Image of the Year. From the article: "If you want to go shallow for an Image of the Year, you can't do better than Paris Hilton, seen through the window of a Los Angeles sheriff's car, weeping as she's being hauled back to prison to complete a probation-violation sentence. But when you first notice the credit on that now infamous picture, there's a double take. The image came from the camera of Nick Ut, whose picture of a little girl burned by napalm, naked and running directly toward the camera and into the conscience of the American people, became perhaps the most powerful and influential vision of the Vietnam War. Not only was the Paris Hilton image taken by one of this country's most celebrated war photographers, it was taken June 8, 35 years to the day after the devastating image of 9-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing her bombed-out village. Let's put these two pictures up on the wall together for one last, end-of-the-year look, and see if something emerges.
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What an interesting, if half-baked essay. It makes me miss Susan Sontag all the more, since she could have made this connection more deeply and more gracefully and without Kennicott's ponderous prose. I flatter myself by supposing that she would also have seen a further connection between these photos that Kennicott misses: the way that moral consciousness is shaped by the medium of photography.
In the case of the Kim Phuc photo, the searing witness of the photojournalist's lens became a catalyst for ethical transformation. Images like this were instrumental in galvanizing anti-war sentiment beyond the protest movement. By capturing and disseminating a difficult truth, Americans in general came to recognize their collective culpability in atrocity. It is indeed difficult to look at the picture and yet, on some level, one is grateful for the truth it conveys since it demands an ethical response. In that time and place, the camera's witness provoked a sort of moral catharsis.
