Interactive Features: Casualties of War: Faces of the Dead

One way in which the New York Times has been pioneering is in its creation of "interactive features" for their web site. Interactive features can take a variety of forms: some look like slide shows and have audio, others are videos, charts and graphs, and still others allow you to search and manipulate information.

It's this last type of interactive feature-- the type that allows you to search and manipulate information-- that caught my eye today.

Looking for news and images on Iraq I saw a new feature about the American soldiers that had died serving our country. The reason it caught my eye was because the images were not photographs-- they were cropped, gray, pixelated-looking and abstracted images.





When I clicked on the feature to try and figure out what this was I saw this image of a single man broken into little grayed out squares.




Each square that composes the image of the single soldier one is "actually viewing" "stands" for one soldier killed. When your cursor moves over the image one can choose to see a different image of a US solider killed in combat. It's a quite literal representation of a part standing for a whole and a whole for a part, but it's also fallacious, because this image cannot possibly represent all the soldiers killed: there aren't enough squares.

What you're actually seeing is a whole image parsed into parts that doesn't even represent a third of the US war casualties.

You're also seeing how what artists do feeds into corporate design, because the parsing of the faces in this layout recalls Chuck Closes' paintings quite, quite easily.



In that image the squares are actually diamonds, but there are other images by Close which more obviously recall this sort of part-whole composition.

Yes, it's just a design choice. But it also says more, because these images not only try to speak from more than one perspective, to unify the US war dead under one cause and situation, but they also dull questions of race through the absence of color. These images also stand directly opposite the color photographs one almost always sees of living US soldiers. The use of gray, or black and white, is also a trope used to recall something past, something old. It's fallacious, too, but that's besides the point. These deaths are not old-- they are not part of the past! this is not history but what is happening now-- and are part of a collective present.

These squares may look like a collection of the present, but they are anything but present or collective.