Roundup: Media's Take This is where we excerpt articles from the
media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
David Carr, in the NYT (April 25, 2004): ...The current
administration's squeamishness about photographs depicting the
consequences of war has plenty of precedents in American
history, but it stands in stark contrast to where war
photography began. In 1862, New Yorkers went to the gallery of
Matthew Brady and saw, for the first time, the gory
externalities of the Civil War. The dead were a persistent
presence because of the limitations of the technology of the
day. Daguerreotypes required subjects that remained still, and
there is no subject more patient than the dead. But by the
beginning of World War I, as the mass reproduction and
distribution of images became more commonplace, the political
and military leadership began to understand that seeing lifeless
American soldiers could have a corrosive effect on the country's
will to fight, and photography was banned altogether. It was onl