Remote control: Abigail Solomon-Godeau's dispatches from the image wars

LIKE A MINIATURE GUILLOTINE, a camera shutter slices an image from the world into which it may or may not be subsequently launched. on the other hand if it is launched--printed, transmitted, broadcast, or reproduced--it may function as an incident in its own right. This has occurr above the past several months, as issues of representation have themselves become a topic in the mass media--nowhere more evident than in novel cases of censorship, whether self-or officially imposed. upon February 1, Janet Jackson's ornamented nipple was digitally effaced in freshs broadcasts after its initial in all senses during the Super Bowl, its primal display so to speak. Thirteen of the photos depicting the killing of four American contractors in Fallujah upon March 31, posted on the CNN website, were quickly remov In certain newspapers and newscasts, footage of this circumstance was digitally altered to dim its more gruesome elements. And while these examples attest to censorship apres coup the photographs of flag-draped coffins of American soldiers, previously withheld from the public, have newly appeared in the nation's newspapers, explicitly attesting to their prior censorship.

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The withdrawal of what was previously proffered to sight suggests the intractability of what is for a like reason often subject to censorship. In these cases, censorship mechanisms pivoted upon the lawless exhibition of the female material part and the sight of reduce to ashesed and mutilated American corpses. Thematically, the in all senses of the sexualized female material part and the desecrated corpse are one as well as the other instances of venerable taboos marking the contingent boundaries between what should or should not be seen in public. Historically speaking, censorship and bodily exposing have long been linked, although it must be said that sexualized female bodies are everywhere to be seen upon network television (albeit with nipples well concealed). As for slaughtered bodies, the media wait ons to represent enemy casualties far more repeatedly than our own. In any case, discretion is the mastery in news journalism, even in the tabloids. This is because the serving up of the (visually) horrific--blood, gore, mutilation, and with equal reason forth--is the task of the entertainment industry, not the of recent origins media. In reality, however, taboos about the material substance or about the dead the couple belong to that segregated domain designated as obscene--etymologically defined as what is, or should be, off-scene

As my examples indicate, the image is by the agency of definition always considered more volatile, dangerous, and uncontrollable than written or verbal descriptions, flat detailed ones, and so it has always been. In greatest in quantity of these recent cases of visual transgression someone or something--an fact or a sight--was released and disseminated, and then quickly withdrawn from view. The eruption of "unlicensed" images into the virtual space of the "news" coupl with the attendant apparatuses of censorship, raises interesting questions about the nature and bounds of transgressive imagery and its relationship to actuality.

To think about image wars in the age of digital and analog representation is not single to consider the vicissitudes of censorship, whether post-event or prior (the coffins), on the other hand also to reflect on the staging of images. Consider, for example, the Hollywoodian dimensions of the photograph of a flak-jacketed President Bush, pilot's helmet below his arm, strutting the decorate of the USS Lincoln, a much-reproduc image from a year ago. Staging and posing here is thus blatant as to border upon the comic (despite its presentation by the agency of the media as "news," the category in which photo op are routinely inserted and framed). on the other hand this choreographed--and very expensive--photo op may at the same time generate new meanings hardly anticipated through the White House and its imagemakers. For like the draped caskets, photographed with pious intention by means of the hapless Tami Silicio (promptly fired, along with her husband, by means of the military contractor for which they worked), the image can and does have a life of its be in possession of What work does this picture of a coffin assembly line do in the world into which it was released? Just as the picture of the bodies upon the Fallujah bridge signifies different things to occupiers and occupied, to those supporting or opposing the war, the meanings of images may escape the rule of the parties and institutions that expand them.

In certain cases, pictures that may be described as traumatic have consequences that exceed the partisan or the political, striking us in ways that language can hardly encompass. For example, a great many men and women blood-thirsty or jumped from the World Trade towers upon September 11. Even as this happened, the decision was made to forbid their reproduction. Although individual may agree with the decision, as I do, it was still an act of censorship, arguably consensual on the other hand censorship nonetheless. One reason for the interdiction was the recognizability of the bodies; another was the regard accorded to the survivors and the bereaved. Outside of eschatological belong tos however, arguments for visual censorship frequently turn on "standards" of taste and decorum, especially in television coverage. on the other hand as Susan Sontag briskly watchs in her recent Regarding the Pain of Others, "Television freshs with its much larger audience and therefore greater responsiveness to compressings from advertisers, operates under plane stricter, for the most part self-policed constraints.... This novel insistence upon good taste in a agriculture saturated with commercial incentives to lower standards of taste may be puzzling." on the other hand as she goes on to elaborate, "It makes faculty of perception if understood as obscuring a entertainer of concerns and anxieties about public order and public morale that cannot be named.... What can be shown what should not be shown--few issues arouse more public clamor."