Shock and Awe
[An excerpt from my book, Computational Photography.]
I watched the American infantry facing a house where the enemy was thought to be, the soldiers hunkered down along a road facing the house, a ways off. Wesley Clark, an army general turned CNN commentator who months later would run for president, sat amazed as the footage came in, again and again noting that this was the first time that sort of an engagement had ever been filmed. The camera was not stationary, it pointed to the house, to the men along the road, to the reporter hiding with the rest. The footage is long, it goes on and on like real life does. Eventually, the tanks arrive and rove around the building. They leave. An air strike is called in, the men on the road shelter from the blast. But all of this takes forever to happen, and while it is happening you, the viewer, have little clear idea what is going on, uncertain that anything at all will happen and wondering if maybe a different channel will be showing more action.
The reporters sure seem excited though. Not just these reporters here on that road but all of the reporters seem to be having the time of their lives. Riding around in armored vehicles in a three-week race across the desert, talking about air defense systems and military strategy, about weapons of mass destruction being used against us and about our own nuclear bombs being dusted off and used to root out the enemy, hidden deep in the mountains. The anchors back home, despite being away from physical danger, are gleefully playing with their interactive electronic maps, debating the merits and demerits of missile-launch technologies and interceptor success rates. It is a miraculous reprieve from the boring coverage of taxes and budgets, decades of culture wars, tiresome environmental warnings. Everyone is watching the news, every day, and the newspeople know that this is their chance to shine, to prove the worth of the protections offered by the First Amendment, their chance to demonstrate the value of the Fourth Estate in the Internet Age and a chance to make some real money.
There were static films being made all over Iraq. The networks broadcast them live or in long excerpts, this static film overlooking this street in Baghdad, that one pointing toward the out-of-sight airport in Mosul, their low-resolution feed recording the ho-hum of daily life in a city despite the great flow of news all about them. The cameras locked and stationary on rooftops, unmanned, waiting for the flash of light, the city-shaking boom, the flames that would hopefully fall within view of the lens, the flailing dotted lines of anti-aircraft fire filling the night sky as the defenders, spooked or actually under attack, hoped against hope to hit their attacker’s planes in the darkness. But mostly the cameras showed nothing and we knew that they would likely continue to show nothing. And still we watched.
