingly in their verdict.
Russian military weapons destroyed and seized by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, near Bucha on March 1, 2022
Thus, images have been and are used to gain the support of one or more nations for a planned war. Images intended to serve as evidence of atrocities allegedly committed by the war adversary are the flame on a fuse.
The emotionally stirring image is the Holy Grail that conflicting parties are looking for. In Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, it already seems decided who has won the war of images: Ukraine.
Thus, each party to the conflict is not only looking for THE IMAGE in order to use it for its own propagandistic purposes, but at the same time is also looking for ways and means that such images can be avoided as best as possible. After the experience of the Vietnam War and the effective work of the war photographers working there, the Americans created “embedded journalism” in the 2003 Iraq War. Basically, this is nothing more than military personnel’s constant supervision and observation of journalists whose freedom of movement is restricted.
Embedded journalism is an expression of an interested party’s fear that narratives will slip away and fall into other hands. It is fear of loss of control. But it is also fear of the power of the image.
Text Uwe Wolff