OPINION: The power of iconic images

The attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, and the dramatic images that emerged from it, are dominating world news. This set me thinking about the important role that iconic images play in capturing attention and influencing reactions to events throughout the world.
Words are important for filling in background, explaining details and spelling out implications. But images pack a punch that cuts through the details to a core message. Impacts of images are visceral rather than rational, but emotional reactions can be dangerous and it is important to dig beneath images in order to fully understand the reality behind them.
Our world is dominated by images, many intentionally designed to deceive and mislead. Have you ever seen a TV advertisement for a car that portrayed its driver stuck in a traffic jam? Not likely! Rather, we see the car zooming along empty highways or crossing empty deserts. The only car in the world! One advertisement showed a car stuck in a jam, but then rising like a helicopter and escaping to empty roads. I fail to understand why car manufacturers believe that such images would persuade anyone to buy their product. But they clearly do.
However, the images emerging from the events in Butler were very real, blood really flowed, but it is the likely future political use of them that bothers me.

Image as message
One media comparison was the photo of a bloodied Trump angrily rising above his protective Special Agents as they rushed him to safety, and the iconic Joe Rosenthal photo of US Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima in 1945. The juxtaposition was obvious and linked the 1945 image of imminent victory in the war in the Pacific with Trump’s promotion of his Make America Great Again (MAGA) message today. Many in the world media believe that this assassination attempt, Trump’s survival and his robust reaction to it, will ensure his re-election in November. The image has become the message.
Joe Rosenthal’s photo can be compared with another WWII image: Yevgeny Khaldel’s photo of the raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag on May 2, 1945. Reaction to both is conditioned by knowledge of the years of war and carnage that preceded the photographed events. These photos do not celebrate conflict. Rather, they celebrate the imminent end of a war.
Iconic images that really haunt us and force us to react tend to be highly personal and often present an image of a victim rather than of a victor. Think of Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photo ‘Migrant Mother’, which captures the misery of the Oklahoma farmers fleeing to California to escape the dust bowl, an episode of American history that was portrayed memorably in John Steinbeck’s novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.
Or think of Nick Ut’s image ‘Napalm Girl’ (nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc), taken in 1972 towards the end of the war in Vietnam, which captured the horror, inhumanity and futility of that war in terms of its impact on an innocent child. This photo, the publication of which was controversial, became a global cultural shorthand for the atrocities of the Vietnam War.
Or think of Jeff Widener’s ‘Tank Man’ image, showing the brave but futile protest of one man in front of the tanks that carried out the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989.
Perhaps the most damning iconic image was Nilüfer Demir’s 2015 photo of the body of a young Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, lying dead on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, after his family drowned in their efforts to flee the civil war that was raging in Syria and reach Greece in a small boat. The EU had already started to open its borders for Syrian refugees, and publication of the photo greatly speeded this process.

Fight?
But back to Trump and the events in Butler, Pennsylvania. As he was bundled off the stage to safety, Trump gestured angrily and urged the crowd to “fight, fight, fight”. This has become the iconic image. Such instant and instinctive reaction to the murderous attack on him by what appears to have been a lone gunman provides disturbing insights into the highly divisive nature of American politics.
Fight who? It could only mean the people who claimed to have won the 2020 Presidential election that Trump believes he actually won, and the people who are running against him in 2024. In other words, the Democratic Party led by President Biden.
Fight how? In the manner of the assault on the Capitol in Washington on 6th January 2021, perhaps?
We recently witnessed the replacement of a right-wing government by a social democratic one in the UK. The electoral contest was fierce but never became violent. France is engaged in a similar challenge and Germany will face one shortly. Here in Europe, we still believe in the stability of our democracies. I hope that the same applies to the USA, but fear that the events at Butler will make that assumption increasingly hazardous.
And remember the old saying that when America sneezes, Ireland gets a cold. If that happens, the northwest region might well get pneumonia.

•  John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.