War photography ... Vietnam still the yardstick

FOR war photography, Vietnam remains the bloody yardstick. During the Tet offensive, on Feb. 9, 1968, Time magazine ran a story that was accompanied by photos showing dozens of dead American soldiers stacked like cordwood. The images remind that the dead are both the most patient and affecting of all subjects.

The Iraq war is a very different war, especially as rendered at home. While pictures of Iraqi dead are ubiquitous on television and in print, there are very few images of dead American soldiers. (We are offered pictures of the grievously wounded, but those are depictions of hope and sacrifice in equal measure.) A comprehensive survey done last year by James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times found that in a six-month period in which 559 Americans and Western allies died, almost no pictures were published of the American dead in the mainstream print media.

There is a very real public appetite for unalloyed images of the Iraq war. "The War Tapes," a documentary filmed by National Guardsmen from New Hampshire on convoy security in the deadly Sunni Triangle, won the Tribeca Film Festival's documentary award and has picked up enthusiastic reviews. "Baghdad ER," HBO's gory look inside battlefield medicine, has been seen by 3.5 million viewers and is the cable network's most-watched news documentary in two years.

EVEN the tabloids are looking to the war to sell magazines through what now seem like forbidden images. Shock, a new photo tabloid magazine from Hachette Filipacchi, ran a blood-red battlefield image on its cover and eight pages inside drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. The photos were gruesome, but nothing that was not manifest in the pages of Life, Newsweek and Time during the Vietnam War.