I was reading on the Reuters website about the Israeli air strike in Gaza the other day and found this amazing photo of a guy being pulled from the rubble of the building in which Hamas had formerly kept their “Executive Force.”
Obviously the shafts of light make it a great picture, and maybe I shouldn’t be so impressed with such a familiar trope, but there are also a bunch of other things that I think make this picture shout rather than speak: the hands covering the eyes, the partially obscured figured in the background, the way the leg in the pair of khaki cargo pants is seemingly bending in towards the camera, as if to push it out of the way, and most interesting to me is the disembodied hand reaching down from the top border of the picture. It is almost too over the top to be considered sublime, but since it is not art, you can’t really question its intentions, you are forced to bask in the horrible reality of it all.
Or, maybe you do think it’s art and it is over the top. Maybe you think that there is always a fair amount of staging of besieged areas by the groups victimized, artfully exaggerated dioramas of oppression set up for the world to see. Let us show you where the rockets hit, this is where the family was blown up, etc, etc. Or, maybe no it’s not that, but that in place of singular intention the photographer (as well as the web “master” I suppose) has at her disposal a cache of photographs to sift through, picking out the best one for publication, which might not necessarily be the truest to what the scene really looked like. But then again, what does anything look like? Everybody in the photo has a unique perspective just by virtue of their individual physical placement on the scene, to say nothing of the differences in traumatic experience (e.g. the ferociousness of the attack has been impressed upon the man with the bloody forehead more so than the guy with the cargo pants).