Picture power: Images that made history

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Picture power: Images that made history By Julian Borger The Guardian intervention, but there is a long nam war - the picture of a nine- history of powerful images sear- A lot of people in Britain year-old Vietnamese girl, Phn Thi remember the death of Ferida ing themselves onto the global It is hard to look at the pho- tographs of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durrah dying in his father's arms on a Gaza street, but once you do it is much harder to forget them.

Imagine that the French tele- vision crew had not been there. The death of a child would per- haps have provoked a shrug of the shoulders and a sentiment along the lines of: "It's a shame, but that sort of thing happens all the time over there." But in an instant, these pictures demolish that cotton emotional buffer.

The viewer sees the terror in Mohammed's eyes and imagines the eyes of his or her own chil- dren in a reflexive act of empa- thy. consciousness and, arguably, Kim Phuc, running towards the diverting the cotirse of history. camera, screaming in pain from Osmanovic, a Bosnian woman napalm burns on her back. who hanged herself after the fall of Srebrenica in July, 1995.

Not When an American photogra- The attack had been a case of so many recall how many boys pher called Eddie Adams filmed the 1968 execution of a Vietcong "friendly fire" - a South Viet- Muslini suspect by a South Vietnamese namese pilot had mistaken a and men from the police general, the image rein- group of fleeing villagers for enclave were murdered by Bosn ian Serb forces in the aftermath — it was roughly 7,000.

Likewise forced a growing unease in the communist troops - but that was not the issue. The picture, all that most people remember United States about the nation's intervention on behalf of a cor- taken by AP photographer, Nick of the Tiananmen Square mas- rupt and dictatorial regime.

Ut, conveyed like no other pic- ture what the war was doing to sacre was the television picture of a single man standing alone i Adams later discovered that the children. front of a tank, blocking its executed man had knifed a These sudden outbreaks of advance.

South Vietnamese family and apologized to the general, angst over individual, well-pho- The picture shocked the tographed tragedies world, but these days the world Nguyen Ngoe Loan. often evokes cynicism - what about is trading with China again, and But whatever the details of the case, the picture illustrated a the hundreds or thousands of human rights issues are on the deeper truth which many Ameri- others who have died?

It is back-burner. Images are power- unfair, but it is natural. Human cans had been reluctant to face beings are wired in such a way ful but short-lived. If the sight of Mohammed dying before our - the thuggishness of their It is too early to say whether Mohammed's death will provoke any more determined Western allies.

The same was true of per- that the tragedy of a single indi- eyes does not change anything in haps the most famous photo- vidual stirs a more emotional the next days or weeks, it proba- graph to emerge from the Viet- response than the deaths of hun- bly never will. dreds. Scripps Howard News Service

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"Picture power: Images that made history," The Daily Telegram, 6 October 2000. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2000-020. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2000-020

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They could not agree on his name