"The Spanish Civil War marked the emergence of the professionalized photojournalist, equipped with a Leica 35-mm. film camera to capture the conflict on the ground. The Vietnam War was the first war to be televised, and it made the carnage in conflict zones 'a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment,' Sontag wrote. Now the small screens are our phones.... For Sontag, photographs had a 'deeper bite' than video when it came to documenting war. A single image taken on the ground could endure for generations, like Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War photograph 'The Falling Soldier.' Social-media documentation is less likely to last—it’s ephemeral by design.... As Sontag wrote, 'Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.'... The flood of TikTok videos is perhaps more likely to evoke our bemused awareness.... Yet... traditional news organizations are pulling their journalists to safety. Social media is an imperfect chronicler of wartime. In some cases, it may also be the most reliable source we have."
From "Watching the World’s 'First TikTok War'/Social media’s aesthetic norms are shaping how Ukrainians document the Russian invasion. Is it a new form of citizen war journalism or just an invitation to keep clicking?" by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).
You can see TikTok's Ukraine videos at #ukraine.
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For Sontag, photographs had a 'deeper bite' than video when it came to documenting war
That would be because it's easier to fake up a good propaganda photo, like teh "tiger cage" photo from Vietnam, than it is to fake up a good video.
the longer the video, the hard to fake it.
For a dishonest left wing propagandists like Susan Sontag, losing the ability to lie easily is clearly a problem
I logged into Twitter last night to see everyone freaking out about some Ukrainian nuclear power plant. They feigned worry and outrage, but I also detected relief for having a reason for sweet dopamine-hitting tweets. In some ways, I think that's why this war is so all encompassing: users must have something to care about!
I feel the same way watching Zelensky's videos or blue check Twitter reporting. These guys aren't very different from the propaganda posed in the Hunger Games books or movies. The fight is ancillary to what everyone else can see.
Wait for the Tiktoks of mass graves. That ought to generate a few clicks for influencers.
“Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?”
Susan Sontag
You'll get a lot of comments by people better informed than me, but I have a vague memory that the Capa photo was posed. In any event, the Spanish Civil War was certainly a triumph for left wing propaganda. It was a civil war between fascists with a Catholic conservative fringe and Communists with a liberal and anarchist fringe. There were atrocities committed by both sides, although only the leftists committed atrocities on their own side. FDR and the British establishment (including Churchill) looked upon it as the Iraq/Iran war of its day. They were right, but that's not how the war is remembered......We have the testimony of Hitler that Franco wasn't much of an ally. Petain's France, the USSR under the Molotov pact, and, arguably, even countries like Sweden and the Netherlands provided more material support than Spain....Early in the war, Hitler asked Franco to boot England out of Gibraltar or to allow his troops pass through Spain in order to do so. Franco refused. I'm pretty sure a Stalin front government would have complied with Hitler's wishes.
"Social-media documentation is less likely to last"
Nonsense. The internet is forever. What's different now is the quick and independent confirmation or debunking that can come from outside sources.
Having been exposed to Life magazine's hard cover World War 2 in pictures. Having worked at length with Marine veterans of Viet Nam convinced me that war was/is not static. Lifting a fellow Marine off a punji stick trap is kinetic. Marines that made it ashore in the south pacific were often pinned down by snipers and had to shit themselves in tropical heat or die. Capture that suffering with yer Speed Graphic. How about riding to battle in an APC with a group of dysentery stricken grunts in Desert Storm? Leica/suffering is girlie bullshit.
Paging Alexander Gardner and Tim Sullivan...
From photography to television to empathetic appeal to a handmade tale.
With war photos, the burden shifts to the person making the claim of authenticity. I assume it's all propaganda until it's proven otherwise.
The commons criticism of photographic evidence, especially when presented with no comment or empathetic appeal, is a dearth of context, attribution, and order. It is a handmade tale to steer a consensus through visual ambiguity, thus the transitional convention of multiple, independent sources to increase signal diversity and reduce bias and prejudice.
A friend of mine is an excellent photographer. She will go to social events and take dozens or hundreds of pictures, then carefully review them and publish the ones that make the attendees look their best. She took one of me that captures a strong, handsome, dashing man. I use it for my profile picture on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
You're damn right still photos can lie.
Sontag turned out the most turgid Germanic nonsense about Art. She was the perfect example of those can, do. Those who can't, write long-winded criticism.
As for Capra, he was a bit of a fake, or at least he faked many of his war photos. He was a brave man. But he wasn't above taking short cuts. And having some powerful friends like Hemingway, Gellhorn, Matthews, etc. didn't hurt.
I'm surprised how little of the war has been captured on cellphone and posted on social media. OR maybe its there and there no way to get it distributed on the internet. OR its being censored.
When you have only one frame, you use it to convey maximum information or emotion. When viewers see that frame it sinks in and stays with them.
A multiframe sequence doesn't pack such concentrated content or make such a strong impression. When you watch a series of changing images, no one image stays forcefully with you.
We can wonder, though, if that's a constant human reality or if evolving technologies and increasing familiarity with video could change it.
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