Photograph Focuses Unwanted Attention on Realities of War

The photograph, perfectly composed, technically flawless, is among the least pleasant you’ll ever see--if you see it at all.

Photographer Ken Jarecke captured this image of a dead Iraqi soldier, along with hundreds of other war pictures, on a Persian Gulf battlefield. When his press pool returned to Saudi Arabia, Jarecke filed his work through the wire services. But as the images began reaching America, a wire editor took one look at the gruesome picture and, Jarecke says, deemed it too disturbing for American eyes.

The shot was pulled from distribution to newspapers and magazines here. On March 3, however, a British newspaper, the Observer, decided to run it, and the photograph was greeted with outrage.

Now the photograph is about to appear for the first time in the United States, published in the July/August issue of American Photo magazine. Accompanying it is an account by Jarecke of how and why he took the picture, and an impassioned and convincing defense of the photo’s publication.

The photograph, Jarecke says, was one of several images of Iraqi casualties he shot, contrary to the wishes of his military handlers in the Department of Defense press pool.

It was only as he made his way back to Saudi Arabia that he realized the potential power of the horrific image curled up in his film canister.

What the photograph shows is an Iraqi soldier who was, apparently, trying to crawl out of his truck when allied bombers attacked the convoy.

In a flash, the soldier became what the camera captured: a charred monster, with blackened, seemingly melted skin clinging to a smooth black skull. Yet in the eye sockets and gaping mouth of that skull, the ghost of a human life can be discerned.

In the photograph’s defense, Harold Evans, president and publisher of Random House, made an argument, which also originally appeared in the Observer, “for realism, not for pacifism.”

Evans believes the Gulf War was a just war. But to be just, a war must be sanctioned by people who understand exactly what the word war means, he said: “No action can be moral if we close our eyes to its consequences. Here, in charred flesh and grinning skull, was the price of patriotism.”

Perhaps even more disturbing to Evans than the photograph itself was the reaction of the Observer readers who believed it should not have been shown.

“They suggest,” he wrote, “that even now, at the end of the bloodiest century the world has known, even now after the trenches, and Hiroshima, and My Lai, popular culture is still largely imbued with a romantic conception of war and resents a grimmer reality.

“Perhaps, in a world where evil flourishes and must sometimes be fought, it is necessary to sustain the heroic imagination, but it is also necessary to weigh the price. The disputed photograph did something to redress the elusive euphoria of a high tech war.”

Or, as Jarecke said more simply: “I think people should see this. This is what our smart bombs did. If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it.”

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