Military Coffins (Photo: the Pentagon, via The Memory Hole)

Everyone thinks they know what they see here. Close one eye and look, and it’s a graphic indictment of American foreign policy. Sad evidence of the cost of our President’s folly. Close another eye and it’s proof of our soldiers’ noble sacrifice. Step to the left and look and it’s an image of a nation-state’s abuse of human trust: men turned into metal boxes, human souls composted by a war machine.

By now, everyone knows the origins of this image and the arguments it provoked: a civilian, an adult, a woman, made this image—and hundreds of others like it—as evidence of the dignified way her company fulfilled its contract to transport our military dead home for burial. The arguments that followed publication of one of her photos were all polemical and “informational”: Public Information vs. Classified Information. Negative Images vs. Positive Images. News and Not News.

Step back from all this. Ask yourself: Is “news” a kind of information, or is it a kind of artform? Is a news photo—a great one, an unsettling one, one like this—a graphic representation, a “true-and-faithful representation” of reality? Or is it also an icon, an emblem, a rebus, a picture puzzle that alludes to the visible world and the invisible one?

Think about the phrase, “The light at the end of the tunnel.” The deceptions and self-deceptions of the war in Vietnam.

But: What about all those books, all those accounts of “The journey of the soul after death”? The light, the brilliance, the shining, the rising upwards, out of the body, bobbing upwards, rising above the bed, above the operating table, upwards, towards the light, upwards then into a tunnel of light.

“All clichés,” you say. A political cliché followed by a spiritual one. But, consider: What if there are archetypes inside of every cliché? This is an image of the dead. There is a tunnel. A tunnel of light. Could those shadows at the end of that tunnel—could they be ghosts? Angels? Spirits? Could we who look at this image hear the echoes of those meanings? Could all these allusions, these associations, these possibilities of meaning be wound inside of this fuselage? This cargo bay of coffins and its flight crew, waiting to receive the dead.

A news photo, a great one, an iconic one is “What it is.” And it’s more. It’s always more.

“‘Next then,’ I said, ‘make an image of our nature and its education and its lack of education…See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling, with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in [this cave] from childhood, with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them. Their light is from a fire, above…and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners, there is a road, above, along which we see a wall built like the partitions [that] puppet handlers set in front of human beings and over which they show puppets…Then see, along this wall, human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts…and statues of men and other animals,…do you suppose such men [bound as they are] would have seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave, facing them?…Most certainly, such men would hold that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things.’”

Socrates is the man doing the telling here. “Here” is the beginning of Book VII of Plato’s Republic.

“Ah!” you say. “Ridiculous!” you say.

And I say: A great news photo—a photo like this—is never, ever, only what it appears to be. It is “Both/And.” It is an icon. It is an emblem. It is what it is and it is always more. Those who have eyes will see.

Michael Lesy is the author of eight books of literary journalism and photography, includingWisconsin Death Trip, Dreamland, and, most recently, Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943. He is a professor of writing at Hampshire College. His last essay for The Revealer was “See the Dreamer,” on a photograph of Sheikh Yassin.

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