What’s in a picture is a question asked again and again, particularly since the 19th century advent of photography. When pictures were drawings or paintings, the composition, emotion and feeling with which the viewer was left could be attributed to the image’s creator. An art image bears less responsibility for truth. Viewers of photographs rarely stop to consider that the photographer, too, chose subject matter, moment, lighting and angle, thereby creating an instant and profoundly influencing our response.
War photography is especially susceptible to coercive interpretation. We remember the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s amazing Disasters of War, the series of 82 prints he created between 1810 and 1820. Although he didn’t make known his intention when creating the plates—he was, after all, a Court painter and couldn’t have risked making his abhorrence of injustice known—art historians view them as a visual protest against a series of violent conflicts. The series wasn’t published until 1863, 35 years after Goya’s death. It is likely that only then was it considered politically safe to do so.
With the invention of photography, war photographers joined journalists on the front lines. We have magnificent examples of combat photography that tells us more than any text about the nature of war. Some photographers have inadvertently photographed their own deaths, a single negative remaining as evidence of a life cut short. Without the photographic images from the Spanish Civil War, the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, or Latin America’s Dirty Wars of the 1970s and ‘80s, it is doubtless we would know as much as we do about those tragic moments in our history. Toward the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, great human migrations joined war as scenes of mass misery.
War isn’t the only scenario where photography can fill in the vast spaces between what happened and our ability to comprehend what happened. The photo that appears at the beginning of this piece was taken in the rubble left after the April 24th 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza, an eight-story building in Savar, Bangladesh where a number of sweatshops housed clothing workers in abysmally unsafe working conditions. The day before that tragedy, the building had briefly been evacuated when cracks were noticed in its walls. But people were forced back to work; the unceasing fever of profit had to be maintained.
Industrial disasters are all too common in a world greedy for profit. The 1984 toxic gas escape from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India killed almost 4,000 and affected the health of many more. In 1942, an explosion destroyed Benxihu Colliery in Liaoning, China, killing 1,549 laborers. Mines throughout the world have frequently been the sites of disasters. I could go on and on but won’t. The point is, each “accident” provokes a renewed effort to keep such travesties from happening again. In some cases factory owners or the architects of badly constructed buildings may suffer some form of punishment. Or a multi-billion-dollar company may have to pay a fine. Quickly the requirements of industry prevent real change.
One thousand one hundred and thirty garment workers died at the Rana Plaza. Two thousand five hundred people were injured, many of them severely. The photograph that heads this piece has circled the world. It shows two Rana Plaza workers dead in the rubble, a man and a woman. They are trapped in a mass of splintered wood, bits of rebar and brick. The man’s eyes are closed. He seems to be embracing the woman, whose face is hidden. The vibrant colors of her sari—pinks and oranges streaked with a watery blue—speak loudly of life. The aspect of the image that caused such international impact is the gesture of protection or comfort the man seems to be offering the woman in that last moment of their lives.
Yet we really have no idea if this man and women were a couple or knew one another only on the assembly line. We do not know if the gesture was intentional or their bodies were thrown into position by the violence of the building’s collapse, if the woman’s right arm which seems to be reaching for her fellow worker’s face was reaching for help or might even have been trying to push him away. We read into this image what we as viewers need. Perhaps the part of this photograph that reveals most truthfully what happened at the Rana Plaza is the twisted mass of a bolt of pale blue fabric with large black polka dots that occupies the left one-fourth of the image. There is no mistaking this metaphor for sweatshops everywhere: putting profit above human wellbeing no matter the cost.
And yet I would wager a guess that few people even look at that mass of twisted fabric. In our version of the news, one human interest story has always had more public impact than a thousand or a million dead; such is the nature of our conditioned take on what happens in the world, especially when it happens far from us and to people we have been taught to view as sub-human. Curiously, this is also our response here at home, and in situations in which it’s more difficult to prove the culpability of individuals. Take the reporting of the recent tragedy caused when a monster tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma. The image of one small dog emerging from a devastated house into his owner’s arms evokes more intensity of feeling than the wider angles of a leveled community. In the photograph at the beginning of this piece, the man and woman frozen in death make the victims of the Rana Plaza real to us. At least for a few brief moments.
I am moved and enraged by this image. Whatever the truth of its subjects last moments, they are dead because of greed. And I know that we in the U.S. feed that greed. Each time we buy a piece of clothing at Wall Mart or GAP, Banana Republic or Ralph Lauren or dozens of other popular outlets, chances are good that it was sewn by someone in Ciudad Juárez or Manila, Taiwan or Savar. Someone who earns pennies of what we pay for the final product and are more likely than we want to admit to die on the job. Death doesn’t only come when a building collapses. It can result from poverty, poisonous working conditions, or other work-related health problems.
I am always wary about such images. The embedded war correspondents—photographers as well as reporters—who risked their lives in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ushered in a new era of journalistic deceit. As individuals, they put themselves at risk, and many were injured or died. But as a class of correspondent they put an end to so-called journalistic impartiality. The very fact of being embedded with a nation’s troops implies they were seriously curtailed as to what they could see, photograph, and report. They were no longer charged with reporting on a war. They were producing propaganda for one side in that war. The embedded journalist has now become a largely unquestioned fact of war.
We must train ourselves to look beneath the surfaces of all these “pictures worth a thousand words.” If we do, we will see much that cannot be faked and also some details we may question. Then there are photographs that, whatever the backstory, project a truth that cannot be argued away. Despite its possibly conflicting interpretations, the one of the man and woman in the rubble of the Rana Plaza is one of these.
I leave you with the poem it inspired in me:
Blood Trail
An instant’s pressure from a photographer’s finger
shows us the man’s head bowed in death,
eyes closed
and outstretched arms
embracing the woman beside him,
also dead.
We long to inhabit the moment
before those deaths.
The bunched knot of the woman’s sari
is a pink and orange bloom
weeping through broken brick
and splintered wood.
Bits of twisted rebar,
a devastated beam
wrapped in a bolt of cloth
gone mad.
That beam may have been the weapon
that pinned her to this rubble
of collapse.
More than a thousand were crushed
when the factory fell.
Our nightly news fills with rage
at easy building codes,
the owner who didn’t care,
a country so far away
its pain never reaches us.
Always somewhere else.
I am afraid
to look at the label
on my latest purchase,
a breezy summer blouse
from Gap or Ralph Lauren,
afraid it will say Made in Bangladesh
or let loose a blood trail
no Tide Ultra can remove.
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