Deflecting the Political in the Visual Images of Execution and the Death Penalty Debate

Abstract

F or more than a decade now, English studies has been increasingly engaged by questions surrounding visual communication-its functions, its limits, its place in our classrooms, in our scholarship, and in our daily lives. Today, in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, the bombing of Afghanistan, the war on Iraq, the spectacle of Abu Ghraib, and other images of torture, humiliation, and death, these questions have taken on a singular urgency. They are not simply matters for the scholar in her den, thumbing through archival photos. They are matters of power and politics. It is a common precept that the visual carries the potential (or the threat) to uncover both the harsh realities of human suffering and the political machinations responsible for that suffering. The Vietnam War demonstrated that precept so clearly with its photographs and film coverage of summary execution, napalmed children, and dying soldiers that subsequent war policy has severely limited press access and suppressed images like recent photos of flag-draped American coffins. Perhaps because the American public has so little in the way of visual evidence of the Iraq war, images that have emerged in such documentaries as Jehane Noujaim's Control Room or Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 become even more compelling in their promise to uncover a politics unavailable in official press conferences or vague war reporting. Clearly, the attempt to suppress the visual, as in any censorship of the press, is an attempt to limit debate. As well, the attempt to publish suppressed images-on the Internet, in film or print documentary, in the alternative press-is an attempt to reopen debate. It is an attempt to resee the issue at hand. That is the power of the image.

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