Brokering the Power of the Image

Looking at dozens of photographs for our D-day special this week, I was struck by how vividly the images caught the chaos of that famous day, a day that claimed the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers. And then I noticed something else: there are very few images that show the casualties. As it turns out, the goriest images were censored, and many pictures of American soldiers killed in combat were not allowed to be shown until later.

How times have changed. Since Gulf War II began, I've looked at thousands of pictures from the battlefront. We've published dozens of them across two-page spreads, including the now famous hospital photograph of Ali, an Iraqi boy who lost both arms in a U.S. bombing. We've never tried to prettify war. Sometimes, however, I saw remarkable images that I felt were too graphic to print in TIME. Case in point: a series of photos taken last spring of U.S. soldiers carefully picking up limbs of dead Iraqis after a battle northwest of Baghdad.

This is not the first time, of course, that TIME editors have weighed the challenge of showing the consequences of war while keeping the sensibilities of our readers in mind. We faced that issue in 1983, when we covered the invasion of Grenada and the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and in 1993, when Somali rebels ambushed U.S. troops and dragged the body of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu. In each case, we ran photographs that upset some readers but refrained from publishing the most brutal ones. We felt that what we presented to our readers did justice to the tragedies, but not in a gratuitous way.

It is not just a matter of when to show the body of a dead American soldier; we've wrestled with what is appropriate to show when covering the carnage in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, when hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were massacred by the Hutu, and during the recent uprising in Haiti, when I viewed photographs of bodies piled up in morgues that were among the most unsettling images I've ever seen. (In that particular case, photographs of the chaos on Port-au-Prince's streets were so vivid that I chose to use them to illustrate the story.)

Yet it is also undeniable that the task of deciding what photos to run in TIME has grown much more difficult in the wake of 9/11. In putting together our special issue on the World Trade Center attacks, I considered whether we should use photographs of the many victims who jumped out of windows rather than stay behind and be burned to death. I ultimately decided to go with a single photograph taken from a far distance of several people falling through the air; other publications ran close-ups of a man making the same fatal leap. I'm not saying that one decision is right and the other wrong but only that my sensibility led me to pick one over the other.