"Shoot it."
"What?"
"Shoot the helicopter. It's going to make a great picture."

the steady apoliticism of this film functions quite effectively to illustrate the reality that photographing something is—itself—a political act. you shoot a picture, and reality coalesces before your particular viewpoint. audiences might interpret the image differently, but the act of taking the picture has already eliminated other realities from the record.

cameras and guns are paralleled in this film very explicitly, and i think garland did that to imbue the camera with power, as part of his "love letter to journalism." but photography in civil war is fetishistic, not clarifying. journalists in civil war are not on some noble pursuit of truth; they just want to take the best picture. it eats them up and spits them out empty.

“Would you take my picture if I got shot?”
“What do you think?”