By J. J. McCullough
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Long before the current trade spat between Justin Trudeau
and President Trump, a striking photograph seemed to foreshadow a troubled
relationship.
Seated in those two famous chairs in the Oval Office,
Trump and Trudeau are angled toward each other. Trump extends his hand to
Trudeau for a shake; the prime minister glances down at it with a look of deep
apprehension, his own hands folded tightly in his lap. The picture went viral
and was widely used by the press to illustrate the inaugural summit of the
mismatched leaders, the hero of enlightened progressivism meets his most odious
opposite. Buzzfeed did a whole essay on the saltiest Twitter reactions — “Today
we are all Justin Trudeau,” etc.
It was all very dishonest. Video of the Oval Office
encounter shows Trudeau returning Trump’s handshake instantaneously. The
damning photo was surgically extracted from the split second in which the
Trump’s hand extended just before Trudeau’s rose to meet it — a moment present
in every handshake that has ever occurred. The summit itself went quite well.
On June 12, Getty Images photographer John Moore
accompanied the U.S. Border Patrol to the bank of the Rio Grande on the
American side of the American–Mexican border. Eager for a photo that, by his
own admission, “conveyed the emotional impact of family separations” now dominating
America’s immigration debate, he snapped a photograph of a Honduran toddler
crying as her out-of-frame migrant mother was patted down by border agents. As
the Washington Post would summarize
in their recount of Moore’s adventure, “the girl’s despair was so complete in
those few seconds,” and the photo accordingly caught fire around the world.
Yet the image of “those few seconds” did not depict what
many seemed eager to assume it did: a child stranded as her mother was carted
away by jack-booted thugs. Subsequent reporting revealed that mother and
daughter, though detained in Texas, remain very much united.
Even if the truth of the toddler’s situation had been
known from the start, I’m not convinced the media storyline would have
differed. As Time put it in
justifying their decision to run an image of the crying girl on their latest
cover, Moore’s photo was a “symbol” that was useful to them in its own right,
just as the Trudeau photo was useful to an earlier gaggle of journalists. Time confirmed what’s been long known:
For both producers and consumers, news photographs today often function more as
editorial illustration than factual documentation.
That photo of President Trump dumping an entire box of
fish food into the Japanese koi pond was useful to many as an illustration of
the president’s boorishness simply because he looked like a boor doing it. The
photo of a hunched Angela Merkel glowering at Trump over the G-7 conference
table was a powerful representation of the so-called G-6-against-1 divide. The
decision of Talking Points Memo to
run a photo of Laura Ingraham, taken during the 2016 Republican National
Convention, in something resembling a Nazi salute to accompany coverage of her
recent “summer camps” comment (about holding facilities) reflected how the TPM
readership perceives Ingraham.
None of these photos were honest; all were either taken
or presented out of context to maximize their editorial impact. The visuals
didn’t report, they offered commentary. They provided politicized art, not
neutral data.
It’s easy to blame social media and political
polarization for using deceptive photographs to make editorial statements more
common and pernicious, but I fear the roots may be culturally deeper.
As an artist myself, I often worry about the declining
public appreciation for the use of traditional illustration in journalism and
commentary. Most legacy news outlets still occasionally commission talented
painters, cartoonists, caricaturists, graphic designers, and visual artists of
other sorts to supplement articles with compelling artwork emphasizing the
author’s agenda. But how much of this labor is breezed past as superfluous
decoration and quickly forgotten?
On June 22, the Washington
Post ran a fine illustration by John W. Tomac accompanying a column on the
migrant crisis. It depicts tiny hands clutching a chain-link fence as President
Trump’s ominous shadow looms over. For those inclined toward a particular
interpretation of the border situation, Tomac’s drawing was every bit as
powerful as the crying girl photo, and frankly, more ethical in its creativity.
Yet did you see anyone share it? When’s the last time you’ve seen any
illustration go viral?
Our collective bias for the cheap literalism of
photography does not reflect well on the imagination of our age. We have become
a people increasingly illiterate about the necessary role of art in political
conversation. Instead of a well-crafted drawing that uses stylization and
metaphor to summarize a situation, we demand bluntly affecting photographs of
emoting humans and allow ourselves to be manipulated by their dishonesties and
limitations.
The new cover of Time
surely represents a nadir of this trend. Only rarely these days does the
magazine run the richly illustrated covers it was once known for. Today, we are
given a crude collage of two unrelated photographs — a standing Trump and the
crying toddler — in an awkward attempt to visually encapsulate the national
mood stirred by the president’s approach to immigration. What they have
actually produced is scandal for themselves, the further politicization of a
family’s private plight, the spread of misinformation, and the degradation of
the media’s reputation at a time when it has never been lower.
Next time, just get someone to draw something.
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