“Something ugly or grotesque can be moving because the photographer’s attention has dignified it,” Susan Sontag stated very assertively in her book On Photography. What is captured in an instant transcends to posterity, and this allows daily acts in a war situation to become true symbols capable of starting revolutions. It is only thanks to the presence of graphic documents that we are able to verify what happens in war contexts, and thanks to them we are able to put a face to each one of the thousands of people who every day suffer or die under bombs, shrapnel and shells. bullets in unfair and stupid wars.
These four images are just a sample of the power of the image and photography to capture moments of conflict that can alter the perception and the story of these. Although none of them managed to stop the violence, all of them have become tools for denouncing injustice with strong testimonial value that, in the best of cases, make it possible to later charge and convict war criminals. They are documents that tell us, with unequivocal certainty, that, in the words of Roland Barthes, “what I see has happened.”
UKRAINE
This week the world was shocked by the stoicism of a Ukrainian soldier, later identified as Timofii Mykolayovich Shadura, who was impassive moments before he was executed at point-blank range by Russian soldiers. Shadura was a prisoner and calmly smoking a cigarette in the forest, when he was shot by Russian soldiers. Seconds before he fainted, he shouted: “Slava Ukraini”, “glory to Ukraine”. The video, broadcast on the internet by the Russian soldiers themselves, has made him a symbol of the Ukrainian resistance. In a few hours, social networks baptized Shadura as the “Ukrainian hero” and were filled with drawings and messages that paid tribute to him.
The Ukrainian ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, denounced the execution as a war crime, for violating the Geneva Conventions and assured that Russia would have to “answer to every war crime.”
CHINA
Taken during the 1989 mass protests in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, the image of the young rebel standing in the way of a column of Chinese tanks became an icon of peaceful resistance around the world. On June 3 and 4, 1989, the Chinese army was ordered to end the mass protests, which had lasted for more than seven weeks and had spread throughout the country. Close to a million citizens had gathered to demand democratic improvements from the government of the People’s Republic. After two days of bloody repression, four photographers, Jeff Widener (AP), Charlie Cole (Newsweek), Stuart Franklin (Magnum) and Arthur Tsang (Reuters), captured the image that would become world famous from the sixth floor of the Beijing hotel. . As the tanks closed in on him on Chang An Avenue, the unknown youth, with a bag in each hand, stood alone and repeatedly stepped into the tanks’ path until he climbed on top of the first vehicle. To this day, the fate of the brave anonymous insurrectionist remains a mystery.
VIETNAM
A photograph, and the split second it took to take it, had the power to alter Americans’ perception of the Vietnam War, and spark a wave of protests. On February 1, 1968, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnamese police chief, executed a handcuffed and imprisoned Viet Cong guerrilla in the heart of downtown Saigon. A few meters away, Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams pressed the shutter seconds before Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulled the trigger and captured the snapshot that, in addition to earning him a Pulizer, chased the South Vietnamese general to the death of he. Capturing the brutality of war in unprecedented ways, Adams’s photo, which flooded the front pages of the international press, was perceived by Americans as graphic evidence that their country was fighting on the side of an unjust government in South Vietnam.
SPAIN
Surely the most iconic photograph of a soldier in combat is the one immortalized by Endre Ernö Friedmann and Gerda Taro’s Leica under the pseudonym Robert Capa. The snapshot entitled Death of a militiaman was captured on September 5, 1936 in the province of Córdoba during the Spanish Civil War, and shows the exact moment when Federico Borrell García, an anarchist militiaman, is killed by a bullet. Immediately after its publication in Life magazine in 1937, the photograph became a symbol of the Civil War in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.
Despite the controversy about whether Robert Capa had the ability to immortalize the fall of a soldier when hit by a bullet or whether it is a montage, there is no doubt that the image went around the world and became a sample paradigmatic of the beginnings of photojournalism.
