It’s been nearly two months since Tehran erupted in protest. It’s only been a few weeks, however, since the memorial for Sohrab Arabi, a nineteen-year-old Iranian shot during post election protests. He disappeared on June 15 but no one who loved him knew he was dead until July 12th. News outlets around the world broadcast different stories—the 26 days during which Arabi was unaccounted for have made it hard for journalists to accept the government’s claim (a single gunshot to the heart) as straightforward truth and rumors of detainment and torture abound. Yet, even if the details conflict, the images agree: a fresh faced, anticipatory photo of the young Arabi accompanies nearly all news stories. His slim-rimmed black glasses frame glossy eyes that now, in the wake of his death, seem disquieting in their eagerness.

A face like Arabi’s makes Tehran’s situation urgent in a way that no litany of hard facts ever could. Political unrest in Iran has become, for those of us at a distance, a collection of iconic images.

“Despite the Iranian government’s efforts to expel journalists and isolate itself, powerful images and poignant words have made their way to us through cell phones and computers,” said President Obama in his June 23rd press conference. He’d been accused of softness, but, in this briefing, his disapproval of Iran’s post-election conduct was unambiguous. “We’ve seen people of all ages risk everything to insist that their votes are counted and that their voices are heard,” the President continued. “Above all, we’ve seen courageous women stand up to the brutality and threats, and we’ve experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to death on the streets.”

“We’ve seen.” He meant that literally. Those of us watching Youtube, browsing Twitter, and reading the New York Times have seen the pictures. And “the searing image of a woman bleeding” referred to Neda, whose death, recorded on someone’s hand-held, traveled the world via viral video. In the video, Neda falls amidst what looks like a relatively calm protest, her legs tomboyishly splayed, lulling up and down, unsure of themselves. Her hands travel to her face with slow toughness and then collapse as her pupils slide lazily leftward into her sockets. Two men kneel over her, one of them holding his hand over her wound. “This changed everything,” said Robin Wright of Time. “Neda Agha Soltan is the martyr, and her visage is the image, which may resurrect the dreams of so many women and men around the world,” wrote Madeleine M. Kunin in The Huffington Post.

Sources say Neda was 26, studying philosophy, and only marginally involved in politics. Human interest stories about the “real” Neda—the sister, daughter, student—have surfaced, but these are thin and traction-less compared to what we saw. We witnessed a beautiful civilian woman —and she was beautiful, her features hauntingly dark and her limbs almost lyrical in the way they succumbed to lifelessness—die before our eyes. We watched as youth and beauty, those two symbolic epicenters of human hope, were shot through the heart.

Certainly, the video of Neda makes injustice palpable. But why do we so badly want images to equal truth? Haven’t years of propaganda campaigns photo-journalism scandals taught us that to say “we’ve witnessed” after seeing pictures is like saying “we were there” when we were 10,000 miles away?

Photography’s history is rife with deception. Circa 1860, only two short decades after the daguerreotype’s invention, Civil War documentarian Matthew Brady notoriously placed Abraham Lincoln’s head atop the body of Senator John C. Calhoun, manufacturing a full-length portrait he was unable to come by honestly. Cruder rumors that Brady moved bodies across battlefields to better capture the war’s devastation have circulated for a century and a half.

A trail of similar photographic deception winds up through the 19th and 20th centuries and the onslaught of digital technologies has, unsurprisingly, made photo manipulation frighteningly more accessible. Brian Walski, a longtime staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, took now infamous creative liberties. On assignment in Iraq, he shot two striking photos. In one, an Iraqi civilian stands surrounded by other seated civilians, hunched, scared and carrying a child. He looks away from a US guard; the guard’s left hand is outstretched and his right holds an erect gun. In the next photo, the same civilian, now closer and still hunched over his child, looks directly into the guard’s face, but now the guard has relaxed his pose and lowered his arm. Walski digitally merged these two images to make one immemorial photograph that shows the civilian beseechingly gazing up at a guard whose tense, outstretched arm and machine gun ward him off. Once discovered, Walski lost his job.

But these sorts of manipulations are less insidious than what they suggest: images of unrest are commercially viable. Good pictures sell news, and a picture is good if its content is gripping, its composition compelling, and its subject worthy of sympathy. Statements like “Neda has become the human face of the Iranian conflict” suggest that a good picture could even sell war.

In 2005, a Pulitzer-winning photograph of a Baghdad execution stirred up a controversy that had nothing to do with digital manipulation. Instead, the question was how any photographer would be able to get so close to a crime of this magnitude. Bloggers suggested complicity or advanced knowledge—brutal claims, given the fact that three election workers were killed at the hands of militants. According to the Associated Press, the unnamed photographs received a tip-off suggesting a demonstration would occur on Haifa Street the afternoon of the executions. Even if this story is true, its implications are unsettling. Who wanted the Associated Press to see three men die? Were the militants using the Western media to exhibit the reach of their machismo? And could the photographer have done anything other than shoot once it became clear that “the demonstration” was something far worse? Photojournalism can be a sordid business, full of opacities that often the photographer can’t even see through.

To assume that fugitively snapped photographs give us uninhibited glimpses into Iran’s political situation does Iranians a grave disservice. The expectant eyes of Arabi and the tomboy elegance of Neda’s dying body should certainly sear their way into our psyches. But people died before Neda and Arabi became token figures and they would have continued to die regardless of a camera’s presence. Photos don’t tell the whole story, and, while we may not know the whole story for years, using single faces of single victims as rallying cries reduces the nuanced lives of individuals like Neda and Arabi to broad strokes.

On Thursday, July 30th, forty days after Neda Agha Soltan’s death, mourners gathered at her gravesite Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery. Thousands were there, along with hundreds of security forces. Opposition leader Mousavi was forced to leave, according to numerous news outlets, and crowds reportedly chanted, “Our Neda is not dead” and “The regime is dead.”

Neda the symbol once again dominated international media, the video of her death playing alongside new footage of the protests and clashes surrounding her memorial. But Neda the person seemed far away—the human face of conflict no longer recognizably human. Her intimate narrative can’t be understood through photos unleashed over the internet any more than the fate of a whole country can rest upon photojournalism’s best shots.

>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 11:24 am and is filed under Graphic Arts, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.