Franklin: Images of America’s Wars

Bruce Franklin discusses in his article that after the War in Vietnam, the power of pictures had become very clear, and with that came the need to control the production and releasing of images. This sort of censoring by the federal government was strictly observed in the Gulf War for which there are very few images. Thus, as discussed in lecture, television news stations began to incorporate computer images and “talking heads” into their reports to fill the gap left by all the missing images. In the Wells reading on “Bearing Witness,” a question is raised about the role of photographs “taken with cheap digital cameras and on mobile phones.” (pg. 91) Today, images like these have come to play a similar role to that of the computer images and “talking heads” in the news; they are used when there are no professional photographs, and have even developed their own merit in their “rawness and immediacy.” I would argue that this phenomenon extends beyond the practice of photography and is perhaps most prominently seen in the use of social media. News stations have come to embrace social media like Facebook and Twitter in their reporting techniques, reading people’s “tweets” about events and sharing posts or encouraging viewers to “like” them on Facebook.