Picture of the Day - 2

Iraq.

I made the point a couple days ago that, after the Jill Carroll kidnapping, the wire services had shifted from western photographers to Iraqi photographers and that had substantially altered the content and presentation of the situation in Iraq.

Just looking at the coverage of this car bombing yesterday highlights the point exactly. As I was looking through some of the wire photos this morning, there were several that I felt were too graphic to put up here.

After almost three years of war, the last few weeks since this change marks the first time this is the case in these "mainstream" western sources.

So, what I'm going to try to do is link to the Yahoo pages for some of these pictures (I think it will work.) It offers a far starker vision of the violence the Iraqis live with. (Warning: these are somewhat graphic. I put them up so they get worse as you get farther along so you can quit if it gets too bloody. Shift left click to open them in a new window.)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (sorry, the picture links are no longer valid. Yahoo seems to have moved on.)

See what I mean. I'm not alleging any sort of bias or self censorship among the western photograhers who were previously covering Iraq, but they were somewhat limited in their access and the fact that when they went out of the green zone, they generally travelled inside a US military escort.

The Iraqi photographers have far greater access perhaps because they don't have the choice to travel with US forces. They lack some of the compositional skills of the western photographers, who have done some amazing work under difficult circumstances, but that also gives their photos a raw/real quality that I find compelling.

I sense less intentional message in these photos, but that snapshot quality gives them a more credible feel.

Take a look, there's some blood, but I think you'll see the difference I'm talking about.

(I've got some life stuff today, so posting may be light til later.)