Iconic images of painful traumatic events play a central role in connecting the present to painful pasts. To what extent do iconic images contribute to cultural memory and to what extent do they facilitate forgetting?
According to Assmann, cultural
memory belongs to a group of people who share the same space or time and is
rooted in a mythical or historical narrative.[1]
It can be contained in objects such as photographs known as “figures of memory”[2]
which represent fixed moments in time that resituate past events in the present
when circulated. The value of these memory objects and iconic images themselves
thus rests in their symbolic function within cultural memory.[3]
This essay will focus on two specific case studies that have often been described
as the icons of war photography and are examples of photojournalism: The
Falling Solider (full and original title: Death of a Loyalist
Militiaman, Cordoba front, September 1936)[4]
by Robert Capa and The Napalm Girl (also known as Accidental Napalm
Attack)[5]
taken in 1972 by Nick Ut. The first
photograph depicts the moment in which a Republican soldier was killed by being
shot in the head during the Spanish Civil War. He is falling backwards onto a
hill, his rifle slipping out of his hand. The focal point of the second image
is a little girl running naked down the road after having suffered napalm burns
on her back and arms during the war in Vietnam. Other Vietnamese children are
in front and behind her as well as American soldiers walking in the background.
Some critics argue that these iconic images facilitate forgetting because they
have come to be defined by ever changing ideology whereas others argue that iconic
images can be incorporated into cultural memory in order to supplement and
support it.
Iconic images contribute most
significantly to cultural memory by becoming symbolic of
a certain historical context to direct public discourse. The Napalm Girl
became synonymous with the anti- war movement of the US against the Vietnam war.
It was not the first atrocity image of the Vietnam War that had been shown to
the public, but it became so iconic because it was circulated during a period
of time in which public attitudes towards the Vietnam war was shifting in a
negative direction. The little Vietnamese girl at the centre of the picture came
to represent the suffering of the
innocent civilians at the hands of the US government. The fact that she was
also a young child and a girl highlighted the extent that she did not belong in
that violent environment. She has stripped off her cloths to escape her napalm
burns but the trauma of the image transcends the typical editorial rules on
nudity through the general consensus that it was signifying the atrocities of
war rather than objectifying the body of a young girl. The nudity has become
secondary to the corporeal violence which has been inflicted on her on behalf
of the US government.[6] Young girls should not be shown stripped
naked in public and these innocent civilians and children should not have been
bombed. The US soldiers in the background are supposed to be looking after the
children in foreign countries rather than strolling casually behind them. The
United States was supposed to be fighting a war for a noble and just cause that
does not involve causing pain to children as they were seen doing and it
highlighted the senseless nature of the Vietnam war. Just as the little girl
has stripped off her clothes, she has stripped away the conventions of her
social life because war does not care for propriety, civility and normalcy in
its savagery. She has come to epitomize humanity’s confrontation with its own
depravity, evidence in her melting flesh. It is this image that contributes to
the cultural memory of the Vietnam war because it has come to define their
generation.
While The Falling Soldier
holds opposing views in regards to its perception on war, it is still an iconic
image that contributes towards cultural memory through its symbolic heritage
from the Spanish Civil War. It also brings back the mythical narrative[7]
of war which shows that iconic images can be interpreted in an abstract as well
as academic and political aware manner. After the Republican defeat, the
country entered a period of repression under Franco and as such the Republicans
were seen as fighting for their own freedom against such a tyrannical force. Capa’s
photograph thus can be interpreted as referring to the notion of an honourable
death of the Republican side.[8]
The soldier in the photograph had been running towards danger down the mountain
with the rifle in his hand when he had been shot, crafting the myth of heroism
and bravery. He has immortalized this moment of supreme sacrifice of the
soldier for the Republican cause because he has paid for it with his own life.
The man in the photograph is falling gracefully, his face shows no sign of pain
or discomfit. Capa does not focus on the brutality and atrocity of war in this
image, being shot was one of the quickest and the least painful ways to die.
Indeed, the background of the green pastures and mountains onto which the
figure is falling give a further ethereal quality to his death and the allure
of heroism of dying for ones cause. The Republicans were not fighting the war
for glory or for themselves but rather they were fighting it for their own
necessity. These iconic photographs therefore contribute largely to cultural
memory by serving as mnemonic triggers to initiate meaning associated with what
has happened in the past and thereby bring it into the present.
These iconic images also have an
aura of ‘timelessness’ that can be reincorporated as part of cultural memory
throughout generations even though they are originally tied to a specific event
and time period. The little girl is running directly towards the viewer, she is
crying out in pain and looking directly at us. The burns themselves are not
visible on her body but it is her pain, more specifically her communicating her
pain that becomes the central feature of the image. As she is running away from
the cause of her burns, she is also projecting her pain forwards, toward the
viewer. She faces the lens, demanding face to face interaction with the viewer.
The photograph projects her pain into our world, linking the past to the
present. She is a figure that therefor represents the horrors of war in general
and not just specifically the war in Vietnam. Her image can be reincorporated
into the political climate of the current generations because she represents
the archetypal suffering and pain of those in the war time environment and because
her expression is one that has been seen universally. In The Falling Soldier
Capa has managed to capture the exact moment that the soldier is dying
known as the ‘about-to-die-moment’ whereby the bullet has just entered his
head. By freezing that sequence of action midway at a particularly memorable
representation moment, the spectators are able to embellish numerous imaginary
schemes on the ‘about to’ moment that is depicted. In this sense they supply a
contingent dimension to visual depiction and it is that dimension which in turn
helps to activate the images third meaning which strikes on a deep and emotional
level for the viewer. The third meaning is seen in the empty space of the sky
that occupies most of the right hand side of the image.
These two iconic images facilitate
connections between images across time and places, making it easier for their
message to be transmitted and become part of cultural memory. They have
acquired universality[9],
invoking and repairing to broad symbolic systems that draw on certain meanings
for the visual representations that are displayed.
Iconic images have become “simplified”[10]
in the public sphere in order for their message to be more easily transferrable
to a larger audience but there is a danger that these simplifications
contribute to forgetting rather than enriching cultural memory. The “natural tendency of social memory is to suppress what is
not meaningful ... and substitute what seems more appropriate or more in
keeping with their particular conception of the world"[11] as was the case with both ‘The Napalm Girl’
and ‘The Falling Soldier’. Some of the American soldiers felt as if they had been
betrayed by the photograph and the public’s categorization as the oppressors.
Their argument is strengthened when one sees how the photograph typically has
been cropped. They have left out the soldiers whose stance suggests that all
could be in danger and a photographer who is just as preoccupied as the
soldiers on the road, suggesting that they had been subjected to danger as
well. The photograph erases any sense of journalistic complicity in the war,
while it also reduces the photo’s reflexivity. We are to reflect on the war,
but not on how it is photographed and that is another form of simplification of
the symbolism of the photograph which is seen to concentrate much more on the
suffering on the victim. Another photo that was taken a few moments later as
the children ran past a group of photographers and film crews and it is even
more damning in this regard because they are also responsible for not helping
the children and merely watching them suffer.[12] There
is also the danger that a dominate analysis of one social group in regards to
one particular interpretation or reading means that public reason has no agency
for challenging other forms of authority, facilitating another form of
forgetting. The limitations of iconic images have come to direct us to the
preferred meaning by the fastest route possible which is not always the most
encompassing one of all the nuances within the iconic photograph. As such these
‘reductions’ in the complexity of the iconic image facilitates forgetting in
one of the most evident manners.
Iconic images also facilitating
forgetting within the public sphere because they have come to be defined by
ideology rather than what is actually depicted in the photographs. There is a
sense that they do not have to depict the truth of an event if they can become
symbolic of the event that they are trying to depict and be explained at the
expanse of social theory. There have been contemporary debates in regards to
the authenticity of ‘The Falling Soldier’. Some critics claim that the
photograph had been staged, that soldier had been posing for the camera and running
a series of drills before it ended in tragedy.[13] Other critics also argue that the identity
of the man and the location in which the photo was taken, a town called
‘Espejos’ was inaccurate and that rather it was the photograph of another man
in another town.[14] The debate on the possible staging of this
image questions its very value because its greatest impact had been that it was
one of the first images shot at the moment of death. According to Sontag, this
reading can be pushed even further. If Capa had staged a fake battle for the
camera then the Republican soldier had been shot dead because he was having ‘a
bit of fun’. This offers a different interpretation from the mere mythical
symbolism of heroism that had been previously explored. These two iconic images
are schematic, lacking details of the images of personal memory. We do not
remember the name of the Vietnamese road where those children in The Napalm
Girl ran screaming from the napalm cloud just as we do not need to know the
exact identity and circumstances that led to the death of the Republican
soldier for it to be iconic. Iconic images therefore facilitate forgetting
because they are valued in terms of their generic symbolism. While it is
able to elicit a deep emotional response, it is does represent the ‘truth’,
leading to the misremembering of the event.
Iconic images influence cultural
memory by contributing to collective memory by mediating the social and
political contradictions that a group of particular people find themselves
facing to such a degree that it allows them to address those common problems. Both
The Falling Soldier and The Napalm Girl became icons of war as a
result of their ability to deal with these issues. Their symbolism can be
reconstructed within cultural memory to be reincorporated throughout the
generations because they convey a universal message that can be used to stand
in for other complex historical events that have happened throughout
contemporary history. While iconic images contributed overall much more
significantly towards cultural memory it can be argued that to some extent they
also facilitated forgetting. They have become reduced in their meaning in order
to appeal to such a large group of people. Many see the image of the ‘The
Napalm Girl’ has the ‘black and white’ relationship between the victim and the
oppressor whereas there are also other perspectives. Iconic images do not
necessarily represent ‘truthfully’ the event that they depict as seen in ‘The
Falling Soldier’, yet they are still symbolically incorporated into cultural
memory.
Bibliography:
Books:
Ed, Roth. J, Maxwell. E, Remembering for the Future: 3
Volume Set: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (New York City: Springer,
2017).
Sontag, Susan, Regarding the
Pain of others, (Picador: New York, 2003).
Zelizer, Barbie, ‘The voice of
the visual in memory’, in Framing public memory, ed. By K. R.
Phillips, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2004), pp. 157-186.
Journals:
Assmann, Jan,
Czaplicka, John ‘Collective memory and cultural identity’, New German
Critique, 65 (1995), 125-133.
Hariman, Robert,
Lucaites, John Lucius, ‘Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic
Photography: The Image of "Accidental Napalm", Critical Studies in
Media Communication, 20 (2003) 35-66.
Ibrahim, Yasmin, ‘Facebook and
the Napalm Girl: Reframing the Iconic as pornographic’ (2017), Sage journals,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117743140
(accessed: 26/12/2019)
Jakob, Brooke Joey,
‘What remains of Abu Ghraib?: digital photography and cultural memory’, Visual
Studies, 31 (2016), 22-33.
Nora, Pierre, ‘Between
Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989),
7-24.
Websites:
Dhaliwal, Ranjit, Robert
Capa: 'The best picture I ever took' - a picture from the past, The
Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/audioslideshow/2013/oct/29/robert-capa-spanish-civil-war (accessed: 26/12/2019)
Meckien, Richard,
Cultural memory: the link between past, present, and future, Institute of
the advanced studies of the University of Sao Paulo (2013)
(accessed: 01/01/2020)
Jajodia. H, Ishaan, The
Mythical Appeal of Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier, Medium
(accessed: 01/01/2020)
[1] Joey
Brooke Jakob, ‘What remains of Abu Ghraib?: digital photography and cultural
memory’, Visual Studies, 31 (2016), 22-33, (p. 24)
[2]
Jan Assmann, John Czaplicka, ‘Collective memory and cultural identity’, New
German Critique, 65 (1995), 125-133, (p. )
[3] Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History:
Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-24 (p. 7).
[4]
Ranjit Dhaliwal, Robert Capa: 'The best picture I ever took' - a picture
from the past, The Guardian,
[5]
Robert Hariman, John Louis Lucaites, ‘Public Identity and Collective Memory in
U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of "Accidental Napalm", Critical
Studies in Media Communication, 20 (2003) 35-66 (p.35).
[6]
Yasmin Ibrahim, ‘Facebook and the Napalm Girl: Reframing the Iconic as
pornographic’ (2017), Sage journals, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117743140
(accessed: 26/12/2019)
[7]
Richard Meckien, Cultural memory: the link between past, present, and future, Institute
of the advanced studies of the University of Sao Paulo (2013)
(accessed: 01/01/2020)
(accessed: 01/01/2020)
[9] Barbie
Zelizer, ‘The voice of the visual in memory’, in Framing public
memory, ed. By K. R. Phillips, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2004),
pp. 157-186 (p. 159).
[10] Ibid,
p. 160.
[11] Ed,
J. Roth, E. Maxwell, Remembering for the Future: 3 Volume Set: The Holocaust
in an Age of Genocide (New York City: Springer, 2017) p. 232.
[12]
Hariman, Lucaites, ‘Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic
Photography’, p.
[13]
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of others, (Picador: New York, 2003), p.
11.
[14]
Ibid, p. 13.
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