Earlier this spring, New York Daily News photographer David Handschuh led a discussion in the photojournalism class he teaches at New York University about the role of photo editors and the ethics of violent images. The next day, four American security contractors were killed in Fallujah, Iraq. Images of the charred, mutilated bodies were displayed on TV newscasts and on the front pages of dozens of newspapers. At the next class meeting, Handschuh's students brought along the photos for discussion. "In a room of 18 people, there were 18 very, very different opinions, and that's the way it should be," Handschuh said.

The Fallujah photos started a public debate about whether such graphic images should be shown. Since then, the debate has continued. With images of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison, and the gruesome killing of Nicholas Berg, "clearly, the power of images has come to the forefront of discussion," Handschuh said, in something of an understatement.

Should the images have been shown?

The debate has focused so much on the images themselves, in fact, that the events depicted in the images have seemed at times to be of secondary importance. Recently, some commentators (also here) have suggested that news media should not have disseminated the photos from Abu Ghraib because the images have inflamed anti-American sentiment.

MaryAnne Golon, picture editor at Time magazine, told the Dart Center that questioning whether the images should have been shown misses the point. "The inflammatory thing is not the images, it's what's in the images," she said. "Of course it's inflammatory, so is war."

Barbie Zelizer, professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and currently a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, agrees. "I find it shameful that that question is even being asked," she said.

"We're continuing to ask the same questions about images that we don't ask about words," Zelizer said. "Should a news story be told? ... We wouldn't be asking ourselves that question."

"We seem to be having these repeated periods of navel gazing among journalists," Zelizer said. "There has been a kind of ongoing story about the images, and that should not be the case."

The questions about images are likely to continue, with hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib yet to be made public, and little agreement from government officials about whether to release them.

"There's no good option about the photographs," psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton said. "I think we would do best to show them all because they will come out."

Why do they evoke such strong feelings?

Golon said that the images' main source of power is that they serve as evidence for accusations of wrongdoing. The facts of a story can be questioned more easily without a photograph.

Handschuh said that for him, as a visual journalist, the images are "a reminder that photographs are taken by people. They highlight the physical and emotional risk involved in photography."

"The photos evoke a visceral response and they can have a powerful impact on Americans in connection with the war," Lifton said. "I think they serve further to raise questions about our mission in Iraq, just as certain revealing photographs did in Vietnam." But, for those who strongly support the war, Lifton said the photos (particularly those of Nicholas Berg) could trigger what he called a "survivor response" that could cause them to want to press the war effort more fiercely.

Zelizer said that the images can cause a different response in different viewers, depending on their previously held beliefs about the war. "The images push people further in the direction that they're already thinking, whether they are for or against the war," she said. The images resonate culturally, she said, because they can conjure up dark collective memories. She noted that some of the photos bear a strong resemblance to historical images of lynchings. The images of dogs attacking prisoners, are "absolutely directly taken from Nazi iconography," she said. "These photos certainly undermine our sense of how we like to think of ourselves during wartime."

» "Abu Ghraib: Bad Apples, Bad Command, or Both?"
— experts on war crimes and war psychology discuss the factors that can lead to war-time atrocities.