White Space

As I said in my last post, this is an iconic image of war - particularly of the Iraq War. And I defintely think it was a powerful piece of visual rhetoric back in the mid 2000's. What I didn't get into was the elements of rhetoric this image uses to convey its message. Feelin a little rusty, but here goes.

The flags draped over the coffins certainly is an iconic image. It represents our country, it represents a fallen soldier. In that way I suppose this is a paradigm. But there is also an enthymeme here, which is that we send over to Iraq our troops and equipment in this cargo plane and they come back to us like this, in coffins. The pathos is pretty clear - my first emotion is sadness, then regret, then anger.

But then I notice the spectacle of it. I see the people at the top of the photo in poses that seem altogether too casual. Who knows. Maybe it's just regret or reverence. In any case, the coldness of the temporary steel tomb probably doesn't help this feeling I get of irony. We send our people, our money and this is what we get in return. They give their lives, forsake their families and this is what they get in return.

Photography is a tricky thing to understand, because you have to be there in the moment and many times you must take what you can get at that very moment. Obviously, the photographer here did not arrange the coffins just so, nor did you likely ask the people to stand as they are. He didn't pick the harsh light at the end of the tunnel so to speak, but he is probably using a flash in the foreground of the picture. So his composition must be thought of in those terms. He certainly has plenty of constraints at work. But that also seems to make the message more authentic. Photography has a sort of ethos that some other forms of visual rhetoric do not.

Paying attention to any and all of the visual elements that something like a photograph represents also lets you emphasize things using those visual "tricks" like lighting, color, focus, etc. It tells you what is important in the photo, how your eye should travel can even be aesthetically pleasing. Visuals are also a lot quicker to absorb. They don't "overburden readers" as the article I analyzed says. And they can even be aesthetic. Even this photo, with its vivid colors could be interpreted as beautiful in the same way that Cormac McCarthy's description of a human being being murdered can be strangely poetic.

The last thing I wanted to point out was the light at the end of the tunnel effect this photo gives. It almost is reassuring, perhaps to those with religious beliefs that include bright, white lights. But it also sort of links the US with that white light, as if their arrival on US soil is a sort of reinforcement of the idea that WE are good and THEY (over there in the Middle East) are bad. In a way it also gives confirmation to the war. Perhaps that's not something that was intended, but if you stare at it long enough I think it starts to make sense.