Selective War Photography: Worthy and Unworthy Victims | Z

Selective War Photography: Worthy and Unworthy Victims :

“A picture,” the old saying goes, “is worth a thousand words.” When it comes to eliciting support for, or revulsion against, a policy, it is often true, for better or worse, that nothing works like an effective visual image.

One example on the better side comes from the biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., no slight respecter of the written and spoken word. In January of 1967, while eating in an airport restaurant on a trip to Jamaica, King came upon an illustrated story, “The Children of Vietnam,” in an issue of Ramparts magazine. The magazine included numerous photographs of youngsters who had been badly burned by United States (U.S.) napalm. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) field secretary Bernard Lee recalled King’s reaction: “When he came to [the] Ramparts [photos], he stopped. He froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding her dead baby, a baby killed by our military. Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, ‘doesn’t it taste any good?’ as he answered, ‘Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.’” By Lee’s account, “that’s when the decision [for King to openly oppose the Vietnam War] was made. Martin knew about the war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it” (David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1986)."