If you were a semiotician you would say that images and words use different systems of meaning, that images can say things that words cannot and vice versa. Semiotics is the study of signification and it’s a useful tool for finding meaning in the things we see in world.

Arguably the most controversial images a person can look at are those of death or of pain and suffering. Usually the viewer experiences a strong negative reaction, which is why David Perlmutter has called them “icons of outrage.”

An icon (from the Greek eikōn, meaning ‘image’) provides a visual stand-in for an object; in other words, it looks similar to the object it represents. Iconic photographs are common in the media and have been repurposed by popular culture to depict anything from a celebrity to an object that characterizes contemporary society.

Generally photographic ‘icons of outrage’ depict horrors that challenge ideological narratives. Images of dead bodies acquire iconic status by shocking the public and in the case of a war conflict are more popular than any other visual depiction.

Two examples of photographic ‘icons of outrage’ are the deaths of Carlo Giuliani, the demonstrator who was shot dead by police in Genoa during the 2001 G8 Summit, and that of a certain Al Qaeda terrorist.

Photographic ‘icons of outrage’ can evoke panic, promote solidarity or elicit a sense of rejection. Each of these outcomes bears a different moral implication for the viewer. But these icons can also disrupt the regular flow of the media and convey to the public a sense of sacredness or an emergency.

And in the age of mass-communication they have the ability to regulate the quality of our engagement with the political sphere. This endows us with the perception of solidarity and entails new moral responsibilities.

The first photograph was taken during the 2001G8 Summit—a few weeks, in fact, before the attack on the Twin Towers. During a clash with protesters, Giuliani was shot dead by the Carabinieri. His death stepped up anti-globalists’ demonstrations against the red zone, the cordoned-off area where the G8 leaders were meeting to discuss the global political agenda. The photograph of Giuliani lying in the street, his head concealed in his blood-soaked balaclava, blood streaming onto the black asphalt, created a sign too strong for it not to become iconic. The victim came to represent the willingness of those in power to use violence to suppress opposition and to protect the regular progress of the G8 Summit.

What happened in Genoa was not a random incident but the start of what has become a most ordinary situation—a merger between the police and the military that erased the boundary between state and national law. In Genoa protesters experienced the supension of the law and the systematic violation of human rights, which after  9/11 became the norm. This constitutes a state of global war in that it does not abide by any established norms within or among nations and it is permitted to take place anywhere and through any means necessary in the name of the ‘global war on terror.’

With the second photographic ‘icon of outrage’ we’ve witnessed a series of carefully orchestrated images disseminated online and in newspapers of the aftermath of the U.S. military’s attack on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Some of them show bloodied corpses of unidentified men, including a close-up of a man lying in a pool of blood who appears to have been, like Giuliani, shot in the head. We know nothing about him other than that he was part of Bin Laden’s entourage. But here the public hasn’t been allowed to see the body of the man who has for nearly ten years been the icon of terror: public enemy number one.

Absent the body of Bin Laden, the anonymous dead man stands in as his surrogate, moving the viewer into the compound where the culprit who killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and attacked the Pentagon was living in hiding.

The viewer’s gaze is then allowed to shift to another celebrated photograph—the remarkable scene that was unfolding in the White House Situation Room at the exact same time. Here we’re shown a decidedly intimate portrait in medias res of two of the most recognizable political leaders in the world—President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The two are surrounded by their staff of advisors and strategists, watching Bin Laden’s execution in real time via a camera mounted on a soldier’s helmet. From their rarified position of power you might say Obama and Clinton watched this macabre spectacle, one in which “justice has been done,” as Obama claimed afterwards in his speech, as one might watch a particularly vicious lovers’ spat on reality TV.

What, in fact, links these two events that happened almost ten years apart—G8 Summit 2001 and Washington/Abbottanabad 2011? In the first instance an unprecedented flood of images, so many that we regard the Genoa G8 as one of the most documented and monitored events in history, something that was unthinkable until the arrival of the consumer digital camera just a few years ago. And in the second instance, an almost total absence of witnesses and a close up image of an unidentified man’s corpse. All we’re told is that the body of Bin Laden was cleansed following Muslim custom before being quickly buried at sea.

The assassinated bodies of Osama and Giuliani, though dissimilar in their impact on world events, are both instances of an established power attempting to preserve itself through military operations—one that can be fought just as much in the streets of Genoa as in Abbottanabad.

However, in Genoa thousands of electronic eyes were recording the suppression on the streets of the G8 demonstrators. For the first time in world history technology, now in the hands of the people, challenged how the spectacle of a global political event became visible to the public and established power lost its monopoly on the production of images. Sure it continued to control big media’s distribution network, but through the Internet and underground channels the image of Giuliani’s dead body became ubiquitous.

Then came 9/11 and former President Bush called for a visual fast, which marked the beginning of an invisible war and a purging of images of dead soldiers and civilians from TV.

But now with the execution of public enemy number one the represenation of death is made partially visible—we see not the bloodied corpse of Bin Laden but someone who was close to him, a surrogate.

In the past few days the news outlets have been broadcasting videos seized from Bin Laden’s compound that show him speaking into the camera with his beard dyed black to make him appear younger and observing himself on TV. As far from heroic as possible, the purpose of showing these images is to desecrate him as icon.

Is this a kind of semiotic revenge or are we perhaps only celebrating the death of our critical gaze through a schizophrenic flow of images in which the nonrepresentable joins the unforeseeable? It’s difficult to say. One thing is certain. The one clear image we’re left with is that of the most powerful military in the world inside one of the most secret chambers in the world as they watch, for us, the spectacle of the execution of their number one enemy.