Photographer Ken Jarecke talks about his 1991 shot of an incinerated Iraqi soldier
Photographer Ken Jarecke talks about his 1991 shot of an incinerated Iraqi soldier, which was at first regarded by many editors as too disturbing to print, but later became one of the most famous images of the first Gulf War.
The image shows a burned-beyond-recognition Iraqi soldier in the front window of a destroyed truck.
The sun is coming in through the back of the truck and most of the surfaces in the image are burned and just torn up, so it's almost a black and white image although it was made on colour film.
It was early in the morning, we had been up most of the night. There was supposed to be a ceasefire in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half.
We had travelled east from Nasiriya towards Basra, hooked up with Highway 8 and we started travelling south towards Kuwait City. And we came across this... just a single lorry, kind of in the middle of a double-lane highway.
I was with a public affairs officer with the US Army and he said: "I don't really get my jollies out of making pictures of dead people." And I said... I just thought of the first thing I could think of, and I said: "If I don't make pictures like this, people like my mother will think what they see in war is what they see in movies." He didn't try to stop me, he let me go and I just went over there. And he might have been the driver of the truck, he might have been the passenger, but he had been burned alive and it appears as though he's trying to lift himself up and out of the truck.
I don't know who he was or what he did. I don't know if he was a good man, a family man or a bad guy or a terrible soldier or anything like that.
But I do know that he fought for his life and thought it was worth fighting for. And he's frozen, he's burned in place just kind of frozen in time in this last ditch effort to save his life.
At the time it was just something... well, I better make a picture of this.
I thought there might have been better pictures. I literally shot two frames and moved on to other things and I didn't really think a whole lot about it.
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