f/16 And Be There

Michael Hedges August 23, 2016 - Follow on Twitter

Images are evermore important to the media sphere. About 100 million are posted to Instagram each day. The vast majority are personal, not newsworthy except for the volume. Across all platforms images are the big attention-getter, shaping news editors decisions proportionally. Images are emotion-laden, including, sometimes, compassion.

Photojournalist Nick Ut will be retiring from the Associated Press next March, he said. His family doesn’t believe it. “Some chefs come home and don’t want to cook,” said his son, Michael Huynh, to the Los Angeles Times (August 21). “He never tires of it. It’s not work to him. It’s like breathing. How do you wrap up a career like that?”

Nick Ut, given name Huynh Cong Ut, won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography. He had been on a roadway near a North Vietnamese village in June of 1972 after a South Vietnamese aircraft dropped its lethal canister. Villager children tried to escape. He took the black and white photo. In the center was 9 year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc naked, running, screaming, soaked in napalm, skin burning.

"I took almost a roll of Tri-x film of her then I saw her skin coming off and I stopped taking pictures," he told Vanity Fair (April 3, 2015). "I didn't want her to die. I wanted to help her. I put my cameras down on the road. We poured water over this young girl. Her name was Kim Phuc. She kept yelling 'nóng quá' (Too hot). We were all in shock.”

The AP titled the photo “The Terror of War” though it became known as “Napalm Girl” around the world. “I’m wondering if that was fixed,” said US President Richard Nixon to an aide days after the photo’s publication, doubting its authenticity, revealed in transcripts of secret recordings decades later. President Nixon was re-elected in a landslide election over a pacifist candidate later that year and announced withdrawal of US troops before his 1973 second inauguration. He would resign from office 15 months later, facing certain impeachment after revelations from other secret office recordings. The South Vietnamese capital Saigon fell in April 1975, ending the war in Vietnam.

This past week the image of 5 year old Omran Daqneesh sitting stunned and bloodied in an ambulance after rescue from a bombing raid on Aleppo, Syria stopped hearts across the planet. The video clip was recorded by Al-Jazeera photojournalist Mahmoud Raslan and released by Aleppo Media Center, widely shared on social media. Russian and Chinese officials - and affiliated trolls - quickly dismissed the images as Western propaganda threatening the Syrian regime.

Images of children and their terror in war evoke - among some - an anguish of powerlessness, frailty, failure. The lifeless body of 3 year old Syrian Kurd refugee Aylan Kurdi photographed by Dogan News Agency photojournalist Nilufer Demir just a year ago also shook those with a remaining capacity for compassion. "I didn't think it would bring this much attention when I was taking the photograph,” she said to CNN Türk (September 3, 2015).

The Syrian regimes war to remain in power rages on. There will be more images. Many.