Picture This!

An Inuit boy was asked once how he thought the world looked in olden days. The child, who’d never been off the Arctic tundra except via satellite TV, thought an instant and replied, “Everything back then was black and white.”

Images have always been powerful in the human mind, where they were forced to reside in the individual imagination until photography’s development allowed image sharing--and manipulation. Imagine how history might differ if Joseph of Nazareth, Christopher Columbus or Ben Franklin portaged a Polaroid. Would the Thirty Years War or slavery have lasted so long with photo coverage? Would Abraham Lincoln be elected with video of his awkward gait and sound bites confined to one phrase? And did everyone really walk that quickly during the 1920s?

Now, it seems, new generations of real images, including those of the North Korean refugee family trying to flee to a foreign compound in China the other day, are assuming a more potent political power.

Everyone has memorable emotional images--the Hindenburg burning, the Spanish soldier as a bullet strikes, Jackie Kennedy in a blood-stained dress or John-John saluting, Jack Ruby sticking a pistol in Lee Harvey Oswald’s stomach.

Some images also developed political impact and purpose. Police dogs lunging at peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Selma. The naked Vietnamese girl running from napalm or a starving African child with a vulture lurking behind. The World Trade Center crash images were deemed so powerful their replay dwindled within days of the tragedy, The Pentagon and Pennsylvania sites, devoid of searing crash images, linger more in our mental backgrounds. Then, the image of a handcuffed, hooded Taliban member kneeling before U.S. guards ignited intense international debate on U.S. prisoner policies.

The haunting film footage in late 2000 of a Palestinian boy caught in Israeli gunfire and the boy’s death in his father’s arms may actually have shown Palestinian gunfire, heavily edited later, according to a documentary on Germany’s ARD-TV.

The world saw images of last week’s attempted escape by a Korean family into the Japanese consulate in Shenyang, China, and their pigtailed daughter crying in terror as Chinese police moved in. Those images exist only because refugee advocates invited a Japanese cameraman to a reserved hotel room overlooking the compound. Dozens of such escapes have occurred for months. Only now, with preplanned images of a little girl dressed in pink, have calls for action mounted.

Americans long ago grew savvy about images in ads. The unanswered question is: Has our ability to process, question and put split-second political images in a larger context kept pace with the ability of technology and proponents to produce and manipulate them and us? There’s no clear image of that yet.