Anne Teresa Demo

In public controversies, photographs most often function as a uniquely reliable and presumably transparent record of an event. One common effect of introducing a photograph into a political debate is to delimit areas of contestation through a photograph’s implicit assertion that "this is how things are." The international controversy surrounding the April 22^nd Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) seizure of Elián González from his Miami relatives, however, dramatizes the limits of photographic truth. Unlike images at the center of other public controversies such as the digitally altered 1994 Time mug shot of O. J. Simpson, the images most frequently used to characterize and evaluate the INS raid and Justice Department handling of the González case were unaltered yet seemingly irreconcilable. In examining the construction of photographic truth in the González controversy, two questions are addressed. First, how are the practices and techniques of image-making used by the press, the state and González’s Miami relatives to define an interpretation of events as "true"? Second, what relationship between evidence, truth and visual rhetoric is suggested by the González controversy? My essay explores these questions by focusing on the three most iconic images in the debate: the Associated Press photograph of a federal agent with his gun pointed toward Elián, the video still of the federal marshal who raced from the house with Elián in her arms, and the reunion photograph of Elián with his father. My analysis foregrounds tensions central to the study of visual rhetoric including realism, publicity and political judgment.

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