Robert Capa’s ‘Death of a Republican Soldier’ is one of the 20th century’s defining images. This iconic photograph preserves the moment a soldier, fighting in the Spanish Civil war, falls having seemingly just been shot. Although there remain some doubts over the authenticity of the image, it remains a powerful metaphor for conflict, republicanism and the struggle against fascism. It also takes its place in a pantheon of images that delight in depicting the suffering of others.
Examples of this genre are as rich as they are varied. They range from religious paintings depicting the tortures of saints, to engravings of public executions. Susan Sontag claims: “The appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost as the desire for ones that show bodies naked”. (Sontag 2003:36) The advent of
photo-journalism provided increasingly frequent opportunities with which to inspect ‘the dripping bodies ready for the gaping trenches’. Edmund Burke testified to this insatiable appetite in 1757:
“I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others” “There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity” (Sontag 2003:87)
When Cappa’s striking photograph, first appeared in July 1937 within the pages of Life Magazine, it did so as a left hand page image. Appearing opposite was a full-page advertisement for Vitalis men’s hair cream. At the time of publication, there was a stark contrast in the type of imagery used by editorial and advertising. Today that
distinction has become blurred.
Photographs are generally open to interpretation. They usually provide the viewer with a selection of reference points. Any meaning carried by these images is essentially ‘in the eye of the beholder’. The authority over imagination that photography seemingly possess, is attributable to its unique ability to make the past as certain as the present:
Photography’s relationship of signifieds to signifiers is one of recording, the absence of code reinforces the myth of photographic ‘naturalness’ (the mechanical process is the guarantee of objectivity). (Bathes: 1977)
Although the act of photographic composition involves editing and exclusion, the ‘truth’ of the photograph means that unlike other man-made images, they are permissible as evidence. It is this air of authenticity that is so appealing to the media and other agencies of consumerist manipulation.
An increasingly sophisticated range of techniques have been deployed in order to harness the power of the photograph and to control its meaning. Meaning arises from the interplay of signs, the world we inhabit is not one of ‘facts’ but of signs about facts which we encode and decode ceaselessly (Hawkes 1977:122)
The proliferation of these visual metaphors throughout advertising and entertainment, information and propaganda, has led to dislocation of ‘reality’. The media ensures that there is only representation. Indeed, the clamour for celebrity confirms that people themselves aspire to become images. Modern society has become a ‘society of spectacle’ and ‘infotainment’.
We have reached the point where reality is permeated by the spectacle. The contradictions in political, economic and social life are being eliminated by the theatrical gesture, which is immediately and pleasantly consumable. (Van Toorn 2006:32)
By reducing the images of the next atrocity to mere instances of vulgar representation, the media has neutralized much of their ethical impact with associations of commodification and contrivance. The ‘refexivity’ proposed by Jan Van Toorn, is an attempt to expose the aesthetic manipulation of visual communication. By freeing itself from the strait-jacket of advertising and production relations, design would be free to take a more emancipatory role. As visual journalists with critical ambitions designers would be able to construct a rhetoric where the spectator / reader is invited to participate in this dialogue.
The manipulations of both producer and designer of the message should be kept visible within the message, by referring to accepted values and visual codes. This strategy aims to reveal the conditions of the production relations in the mediated display and enables the message to be experienced as an argument – as an artificial product with an ideological background in the permanent debate on the conditions of social reality (pragmatics). (Van Toorn 2006:33)
Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the pain of others, London, Penguin Books
Bathes, R. (1977) Image, music, text, London, Fontana Press
Van Toorn, J. (2006) Design’s Delight, Amsterdam, 010 Publishers
Hawkes, T. (1977) Structuralism and semiotics, Reprinted 1992, London, Routledge
