FAY ANDERSON
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1942, while waiting in the tall kunai grass, George Silk, a precociously talented 23-year-old photographer accredited with the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF), photographed a New Guinea volunteer gently guiding a wounded Australian soldier, Private George C ‘Dick’ Whittington. The photograph, now known as ‘the blinded soldier’, has become part of our national memory, embodying the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan and racial harmony.
The Department of Information (DOI), which was responsible for still photography and cinematography of Australians on active service, refused to release the photograph to newspapers, since it presented a more troubling narrative: Anzac vulnerability. The US censors did not share the same ideological and racial anxiety, and after one of Silk’s friends submitted the still to Life magazine, it appeared as the ‘Picture of the Month’. Silk found he was ‘up for treason from then on’ and resigned.1 The image, originally called the ‘blinded soldier and fuzzy-wuzzy’, was only published in Australia in 1943 in a limited-edition booklet after Silk’s controversial departure. Silk worked for Life for the remainder of his career.
Silk’s experience is not exceptional. Accredited Australian photographers were given unprecedented access to the troops until the 1960s, but they were forbidden to depict Australian fragility. Images of ‘our dead’ have never been seen in mainstream newspapers, and pictures of our wounded were only published when they accorded with dignifying iconography. This selectivity has endured, with access to Australian soldiers now completely managed by the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Consequently, the photographic record of Australian military engagement continues to be limited, despite the centrality of the Anzac legend.
The idea that the public could be prevented from seeing the costs of war and its victims is now almost impossible to conceive. The suffering of others can be viewed with a click of a mouse. Photographs of our allies, enemies and non-combatants continue to be debated, including issues of voyeurism and exploitation, the narrative of ‘us and them’, provenance, and the ethics of showing violence (and now viewing and sharing it).
5.1 George Whittington, Buna, Papua, 25 December 1942. Photographer George Silk (Australian War Memorial, AWM 014028).
The antecedents of the ADF’s current censorship policies date back a hundred years. World War I photographers fell into two main categories: amateur and official. Reflecting an astonishing naivety about the nature of the war and its anticipated brevity, Australian soldiers were each given a Vest Pocket Kodak to document their exploits at Gallipoli. The soldiers were effectively citizen photographers long before that practice was named. The cameras were quickly confiscated when the adventure spiralled into a bloodbath.
The official war photographers wore uniforms, were given the rank of captain and were embedded—attached to a military unit—to use another contemporary idiom. The military regarded them as ‘eyewitnesses’ and publicists rather than newspaper photographers. Great Britain commissioned approximately a dozen official photographers, and CEW Bean, Australia’s Official War Correspondent, and Philip Schuler, an Age journalist, photographed at Gallipoli. Australia eventually accredited only three: Herbert Baldwin in 1916, a British photographer, who lasted barely six months before being discharged due to ill health (a euphemism for ‘shell shock’), and Australian photographers Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins. Hurley sometimes manipulated his photographs, combining up to twelve negatives in order to convey the multiplicity of action.
Though both Hurley and Wilkins produced an extraordinary body of work (manipulation aside), photographs of Australians in combat never appeared in newspapers during the war. Published images were restricted to staged photographs of soldiers on training exercises, the soldiers as tourists in Egypt, departing for or arriving in London, or studio portraits of the young men captioned with mandatory references to heroism, sacrifice, the fallen, and the defence of freedom and Empire.
In contrast, it was the unpublished photographs that provided a vivid tableau of unseen military life: the nightmarish conditions, the ravaged landscape, and the Australian dead, dying, maimed and emotionally fragile. While the newspapers were forbidden from publishing realistic imagery, photographs were disseminated in other ways. Schuler’s images were published in his book Australia in Arms. Photographic exhibitions were held during, and in the wake of, World War I. The public, however, were assured in 1921 that ‘subjects of a ghastly or gruesome nature’ would not be shown and all the pictures had been ‘rigidly censored’.2
Sanitised imagery obscured our understanding of World War I. Of the 416 809 Australians who enlisted, more than 60 000 were killed and about 156 000 were physically or psychologically wounded, in addition to 700 reported cases of self-inflicted wounds. There are no reliable statistics to indicate how many returned soldiers suffered from mental disorders.3 Those who succumbed to mental illness did not have a place in the celebration of nationhood and masculinity or in its visual evocation. While the cultural representations of the war came from the journalists, press photography did not occupy the same place in our collective memory.
5.2 ‘Queensland Heroes’. The Telegraph (Brisbane) 23 September 1916, p. 13 (Telegraph/National Library of Australia).
The Australian military’s distrust of photography continued throughout the twentieth century, along with political and cultural assumptions relating to heroism and suffering. For the duration of World War II, the DOI controlled all Australian frontline photographers. It permitted only twenty-seven professional photographers access to the front line and allowed another eighty-eight enlisted men to work as official photographers. The government met all costs.
This control affected the photographers both logistically and visually. Photographers either worked in the Military Historical Section, whose function was to collect cinema and photographic records of historical value for permanent preservation in the Australian War Memorial (AWM), or as ‘publicity’ photographers.
The publicity (usually newspaper) photographers were escorted and instructed to ‘mainly concern themselves with subjects of transitory importance, which are likely to win popular appeal’.4 Frank Forde, the Minister for the Army, decided that it was economical ‘to produce a comparatively small number of photographs’ and ‘to concentrate on the highlights’.5 The Chief Publicity Censor office censored all publicity photographs before publication, and the final responsibility rested with the minister.6 Any ‘atrocity stories concerning Australians’ were not published unless officially released.7
Three sets of photographs were ‘made a week’, collectively captioned as DOI images and pooled.8 This decision was intended to avoid a number of outcomes: the circulation of photographs of Australian dead; the privileging of wealthy news organisations; ‘undesirable’ competition for sensational war pictures; ‘endless censorship troubles’; and continual ‘agitation to allow photographers access to the front’.9 Graphic photographs of the Darwin bombing, for example, were not released, and initial reports were either devoid of images or illustrated with maps of Australia or aerial views of Darwin before the bombing.
The DOI did not feel the need to recognise the nature of hard news or the newspapers’ commercial enterprise. The DOI’s control extended to the visual focus. The correspondents were instructed to concentrate on a masculine, lionised record of the Anzacs’ ‘fine work’. The first photographs of ‘wounded diggers’ from Kokoda were released in September 1942 to challenge the complacency of the Australian public but also to reassure them that medical attention was always available. The accompanying captions glorified the ‘warriors’ and the ‘remarkable tales of escape’, and made occasional references to ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’ or ‘boongs’, reflecting the casual racism of the era.10 As Caroline Brothers reminds us, ‘photography has little to do with its particular content, or with any notion of photographic truth; it bears witness instead to the ideological currents which produced it and the collective imagination it inflected and to which it contributed’.11
5.3 Darwin bombing. The Advertiser, 20 February 1942, p. 1 (News Corporation Australia/National Library of Australia).
The news organisations did not silently acquiesce. In 1944, there was a series of embittered exchanges between Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Information, and Australian newspaper editors about the ban on press photographers on the front line and the ‘unsuitable pictures’ supplied by the department.12 Cabinet argued in favour of continuing to refuse accreditation to press photographers in combat areas. ‘The official War Correspondents are producing work of a high order,’ they disingenuously replied. ‘There is no complaint from the Press that they are getting insufficient pictures from the DOI.’13
Two years before, Ralph Simmonds, the editor of the Melbourne Herald, wrote to Prime Minister John Curtin objecting to the system under which ‘only certain official photographers controlled by the DOI are permitted to work’ in the military areas, which proved ‘a very great obstacle in the way of publishing pictures’. Several months later, in November 1943, US correspondents also protested against the restrictions of Australian censorship, which had extended beyond issues of national security.14
While the Australian authorities were excessive in censoring, they were not unique in their refusal to publish graphic photographs of ‘our boys’. Decisions about acceptable content troubled all the Allies. The US authorities were also reticent, until 1943, when they sanctioned Life magazine’s publication of George Strock’s elegantly composed image of three dead US soldiers lying on Buna Beach.
The Australian stance on depicting death was not always extended to images of other Allied soldiers. Audiences were increasingly permitted to view US casualties in newspapers after 1944, though the bodies always retained their dignity and anonymity in the composition of these images.15 Photographs of dead Germans strewn across the battlefield were common. So too were Japanese casualties.
The parochial obsession with the Anzac narrative meant that Australian photographers were not accredited to the European theatre of war. Instead, all photographs of Great Britain and Europe were lifted from wire services and agencies. In 1935, two agencies—the Australian Press Association, run by John Fairfax and the Melbourne Argus, and the Sun Herald Cable Service, serving the HWT group in Melbourne and Sydney’s Associated Newspapers—were amalgamated to form the Australian Associated Press (AAP). This new entity had a monopoly on international news supply to Australian newspapers and restricted the supply of photographs.
Thus the photographs of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, which have become a lasting ‘iconic representation of war atrocity and human evil’, were not taken by Australian photographers.16 Newspaper readers only saw Nazi atrocities through the work of other Western photographers. The images of Nazi atrocities were also delayed and not published in Australia until 21 April 1945, almost three weeks after the liberation of the first German camp, and ten days after the first Australian printed report. The pictorial interest lay in the dead rather than the living. The victims were presented collectively, without identity and often naked, with no regard to the feelings of the survivors or families. Their masculinity, which had defined the visual record of the AIF, was distorted. Even the photographs of the ‘Jap dead’, as they were often called, were not presented in the decayed condition of the concentration camp victims. The photographs of the liberated Allied prisoners of war were treated very differently: the soldiers were usually identified, clothed and presented with a supporting narrative.
Barbie Zelizer observes that the camp images informed the collective memory of the Holocaust in the United States.17 Certainly, as Jane Lydon notes, the revelation of Nazi genocide afforded the ‘medium of photography a new legitimacy’, and ‘photographic evidence became crucial in reporting distant atrocity’.18 A closer examination of the publication of liberation photographs reveals that not all Australian newspapers circulated them as widely as others. Many editors supported very different national priorities and were ambivalent about the ‘spectacularising’ of atrocity, regulating the images accordingly.
The Vietnam War is remembered as destroying the tradition of providing visual affirmations of ‘our boys’. According to the military and hawkish politicians, it was the ‘great uncensored war’ in terms of press access to the troops and news imagery; the war that was lost in the ‘living rooms’ of America and, by extension, Australia, with photographs of violence circulated by a pacifist media.19
This collective mythology has been discounted for several reasons. First, as Michael Arlen, Daniel Hallin and others argue, the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’—the notion that hostile and negative reporting led to the military defeat of the United States—is inherently flawed.20 Second, the Australian media’s experience was very different from that of their US counterparts. Vietnam was not an ‘open war’ in the sense that photographers were uncensored and given free access to the Australian troops. In addition, and with the exception of a few outstanding newspaper photographers like Fairfax’s Denis Gibbons and Stuart McGalderie, staff photographers did not cover the war continuously. Defence relied instead on their own public relations photographers.21
There is a tendency in popular historical memory to conflate US and Australian media experiences during the war, and to exaggerate both the transformative influence of the imagery and the Australian press’s supposed opposition to the war. Australian photographers recall a generous US military policy in terms of providing transportation to the front and access to troops. But the Australian authorities were not as accommodating. Their reluctance could possibly be attributed to the ‘water torture case’, which was initially exposed by a US journalist, Martin Russ, in 1968 and is still contested.
Eighteen months earlier, in July 1966, Australian intelligence staff had questioned To Thi Nau, a member of the Viet Cong accused of spying on the Australian base at Nui Dat. To was captured and taken to Nui Dat, where her interrogation extended over a 30-minute period. Gabriel Carpay photographed the first minutes of the interrogation, and then the final minutes.
Carpay was part of a group of enterprising Australian freelance photographers who travelled to Vietnam to establish their reputations. He was invited to To Thi Nau’s interrogation with John Sorell of the Melbourne Herald and Geoffrey Murray of AAP. After Russ broke the story, Carpay’s image was used to support Sorrell’s contention that Australian soldiers were ‘given to torturing prisoners’ and that the officers had forced water down To’s throat for more than half an hour.22 Carpay insisted that his photograph did not confirm Sorrell’s account or OZ magazine’s later interpretation.23
5.4 Thi Nau, a 23-year-old Viet Cong prisoner. Photographer Gabriel Carpay, published in the Herald (Australian War Memorial, AWM P01404.013).
After the disclosures, the military conducted an internal investigation.24 Phillip Lynch, the Minister for the Army, announced that he could find ‘not one scintilla of evidence for the charge’, and then Prime Minister John Gorton cavalierly observed in parliament that the woman had been well enough to pose for photos after her ‘torture’. The Senate rejected a full inquiry and agreed to a DLP amendment expressing ‘utmost confidence in the Australian troops in Vietnam’. In 2010, Peter Barham, a former SAS sergeant and interpreter, revealed that he had witnessed the interrogation and confirmed the torture.25
After 1966, it became common for photographers to be shadowed by Australian Army PR officers. Neil Davis, a cinematographer and photographer, famously recalled that the policy of the Australian Army was known in the trade as the ‘feel free to fuck off’ approach to public relations.26
Photographers were often nostalgic about the freedom they enjoyed in Vietnam. Few of the published images of Australian soldiers betrayed discord or contradicted the narrative of the virtuous Anzac soldier. Most photographs of soldiers on the home front conveyed feel-good stories of farewells and reunions, including a series of images of the pop singer Normie Rowe’s enlistment and regulation haircut. Typical of such soft stories is one captioned ‘frontline fashions’, with a photograph of the Minister for Defence ‘inspecting the latest in Australian uniforms in Canberra’.27 The exception involved stories about ‘fragging’, the act of murdering members of the military. In January 1968, 22-year-old gunner Leonard Newton was found guilty of the manslaughter of Robert Birse. A Courier-Mail photographer managed to take two photographs: a distant shot of Newton disembarking in Brisbane under military escort and one of his wife, their daughter and his father, who expressed his anger towards the army for treating them in a ‘callous way’.28
After the water torture case had broken, photographs of troops with prisoners emphasised Australian benevolence and the enemy’s capitulation;29 other images depicted Australian troops on patrol or resting in the field. Perhaps the most memorable was Michael Coleridge’s stunning but ‘safe’ image of B Company, 7RAR, about to be airlifted back to Nui Dat after a cordon and search of Phuoc Hai village in 1967. But some of the most evocative photographs of the Australian experience of the war were not seen—in contrast with Life magazine’s searing photographs.
After the Tet Offensive in late January 1968, Australian newspaper images of US troops and the Vietnamese were more violent and provided the first graphic portrayal of war in the press since the liberation imagery at the close of World War II. Papers emphasised the visual aspects of their coverage, with the promise of ‘more dramatic pictures’ delivering shock value and commercial appeal.
There was little hesitation in showing violent photographs of the Viet Cong or even the South Vietnamese. Images of dead US soldiers were published, but they were framed to emphasise their humanity. The most striking photographs were of the ‘other’ and drew upon a visual language of abjection. The accompanying headlines conformed to simplistic stereotypes: ‘Anzac troops slashing into red area 24 “kills”’ and ‘Reds died in Anzac attacks’.30 In February 1968, many dailies printed the image of two South Vietnamese soldiers dragging the corpse of a Viet Cong (or suspect, depending on the newspaper) killed during a raid on a billet in Saigon. It conveyed the banality of suffering. Some outlets chose to print images of Viet Cong corpses put on display by government soldiers with captions reminding readers of the Viet Cong’s malevolence.31
The editorial treatment varied. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph was relatively benign in its visual coverage and not as picture-driven as its Melbourne equivalent, the Sun News-Pictorial. On almost a daily basis during particular months, the Age printed the most devastating photographs of the dead and injured, the destruction, and American valour and suffering. It was a more diverse cross-section of photographs, but this visual representation was neither a watershed nor widespread.
In Australia, the treatment of images of General Loan, the ‘Napalm girl’ and My Lai—which are often identified as defining the collective memory of the war in the American consciousness—were inconsistent, illuminating issues of censorship, partisanship and editorial policy. Eddie Adams’ famous photograph of Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a ‘Vietcong’ suspect in a Saigon street in 1968 is sometimes credited with ‘single-handedly shattering public faith in the war’.32 But it was published erratically in Australia: the Courier-Mail, Canberra Times and the Daily Telegraph did not print it at the time; the Sun published the defining image; and the Age printed two stills from the moving footage alongside a photograph of the bodies of two Americans after they were ambushed.33
Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuc, better known as the ‘napalm girl’, is popularly cited as the image that ended the conflict. Peggy Phelan rightly observes that while we sometimes claim that certain photographs have changed the world, the relationship between still imagery and transformative action needs greater scrutiny.34 The New York Times captioned the photograph, ‘End this war’.35 But the image was not emblematic of this pacifist message in Australia, and the photograph did not appear in many newspapers, including the Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier-Mail and Canberra Times. In the case of the Age, the image of the child in agony was not used (possibly due to sensitivities about full-frontal nudity rather than her distress) but a less well-known photograph of Kim Phuc from behind was printed.
5.5 ‘Vietnam’s Day of Death’. Sun News-Pictorial, 1 February 1968, p. 8 (News Corporation Australia/State Library of Victoria).
Another crucial collection of photographs that offered a less than reassuring view of Allied wartime experience and that were deemed to galvanise anti-war sentiment were the photographs of the My Lai massacre committed on 16 March 1968, when the US Army’s Charlie Company murdered between 347 and 504 Vietnamese civilians. The treatment of these images in Australia revealed continued editorial support for the United States and ongoing uncertainty about the validity of photographs as evidence.
Despite the existence of Sergeant Ron Haeberle’s photographs, the US Army did not begin investigating My Lai until the spring of 1969. The media initially refused to cover the story until freelance journalist Seymour Hersh’s account on 13 November. Haeberle’s local Ohio newspaper, the Plain Dealer, published the photographs on 20 November, and Life magazine devoted a ten-page photo essay in December. Despite the widespread circulation of the images, Australian newspapers were reticent to publish them.36 Most outlets refused to release any images of the bodies strewn along the road or the American troops setting fire to the villagers’ houses. A common motif of the atrocity photograph is the inclusion of the bystander, who either shows little response or a sadistic enjoyment.37 The American onlooker (or instigator) was too difficult for Australian editors to bear. While the Australian newspapers covered the story in text rather than photographs, some continued to express doubt about its validity with conflicting reports.38
For all the claims made about Vietnam being the first television war, it is these photographic images that have endured as iconic representations of the conflict. Andrew Hoskins describes them as ‘flashframes’ of memory: ‘the freeing of time and space and its capture of a single frame seem to carry greater cultural and historical weight than the moving image’.39
Irrespective of the medium, though, the military were convinced that the violent images of Vietnam had caused irrevocable damage. Consequently, most photographers and the media in general were relegated to press conferences and briefings rather than the front line during the Falklands War and the First Gulf War.
The four coordinated terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on the luminous morning of 11 September 2001 challenged the traditions of photojournalism and galvanised support for the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where pictorial selectivity in relation to the Anzac legend continued. In previous conflicts, the military and governments were aided by a system that enforced accreditation and exploited slow channels of communication. By 2001, these controls were redundant. The Americans considered their options in Afghanistan until the Pentagon adopted embedding in 2003, but the ADF revisited past media management from the Vietnam War, first by refusing access and later through restrictive embedding opportunities. Consequently, the photographic record of Australian troops in Afghanistan and Iraq is limited.
Jason South initially spent almost four weeks in Iraq, returning home four days before the invasion to join his partner, who was expecting their first child. He returned later in 2003. The pre-Saddam days, according to South, ‘felt very safe; you were being watched and monitored. But when we went back, it was the void, it was just a lawless state.’ On the eve of the war, the Australian’s photographer John Feder and his journalist colleague Peter Wilson were put under house arrest for several days when the Iraqi authorities detained them after entering the besieged town of Basra.
Kate Geraghty arrived in Qatar to cover the lead up to the Iraq invasion. The ADF’s public affairs officers, she says ‘were a joke’ and gave her extremely limited access. ‘I could only photograph people sorting mail, standing guard, exercising, nothing of any great substance; I did get into the Joint Command, but that was a pool position for all media. That’s why we turned to the British military PR.’ Geraghty later ‘negotiated’ access and travelled on the Kanimbla during the first two days of the invasion. ‘I asked to photograph the Iraqi POWs that were on board and I wasn’t allowed. I was told that photographs were only taken for historical purposes, [and] I countered that the Sydney Morning Herald was a historical record.’ The ADF had adopted the previous convention of accrediting their own photographers ‘for historical purposes’. Occasionally Geraghty found ways of evading the restrictions, joining the Australian divers who invited her to go on patrol on Anzac Day, effectively circumnavigating their own command structure.
As one of the AWM’s official photographers, David Dare Parker found the ADF easier to negotiate with when he encountered problems in relation to access and force protection. He speculates that his status might have ‘added some weight’: ‘I had no real problems working alongside the ADF, although they had only just arrived in the theatre and whatever future protocols they may have had later on were not yet in place. I do remember sitting in on an ADF briefing before leaving Australia for the Middle East and there was some mention of a need to be distrustful of the media that raised an eyebrow. I can’t remember exactly what the words were, but no surprises when I heard about the difficulties journos had later on in the game.’
More than three thousand journalists and photographers covered the Iraq conflict from March until April 2003. It was the most reported war of all time. This unprecedented coverage was not necessarily linked to the war’s significance but was bolstered by the Bush administration’s military strategy to embed the press. Much has been written about the myopic flaws of the embedding system. Some acknowledge the virtues of embedding when it is balanced with independent coverage.40 Embedding is partly justified by economics, says Peter McNamara: ‘To send someone into a war zone, they’ve got to have special training, they’ve got to be equipped with vests, which are five or six grand each. If you go back to the Vietnam conflict, photographers went in with a camera bag over their shoulder.’ South emphasises the safety aspect, but has profound reservations about embedding for three reasons: access, pooling and independence. ‘News Corp had to share all its content because they were embedded. It also meant we were ahead of the curve; we covered jobs before the Australian military got there,’ he says.
Whatever the merits of embedding—and safety and budgetary considerations are significant issues—the ADF differed from its allies in 2003. The press were not permitted to accompany Australian troops in battle, a decision rationalised by ADF spokesman Brigadier Mike Hannan on the grounds that the 2000 SAS troops were too few and too specialised to feasibly embed Australian journalists.41 Access to the troops or even rudimentary provision of basic information was not permitted until 2005, when the ADF allowed what some journalists derisively describe as ‘bus tours’ or ‘junkets’ to a select group. The tours involved a few days on the ground, most of them spent on heavily fortified bases, escorted at all times by an officer from Defence Public Affairs.42
In 2008, Public Affairs hosted six media tours in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which included twenty-eight journalists and photographers from seven different agencies. The tours were extended to ten days, ‘where they fly you in, take you through a couple of days’ training on the ground, then take you around to spots where you can talk to soldiers, and then they fly you out’. You would not, a photographer says, ‘see the “real story”’.43 Angela Wylie spent ten days in Afghanistan in 2008 during one of the hosted media tours. ‘It was very managed,’ she recalls. Another photographer expresses frustration over the brevity of the tour and the ‘specific brief’, which precluded stories in Tarin Kot about schools and women.
Embedding was more extensively trialled by the ADF in 2009, when the ABC’s Sally Sara and News Limited’s journalist Ian McPhedran and photographer Gary Ramage travelled with Australian units in Afghanistan for three weeks. It was, according to Ramage, the first time ‘the ADF decided to do it properly, embed us, and show us everything’. The Statement for Understanding for Accredited Media placed ‘the burden of compliance’ on the media.44 The ADF told the ABC’s Media Watch that it was ‘extremely pleased with the volume and general quality of reporting that the embedded journalists produced’. McPhedran was more circumspect and expressed frustration on his return.45 By 2011, the ADF were organising more embedding opportunities in Afghanistan, but the control was partly justified for safety and security reasons. Some photographers also felt embedding was necessary to overcome many of the practical obstacles they would otherwise face in trying to get close to the military action. Another photographer ‘didn’t think it was worth going over and not being embedded, especially when the Australian media weren’t that interested in it’.
In interviews, many photographers raise a number of concerns about the ADF and, in particular, its Public Affairs officers. First, there is disquiet about their contemptuous attitude to the press. Irrespective of the theatre of war, some photographers—and several requested anonymity—described the ADF as ‘arrogant’, ‘obnoxious’ and ‘rude’. Renee Nowytarger recalls an incident in East Timor in 2006 when a PR officer told the journalist she was working with to ‘just put a lead on her, will you? Put a lead on it.’
The second concern relates to control. According to the ADF guidelines (and the Pentagon regulations), the degree of access was conditional, and embedded media were not permitted to pursue a story away from the military. ‘I understood that when you are embedded, you were limited in what stories you could tell or how far down into a yarn you could get,’ Wylie explains. ‘The storytelling was fairly sterile, but on the ground it was terribly exciting.’ Penny Stephens also noted the narrow opportunities to meet local people because the media were classed as ADF staff. The five-day patrol afforded some opportunities, and as a woman she was able to engage with some Afghani women.
These limitations were not unique, but the ADF imposed greater restrictions than other Western military. One photographer maintains, ‘There’s a conflict between what they want you to see, and what you want to see.’ There was also tension over, and limits on, what could be photographed. Another photographer recalls the directives regarding the ‘areas that you’re allowed to shoot, but not what to shoot. At one point, I was kind of like “Fuck this, I’m out of here.”’ According to one photographer, the embeds had to sign legal documents about disclosure, some photographers had their work censored or some photographs were not published because the army refused to approve them. While one photographer notes that the ADF have become more relaxed on subsequent tours, they still assign a public affairs officer, who ‘draws up an itinerary that doesn’t really cover what I want. The media are trying to find out the real crux of what people are doing out there; but they don’t allow you to get to it.’
The tension between the Australian military and media has apparently not diminished. In 2013, the ADF attempted to ‘derail’ a two-week assignment undertaken by Geraghty and Fairfax journalist Paul McGeough. The Fairfax team had travelled to Uruzgan to interview the Afghanis and Matiullah Khan, the provincial chief of police. ‘The ADF/Australian government attempted to block us from reporting or staying in Uruzgan until Matiullah Khan stated we would be his guests,’ Geraghty explains. ‘Although we had Afghan journo visas, the ADF at Tarin Kowt airbase would not let us proceed off the base from our commercial flight. It took several hours until Khan intervened.’ McGeough later reported on the ADF’s ‘tight military control on the movement of journalists and their access to military and civilian interview subjects’.46 The pictorial storytelling was also constrained by what newspapers judged as permissible to publish. One photographer argues that Australian newspapers are getting ‘a little bolder but there’s still a line they won’t cross’.
While the Australian media wouldn’t publish photographs conveying Australian vulnerability, imagery of the US dead was not similarly sanitised. Newspapers printed photographs of the burned bodies of four US security contractors ambushed and murdered in Iraq in March 2004, for example.47 The scenes were reminiscent of the AP still images of the naked and battered body of a US soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993,48 which prompted the withdrawal of US troops in Somalia the following year.
The ADF were, however, more reticent in releasing imagery of the enemy. Unlike the trophy photographs of the Japanese published during World War II, the only ‘graphic’ image Defence released was a photograph of Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith’s bloodied running shoes the day he earned a Victoria Cross for actions during a helicopter assault against the Taliban. The photograph caused consternation because it was deemed at ‘risk of inciting further acts of violence or terrorism’.49
Several interviewed photographers note an inevitable point of comparison between the ADF and other military. Stephen Dupont, as a freelance, was embedded with the Americans on four tours, once with the British, twice as an official photographer for the AWM with commissions in Afghanistan (2012) and the Solomon Islands (2003), and many times with the Afghans. The Americans, Dupont says, are ‘probably the easiest to embed’ because they are organised, permit ‘amazing access’ and ‘treat the media very well’. By comparison, the British ‘were not quite as good but still okay, and the Australians are the worst … I’ve always found the Australians really hard to deal with and, actually, I never embedded with them for that very reason. I tried once and I couldn’t get access … To do an embed with the Gurkhas was a great experience.’50
‘Some of the embeds took amazing photographs,’ Geraghty comments, ‘because they were right there on the front line going into Baghdad.’ The stunning work by Australian photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson, who was embedded with the US forces during the battle of Falluja in 2004, shows the extraordinary access.
The ‘reasonable’ openness of the US military observed by one photographer extends to their willingness to release photographs that reflect badly on them. Dupont experienced this first hand when he was embedded with the US forces and filmed US soldiers setting fire to the bodies of two Taliban members killed the night before. The burning of the corpses and the fact that they had been laid out facing Mecca were deliberate desecrations of Muslim beliefs.51 A US psychological operations unit had also used the incident to incite the enemy. According to Dupont, there was no attempt to prevent him from filming or filing the still pictures. ‘Once you’re embedded with them, you can pretty well see whatever they’re doing,’ he says. It also resulted in a change of US military policy: ‘That’s why they’re always getting into trouble, the Americans, because they just give the media such good access and in the situation of my Taliban burning … They knew I had the footage … I got out of the country really quickly afterwards because I felt that I had something potentially hot.’ Psychological operations were temporarily suspended, and the incident (and its coverage) prompted the US military to produce a cultural awareness handbook, which was then issued to every soldier serving in the Middle East.
5.6 US troops burn the bodies of two dead Taliban following an ambush on their convoy outside Gonbaz village, Shawali-Kot in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, 1 October 2005. Photographer Stephen Dupont (Stephen Dupont).
The difference between the US and Australian militaries fascinates the photographers we interviewed. Clive Hyde says that the Americans allowed him to photograph ‘anything’. Another echoes this, observing that the Australian military were still struggling with the concept of having civilians running around their battle zone: ‘The Americans are very good at it; the British are catching up but Australia doesn’t do it very well at all.’ You couldn’t photograph wounded soldiers while with the Australians, Dupont explains. ‘The Americans had a huge “in-bed” program. They had journalists in there every day for years on end. Australia still doesn’t have that.’ Dupont attributes the Australian military culture to an archaic, old-school colonial sensibility, which the English have advanced from: ‘The Australians will invite people to embed with them, but they’ll invite certain people that they feel safe with. The Americans don’t have that, sort of, segregation. I think they’re a lot more open. It is partly historic.’ McNamara observes that the ‘ADF has always … been careful of their image and wanted good publicity’.
The Department of Defence’s photographic gallery of largely sanitised publicity pictures is now the main provider of photographs from wars involving Australian troops, and it assiduously protects that image.52 ‘It’s a propaganda unit. The censorship is increased to a really ridiculous position,’ one photographer notes. ‘The newspapers use those images and increasingly will do more so as they become under tighter and tighter fiscal reins and there’s less and less of their own people.’ Despite the changing nature of warfare and the technological transition in photography from film to digital, from the darkroom to immediate transmission, the Australian public continues to be deprived of an extensive and varied record of our military’s experiences. As one photographer says, the ADF refuses to release any photographs that make it ‘uncomfortable or that shine a light on any sort of truth’.
5.7 Screenshot of the Australian Defence Force image library (image courtesy of the Australian Government Department of Defence).
Fortunately, embedding has not been the only way to document war. Photo essays taken by unilateral staff photographers and freelancers offer intimate imagery and emotional depth. More importantly, they humanise civilians, trying to ensure their identities are not racialised or gendered. Dupont travelled to Afghanistan annually for twenty-two years, capturing everyday life. Since 1982, Tony Ashby has funded many of his assignments in the Middle East, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Africa, Belfast, the Balkans and Afghanistan. His commitment and work are described by a number of colleagues as ‘brilliant’, ‘awesome pictures’, ‘fantastic portraits’. And Dare Parker has reported from conflict zones including Iraq, East Timor, Gaza and Bangkok as a freelancer. Most of his projects were self-funded and self-assigned.53
The visual coverage of genocide and of conflicts that do not always involve Australia has been constrained by different limitations, including a lack of resources and interest. Consequently, Australian newspapers often source conflict images from agencies, freelancers or self-funded staff photographers like Ashby.
The appetite for horror and the hunt for corpses and sites of mass graves in order to confirm genocide and human rights abuses have, since the Holocaust, significantly influenced the newspaper enterprise. Images of the liberation of concentration camps established the ‘show me’ phenomenon and became the paradigm for coverage of subsequent genocides.54 Many of the grainy, grimly familiar photographs of piled, emaciated cadavers, mass graves and refugees waiting at train stations during the Balkan wars in the 1990s were reminders of Hitler’s murderous regime.55 As Susan Sontag observes, ‘photographs echo photographs’.56 The Western representation of the concentration camps revealed the evidential value of photographs, which serve to confirm news of atrocities, lending a moral clarity to the photographic endeavour.57
The downside of using photographs as evidence was that photojournalists lost their immunity. Many commentators cite the Balkan conflict of the 1990s as the defining moment when the press began to be targeted and silenced. But it had occurred earlier, first in Vietnam and Cambodia, and then in East Timor, when the Balibo Five, a group of journalists working for Australian television networks, were slaughtered by the Indonesians to cover up the invasion of East Timor in 1975. The Indonesian authorities continued to restrict journalists and deny accounts of massacres. In 1999, a year after the resignation of Indonesian President Suharto and in anticipation of the UN-sponsored ballot on independence in August that would end Indonesian’s annexation if the Timorese voted for autonomy, the media descended on East Timor.
Australian news organisations sent more staff photographers to cover the ballot and the ensuing violence than had been despatched to other conflicts in the 1990s. The greater visual attention given to East Timor was partly due to geopolitical factors. Geraghty, who was a cadet at the Border Mail in Albury, partially funded her trip for two weeks out of personal interest and to see if she could ‘cope’. South spent six months in East Timor working seven days a week and was nearly stabbed in August 1999 as he captured images of the Indonesian militia, the escalating intimidation and the East Timorese refugee camps. On 1 September 1999, as the militia fired homemade weapons, the Australian’s photographer John Feder arrived at the UN mission compound, which housed more than three hundred people.58 Five days later, the militia opened fire on 2000 people who had sought refuge at a school outside the compound. Dupont’s images draw attention to the unrest, focusing on refugees, the streets of Dili, children and the media phalanx.59
While South concedes that six months was too long to remain there, he explains his emotional investment, pride and determination that the Indonesians were not going to get ‘away with it’: ‘I think due to Australia’s pressure and Fairfax and News Limited battling it out and the ABC’s persistent coverage, if we hadn’t kept filing and kept jamming it into the Howard government’s face, they wouldn’t have sent INTERFET troops. It was unavoidable. It was social genocide and war crimes on our doorstep’.
5.8 A refugee returning to the burnt out remains of his home in Dili, East Timor, 26 September 1999. Photographer Jason South, published in the Age (Jason South/Fairfax Syndication).
There is a hierarchy of death, so that less circumspection is shown in relation to African and Middle Eastern atrocities than with atrocities closer to home.60 Unlike East Timor and the Balkans, agency photographs of rotting corpses dominated the limited visual coverage of the Rwandan genocide, headlined as a ‘tribal bloodbath’, rather than nuanced analysis of the events.61 The debate over whether to publish Ashby’s singular photograph of the dead body of a ‘beautiful little girl’ caused more dismay in the editorial conference than images of mass killing.
The selective visual coverage was also partly caused by limited access. Rwanda was South’s first overseas assignment. He describes it as a ‘difficult job, difficult to get pictures out. It was terrifying. It was just harrowing.’ South, who was hanging out ‘with the frontline guys, the Marlboro boys’, learned how to work and survive in this environment but recalls the anxiety and pressure of getting the story and meeting deadlines. Ashby simply says, ‘Shocking stuff in Rwanda. Awful.’62 But the world also ‘did not want to know’, a correspondent for the Australian wrote in 1994. ‘Rwanda was too difficult, too remote, maybe too black.’63
Since the early 2000s, there has been a significant shift in war imagery, which is now diffused through a mesh of new media: professional and amateur videos, imagery from diverse sources, podcasts, blogs, documentaries, video-sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube, and social media.64 It was social media and the immediate dissemination of photographs, particularly of children, that allowed viewers greater access to Gaza.65 The public are now active consumers, gatekeepers and distributors. As Media Watch argued, the outrage over the killing of 2100 Palestinians, along with sixty-six Israeli soldiers and seven civilians in Israel between 8 July and 27 August 2014 did not apply to Syria.66 One exception is the photograph of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Turkey on 2 September 2015 after he had drowned with his sister and mother escaping Syria.
Some memorable sites of suffering have been extensively documented, but other equally cruel wars and instances of civilian slaughter have remained relatively under-photographed. Visual selectivity has characterised the conflicts in Chechnya, the Congo, Syria and the Russian intervention in the Ukraine. There are also countries that have become too dangerous for Western photographers. Nigel Brennan, an Australian freelance photographer and former staff photographer for the Bundaberg News-Mail, concedes that he went to Somalia to ‘make a name for himself’ as well as to highlight the humanitarian crisis after most Westerners had pulled out. Brennan and Amanda Lindhout, a Canadian journalist, were kidnapped and kept captive by Islamist insurgents for fifteen months until their release in 2009.
According to Brennan, 2008 and 2009 saw a shift to a greater reliance on freelance photographers’ work. Nicholas Kristof observes that while established media outlets are no longer willing to send their staff correspondents to some countries, particularly after the death of Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin in Syria, they accept freelancers’ and stringers’ photographs without taking any responsibility for their care.67 James Foley and Steven Sotloff, who were both murdered by Daesh, were freelance journalists. Describing the new business model as exploitative, Brennan notes the freelancers do not have any hostile-environment training or personal insurance, particularly kidnap insurance.
The SMH did invest in staff photographers, though, and in 2014, Geraghty covered ‘the body-less funeral’ of Reza Berati (the asylum seeker who was killed on Manus Island) in Tehran, Crimea after the Russian invasion, the unfolding war in the Donbass region of east Ukraine (until it became too dangerous to take photographs), and Iraq. ‘The threat of being kidnapped and then sold on to ISIS had become a massive threat. Being caught in a suicide bombing, huge, huge threat,’ Geraghty says. On 17 July 2014, within two weeks of her return home, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was downed in a field of sunflowers.68
The bloody civil war in the Ukraine had largely been ignored by the 24-hour news cycle and only became ‘real’ in the west when US and German intelligence concluded that MH17 was shot down by a Buk surface-to-air missile fired by pro-Russian insurgents. All 298 passengers and crew—from Holland, Malaysia, Indonesia, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, the Philippines, Canada, New Zealand and Australia—were killed.
MH17 was the catalyst for the circulation of unmediated images of dead Westerners, possibly even Australians. By 2014, technology had changed the way in which photographs captured international events and sites of trauma. Because the plane came down in a war zone where there was no effective securing of the scene, photographers and civilians were able to wander the site, and images were widely disseminated on the internet, including through newspaper websites. Professional photographers were restricted unless accredited by the pro-Russian rebel forces. The photographs contrasted with the more respectful visual coverage of Lockerbie, which showed only the plane debris in the sleepy town ‘the night it rained death’.69 Explaining the circuitous attempts to cover the story, Geraghty recalls the SMH finally ‘pulled the pin’ on the assignment because ‘the AFP officers had left and the international MH17 search team could not get access to the crash site’. It was considered too dangerous.
The Australian published images of two victims on the front page. Verity Chambers remembers seeing a series of photographs first on the Time magazine website that included bodies that had fallen through village houses. Reflecting on whether such images should be published, Geraghty says, ‘I think it’s a day-to-day ethical question that the editors discuss. It depends on how graphic it is. I’ve never been told not to photograph a dead individual. But, you know, this is war. What the hell do they expect? I don’t know if they should be shown but I don’t think that we should criticise photographers for taking them. And is it only unethical or upsetting because they’re Australian? Look at Haiti, the earthquake; a cascade of dead bodies. It’s hypocritical to decide that just because they’re Australian, they deserve more dignity than someone from Africa or Afghanistan.’
Fairfax and News Corporation both ran photographs of familiar belongings taken by freelance Ella Pellegrini. A photo gallery on the News.com.au website was headlined ‘Inside the crash site …’ and included video, text and seven photographs showing items from the plane lying on the ground, including letters to Australia and a bag, but also dead exotic birds, and a dead dog captioned ‘Upsetting’.70
5.9 Debris and objects found scattered on the ground at the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) in the settlement of Grabovo in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 20 July 2014. Photographer Ella Pellegrini, published on News Corporation Australia’s News.com.au website, 22 July 2014 (Ella Pellegrini/Newspix).
At the same time, multimedia platforms and close media collaboration have provided greater autonomy and visual opportunity to cover less ‘popular’ wars. Geraghty, for instance, exposed, to great acclaim, the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the impact of war on a civilian population who have been living in refugee camps for fifteen years.71 Instagram has been embraced as a powerful tool for photojournalists, including Andrew Quilty, an acclaimed Australian based in Kabul since 2013.
5.10 A young orphaned girl stands in Mugunga 1 IDP camp carrying her baby sister as she blows her whistle, the only thing she brought with her as she fled the fighting in her village, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photographer Kate Geraghty (Kate Geraghty).
The rise of social media has also ushered in less controlled use of ‘trophy’ imagery—visual symbols of the conquest and humiliation of others, contrary to most established moral codes.72 The souveniring of battlefield trophies, whether through the physical mutilation of bodies and routine collecting of body parts or through the gathering of photographic trophies, is an enduring practice.73
Trophy photographs remind us that some of the most troubling images of war—and, by extension, the most powerful—have an unedifying provenance. From 1933, the most assiduous recorders of their atrocities were the Nazis—both official documenters and those who witnessed the persecution, and then the extermination, of the Jews and other minorities. The camera, as Susie Linfield writes, was used in a ‘celebration of cruelty’ rather than a condemnation.74 Despite their offensive origins, the ‘trophy’ photographs of the rounding up of Jews in the Polish ghettoes—or, as Jean Amery describes them, ‘the waiting room of death’—have clear evidential value.75 Many Australian newspapers ignored the plight of the Jews. Under the inspired leadership of several dynamic editors—including CS McNulty in 1939 and Brian Penton later in 1941—the Daily Telegraph devoted the most consistent print and pictorial attention to the genocide. This included printing a trophy photograph of a Polish ghetto in 1942, found in the belongings of a German soldier killed on the Eastern Front.
5.11 Warsaw Ghetto. Daily Telegraph, 30 October 1942, p. 3 (News Corporation Australia/National Library of Australia).
It was not only the Nazis who recorded their grim rituals. The haunting image of Sergeant Leonard G Siffleet about to be beheaded with a sword by Yasuno Chikao on 24 October 1943 warrants examination.76 Siffleet’s photograph (and there were a number of different prints) was recovered by US forces from the body of a Japanese major in April 1944. This is the only known surviving image documenting the Japanese beheading of a prisoner. Circulated by UPI, the photograph appeared in both the United Kingdom and United States (and on a full-page spread in Life magazine) but never appeared in Australia at that time.77
Souvenir or trophy photographs have endured, but cultural debates about them have intensified as the methods and objectives of cruelty have been refined by technology. As demonstrated by images from al-Qaeda militants and now Daesh—who celebrate suicide bombings, and the beheading and kidnappings of Westerners—both sides understand that the camera has power, and the availability and portability of digital equipment increases this potential.78 What is new, as Linfield notes, is not just the ease with which the images are transmitted but the relationship between the acts of violence and their documentation. It is difficult to distinguish between the two.79
In August 2014, a five-minute YouTube video showed American journalist James Foley on his knees before a black-robed man, inappropriately dubbed ‘Jihadi John’ by the tabloids, with a knife to Foley’s throat. The end of the video depicted Foley’s decapitated body. Over the following months, video of journalist Steven Sotloff’s execution was also released, and later, footage of the executions of British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, and of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, were posted online.80 The murders trended on Google, Facebook and Twitter. Some of the public sought out the beheadings, while a social media campaign, #ISISMediaBlackout, urged people not to share and spread the graphic images.81
Once, we heatedly debated the ethics of showing images of violence, but now we also need to consider the ethics of viewing and sharing, decisions that once lay with editorial gatekeepers. Some news organisations, including the SMH and the Age, printed the first still of James Foley, and Fairfax’s online news coverage included a link for those who wished to view the footage (with an explicit warning).82 The Telegraph headline, ‘PURE EVIL’, filled the front page, along with the still image of the terrorist with a knife to Foley’s throat minutes before death. ‘The image is confronting,’ Paul Whittaker, the Telegraph’s editor, told Media Watch. ‘But the wickedness of this extremist Islamic group will not be properly understood while media outlets engage in self-censorship. We do not shy away from our obligation to our readers to tell the truth.’83 After receiving a complaint, the Press Council investigated and vindicated Whittaker’s decision, citing public interest.84
There is vociferous debate in the Western media about whether beheading videos should be viewed at all. There are those, like Whittaker, who see the more graphic still images and video as proof of the militants’ barbarity. Some see the restriction of images as censorship. Others regard the footage as too ghastly, or at least counterproductive, to show, describing it as a form of pornography.85 The footage became an effective tool for galvanising support for the United States and its allies to return to Iraq. Prime Minister Tony Abbott responded to Daesh and their grotesquely slick imagery by accusing them of declaring war on the world. In April 2015, Australia deployed the first of 330 additional Australian troops to Iraq to train local forces in the fight against Daesh.
The Daesh footage reveals that, first, while it is more acceptable to show graphic photographs of non-whites, it is nevertheless possible to show images of dead Westerners in Australia.86 Second, news values continue to reflect Western apathy, whereby the suffering of some nationalities receives greater coverage than the suffering of others.87 The Paris attacks in November 2015 were given far greater precedence than the Beirut bombings two days earlier and provoked debates about inequitable coverage and selective grief.
The power of war and conflict images can be contradictory: they can both dehumanise and arouse empathy, be complicit in suffering and provoke action, exploit the vulnerable and argue on victims’ behalf. In an age when technology permits unmediated images of violence, even of Western victims, newspaper organisations have a responsibility to allow their staff photographers to document war and atrocity, and to contextualise these images accurately,88 so that the realities and agonies of war are not avoided or forgotten.
