The Photographs That Made Trump an Incarnation of Defiance
If we had seen the attack on former President Donald J. Trump only through television footage, it would have appeared shocking, but also chaotic and muddled. The candidate dives to the rostrum after an assassin’s bullet grazes his ear. Secret Service agents jump in. He gets back on his feet, gestures to the crowd and is rushed out to cheers.
The still images of the assassination attempt — by Doug Mills of The New York Times, and by photographers from The Associated Press and Reuters — tell another story. Blood running from Mr. Trump’s ear to his lips testifies to how close the former president had come to death. His raised fist offers a highly legible refusal to capitulate. To the television cameras, everything was pandemonium. In the lens of the still camera, the horror of the attack was translated into embodiments of authority, defiance and near martyrdom.
I understand the tendency to hunt for visual analogies when extraordinary events like this take place. The American flag billowing behind Mr. Trump’s bloodied face in some of the photos may superficially recall a Romantic tradition of bloodied national heroes, real or allegorical. A reverse image bot without much horse power could easily match them to Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” (1830), in which a woman embodying France raises a flag in her right arm, or John Singleton Copley’s “Death of Major Peirson” (1782—84), a history painting of a victorious general dying beneath the British flag. The triangular formation of Secret Service agents seems to have put quite a few people in mind of the photo of the flag being raised at Iwo Jima.
People like these visual analogues because they offer a pedigree to news imagery. They promise to assign distinction to outliers in our perpetual image stream, and to inscribe the past in the present. But as a moral matter, I have always bridled against the temptation to treat images of suffering (two people are dead, and Mr. Trump and two others are injured) as objects of aesthetic judgment. And analogies like these underestimate a larger change in how we encounter images today, where even the most “iconic” picture is something mutable and unfixed.
