The Taste for Taboo
NOTE: This article
contains links to images that many will find distasteful.
By Charles
Paul Freund
(1,427 words; posted
Saturday, Oct. 18)
At the height of the pop
misery following Princess Diana's death, one of America's eminent historians
appeared on a PBS panel to discuss the meaning of it all. Asked if the intense
grief would have any lasting results, she suggested that it might affect the
public approach to celebrity and predicted that the paparazzi accident
photos then known to exist would "never see the light of day." She'd barely
finished her prediction when the other panel members broke in. Those pictures
had already been published, they noted glumly: The German tabloid
Bild had printed them that morning. (If you want to see the crash photo
that appeared in Bild , click here and scroll down.)
The printing of such a photo
was news in its own right. Because Diana allegedly was hounded to her death by
photographers, displaying or even looking at pictures of this kind was
interpreted by commentators as venal: an assault on Diana's memory, if not an
endorsement of the crime. But tabloids like Bild are an old media model
now; the Internet soon kicked in with even more pictures, overwhelming the new
photomoralism. (For a sampling of distasteful Internet offerings, click .)
The Diana pictorial taboo and
its underlying moralism turned out to be remarkably evanescent, and a secondary
morality tale has arisen to explain why: It's the Internet's fault. The new
technology, according to this view, is a tool of cheap voyeurism, capable of
smashing public decency with unprecedented speed and efficiency. But even if
one assumes a degree of voyeurism in the Diana case, the charge misses the
point. Such imagery has long been a tool of popular grief in American
culture.
The fact is that the
very intensity of the reaction to Diana's death made the viewing of such photos
more likely, not less so. Photography's relationship with grief is an intimate
one. In the case of Diana, that relationship seems to have played itself out in
familiar ways: People sought out photos of her in death--including spurious
ones--because she was important to them.
We have always found ways--excuses, if you like--to look at
documentary images of violence and death. Whatever our level of
acknowledgment--tabloid exploitation or elite refinement--we categorize such
images intellectually and emotionally, transforming appalling scenes into
objects of sentiment, pieces of evidence, and even works of art. Indeed, the
cathartic opportunities presented by such images, whether sentimental or
aesthetic, have a long history of overwhelming any questions of documentary
value.
At the high end of culture,
death imagery commonly becomes art, especially in the case of war photography.
Generations have pondered Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan's justly
famous photos of the dead at Gettysburg. The battle ended, these men lie
hauntingly in fields of stillness, a "harvest of death," in Gardner's own
phrase. (Click to see A Harvest .) Yet students of these photos noticed
some time ago that the same corpses seem to show up in different places on the
battlefield, and they concluded that the photographer had "arranged" the dead
in order to achieve pleasing tableaux.
One of the most famous of all
photographs is Robert Capa's 1936 Moment of Death , taken during the
Spanish Civil War. (Click to see Moment .) It presents a Republican
soldier as he is shot, capturing what usually is interpreted as an instant of
noble sacrifice. In his 1975 book, The First Casualty , Phillip Knightley
examines this picture and its history at length. Paying homage to the great war
photographer's courage and talent, he nonetheless notes the conflicting stories
of the photo's origins, Capa's own silence about the image in his writings, and
other writers' questions. Knightley carefully concludes only that the
photograph "turns out not to be the clear and simple statement of fact that it
otherwise appears." Yet, assume that this famous still was not portraying an
act of slaughter: Would it be a relief or a disappointment? People see what
they want in pictures. Even in pictures of death.
At the level of mass
information, we readily grant ourselves permission to look at such images.
Terrible scenes of massacres, bombings, and the like are displayed almost
daily. (rotten dot com
provides constant updates on such atrocities.) To the degree that we regard
them as goads to compassion and involvement (as in Bosnia or the Middle East),
showing them is a purported moral good. But it is easy to take this idea of
death imagery as important evidence and to expand it into an excuse that
legitimizes the sort of voyeurism we have just seen in the Diana case.
That is just what has
happened with a number of shocking images involving famous and beloved persons.
The view of Robert Kennedy lying in a pool of his own blood has been reproduced
regularly for almost 30 years with minimal objection or concern about his
family's feelings. It is regarded as a valid news image, but what does it
really tell us?
Worse, autopsy photographs of
John F. Kennedy have been published in many books, including some that have
been best sellers. (If you really want to see the so-called "death stare,"
click .) The conceit, of course, is that careful scrutiny of these images may
reveal something important about JFK's assassination. For that matter, the
dreadful Frame 313 of the Zapruder film with its cranial explosion may be one
of the most-reproduced images in recent decades.
There is by now a whole
gallery of such images, many of them reproduced to illustrate conspiracy
narratives. Internet sites featuring Diana pictures frequently link to Diana
conspiracy sites. For some, Diana's pictures are also "evidence" of a deeper
plot. Even a Marilyn Monroe autopsy picture has been published under the same
guise. (Those willing to confront a startlingly changed Marilyn can click .)
People find the excuse they need to see a photo. Even the wrong excuse.
It's easy to interpret this as popular depravity, but the
matter is not so simple. Autopsy pictures, common enough on the Internet, are
not a popular genre; nor are the death photos of just any famous people.
Crime-scene photos of Nicole Brown Simpson, notorious as her death was, caused
little stir. The death images that have received the greatest attention have
something important in common: All of them are of people who have been subject
to popular hagiography, people who are the public's most beloved figures. The
biggest-selling American tabloid of all time was the National Enquirer
issue that published pictures of a dead Elvis. Now we have Diana.
The emotional relationship
between grief and photography dates to the very birth of the camera in the
Victorian period. Americans of the last century surrounded themselves with
photographs of dead family members posed in their coffins, a practice so
widespread as to be an important source of income for photographers. Such
photos--compiled in Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip and
elsewhere--now appear macabre. (If you want to see one, click .) But we are
looking at them with detachment, the emotionally "cool" state that Americans
developed after World War I.
American Victorians weren't
cool: They subscribed to a veritable cult of grief. "No home ever reaches its
highest blessedness and sweetness of love and its richest fullness of joy till
sorrow enters its life in some way," wrote one minister quite typically in an
1882 family advice manual.
Their attitude applied to
beloved public figures as well as to family members--which is precisely why
death photographs of Abraham Lincoln were forbidden in the wake of his murder.
Secretary of State Edwin Stanton, apparently concerned that a trade in such
images would develop, refused to allow any to be taken. Given the intensity of
the Lincoln hysteria, Stanton surely was right.
The proof is that, over the
years, several Lincoln "death portraits" surfaced after all. They are, of
course, all spurious. One can see four of them in Twenty Days , by
Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. (You can see an enlargement
of the two images below by clicking .) These images have various origins, and
it is unclear whether they were posed, misrepresented, or innocently
misidentified. But the result is the same in any event: At some point, they
were accepted as authentic by people who esteemed the dead president, and they
were treasured as such.
People find the value they
seek in an image. Even the wrong image. That may be a pseudo-Diana in the
notorious Internet picture, but there's nothing new about such spurious images
and nothing false about the emotions that have led so many people to look at
them.
