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Icons of War and Terror

This book explores the ideas of key thinkers and media practitioners who have exam-
ined images and icons of war and terror.
Icons of War and Terror explores theories of iconic images of war and terror, not as
received pieties but as challenging uncertainties; in doing so, it engages with both critical
discourse and conventional image-making. The authors draw on these theories to re-
investigate the media/global context of some of the most iconic representations of war
and terror in the international ‘risk society’. Among these photojournalistic images are:

• Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running
burned from a napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972;
• a quintessential ‘ethnic cleansing’ image of massacred Kosovar Albanian villagers
at Račak on 15 January 1999, which finally propelled a hesitant Western alliance
into the first of the ‘new humanitarian wars’;
• Luis Simco’s photograph of marine James Blake Miller, ‘the Marlboro Marine’,
at Fallujah, Iraq, 2004;
• the iconic toppling of the World Trade Center towers in New York by planes on
11 September 2001, and the ‘Falling Man’ icon, one of the most controversial
images of 9/11;
• the image of one of the authors of this book as close-up victim of the 7/7 terrorist
attack on London, which the media quickly labelled iconic.

This book will be of great interest to students of media and war, sociology, communica-
tions studies, cultural studies, terrorism studies and security studies in general.

John Tulloch is Professor of Communications, University of Newcastle, Australia.

He is the author of 18 books in media and television studies, film history and theory,
literary and theatre studies, and the sociology of risk. His books include the widely cited
Risk and Everyday Life (with Deborah Lupton, Routledge, 2003) and monographs on
Doctor Who (1984), A Country Practice (1986) and Trevor Griffiths (2007).

R. Warwick Blood is Professor of Communication, Faculty of Arts and Design, Uni-

versity of Canberra, Australia. Previously, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent
and producer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He has published on risk,
news reporting and portrayal of health issues.
Media, War and Security
Series Editors: Andrew Hoskins, University of Nottingham
and Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Bowling Green State University

This series interrogates and illuminates the mutually shaping relationship between
war and media as transformative of contemporary society, politics and culture.

Global Terrorism and New Media

The post Al-Qaeda generation
Philip Seib and Dana M. Janabek

Radicalisation and the Media

Legitimising violence in the new media
Akil N. Awan, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin

Hollywood and the CIA

Cinema, defense and subversion
Oliver Boyd-Barrett, David Herrera and Jim Baumann

Violence and War in Culture and the Media

Athina Karatzogianni

Military Media Management

Negotiating the ‘front’ line in mediatized war
Sarah Maltby

Icons of War and Terror

Media images in an age of international risk
Edited by John Tulloch and R. Warwick Blood
Icons of War and Terror
Media images in an age of
international risk

John Tulloch and

R. Warwick Blood
First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 John Tulloch and R. Warwick Blood
The right of John Tulloch and R. Warwick Blood to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tulloch, John.
Icons of war and terror : media images in an age of international risk /
John Tulloch and R. Warwick Blood.
p. cm. — (Media, war and security)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. War in mass media. 2. Terrorism in mass media. 3. Violence in mass media.
4. Visual communication—Political aspects. I. Blood, Richard Warwick, 1947–
II. Title.
P96.W35T85 2012
303.6—dc23
2011052094

ISBN13: 978–0–415–69804–7 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–69805–4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–11309–7 (ebk)

Typeset in Baskerville by
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon
Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

1 Guernica: icon of state terror 15

2 Ways of seeing the napalmed girl: icons of agony and beauty 29

3 Two Bangladeshi boys and public culture: iconic or absent? 46

4 ‘The Gulf War did not take place’: smart-weapon icon 62

5 Picturing Kosovo: virtual, new or old war? 81

6 Did 9/11 ‘change everything’? Icons out of a clear blue sky 97

7 Shock doctrine in Iraq: the ‘Marlboro Marine’ and

‘Shock and Awe’ 120

8 Abu Ghraib, regimes of looking and risk: icon,

index and symbol 140

9 Witnessing terrorism in New York and London: trauma icons 165

10 Culture warriors: icons of the colonial, then and now 181

11 Conclusion: walls and borders 199

References 210
Index 217
Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Stuart Allan, Anton Tulloch and Janet Andrew
for their meticulous and creative advice in terms of the book’s stylistic and con-
ceptual presentation, Associate Professor Kerry McCallum and Dr Kate Holland
for their support in completing the text, Dr Sonja Chandler for her help with
references and style, and Janet Andrew for compiling the index. We have been
given ongoing advice and support by the series editors, Professors Andrew Hoskins
and Oliver Boyd-Barrett, who have been important in the final edits of this book,
while Brunel University was generous in providing John Tulloch with six months
research leave to compile the first draft. Our thanks also go to Andrew Humphrys
and Annabelle Harris of Routledge for their ongoing professional support and
advice on all areas of the book’s development.
Excerpts from Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J.L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic
Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy courtesy the University of Chicago
Press.
Excerpts from Schama, S. (2006) The Power of Art [TV programme] BBC, BBC2;
[DVD] courtesy BBC, London.

Members of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Maori communities are advised
that this text contains names and images of deceased people.
 Introduction

Said to be Neda Soltan, fatally wounded in Tehran, on a video posted on YouTube,

June 21, 2009. © AAP

On 23 June 2009, SBS television news in Australia showed an image caught on

a mobile telephone camera, which, the newsreader said, was ‘rapidly becoming
iconic’. It was the death scene of the 27-year-old music student Neda Agha Soltan.
She had been shot in the chest during the Tehran street protests against the report-
edly rigged election results returning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
to power.
The following morning the Canberra Times headed its world news page with
‘Dying Neda icon of Iran unrest’ (24 June 2009: 8). Beneath this headline is the
photo-image of a prostrate young woman, her panicking eyes wide open, looking
2 Introduction
sideways towards the camera. Her arms are sprawled on either side of her ashen
face, while male bystanders lay their hands on her chest, trying to preserve her
failing breath. Inset in this image is the photograph of an attractive young woman
smiling at camera with her head whimsically tilted to the side, her hair-style and
make-up instantly recognizable as ‘Western’. On the same day The Australian news-
paper headlined its front-page piece, ‘Death on video grips world’ (Lyons 2009:
1). Its photograph of Neda is of an entirely different young woman. But again,
her long hair framing the face, without headscarf, signifies ‘Western’. The Sydney
Morning Herald led its world news piece with ‘A martyr emerges from the blood-
shed’ (Erdbrink 2009: 9), in this case accompanied by a photo of Iranian women
lighting candles in memory of Neda Soltan ‘whose death in Tehran last Saturday
has sparked world anger’. We can see a framed photograph of Neda in this ‘shrine
to a martyred victim’, positioned at the apex of the triangle formed by the burning
candles. She is dignified, slightly smiling to camera, and in a head-scarf this time,
as befits this impromptu spiritual memorial.
What we are observing here is the international news media’s part in construct-
ing photojournalism’s icons. Newspapers are aware of their part in this. Indeed,
the same Canberra Times photo of Neda, now carried large on The Australian’s world
page, is anchored by words specifying that this image was taken by her boyfriend
who is also a photojournalist. Part of the accompanying article relies on the gap
the newspaper recognizes between the boyfriend as worldly journalist and Neda
as innocent victim.
The Australian’s John Lyons comments on Iranian people clustering in internet
cafes, comparing their images of state brutality, and especially keen to show them
to Western journalists. ‘What is happening in Iran at the moment is an uprising by
the internet generation’ (Lyons, 2009: 8). The Associated Press/Agence France-
Presse article in the Canberra Times says that ‘Poems, tributes and angry denun-
ciations of Iran’s Government have multiplied online. In some, she is compared
to the lone man standing with shopping bags in front of the column of tanks in
Tiananmen Square’ (Canberra Times 2009: 8).
In this description of icon-making, old media (the foreign journalist) and new
media (local people using the internet) are portrayed conducting together the
democratic process of spreading the news of state terror. Lyons of The Australian
says ‘In this strange civil war, internet cafes have become the command-and-
control centres of the opposition’ (2009). The Canberra Times also describes how
the image of Neda, ‘Angel of Iran’, has been circulating inside Iran via bloggers
and Twitter despite official blocking of websites and jamming of satellite televi-
sion signals.
In their own discussion of the Neda icon, Aleida and Corinna Assmann argue
that these different professional and amateur communication systems are usually
kept separate because the role of journalists is to provide verifiable information for
which they are accountable, whereas social network systems exchange informa-
tion that is unverified opinion (2010). But in the Neda case, the Iranian govern-
ment had blocked foreign news reporting, so the amateur communication system
took over its function.
 Introduction 3
Assmann and Assmann discuss four stages in this process. The first level relied
on an on-the-spot witness, in this case a trained doctor and publisher, who tried
to help the fatally injured Neda and spoke out about the shooting as having truly
happened. At the same time another witness captured her image on a 40-second
video-clip on his mobile phone camera. The second level of the making, multipli-
cation and communicating of the Neda image was that the video-clip, together
with the oral testimony of the witness, was uploaded to the internet where it was
sent around the world by social networking:

The news spread as quickly as it did because many people around the world
were watching the events in Iran closely and minute by minute. Thus, within
hours, the discussion about her death, marked with the hashing #neda, was
among the first on the list of ‘trending topics’ on Twitter.
(Assmann and Assmann 2010: 227)

Thus, as CBS television put it, Neda became a world-wide cyber icon and images
from the amateur video-clip were broadcast on TV channels and printed in news-
papers internationally.
The third level Assmann and Assmann describe is the turn from private and
public communication to political action in Paris:

Stills from the clip were printed out and transferred to placards used during
new protests in Iran and in other countries around the globe. Images of her
death, contrasted with pictures of Neda alive, smiling into the camera, sent a
highly emotional statement to the world, serving a powerful indictment of the
Iranian regime.
(p. 228)

At the fourth level, further videos and photos of local street demonstrators fol-
lowed those of Neda into global observation. ‘In this process of reproducing and
recycling her picture on multiple levels, Neda’s image supports a living memory
that is kept alive’ (p. 228).
Yet Assmann and Assmann note that although ‘this new technology system
offered an alternative of democratic empowerment against censorship’ (p.229), it
also had pitfalls, since in the early stages of constructing her story the urge for pic-
tures led to a search of the internet which turned up another image of a different
woman, Neda Soltani, being downloaded from her Facebook profile. The image
was circulated on the web and taken up by international newspapers (as we noted
ourselves in the Australian press). This had tragic consequences for the second
Neda who felt the need to flee from Iran (Mekhennet 2010).
However, there is another downside in the circulation of the Neda image that
Assmann and Assmann do not mention, which is to do with newspaper profes-
sional ideology. This making of icons is seen as legitimate in newspaper narratives
because of their high valuation of Western democracy and the role of the news
media within it. Neda herself is defined as icon in each newspaper in that self-same
context. Each newspaper finds in Neda’s own name a circulating voice on behalf
4 Introduction
of democracy, even as her personal light is turned off. The Australian, printing a
piece from within the Murdoch stable, The Times, says ‘Soltan, whose first name
means “voice”, has become a martyr for freedom’ (Lyons 2009: 8), while the Sydney
Morning Herald says her ‘first name means “the calling” in Farsi’ (Erdbrink 2009: 9).
This voice, calling powerfully to her own people and to the world via new media,
is contrasted poignantly with the helpless local words of a fatherly old man seen in
the video image bending over her dying body. He is said to be her music teacher,
calling ‘Neda, don’t be afraid . . . Neda stay with me, stay with me’ as blood gushes
from her nose and mouth (Lyons 2009: 8). His lone voice is futile; but her ringing
voice to the world is pictured in contrast to the Iran government’s failing ‘attempt
to suppress details surrounding election protests’ (Canberra Times 2009: 8).
This contrast of the voices of ‘the people’ against ‘the government’ is symbolic at
three levels. First, it is the voice of Western-style democracy; as both in images and
words Neda is constructed as ‘Western’ in spirit. The video clip ‘shows her sinking
backwards to the ground as two men rush to her side. Her long black cloak falls
open to reveal Western jeans and sneakers’ (Lyons 2009: 8).
Second, though, this icon-in-the making is revealed as embedded in a histori-
cal ‘Eastern’ religious consciousness. All three of the newspapers we mentioned
emphasize that Neda’s
bloody imagery could have an important impact on public opinion inside Iran,
where the idea of martyrdom resonates deeply among a populace steeped in
the stories and imagery of Shi’ite Islam, a faith founded on the idea of self-
sacrifice in the cause of justice.
(Canberra Times 2009: 8)
This is why the newspaper headlines mix the terms ‘icon’ and ‘martyr’.
Third, the newspapers contextualized Neda’s ‘voice’ and ‘calling’ via immedi-
ate reference to the reaction of US President Obama. The Australian, for example,
quotes a White House advisor saying that the President ‘has been moved by what
we’ve seen on television . . . particularly so by images of women in Iran, who have
stood up for their right to demonstrate, to speak out and to be heard’ (Lyons 2009:
8). Neda’s image thus enters the symbolic realm of US real-politik, representing
the shift from George W. Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ confrontation with the Iranian state
to Barack Obama’s preferred negotiation. His reported comments at the time of
the shooting were that ‘the last thing’ the West needed was for Iran’s people to see
the election demonstrations as events manipulated by the US. The Australian article
‘Footage of woman’s death gives protestors a martyr’ (24 June 2009: 8), placed just
below their large ‘Western’ photo of Neda, is near another article ‘Obama still
keen to talk to regime – Revolution in Iran’ (p. 8).
But The Australian’s editorial on the same day concludes that ‘Barack Obama is
being overly cautious in responding to Iran’ and draws on one of the neo-liberal
heroes of the Murdoch press to offer him guidance:

Like the protestors mown down in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, Iranian
student Neda Salehi Agha Soltan, 26, has become a powerful symbol . . . The
 Introduction 5
US President wants to avoid being accused of ‘meddling’. As the leader of the
free world, however, he would erode his credibility, and that of the US, if he
remains on the fence between the Iranian regime and protestors whose princi-
pal crime is battling for democracy . . . Ronald Reagan proved how effective a
hardline approach could be in dealing with the former Soviet Union . . . Being
too timid will not advance democracy and peace.
(The Australian, 24 June 2009: 13)

Reflexivity and the making of icons

We have opened our book with the death images of Neda Soltan for two reasons
which are central to our argument throughout the chapters that follow. First, this
imaged event clearly illustrates how the media are active in constructing icons. In
particular, the editorial from Rupert Murdoch’s Australian shows how the making
and reporting of ‘a martyr’ is embedded in icon history (the Tiananmen Square
image), political history (President Reagan) and current politics as defined using
jargon words from Cold War days (‘leader of the free world’). This newspaper wel-
comes current heroes (the Iranian people) into a world ‘battling for democracy’, a
battle which The Australian and The Times have been waging for many years. These
new ‘icons’ and ‘martyrs’ are described in the same term, ‘battling for democracy’,
which the Murdoch press similarly trumpeted in relation to the (now old and pub-
licly discredited) Iraq War. Further, as we will illustrate in chapters that follow, the
Murdoch media narrative about ‘the free world’ and ‘democracy’ will be a haunting
theme of other iconic images we describe. Both in words and images the notion of
‘Western lifestyle’, as invoked graphically by the detail of Neda’s black cloak falling
open to ‘reveal Western jeans and sneakers’, is symptomatically part of a neo-liberal
concatenation of ‘freedom’ with ‘democracy’, and of ‘democracy’ with ‘capitalism’.
Second, the reporting of the circulation of the death images of Neda Soltan
displays a degree of media reflexivity. The newspaper stories have at their heart
the role of the old and (especially in this story) the new media in circulating ideas
of freedom and democracy. In an important sense this story promotes the media
itself. New media, in the hands of ‘the people’ against an oppressive government,
is ‘the story’ itself. It is the underpinning ‘new angle’ of this tragic tale. Through
this new media the ‘voice’ and the ‘calling’ of the dead woman–martyr–icon sup-
posedly offers us all hope from beyond her isolated grave.
Yet this making of an icon in and through the media is only reflexive to a limited
degree. It is reflexive in the ‘news’ content of the story; but not in its own critical
assumptions which are in fact the underlying context of this reflexivity. The ‘free
world’ of The Australian editorial and journalistic narratives about Neda is the self-
same neo-liberal (Reaganite) ‘free world’ which former Australian Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd denounced not long before in February 2009. In a long article enti-
tled ‘The End of Neo-Liberalism’ in The Monthly magazine, he said:

The time has come to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the
past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes. Neo-liberalism,
6 Introduction
and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as
little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy.
(Rudd 2009: 25)

The ‘free world’ of neo-liberalism, which The Australian was still proclaiming in its
editorials, was itself experiencing an acute loss of credibility at the very time that
its editor was warning Obama of the erosion of his credibility. Rudd describes the
current global economic crisis, employment crisis and ensuing social crisis as the
result of the triumphant ideology of ‘neo-liberalism – that particular brand of free-
market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became
the economic orthodoxy of our time’ (p. 20). On the twentieth anniversary of
the fall of the Berlin Wall, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev expressed
similar concerns as Rudd.

Today’s global economic crisis was needed to reveal the organic defects of
the present model of western development that was imposed on the rest of
the world as the only one possible; it also revealed that not only bureaucratic
socialism but also ultra liberal capitalism are in need of profound democratic
reform.
(The Guardian 31 October 2009: 35)

Kevin Rudd notes as evidence of his damning critique of neo-liberalism that ‘even
the great neo-liberal ideological standard-bearer’, the long-serving chairman of
the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, has conceded that his ‘ideology was not
right; it was not working’, and that ‘the “whole intellectual edifice” of modern risk
management had collapsed’ (2009: 22). Yet, The Australian’s notion of ‘freedom’
and ‘democracy’ remains committed to that 30-year-old narrative, which grew
especially powerful in the decade around the collapse of the Soviet Union. Neo-
liberalism is the old economic system within which Murdoch’s Australian newspa-
per was – not at all reflexively – attempting to construct the new iconic image of
Neda Soltan. Rudd is expressing a political–economic point of view, which we will
elaborate theoretically in Chapter 7. The Australian has an opposing ideological
point of view which many people still share. Our point in mentioning reflexivity
here, and throughout the book, is to emphasize both the importance of recogniz-
ing the making of icons and the intellectual and ethical need within a democracy to
be reflexive about that process of making. This means that we need to be reflexive
about our own critical assumptions too.

Reflexivity and becoming an icon

On 7 July 2005, a photo of the first author of this book, John Tulloch, unex-
pectedly became an iconic image. He was photographed being helped away from
the bombed wreckage of a London underground train after the suicide bomber
attacks on London that day. Together with two other 7/7 images – of a bombed
red London bus and of an injured woman wearing a surgical mask – this image
 Introduction 7
was carried by the media around the world. The international media quickly pro-
moted these three images as ‘iconic’, representing the resilience and suffering of
Londoners that day.
Inevitably this personal encounter with iconic images and prevailing Western
discourse on terrorism lends a subjective and reflexive dimension to our discus-
sion. So we, as authors of this book, adopt a different approach to Robert Hariman
and John Lucaites (2007) in their important monograph on iconic images in the
USA. They define their selection of iconic images quantitatively and empirically
(i.e. they select images which have appeared most regularly in collections and com-
pilations of iconic photographs published internationally). Certainly the images
which we have chosen are widely regarded as iconic, and we are sure that readers
will recognize them as such. But the personal, subjective and reflexive approach
we also adopt is not simply experiential, the result of one of us experiencing close-
up, and somewhat powerlessly, the construction, circulation and manipulation of
his image in the world’s media. It is also our way of establishing the wider point
that all constructions of the iconic, among media practitioners, public intellectuals,
or within academia, are in important ways subjective. The making and unmask-
ing of ‘icons’ is always relative to the discursive frames adopted by the people who
select them for remediation. If, as Judith Butler argues, ‘It makes sense to trace the
discursive uses of modernity’, so too does it make sense to trace the discursive uses
of the term ‘iconic’ within it (2010: 109).
So our process of selection is not empiricist, as is the case of Hariman and
Lucaites. Rather we work between two counter-empiricist theories of knowledge –
realist and conventionalist (constructivist). These both emphasize, as Terry Lovell
describes, the role played by our critical assumptions (and ‘theories’) in construct-
ing understandings of the world. For Lovell (and for us):

Modern epistemological realism . . . concedes that knowledge is socially

constructed and that language, even the language of experience, is theory
impregnated. Yet it retains the empiricist insistence that the real world can-
not be reduced to language or to theory, but is independent of both, and
yet knowable . . . Theories develop models of real structures and processes
which lie at a ‘deeper’ level of reality than the phenomena they are used to
explain. The theory explains the phenomenon because the phenomenon and
the ‘deep structures’ are causally connected.
(1980: 17–18)

Our discussion in this Introduction of the iconic image of Neda Soltan in terms
of Kevin Rudd’s (and Rupert Murdoch’s) ‘underlying’ context of neoliberalism is
realist in this sense.
In contrast, as Lovell argues:

The limit position which all conventionalisms more or less approach is

one in which the world is in effect constructed by and in theory. Given
that there is no rational procedure for choosing between theories, relativ-
8 Introduction
ism is the inevitable result. Epistemological relativism does not necessarily
entail a denial that there is a real material world. But if our only access
to it is via a succession of theories which describe it in mutually exclusive
terms, then the concept of an independent reality ceases to have any force
or function.
(p. 15)

Baudrillard’s theory of a ‘virtual’ world where reality has been wrenched free of
empirical grounding and represented only in simulated images (Chapters 4 and 6)
is quite commonly taken to be a postmodernist conventionalism; though we, fol-
lowing William Merrin, think differently (Chapter 4).
Working with these two understandings of knowledge production, this book,
instead of quantifying the iconic empirically, is interested in examining the iconic
theoretically, drawing attention to the qualitative, creative and theoretical making,
remaking and remediation of icons of war and terror.

Ways of seeing icons

Following our approach to the theoretical understanding of iconic images, this
book is based on four principles. They are critical assumptions underlying our
ways of seeing the images we describe here.
The first principle is to explore images of terror and war from the 1970s, when
the Vietnam War produced unusually powerful iconic images, to the present.
Whereas a recent academic focus in cultural studies has been on celebrities, this
book looks the other way, exploring the emphasis on photographic images of
war and terror over the last four decades. This particular choice of subject has a
personal dimension. Observing the reproduction of his own image on numerous
newspaper front pages and on international television in the months and years
after he was seriously injured in the 7/7 terrorist attack, the first author became
curious about the emotional, professional, political and ideational combination of
practices and events that produced iconic images via the media. What made them
iconic? This mix of subjective, professional, political, public-intellectual and aca-
demic identities, which we also will see operating in Simon Schama’s analysis of
iconic images (Chapter 1), provides us with a basic interest in writing this book.
Our second principle raises the issue of ‘objectivity versus reflexivity’. Not only
has it been a commonplace of academic debate in the period since the 1970s, but it
has become a concern within photojournalism also, that there are major problems
associated with claiming to maintain an objective position in analyzing (or pho-
tographing) reality. Of Terry Lovell’s three quite different epistemological posi-
tions – empiricist, critical realist and conventionalist – only an empiricist position
would believe that, provided one’s methodology for gathering, photographing and
interpreting data is scrupulous and appropriate, the objective analysis of reality is
unproblematic. Both the critical realist position, which looks for a ‘deep structure’
beneath the empirical surface of appearances, and the conventionalist (or social
constructivist) position (which in its more radical formulations tends to see ‘reality’
 Introduction 9
as an artefact of theory and language) draw attention to the need to incorporate
the location of the speaker/writer/researcher reflexively as part of the data to be
analysed, as we will do with Schama’s Guernica in Chapter 1. In sociologist Alan
Irwin’s definition of ‘broad’ constructionism, we will point to the discursive forma-
tion of icons in Schama’s TV programme ‘within particular social settings and
contexts’ (Irwin 2001: 176; and Chapter 11).
Third, in long academic careers in communication and media studies we have
noted the emergence and circulation of writers and academics as public intellectu-
als. Since the early 1970s, when film, media and cultural studies were beginning
to flourish, our professional field has also seen a succession of celebrity academics
and a bewildering proliferation of theories attached to them. As phases of aca-
demic debate shifted, so various versions of realist–modernist and constructivist
–postmodernist theories have contended. We want to survey the power of this
work about images, forgetting nothing (hence our early focus on John Berger), but
not uncritically celebrating anything. In other words, we want to display ‘older’
intellectual fashions (such as Berger) with the same space and intensity as ‘newer’
ones (like Baudrillard and Hoskins). Thus, at one level, we will survey the work
– from the 1970s to the present – which students in the humanities, social sciences
and visual arts have found helpful in exploring images. But at another level, there
is a significant empirical dimension to this book. It is a critical scholarly text which
makes the theories of the iconic that we explore work in relation to the images of
our choosing. This is a way of assessing evidentially in terms of changing theoreti-
cal perspectives, sometimes by way of our own empirical research in the field.
Our fourth principle is that the meanings of iconic images matter in the public
world. The shocking images of planes slicing into the World Trade Center in New
York on 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’) became part of a local, national and interna-
tional trauma. But there are some terrorisms – by states, by mercenaries, and by
individuals – that went on long before and have continued long after 9/11, as for
example at Guernica. Among the ‘core values’ of Western Culture which Edward
Saïd most valued from his own position of cultural hybridity (Chapter 10), was the
‘unwavering belief that the rigors of intellectual thought and the courage to speak
one’s conviction will lead down the . . . road to discovering and demanding equal
justice for all’ (Bayoumi and Rubin 2001: xxxiv). It is to that positioning within
Western intellectual cultures – the position which attempts to use ‘core’ Western
Enlightenment values against the neo-colonial history of Western discourse itself
– that many of the critical thinkers, artists and media professionals surveyed in our
book aspire as they instruct us, in Schama’s words, ‘on the obligations of being
human’.

The book’s themes

Following these principles, this book adopts the strategy of juxtaposing iconic images
of a particular decade with the academic and public intellectual writing about iconic
images at that time. That gives us the opportunity, where relevant, to compare the
often limited, even controlled discussion of these images in the media at that time
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