Saturday, July 20, 2013

What's in a Photo? Why the Rolling Stone Cover of the Boston Bomber Fails


There have been several opinion pieces published recently taking the position that Rolling Stone magazine’s decision to put a certain photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its next cover, in which an article by Janet Reitman examining the bombing suspect appears, is commendable, explainable or, at the very least, should not offend us any more than we are already offended by Tsarnaev’s murderous acts at the Boston Marathon this year.  (Jesse Singal (Boston Globe Opinion, July 18, 2013); David Weinberger (CNN Opinion, July 19, 2013); Yvonne Abraham (Boston Globe Metro, July 20, 2013).)  For anyone who missed it, the upcoming cover displays a close-up photograph of Tsarnaev, in which he stares directly at the camera in sepia tones.  His hair looks artfully mussed, his T-shirt could be from Abercrombie and Fitch, and his expression looks smug; borderline sultry.

It is accompanied by the following coverline:  “THE BOMBER: How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell into Radical Islam, and Became a Monster.”

The opinions and arguments expressed by these authors are persuasive, even to someone like me who was just shy of finishing the marathon when the bombs went off, my family across the street from the second explosion.  In sum (and not to conflate them; they are each nuanced pieces with slightly different angles, and I’m sure there are more out there than I cite), their main point is that Rolling Stone’s decision to portray Tsarnaev on the cover as a “normal” teenager highlights the real danger presented by the terroristic world in which we live; that the fact he does not look like the “monster” he is (as evidenced by the cover photo) puts the terrifying into terrorist.  They further stress (and with this I agree) that labeling our enemies simply as “monsters” or “terrorists” glosses over the ambivalence in many of these individuals and the path they took to terror.  That in order to understand fully how this event could occur, which is central both to our humanity and to our national safety, we must explore this ambiguity and its shades of gray.  The ultimate suggestion is that the juxtaposition of Tsarnaev’s inviting image on the cover with the label of “monster” in the coverline is at the core of the paradox that we so desperately need to solve.

These arguments fail for the following simple reason:  Most “normal” teenagers do not have their photos on the cover of Rolling Stone.  Even accepting the assumption that what unnerves us about a terrorist like Tsarnaev is his unexceptional appearance, the only reason he is the subject of a feature article in Rolling Stone magazine is because he decided, with his brother, to take two pressure-cooker bombs and detonate them at the finish line of one of the most historic and revered road races in the United States.  While I do not fault Reitman's decision to investigate Tsarnaev’s background, or the subsequent debate as to how the cover photo might relate to her piece, it is misguided to suggest that letting Tsarnaev’s image reside in such an iconic space, and particularly in such a flattering light, is necessary to make the point that the face of terrorism has changed, or necessary to ignite responsible debate about our country’s potentially dangerous presumptions regarding who fits the profile of a terrorist.  The cover photo is not a reflection of Tsarnaev as a “normal” teenager who somehow became a terrorist; it elevates him to a celebrity, plain and simple.

The defense, explanation, or acceptance, of Rolling Stone’s cover offered by these various opinion pieces seeks to connect the editors’ choice and placement of that particular photo on the cover to the underlying article’s warning that we may not know terrorists when we see them.  They may, in fact, look “normal” – even seductive (danger can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, after all).  But is that really the most important message from all of this?  Don’t we already know that we were blindsided?  And, if we are going to engage in an admittedly important dialogue around our nation’s and culture’s current approach to profiling and understanding terrorists, particularly those internal to our country, is the take-away really that we should be on alert for someone who looks like he came from a photo shoot?  When I think of the many other angles and creative choices available to the editors at Rolling Stone I can’t help but be disappointed – no, outraged.  Perhaps Rolling Stone has gotten what it wanted in terms of publicity and notoriety, in the arguable furtherance of demonstrating that even terrorists can look like cover models.  But I’m not sure those who decided to publish the photo understand the collateral damage of that “win” to those of us who were there.  Because after three months of not thinking about the individuals who wreaked havoc on my family and so many others that day (they were, to me, bit actors in play; not worthy of being listed in the credits; extras; the prop knife in Act I that you see on stage and know it foreshadows tragedy in Act III…), I now can’t stop seeing their faces.  And I fear that Ms. Abraham’s assertion in her piece that “it’s not like this cover image, which most of us have seen before, is going to change anybody’s mind about Tsarnaev and what he did”, sadly underestimates the celebrity culture in which we live.

So while I acknowledge that these authors have articulated some of the best arguments to explain Rolling Stone’s choice, I remain convinced that the editors of Rolling Stone deserve every second of backlash and boycott.  And even if we are “strong enough” to see this terrorist glorified on the cover, as one piece suggests in questioning certain businesses’ decision not to carry the issue, we’re also strong enough to tell Rolling Stone, loudly and repeatedly:  Shame on you.  You misjudged, you miscalculated, and you let marketing greed influence editorial integrity.  You have unnecessarily re-traumatized the survivors of this attack, all for publicity in the guise of nuanced journalism.  And expressing our outrage about Rolling Stone’s decision in no way undercuts or avoids the important conversation around the ambiguous grays of terrorism.

Because sometimes the wolf really does come in sheep’s clothing; and needs to be disrobed.