Julie Uszpolewicz
Suspected Lumumbist freedom fighters being tormented before execution, Stanleyville, 1964, Don McCullin.
There is nothing as powerful in making the viewer realise the atrocity and the suffering of war, as an image. Statistics are too dehumanising, words leave too much to the imagination, but photography has the rare power of being apparently objective. However, looking at the documented conflicts has been criticised by several post-modernist thinkers (such as Jean Baudillard) as being passive. In the contemporary world of social media, we are faced with images of horror more than we have ever been before, therefore, perhaps the question of the role of photography requires revisiting. Is there a right way to look at the war in the reality that is saturated with photographs of distant conflicts and human rights abuses? Perhaps this article will raise more doubts than give answers, but it seems worthwhile to stop for a second and ask what kind of pictures we are bombarded with in the news.
The question of ethics in political photography is nothing new. We can recall the notorious debate over Kevin Carter’s “The Struggling Girl,” that won him a Pulitzer Prize, but for which he was widely criticised with remarks that he chose to take a picture instead of helping the famine victim. In reality, he was surrounded by soldiers and ordered not to interfere with the situation, but this scenario still challenges the way we think about documentaries. Is the objective of raising awareness about suffering enough to justify sending photographers to regions facing humanitarian disasters? However, there is a difference between artistic photographs of suffering that are then exhibited or get awards and the photographs that accompany journal articles that we see all the time in the Economist, the Guardian or whatever news outlet you read. Political photography appears in different contexts and for different purposes.
“These dead are supremely uninterested in the living.” This is how Susan Sontag’s essay “Regarding the Pain of Others” ends. She is right. Our awareness of the famine in Central Africa or of the atrocities in Syria is usually passive. Sure, we can feel sympathy for the suffering, we may even feel outraged or shocked or reflect on our own privileged position. But what is this our sentiment for, if it has no real effect on the situation? The passivity of the spectator’s guilt is the argument most often put forward by post-modernist critics. “The true witness is that who does not want to witness,” writes Rancière in “The Emancipated Spectator.” When we open a photo documentary or even an article reporting the abuses of human rights somewhere we are already prepared for what we are about to see, we know to expect — it may still move us, but we make a conscious choice to look at it. However, Rancière was writing before social media became such an important channel for social movements and political manifestos. We may be scrolling through our friends' stories on Instagram and see a video from the bombing of Aleppo or arrests during mass demonstrations — do we become any truer witnesses when we stumble upon those randomly or do we become desensitised as we quickly swipe to see a picture of an influencer having brunch in Soho?
The context in which a work appears is significant. The beauty of an image lays in its universality — the power that it holds outside of the circumstances in which it was created. This is why up to this day there is something unique in visiting the Last Supper or the Sistine Chapel. Political documentaries, though, can be cursed by this universality, by this detachment. Most contemporary conflicts take place in Asia or Latin America — in other words, for the Western viewer, they are, indeed, far-away situations with little effect on our daily lives. But even when things were happening much closer to the imagined border of the Western world like the European Refugee Crisis the media despite the overflow of photographs managed to distance ourselves from it. When you read a news article from the safety of your own home it not only shocks you or evokes sympathy, it also reassures you that you are safe. A photograph transported across contexts creates an uncrossable gap between the seeing and the seen.
So what role exactly do photographs play in illustrating the political situation? The awareness of death happening somewhere on Earth. Jean Baudrillard takes this argument further and claims that it is not a real death we are moved by when looking at pictures of casualties, but by their virtual death. This virtual death begs another question — the suffering of who exactly are we looking at? The victims of war become objects of a picture in the name of raising awareness, of sharing information. Photography objectifies (it is even in the language we use to talk about what is photographed, what is the object that the lense is directed at). The captions of such documents are often anonymous — a suffering women, a scared girl or, simply, a time and a place. There are no names; they are just depictions of the general, mass victims of atrocities. Even in close up portraits they are just selected parts of some bigger crime against humanity. As much as photography is a medium often perceived as objective it offers us only limited knowledge about the situation. After all, those images rarely give us any information we did not know before — do we really need to look at war documentation to become aware that terrible things do happen?
The underlying question of all these analyses is the question of why do we photograph war. To shock — for the more artistic projects, perhaps, but for the photographs accompanying every news article we read, that seems to be an overstatement as its abundance takes away the shock factor. To inform — in several ways, yes, but a photograph in itself offers only a glimpse of the conflict and does not really tell us anything about the political situation. Not to mention it can be very easily manipulated. To awake a sentiment — doubtlessly, but the spectator guilt does not really have any real impact on the conflict. To catch attention — this seems like the most reasonable explanation, but it seems like there should be something more than that. Visuals in the social media era are maybe even more important than the text — perhaps it is just a way we communicate relevant issues nowadays.
All the critical analyses I have mentioned here ask relevant and important questions. To look at the images of war is passive — yes. The virtual and not the real death is what we are actually looking at — also yes. Photography objectifies — again, yes. Yet, it seems that all those critiques could be applied to any other intellectual study of conflict. After all, to read an academic article as a student of politics about, let’s say, the issue of Palestine, is also passive and does not really help the suffering in Gaza or serve the peacemaking process in the short-term. To keep up to date with the news about all the political tensions that happen in the world right now also for the most part does not really influence those situations. Perhaps behind all those questions about photography that I posed, there is a much simpler and a much broader question — what is all this awareness really for and what does it mean?
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