Elusive and Illusionary

Wednesday morning, scanning the newspaper in search of information that might begin to restore a shattered equilibrium, I was stopped in my tracks by a photograph. The picture showed a solitary woman, mummified in ash, frozen in mid-stride.

Her mouth is open, more in stunned exhaustion than in any apparent effort to speak. Her eyes instead do the job usually assumed by language, imploring us straight through the reciprocal eye of a camera lens. A yearning open hand is raised in our direction.

This haunting photograph, taken by Stan Honda for Agence France-Presse, does what all great photojournalism does: It offers the most direct visual connection to an event, short of witnessing it with your own eyes. In the process, the chaotic, ephemeral flow of undifferentiated experience is crystallized.

Honda’s remarkable picture gives the nearly inconceivable magnitude of Tuesday’s terrorist horror the eloquent gravity of a singular face. Her anonymous, ghostly figure moves like a human shadow through an indeterminate interior space. The scene is shrouded in a bitter yellow hue, at once radiant and toxic, which is apparently caused by artificial light that’s been fractured, filtered and dispersed through smoke and drifting ash. The woman, staggered but unbroken, looks somehow ancient, as if a relic out of time, yet simultaneously so inescapably of this surreal moment as to be its avatar.

Is this a picture that will come to be an iconic representation of the ghastly episode that has so grimly ushered in the 21st century? An icon is more than just a famous picture; it’s the pictorial embodiment of shared belief. That’s what Charles Porter IV’s photograph of a baby cradled by a fireman became for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. And, a quarter-century before, what Nick Ut’s photograph of a naked, screaming, fleeing 9-year-old girl burned by napalm became for the Vietnam War. And John Filo’s Pieta-like picture of a teenage girl kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller, shot dead by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970, which came to represent the antiwar movement.

Or will another picture assume the uneasy mantle of icon of a terrorist event? Many candidates have flooded the press in the last five days.

And then there is the coursing stream of television images, necessary to fill the continuous 24-hour cycle of modern news. They’re played and replayed in endless repetition, as if seeing them just one more time might finally, somehow, explain an experience that seems beyond rational comprehension.

* An airplane slicing diagonally into a skyscraper’s facade, disappearing for a split-second before a gigantic fireball erupts.

* A man seated below the smoldering World Trade Center, which looms above and behind him, then fleeing from the frame when the black silhouette of a plane suddenly cuts across a blue wedge of sky and slams into the building.

* Towers of steel and glass disintegrating like enormous Roman candles as they collapse to the ground and erase what had been icons of the New York skyline.

These and scores of other extraordinary pictures, both still and moving, have burned into our collective consciousness since Tuesday. But which, if any, will separate from the eye-popping avalanche--a landslide that has not only approached, but long-since surpassed, visual overload--to assume the status of icon? My guess for now is: None.

It will not be a failure of art. Honda’s graceful picture attests to that. Instead, there are good reasons that an iconic photograph has not emerged, reasons that have to do with the volume of images and the way they’ve been delivered. What’s more, the absence of an icon may be doing us an unexpected favor.

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The absence can begin to be understood by looking at special editions rushed out by the three weekly national news magazines. Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report each put a disaster photograph on its cover--as did most every newspaper in the world Wednesday morning--and all three show the same subject: the huge, aerial fireball engulfing the World Trade Center in the moments after 9:03 a.m., when the second hijacked airliner hit the south tower. Identical subject, but the three photographs of the towering inferno show radically different views.

That sharp difference points to the problem of scale and volume. The creation of iconic status is fueled by the mass repetition of one image chosen over all others. New York, unlike Oklahoma City or Kent, Ohio, is the media capital of the world. As the tragedy unfolded over the span of 18 minutes that separated the two crashes, and over the following 47 minutes before the first tower collapsed, who knows how many scores of cameras--professional and amateur alike--were trained on the unbelievable sight?

Relative to our technologically sophisticated world of instant communications, the terrorist assault took an eternity. Untold numbers of images were made while millions of television viewers watched in real time. Dozens of first-rate photographs of exactly the same subject were published almost simultaneously.

Equally important, the absence of such a picture is the result of a disruption in continuity. Typically, words precede the creation of iconic images. A story is told, then a picture forms. What is an icon, after all, but art’s equivalent of the word made flesh.

But the word comes first. Icons illustrate existing faith and doctrine, which is often inchoate until the picture comes along and suddenly sorts out the disarray. Then, a gathering critical mass of people sees the image and collectively knows, “That’s it!”

Mathew Brady’s famous photographs of the Civil War were published months (and sometimes years) after they were taken. Publication of Sam Shere’s classic 1937 picture of the Hindenburg exploding above Lakehurst, N.J., followed breathless radio accounts. The 1945 image by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal showing Marines raising the American flag at Iwo Jima--perhaps the most famous photojournalistic icon of all--emerged later in the public consciousness, through posters and newspaper accounts promoting a drive for war bonds.

Like the Vietnam-related images by Ut and Filo, these photographs filled in the missing picture for stories that were already being told. Perhaps that remains possible here, since inchoate feeling still characterizes so much of this ongoing event. But there’s a hitch: In the terrorist assault last week, the typical sequence was reversed.

Pictures preceded language. The stories were being told simultaneously with the arrival of the image flood--and in many cases only by the pictures themselves. We stared at them in an inescapable condition of disbelief, as language sputtered and words struggled to keep up.

Amid the rapidly mounting rubble of agonizing pictures, words repeatedly seemed to fail. We all became a bit like that ash-covered woman shrouded in an otherworldly, fractured light--mouth agape, eyes bleary and arms flailing in the direction of the camera’s lens, relentless and ubiquitous.

And, for now at least, that might not be such a bad thing. For icons also simplify. They’re a visual form of cliche. The story that erupted last week is complex, and established doctrines need reexamination and revision. It may just be too soon for icons yet.