h&F: You used Vietnam as an example of great war photography. What changed and why?

SHIELDS: One is the brilliant military move of keeping your friends close and enemies closer. Basically, the government embedded journalists and photojournalists with combat troops so, on the one hand, you’re gaining access, but on the other you have huge amounts of censorship and self-censorship. Starting with the Gulf War, you see the Times’ war photography move from more ambitious Pulitzer-prize winning photography by Eddie Adams in Vietnam—the famous pic of the girl running naked through napalm—those pics seem to me increasingly less likely, almost impossible in the current times ecology. I think another factor is right wing propaganda machines are on the lookout for any organization whether it’s NPR or the Times to show any kind of left bias.

Right wing think tanks are pushing things towards the center, or the center-right, I think you can’t overestimate the ubiquity of the web so that pics can get disseminated immediately from a foxhole to the Times and back within a second. Therefore, pics can effectively be vetted by the very troops that the photographer is embedded with.

I think that this kind of odd intersection of military industrial media complex in which the Times tries to hold onto its brand by having the ear of the government, and part of the courtship of the government so that the Times can gain access is, to me, whether consciously or unconsciously, to run pics that are problematically respectful, dignified, noble, airbrushed. Yes, on page 38 at the end of a story there might be a paragraph that talks about the cost of war, but boy that lead picture is going to frame the whole discussion as an essentially dignified and noble and above all worthy sacrifice. From 1974, '73, '72 they were running sometimes astonishingly visceral Vietnam pics. Then, they started to run color as of '97, pushing it toward a more pictorial tradition. Hickey points this out really well: “Basically flying dirt of World War II became flying paint of abstract expressionism." All of these photographers have gone to school with all of these modernist masterpieces. Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, Pollock, Rothko, and all of these photographers and photo editors have been hugely schooled in the last 40 years on 20th-century pictorial masterpieces or master artists. The photographers are running footnotes of these paintings. In my slightly paranoid reading, they’re no longer sort of seeing what’s on the ground. They’re trying to find a picture that looks like a faint copy of a Jackson Pollock.

It’s ok if you’re running a sort of swooning beauty of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller center to make tourists come to New York. Ok, no harm was done.

But when you’re essentially selling, moving lambs led to slaughter, this is how consent gets manufactured. That’s real and that counts and the Times has a megaphone responsibility and capability that the Des Moines Register doesn’t have.