Photographing the Dead

We’ve had a lot of discussion this past week about the distribution of photographs of people who died violent deaths.  We’ve discussed the purpose of releasing such images, who might be offended by such images, who has the right to see such images, and so on.

During the American Civil War many people could not get enough of pictures of battlefield dead.  Some images were grusome:

Some, including this one, which is most probably posed with a body moved from elsewhere, offered something approaching the peaceful and romantic:

Then there are those that show the destruction wrought by war upon a human body:

And, finally, there were those that sought to be more philosophical …

… although even that was to some extent posed, as this shows:

Immediately after the battle of Antietam Matthew Brady’s team went to the battlefield to take pictures of the dead.  The following month the results were displayed in New York City, and on October 20 a reporter for the New York Times offered his take on the images in context.

The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement. There would be a gathering of skirts and a careful picking of way; conversation would be less lively, and the general air of pedestrians more subdued. As it is, the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type. The roll we read is being called over in Eternity, and pale, trembling lips are answering to it. Shadowy figures point from the page to a field where even imagination is loth to follow. Each of these little names that the printer struck off so lightly last night, whistling over his work, and that we speak with a clip of the tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse. It is a thunderbolt that will crash into some brain—a dull, dead remorseless weight that will fall upon some heart, straining it to the breaking. There is nothing very terrible to us, however, in the list, though our sensations might be different if the newspaper carrier left the names on the battle-field and the bodies at our doors instead.

We recognize the battle-field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door. The crape on the bell-pull tells there is a death in the house, and in the close carriage that rolls away with muffled wheels you know there rides a woman to whom the world is very dark now. But you only see the mourners in the last of the long line of carriages—they ride very jollily and at their ease, smoking cigars in a furtive and discursive manner, perhaps, and were it not for the black gloves they wear, which the deceased was wise and liberal enough to furnish, it might be a wedding for all the world would know. It attracts your attention, but does not enlist your sympathy. But it is very different when the hearse stops at your own door, and the corpse is carried out over your own threshold—you know whether it is a wedding or a funeral then, without looking at the color of the gloves worn. . . .

Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it . . .

We should scarce choose to be in the gallery, when one of the women bending over them should recognize a husband, a son, or brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies, that lie ready for the taping trenches. For these trenches have a terror for a woman’s heart, that goes far to outweigh all others that hover over the battle-field. How can a mother bear to know that the boy whose slumbers she has cradles, and whose head her bosom pillowed until the rolling drums called him forth—whose poor, pale face, could she react it, should find the same pillow again . . . when, but for the privilege of touching that corpse, of kissing once more the lips through white and cold, of smoothing back the hair from the brow and cleansing it of blood, stains, she would give all the remaining years of life that Heaven has allotted her—how can this mother bear to know that in a shallow trench, hastily dug, rude hands have thrown him. She would have handled the poor corpse so tenderly, have prized the boon of caring for it so dearly—yet, even the imperative office of hiding the dead from sight has been done by those who thought it trouble, and were only glad when their work ended.

Such words are well worth reflecting upon this weekend.  As Jon Stewart said in reference to the recent controversy: “Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians…. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is.”