iraq

Joseph C. Phillips: "Beheading in Iraq": July 6, 2004 [NPR]

Phillips discusses the lynching of Afro-American Zachariah Walker, who in 1911 was pulled from the hospital by a hundred men and burned at the stake for killing a police officer. The crowd stood around the body in obvious delight, posing for a "Kodak moment," as Phillips suggests. Phillips compares this incident to the desecration of bodies in Fallujah and the beheading of Nicholas Berg. He notes how groups often have used violence to shock, frighten and intimidate others different from them.

Of this lynching Gode Davis and James M. Fortier write: "Walker was hurled onto the pyre, his body quickly enveloped in flames. The crowd roared its approval, and those close to the fire hunched forward, according to a newspaper report, 'eagerly watching the look of mingled horror and terror that distorted his blood-smeared face." [...] The following day, the Coatesville Record remarked on the politeness of the crowd: 'Five thousand men, women, and children stood by and watched the proceedings as though it were a ball game or another variety of spectator sport.' Boys had stopped for cold soda afterward at the Coatesville Candy Company to retell the story. Many returned to the site the next day to gather fragments of bone and charred flesh as souvenirs.'"

Camera/Iraq here includes the original picture of Walker that Phillips discusses—a reminder that recent acts of atrocity in the Middle East had striking parallels in our own country several decades ago.
[NPR's The Travis Smiley Show—RealAudio]
[Link to Phillips' essay in print]
["American Lunching," a film by Gode Davis and James M. Fortier]

[War Photography in History]

Lesson Plan: The War in Vietnam—A Story in Photographs
[National Archives]

Another Vietnam: Pictures from the Other Side of the War
[Link]

Vietnam Icons
• South Vietnamese National Police Chief Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong officer, Saigon, 1968
• Nine-year-old Kim Phuc running with napalm burns. By Nick UT, 1972.

Media and War: The Battle for Hearts and Minds
[Link]

Rob Silberman provides valuable background in this short essay on "Photography and War"
"War photography also raises questions about freedom of the press, with government control inevitably at issue. There is always the possibility that censorship by the government and self-censorship by photographers, editors, and publishers, combine to limit what we see about any particular military situation.

The history of the century has been the history of changing versions of the conflict between the government and the press, and changing photographic coverage."
[American Photography: A Century of Images—Photography and War]

Section continues: