Word: photographers
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...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...
...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...
There was never any question about whether to run the abuse pictures from Abu Ghraib. After all, these photographs did not simply illustrate a story; they were the story, and we did as others did, blurring the genitals of the prisoners but otherwise showing what the world saw. For the cover image, we chose not to run a picture but instead asked artist Matt Mahurin to do an illustration of a hooded prisoner with his hands tied behind his back, a haunting image that captured the drama of the moment better than any single photograph could...
...however, print a picture of the actual beheading of Nicholas Berg, just as we did not publish a photograph of the severed head of Daniel Pearl two years ago. These images are widely available on the Internet, and, obviously, those who committed these atrocities did so in order to attract publicity. Photographs of Berg and Pearl taken just before their deaths told the horror of the story well enough for our readers without playing into the hands of the killers...
...keep your sensibilities in mind as well as our own. I'm struck often, by the way, by the emotional impact of the more subtle images. I've seen pictures of the planes hitting the World Trade Center hundreds of times, but none affect me quite the way the photograph on this page does, which we ran in our special issue: two women on the street, one with her hand over her eyes and the other with her mouth covered, her eyeglasses catching a glint of the tragedy. The scene perfectly captures the reactions of so many of us, then...