How to interpret ... ?

Ave, Maria

The cover of Time Magazine, published on 12 April 1999, has become an icon of the Kosovo crisis and been used by many newspapers and magazines. While the production background may certainly be of interest for a more systematic research on the various interrelations between what we can see and what we can say (‘the discourse’), I will primarily concentrate on how this cover produces a powerful narrative for intervention by and through the interplay of the image and the text.

The image, a photo which seems to be taken by an eye-witness, shows a women who is nursing a baby while she is walking or standing with many other people in a queue. Her face, shoot in frontal perspective, looks rather exhausted and hopeless than the image of the overwellming joy of a mother holding her newborn. The strong grip of her hand expresses the density and exertion of this public situation. Regarding this mother in a merely private and intimate monent nursing her child feels like a voyoristic intrusion the spectator is inevitably forced into.

The text provides some relief for our interupting gaze. “Kosovo Speacial Report: Are ground troops the answer?” -  a spectator who is not familiar with the politcal debates concerning the NATO air strikes against Serbia in 1999, may be unable to understand such a title (but she may interpret the image). Bearing the reports of a humanitarian crisis and ongoing attrocities of Serbian forces against the people in the Kosovo in mind, NATO allies were in need of justifying a military intervention without an explicit mandate of the UN security council. The deployment of ground troops was a highly contested issue due to the extraordinary circumstances of this intervention without UN authorization and the suspected victims of own soldiers.

While NATO never deployed ground forces to Serbia or the Kosovo, the Time cover produces a quite powerful narrative justifying a military engagment of ‘the West’ in order to protect the people of the Kosovo– in aprticular womean and children. What makes the image so familiar is how it (implicitly) cites of a well-known icon: Maria holding Jesus in her arms. The biblical story of Maria and Joseph searching for shelter, how everyone turned away, and how they finally found a barn where Jesus was born, has been one of the most powerful images artists have dealt with. When the church still was the main sponsor of artistic work, the symbolic presentation of Maria was highly popular and the depiction of this figure was known to a wide public. A young women, covering her head with a shawl and rocking a half-nacked boy in her arms was a symbol of dignity, beauty and religious confidence. However, the young mother on the Time cover lacks such an aesthetic dimension. How she is presented directly speaks to the eyes of ‘Western’ publics who are able to decode its symbolic representation. Hence, the power of this image refers to the interplay between such a symbolic representation and its claim of authenticity as being a photo of an eye-witness. In the end, the spectator takes over this position and has to decide whether to help or just to gape.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,12-04-1999,00.html