Iconic Images in an Internet Age

To the moon and back

NewsAdam Kovac — Published October 19, 2010

In June 1985, National Geographic ran the picture as the cover image for a story about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 25 years later, it is arguably the image most closely identified with that conflict. It’s the kind of picture that doesn’t say a thousand words—it says more than entire books about how a historical event was processed by the majority of media-consumers.

And it’s the kind of picture that might not have a place in the cyber-space dominated media of the future.

Mass media is a fairly recent development in human history. The first true newspapers came about in the early 17th century, and radio is barely over 100 years old.

Up until recently, the news was a way for people to be united, due in large part to the limited ways in which it could be consumed. You had your daily newspaper, which may or may not have been the only one available in your city, you had a variety of radio stations and you had network news. In the latter case, the evening news was something that was experienced the same way by people across entire countries, let alone cities.

This was before the proliferation of specialty channels and the Internet, before you could instantly customize what news would make it into your home. As the media continues to fracture, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to connect to others through the news. It’s not that the stories will be different, but that our framework for processing them—both in the moment and historically—will have radically changed.

One of the most visceral ways that people catalogue history is through images. Photographs and video take news out of the abstract and give you a sense of exactly what happened in a way that words cannot. The best such images give the sense of encapsulating an event or even a person in its entirety.

Think of Neil Armstrong slowly descending from the Eagle onto the lunar surface. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” became arguably the most famous phrase in recorded history. Those eleven words and short climb down a ladder became a symbol for the potential of man. It literally ushered in the Space Age.

On Nov. 3, 1948, the Chicago Tribune famously ran the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman,” inaccurately claiming that President Harry Truman had lost the presidency to Thomas Dewey. The photo taken of Truman holding the issue aloft, grinning wryly, is how he is best remembered in history—which is saying a lot when you consider he was the only man to ever order the use of nuclear weapons.

The irony is that the most iconic images of all have a way of being absorbed into popular culture and, eventually, can have almost nothing to do with the original subject.

For example, right now somewhere on campus, somebody is wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a young man with a beret and wispy beard staring defiantly into the distance. Ask them about it, and they probably won’t be able to tell you that the photo on the t-shirt was taken at a memorial for La Coubre, a freighter filled with munitions that exploded in Havana Harbour. Yet Che Guevara’s picture is a symbol for the optimism of youth, not dynamite accidents. The fact that millions of t-shirts bear the face of a communist revolutionary is an irony lost on many. Che has ceased to be Che. The photo has taken the place of the man.

Try to imagine that photo being taken today. Where would you see it? Where would it manage to become ubiquitous enough that it would garner pop-art status? What made it special was that it was selected, probably out of many pictures taken that day, because of how everything aligned perfectly. The tilt of his head, the fiery expression in his eyes, the wild mane of hair that’s perfectly disheveled—it all came together for maximum impact. But you wouldn’t see that one picture picked out of many by an editor or photographer today—you’d have access to an entire gallery of shots to scroll through on your news website of choice. That classic picture would never have etched itself into the public consciousness had it been taken 50 years later.

Then again, it might never have been taken in the first place. Professional cameramen are quickly being replaced by anybody with a camera on their smart phone. When riots broke out following a controversial presidential election in Iran, there were few Western reporters on the ground. The majority of information was gleaned from average Iranians tweeting, emailing and Facebooking what was happening.

With the possible exception of a grainy video of a girl named Neda Agha Soltan lying in the street, slowly dying of a bullet wound, no singular image has managed to encapsulate that struggle.

Similarly, during the G20 conference that took place in Toronto in June, the most shocking footage of riot police was taken on iPhones and broadcast on YouTube, rather than on professional video cameras and broadcast on network TV. And again, no iconic images have emerged that will instantly remind a viewer of what happened during those three days.

It’s hard to say if the vast expansion of access to information is a good thing or a bad thing, as singular images are replaced by complex tapestries. It’s getting harder to find the truth among all the competing narratives at your disposal.

A cynic might say that we were never getting the truth before, only a filtered and processed version if it. Still, as a sentimentalist, I can’t help but romanticize the idea of a nation glued to their TV’s, all watching the same video of men walking on the moon for the first time.

So whether you think the democratization of media is a good or a bad thing, it is coming with a price. We are leaving the age of the shared iconic image behind.

This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 10, published October 19, 2010.