Documentation in the Modern Age

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In “The Best We Could Do,” the American photographer Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for his famous photo, “Saigon Execution,” depicting a South Vietnamese general with his gun pointed at a Viet Cong soldier. The photo was broadcast all over the world, bringing light to the situation in Vietnam, but it was also taken out of context, ruining the general’s reputation and being distorted by American media into an oversimplification and stereotyping for their own narrative.

It made me think back to the Violent Images synthesis essay we wrote a few weeks ago. I had been adamant about releasing images as truthfully as possible without censorship, even if they were violent, putting the general public as a higher priority than the people directly tied to a photograph. But the story behind “Saigon Execution” made me rethink my stance. On one hand, the photo did result in knowledge spread about the reality of the Vietnam War, and protests taken in action against it; but there were also unintended consequences that became collateral damage as a result. In the past, people had almost no methods to document reality—written words and mediums like painted portraits were “filtered” through the writers and artists creating them, and inaccessible to those who lacked the means to get them, such as the illiterate and the poor. But photographs changed that, providing irrevocable proof of things that happened. In the modern age, these methods of documentation have become increasingly accessible to the public—anyone can take pictures and post them online, into a digital space that is almost impossible to obliterate. The result is that everyone has a digital footprint, a “trace” that is immortalized and can be used against you—perhaps forever.


In Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, the opposition dug up his old music videos to ridicule him. In the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein saga, videos of Donald Trump and Epstein’s interactions resurfaced from decades ago. Our ‘footprints’ can be used for both criminal investigations, stalking someone on Instagram or to mine data for algorithms—documentation can be preservation, blackmail or surveillance alike, distinctions that are, increasingly, at the mercy of others to decide.

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