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The earthquake in Haiti returned images of the body to the front pages of American newspapers. Three days after the January 12, 2010, disaster leveled much of Port-au-Prince and cast an already desperate nation deeper into the mires of misery, the Washington Post ran an image by staff photographer Carol Guzy, showing a man emerging from a thin gap in the rubble. Next to him a schoolgirl is seen from behind, apparently bent over and kneeling. A first, cursory reading of the image suggests that perhaps she is praying. A second glance makes it obvious that the head and upper torso of "Ruth," a student at the Ecole St. Gerard, have been crushed by a slab of falling concrete.
The New York Times ran photographs equally gruesome, including one of a man's body laid out on a makeshift stretcher, covered in a thin layer of chalk dust. Photographers working for the BBC and for wire and stock companies chronicled the crisis in the usual categories of disaster imagery: broken buildings, tent cities, looting, and the obligatory small dramas of search and rescue. But the wounded, the suffering, and the dead body took on surprising prominence, not just in the images emerging from Haiti, but in the photographs that made it through the filters of taste and editorial reticence at mainstream news organizations.
After almost a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which graphic images of the wounded and dead were often deemed too politically volatile for most audiences, the Haitian earthquake allowed a return of the raw. Images that made suffering both tactile and terrifying burst through conventions of caution and rattled a language of synecdoche and substitution that had formed during news coverage of the "war on terror." Something about Haiti made it permissible to display human suffering without the usual fears of exploiting the victim and alienating the reader.
The images of Haiti contrasted strongly with images from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries, such as Israel, where the United States has a deep emotional and political engagement. Newspapers have always debated the line between informing readers and protecting them from graphic images. News coverage over much of the last decade has reflected the politicization of war, and the line between documentary...