Tearing down our icons

Let’s face it, iconic images bother us. They stand as an immovable beacon of our time, outside of it, impelling us at every sight, forcing us to admit their status as greater than any other. Because they are a statement about our world, about us, about who we are as a society, good or bad. They tell us something fundamental. And that’s a problem because we cannot answer back, question it, argue. They are immutable, that’s what makes them iconic.

They gain a higher status than what they represent; they are no longer a simple representation, they become symbolic. They tell a whole story, they represent a whole era, a whole event, in one frame. They are the Magnum opus dream of all photojournalists, yet so few achieve it because they are an improbable perfect conjunction of right place, right time, right equipment. And even the most experienced photojournalist cannot make that happen; it just is.

While most of us love them even with the discomfort they bring us, others cannot stand their arrogant, self-important posture. They will bring them down, like their ancestors did a thousand years ago, with painted icons. Those were of a religious nature and, like their modern counterparts, they had taken on too much importance, being elevated above their status as images into objects of worship. And, not unlike today, some felt it necessary to tear them down.

Of late, at different times, pretty much all iconic photojournalistic images have been torn down one way or the other. From Roger Fenton’s empty Crimean valley, to Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier, to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, to W. Eugene Smith’s Tomoko in her Bath, to Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl, to Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag raising, to Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl—one by one, one after the other, torn down. Because, like their ancestral siblings, their importance, their elevation to a higher photojournalistic status than others, bothers some.

It’s been by scholars, it’s been by journalists, and it’s been by other photojournalists. The latter, one would think, would be the most astonishing, as you would expect a respect among peers. But instead, you get the deep, dark jealousy of having tried, unsuccessfully, through an entire career to create one of those iconic images and never succeeding.

Think about it. You spend your whole career chasing that moment. You risk your life in war zones, you work refugee camps, you document suffering and injustice. You do everything right: you’re in the right places, you have the skills, you have the eye, and you even got awards. And nothing. No image of yours becomes iconic. No image of yours gets endlessly reproduced, taught in schools, and recognized instantly by millions. You remain a working photojournalist, respected perhaps, but never elevated. Never mythologized.

And then you see someone else achieve it. Maybe they achieved it early, maybe easily, maybe with what looks like luck rather than skill. Or worse—maybe they achieved it and then rode that one image for an entire career, becoming wealthy and famous from a single frame while you toiled in obscurity with thousands of competent but unremarkable photographs.

The resentment builds. You tell yourself you’re motivated by truth, by journalistic ethics, by protecting the integrity of the profession. But underneath is something rawer: Why them and not me? If you can’t create an icon, you can at least destroy one. You can bring them down to your level. You can prove they didn’t deserve their elevation in the first place.

So you start investigating. You look for the manipulation, the staging, the lie. You become obsessed. The investigation becomes a crusade. Years spent building a case, sometimes writing article after article, or producing and appearing in documentaries, pressing the argument long after it matters. You position yourself as the guardian of truth, the one brave enough to expose what everyone else was too naive to see. The methodology sounds rigorous—interviews with witnesses decades later, geometric analysis of photographs, assertions about what should have been physically possible. But it’s mostly hearsay, unreliable witnesses selected simply because they’re still alive, pseudo-science based on questionable data. It’s a very, very obsessional belief that somehow, you have been chosen to reveal the truth to the world.

With photography, unlike painted illustrations, the issue is that a knife or fire is not enough. You destroy one copy of an image, and soon thereafter, thousands reappear. Even if you destroy the negative, it will never be enough to make it disappear. So modern iconoclasts do not go after the image; they go after the creator. Time after time, it’s been the photographer’s integrity, morality, and behavior that have been put in question, as with Capa, Lange, McCurry, or Ut. They are presented as liars, so therefore their work cannot be of value. Tear down those images, because their creators are unworthy of your admiration and trust. They are fake, cheaters, liars, and immoral bastards.

The result is never what the iconoclast expected to gain. While they most often succeed in creating doubt over the veracity of an image—how it was taken, by whom, when, and why—they never really succeed in tearing down the iconic image. The images survive because they’ve transcended their creators, become larger than the photographers who made them. They exist in collective memory as symbols, not as historical documents subject to verification. Iconic images don’t derive their power from documentary purity. They derive it from emotional truth, from their ability to compress complex realities into a single comprehensible moment. The Afghan Girl doesn’t move us because we’ve verified McCurry’s field notes. She moves us because her eyes communicate something fundamental about displacement, fear, and resilience. That power doesn’t evaporate when we learn he removed a pole from a different photograph.

What they do succeed in is casting doubt on the whole industry of photojournalism, from the photographers who took the images to the editors who selected them to the publications that printed them. The irony is that it includes their work in the process. Each time, they chip away at the trust we have placed in that fragile ecosystem that protects us from ignorance. Every attack adds another layer of doubt. Not just about that photographer or that image, but about all photographers and all images. If Capa might have lied, maybe they all lie. If McCurry manipulates, maybe they all manipulate. If we can’t trust the icons, the best, most celebrated images in the entire field, how can we trust anything?

The iconoclasts tell themselves they’re purifying the profession, but what they’re actually doing is demolishing the very possibility of trusted visual testimony. They’re creating a world where every image is suspect, where no photographer has authority, where the public assumes all photojournalism is staged or manipulated or fraudulent. The images survive. The photographers are destroyed. And the rest of us are left in a world where we can no longer trust our eyes.