ABSTRACT
Dover Air Force Base is the primary entry point for American military casualties from overseas, in a solemn and choreographed media event, President Obama served as a witness to and participant in eighteen 'dignified transfers', the careful and routinized procedure for transporting American military dead back home. The photographs from Obama's predawn trip consisted of various views of the President at the head of a line of uniformed military personnel saluting flag-draped containers that held the remains of American casualties. These containers, in colloquial and media usage, are often referred to as 'coffins'. Actual coffin photos, pictures that clearly showed coffins or their contents, would satisfy a voyeuristic impulse, while also raising the political and ideological stakes of the demand for the right to look at them and inflating the significance of subsequently being allowed to do so. Although many antiwar activists implied that the sight of the 'coffin photos' would arouse popular opposition to and protest against the war.
