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The looking/not looking dilemma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

FRANK MÖLLER
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Abstract

When confronted with images of war and other forms of human suffering, not looking is not an option, not only because we are permanently exposed to images but also because it would not seem to be a morally tenable position. However, looking at images of human suffering is often said to prolong this very suffering and to fix human subjects as victims. Especially when acts of violence have been committed in order to produce images of these very acts the relationship between viewing the images and participating in the acts of violence qua viewer appears to be uncomfortably close indeed. Thus, looking is not an option, either. This article, in the first part, engages with standard criticisms of photography, especially with accusations according to which photographs aestheticise that which they depict and desensitise their viewers. In the second part it discusses Alfredo Jaar's and Jeff Wall's work in order to show possible ways to circumvent the looking/not looking dilemma.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 781 - 794
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2009

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References

1 Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 9 (for all quotations).

2 Horst Bredekamp, ‘Wir sind befremdete Komplizen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 May 2004, p. 17.

3 This argument is pertinent especially to the images of the ‘human pyramid’ taken on 7 November 2003 because ‘the pyramid had been staged in order to take photographs’. Before 7 November ‘the photography had always been a response to what was going on, not the occasion for it’. See Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story (London: Picador 2008), pp. 195–6.

4 Eisenman, Abu Ghraib, p. 35. See also Gourevitch and Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, for a discussion of the photographers' intentions, for example, pp. 112–3, 135–40, 176–84.

5 David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), p. 182.

6 Description of Jeff Wall's digital montage ‘Dead Troops Talk (A vision after the ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)’ (1992). Online room guide to Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004 at Tate Modern, 21 October 2005–8 January 2006 {http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/rooms/room8.shtm}. See figure 1.

7 Oliver Wendell Holmes in The New York Times, 20 October 1862, writing on Matthew Brady's photographs of the American Civil War {http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwbrady.html}

8 Ryszard Kapuściński, Another Day of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 96.

9 John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), unpaginated.

10 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 71.

11 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 42.

12 For a powerful statement to this effect, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1978).

13 Mark Reinhardt, ‘Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique’, in Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (eds), Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Williamstown/Chicago: Williams College Museum of Art/The University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 21 (for all quotations). For a useful discussion of the etymology of the terms aestheticisation and aesthetic, see ibid., p. 23.

14 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 2 (for both quotations). Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye, adds: ‘The subject and the picture [are] never the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so.’

15 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 44 (for both quotations).

16 Mieke Bal, ‘The Pain of Images’, in Beautiful Suffering, p. 104. Note that some viewers might be attracted precisely by the seeming lack of compositional elaboration which in fact might be carefully elaborated indeed.

17 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

18 Elizabeth Dauphinée, ‘The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery’, Security Dialogue, 38:2 (2007), pp. 139–55.

19 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, p. 176.

20 Jonathan Jones, ‘Jeff Wall’, Guardian, 29 November 2007, on Jeff Wall's photograph ‘War Game’ (2007) {http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/photography/story/0,,2218728,00.html}. See figure 2.

21 Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Body in Pain’, The Nation, 27 November 2006 {http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061127/danto}

22 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 214 and p. 218.

23 Sharon Sliwinski, ‘A painful labour: responsibility and photography’, Visual Studies, 19:2 (2004), p. 156.

24 Jenny Edkins, ‘Exposed Singularity’, Journal for Cultural Research, 9:4 (2005), p. 372 (for all quotations).

25 Sliwinski, ‘A painful labour’, p. 154.

26 Fernando Botero, Botero Abu Ghraib (Munich: Prestel, 2006).

27 See Frank Möller, ‘The Implicated Spectator – From Manet to Botero’, in Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski (eds), Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 34–37.

28 John Berger, ‘Photographs of Agony’, in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 289–90.

29 See David Campbell, ‘Cultural governance and pictorial resistance: reflections on the imaging of war’, Review of International Studies, 29 (2003), special issue, p. 71.

30 Martha Rosler, ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)’, in The Photography Reader, p. 262.

31 Sliwinski ‘A painful labour’, p. 153.

32 Reinhardt, ‘Picturing Violence’, p. 16 (emphasis added).

33 David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 246.

34 Bal, ‘The Pain of Images’, p. 95 (for all quotations).

35 Reinhardt, ‘Picturing Violence’, p. 31.

36 See, for example, Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006); Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (London: Arrow Books, 2004); Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998).

37 For the following discussion, see the artist's website at <http://www.alfredojaar.net> and Alfredo Jaar, Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project 1994–1998 (Barcelona: ACTAR, 1998).

38 Reinhardt, ‘Picturing Violence’, p. 32.

39 Marguerite Michaels, ‘Sorry, Wrong Country’, Time, 8 June 1994 {http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980859,00.html}

40 On the avoidance of the word ‘genocide’ in many official assessments, see Gourevitch, We wish to inform you, pp. 151–54.

41 Michael Geyer, ‘The Place of the Second World War in German Memory and History’, New German Critique, 71 (1997), p. 7.

42 Jaar, quoted in Strauss, Between the Eyes, p. 91.

43 The number of seconds given each instalment is taken from Reinhardt, ‘Picture Violence’, p. 33.

44 Bal, ‘The Pain of Images’, p. 115.

45 {http://www.alfredojaar.net} →recent projects, →THE RWANDA PROJECT 1994–2000, →The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, 1996.

46 It is irrelevant in the present context that the exact number of people killed during the genocide could not be established. Estimates vary from 500,000 to more than a million. See Straus, The Order of Genocide, p. 1.

47 Reinhardt, ‘Picturing Violence’, p. 33.

48 Dauphinée, ‘Politics of the Body in Pain’, p. 147, equates ‘the “haunting” nature of the [Abu Ghraib] photographs’ with ‘their brutality’. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, p. 174, show that iconic images do not have to be ‘especially horrific’ and Gourevitch and Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, p. 185, add that ‘BRUTALITY IS BORING’.

49 Strauss, Between the Eyes, pp. 79–81.

50 Sontag, Pain of Others, p. 105.

51 Ibid.

52 Patrick Hagopian, ‘Vietnam War Photography as a Locus of Memory’, in Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister (eds), Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), p. 208.

53 Bal, ‘The Pain of Images’, p. 97.

54 Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment (London: Abacus, 2006), p. 31.

55 Reinhardt, ‘Picturing Violence’, p. 33.

56 Strauss, Between the Eyes, p. 97.

57 Hariman and Lucaites, ‘No Caption Needed’, p. 176, referring to ‘Accidental Napalm’ but their statement is applicable to many war photographs.

58 Wall, as quoted in Arthur Lubow, ‘The Luminist’, The New York Times, 25 February 2007 {http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25Wall.t.html}

59 Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 319.

60 Sontag, Pain of Others, p. 124.

61 Online room guide to Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004 at Tate Modern, 21 October 2005–8 January 2006, room 8 {http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/rooms/room8.shtm}

62 Sontag, Pain of Others, p. 125.

63 Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 39.