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  Date / Time: 7/2/2009 8:08 PM UTC

  Neda, Obama and the Power of Pictures
  

  The Issue: At a White House press conference last week, a reporter asked President Obama about Iran and whether he had watched the video of Neda Agha-Soltan being shot in the chest and bleeding to death on a Tehran street. Obama said he had, and added: "It's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking." He went on to condemn Iran's suppression of demonstrators, saying, "There are certain international norms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression." That's when the reporter Helen Thomas started to say, "Then why won't you allow the photos..." referring, Obama understood, to photos of the abuse of detainees held abroad by the United States, photos whose release he has blocked. "Hold on a second, Helen," he said. “That’s a different question.” But is it, really? If vivid images help us understand events, shouldn't they be disseminated and seen? The Argument: They should. To ban these photographs because they are so lurid as to arouse America’s enemies, as Obama has argued, is akin to saying only boring material may be circulated. Such a policy would benefit — well, supply the name of whatever novelist you find particularly dull — but it would not promote good government. What’s more, ethics imposes this pesky standard: “What’s sauce for the goose…” We should not rebuke Iran for a lack of openness and then resist it ourselves.
  
  Here is the case the president has made: “The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.” He has found allies in Congress and a particularly eloquent supporter in the journalist Philip Gourevitch.
  
  The argument is unconvincing. Obama’s own response to the Neda Agha-Soltan video belies his assertion that the photographs would not add to our understanding. Actually seeing Soltan die affected Obama as no verbal account had done, his own remarks confirm. There are many kinds of understanding, including the kind grasped from making a visceral emotional connection to an event.
  
  Photographs can communicate so movingly as to become vivid symbols of the events they depict — Dorothea Lange’s of families during the Depression, Robert Capa’s of the death of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, Nick Ut’s of terrified Vietnamese children fleeing a napalm strike. All offer genuine insights. These are the work of talented photojournalists, but amateurs, too, have produced equally potent images — the harrowing photographs of the lynching of African-Americans, for instance.
  
  Beyond pedagogy, photographs can be an impetus to civic engagement. Jacob Riis’s images of poverty in New York, for example, published in 1890 as “How the Other Half Lives,” roused a city to action. And it is unlikely that so much attention would have been paid to Abu Ghraib had those disturbing photographs not emerged in 2004.
  
  (Obama’s second assertion, that the indignities shown in the photographs were the acts of a few bad apples is not universally held. Amrit Singh, an A.C.L.U. lawyer involved in the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that seeks to have the photographs released, says she believes that they “would likely expose other links between official policies and the abuse conducted on the ground.” This dispute cannot be resolved by suppressing the photographs.)
  
  And while the photographs might subject the country to criticism and our troops to danger, we ought not simply capitulate to this peril. We do not have open government if we disguise official misconduct or soft-pedal it so as to inhibit any vigorous response. We do not have transparency if we allow public access to only uncontroversial photographs — the president romping with his lovable dog, Bo; the president romping with Germany’s lovable chancellor, Angela Merkel. And surely history has taught us to be wary of any government’s insistence that security demands secrecy — consider, for example, the Pentagon Papers.
  
  There is also the matter of personal integrity. President Obama campaigned as a proponent of openness and accountability. On his first day in office, he issued new ethics directives, pledging to make transparency a hallmark of his administration. As recently as April, Obama’s justice department said it would comply with a court order to release the photographs. There is no dishonor in revising a policy or changing tactics in response to altered circumstances. But a commitment to openness in government is neither situational nor tactical: it is a moral principle, a fundamental idea about governing. And in fact circumstances have not changed. The photographs are not new. American troops, whose safety is rightly a concern, have long been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  
  Transparency is an essential condition of democracy: citizens cannot make the informed decisions self-rule requires if they are denied knowledge of the actions of their government. Government cannot be accountable if its actions are veiled. But more than this, transparency is an ethical ideal, the political expression of a commitment to honesty. It is disheartening to see it resisted by someone who has spoken so ardently in its defense.
  

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