<underfire> chaos, illusions & the 60's

[Ananya Vajpeyi]

The current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, CJR (Nov-Dec 
2006), is titled "Into the Abyss" and carries statements and photos 
from forty-five journalists who have been reporting from Iraq between 
2003 and 2006. Their testimonies and their images make it nonsensical 
to speak in terms of victory or defeat. What you see is devastation for 
Iraqis, for Americans in Iraq, and for all those involved in or 
affected by this war whether in Iraq, America or elsewhere. If this 
issue of CJR is a "cavalcade of images", it is a cavalcade headed, as 
the title suggests, into the abyss. I find it hard to believe that even 
the prospect of American victory, were it to exist, would turn the 
American public in favor of the war.

The editors of CJR, in their editorial titled "Assignment Iraq", write: 
"For this special forty-fifth anniversary issue of the Columbia 
Journalism Review we have constructed a different kind of history of 
the war, an oral history told through the voices of many of the 
journalists who have covered it. We interviewed forty-five reporters, 
photographers, translators, and stringers, and gathered war photos, 
too, many of them previously unpublished in the U.S. (...). You can't 
read this history... without appreciating the fact that the coverage of 
the war and the course of the war are somehow intertwined." (CJR, 
Nov-Dec '06, p1).

I suppose one of the threads of our discussion here on Underfire is 
proceeding as an attempt to flesh out exactly what this "somehow" 
gestures towards -- in other words, we are trying to figure out exactly 
how "the coverage of the war and the course of the war" are indeed 
"intertwined".

Ananya.

On Nov 4, 2006, at 9:50 AM, joy.garnett at gmail.com wrote:
>
> Under Fire  http://underfire.eyebeam.org
> 16 October - 10 December 2006
> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
> all writings copyright individual authors
> no commercial use without permission
> to post a message, send an email to:
> underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
> to unsubscribe, send an email to:
> underfire-leave at underfire.eyebeam.org


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 2121 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://underfire.eyebeam.org/pipermail/underfire/attachments/20061104/6952b138/attachment.bin