Discuss the main problems in

translating experience into

knowledge, with particular
reference to the relationship
between researcher and
researched subject.
How can we access lived experience? Can words, drawings, photographs
capture lived experience? What are the translations that take place
between the subject, the media, the translator (photographer, journalist,
academic, etc) and the audience (general public, students, policy makers,
etc)?
KEY TEXTS:
Sylvester, Christine (2012) War Experiences/War Practices/War
Theory, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 40(3): 483-503
Campbell, David. (2003) Representing Contemporary War, Ethics
and International Affairs. 17(2): 99-108.
Gibbon, Jill (2010) Dilemmas of Drawing War, in Sylvester,
Christine, ed. (2010) Experiencing War. Abingdon: Routledge (PP.
103-117).
Kynsilehto, Anitta & Puumala, Eeva (2012). The Ontological Gap
between War as Experience and War as Knowledge, ISA paper
presented at the ISA Annual Convention in San Diego, April 1, 2012.
Povrzanovic Frykman, Maja (2002) Violence and the Rediscovery of
Place Ethnologia: Journal of European Ethnology 32(2): 69-88
Main problems: ontological gap between researcher and researched subject in asylum
process.
Media view of the Other.
Can take on the journalistic quality
Leads to compassion fatigue ultimately.
Researcher and researched subject media is our translation. We want the knowledge.
Creation of an other. media just wants us to consume their shit.
We see the distant other and leads to compassion fatigue.

Dilemmas of Drawing war Jill

Gibbon, in Experiencing War C.
Sylvester (2010)
http://pmteu.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?
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The tradition of sending artists into war zones has an ideological

function p103
The artists presence in the war zone has become the defining
feature of official war art. Artists have been commissioned to visit
and document all of the recent wars in which British troops have
been involved. P104
Artists are dispatched to war zones to make art. The rationale is that
they should be eyewitnesses of war. P104
The emphasis on witnessing in official war art contrasts sharply with
the need to keep artists safe, sometimes with ludicrous
consequences. The artist, Steve McQueen, was sent to Iraq in 2003
just as the conflict escalated and was virtually confined to army
barracks. P104
. ^^ Ironically he would have seen more of the war on the news
had he stayed in the UK. It seems likely that the practice of sending
artists into war zones continues, in spite of the inevitable logistical
difficulties, because it has an important ideological function. P104
Official war art initially had an overt propaganda purpose as it is
clear from the title of the institution that established it the War
Propaganda Bureau. However, according to the Imperial War
Museum it subsequently took on a loftier aim. P104
In this section I will argue that official war art continues to work as
propaganda, though in a more subtle way than when it was first
commissioned, largely through the emphasis it places on the war
zone, and the claim that it aspires to something higher. While the
emphasis on the war zone restricts the content of the official war
art, the idea that it evokes something higher imbues that context
with transcendent value. P104-105
The word witness derives from the Old English witan, to know. In
the thirteenth century witness was used to describe various types of

knowledge including inner knowledge or conviction, knowledge

based on observation, and a quality of wisdom or a skill. It was used
as a verb to describe the act of giving testimony to such knowledge,
and as a noun to describe an observer or a piece of testimony or
evidence (Lewise, 2000). Although most of these meanings remain
in use, they have separated into distinct dominant and marginal
strands. Whereas a witness of conviction has become marginal, a
witness based on observation has become dominant, particularly as
a noun to refer to an observer. It is this meaning of witness that
structures official war art. P105
The gulf between contemporary meanings of witness can perhaps
be explained by the rise of empiricism and positivism in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Empiricism advocates
methodical observation as a reliable source of knowledge.
Positivism, a nineteenth-century school of philosophy, goes further
than this, advocating direct experience as the only genuine source
of knowledge. In some versions, observation is presented as giving
direct access to reality. This idea has been widely criticised in
twentieth-century philosophy for ignoring the many ways we
interpret what we see, and the social influences on meaning
(Barbanell and Garrett, 1997; Craig, 1998). Nevertheless, the idea
that observation is the only valid source of knowledge continues to
have resonance. It runs through official war art. P105
the Artistic Records Committee of the Imperial War Museum
insists on eye-witness accounts from its commissioned artists
(Gough, 1994). P105
The importance of this rule is evident in the response given to
artists who seem to have strayed from it. Peter Howsons painting of
a rape in the Bosnian War, Croatian and Muslim (1994), was
excluded from the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum
because it was based on a victims accounts, rather than anything
that Howson had actually seen. P105
The artist who is confined to acting as witness is powerless to
reveal those things hidden from the video: high-tech atrocities
committed against civilians and conscript troops, soldiers buried
alive in their dugouts, the cultivation of starvation and disease by
the bowing of sewage and irrigation systems (Stallabrass, 2004,
p106). P106
In addition to restricting its content, the insistence that official war
art is based on observation has often been used to guarantee the
authenticity of the work. This 1918 review likens the war artist
C.R.W. Nevison to a court witness: He is content to appear not as a
judge or advocate but simply as an uncorrupted witness. He states
without rhetoric what the eye sees (Flitch, 1918, in Malvern, 2004,
p48). P106
The first official war artist, Muirhead Bone, trained as an architect
and specialised in observational drawing. . Marks are made to
represent what is seen rather than to express a feeling or opinion
about a subject. P106

As causalities soared observational drawing became inadequate to

the task of representing the war. The war clearly involved more than
smoke on a distant horizon. Muirhead Bone seemed to acknowledge
this when he described his war drawings as limited and prosaic
(in Malvern, 2004, p24). P106
From 1917 the emphasis in official war art shifted from apparently
objective reportage, to art. This is what the Imperial War Museum
meant when it said that the scheme eventually aimed much
higher. P107
Artists had no restriction on what they could draw I am afraid I
connot give you any directions as to what you should draw I am
quite content that you should go drawing whatever you think best
(Masterman, 1917, in Malvern, 2004, p49). P107
As part of this change of emphasis, expressive approaches were
encouraged. Expressive methods derive from a debate running
through twentieth-century art about the meaning of realism. Does a
realistic representation depict outward surfaces, or reveal unseen
political aspects or psychological responses to a situation? In
contrast to the emphasis on visual accuracy in observational
drawing, expressive techniques use exaggeration, metaphor,
idealisation and distortion to highlight artists subjective
interpretations. P107
These images were clearly subjective however they continues to be
presented as offering truths of war. This is evident in the title of one
of the earliest publications of Paul Nashs war art Strange but True.
An introduction by the propaganda bureau began with the warning,
some fault will be found with what Lieut. Paul Nash has done here.
It will be said that no barbed wire ever twirled on this earth in the
forms which are taken by his (GHQ, in Nevinson et al., 1918, p87).
P107
instead of depicting external surfaces, Nashs work revealed a
deeper reality. He has got, at his best, to the essence of many
things he has seen (GHQ, in Nevinson et al., 1918, p85). P107
It was the least literal, and for that very reason the most truthful
(Konody, 1917, in Malvern 2004, p44). P107
The use of expressive techniques allowed artists to convey personal
interpretations of the things they saw. However, these reviews claim
more than this. They suggest that the artists reveal essential truths.
Similar claims are made in relation to contemporary war art.
These claims require more than a positivist idea of witness. They
draw on a romantic idea of art as a source of essential, authentic
values. This is a complex idea, deriving from the emergence of
romanticism in the nineteenth century, and its impact on meanings
of art and aesthetic value. As it is so fundamental to the ideological
workings of official war art, it is worth tracing its historical sources.
P107-108
The term romanticism emerged in the early nineteenth century to
describe an emphasis on deep feeling, extreme experience and self-

expression. . An emphasis on feeling was already evident in the

term aesthetic that came into use in the eighteenth century.
Although in contemporary usage aesthetic refers to qualities of art,
in the eighteenth century it had a much more general meaning. The
philosophers Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant used
aesthetic to refer to the perception and communication of feelings
through the senses (Harris, 2006, p10, Williams, 1976, p32). By
stressing sensation and feeling as a source of understanding, these
discourses represented a significant departure from the emphasis
on reason in the Enlightenment. P108
In the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deep
feeling was expressed as an impetus for self-determination and
given a collective form. Conversely, however, the aesthetic
emphasis on sensuous felling also underpinned bourgeois ideology,
emerging at the same time as the modern state. Whereas a
barbarous state maintains its authority through blatant repression, a
democracy is held in place by an apparent consensus of fellow
feeling. [problem].. it demanded both that aesthetic feeling was
both subjective and universal. .[solved] by a dramatic restriction
in the meaning of the term. By the end of the nineteenth century,
aesthetic was used almost exclusively in relation to internal
characteristics and qualities of art (Eagleton, 1990, Harris, 2006,
Williams, 1976). p108
Until the seventeenth century, art was used to describe any skill.
However, by the nineteenth century the term had specialised to
refer to the fine arts painting, drawing and sculpture. Alongside
this change, the romantic emphasis on emotion focused on artists
who came to be regarded as specialists in feeling. . With this
development, art was conceived as separate from society, and the
term aesthetic came to represent higher qualities associated with
art p108
This puts a new perspective on the claim made by the Imperial War
Museum that, after an initial function as propaganda, official war art
aimed much higher. Official war art literally transforms war into
art, and , in doing so, links war to supposedly universal values
widely associated within art. Far from marking a break from the
propagandist function of official war art, the evocation of higher
values refines that function. P108-109
In 2004 Langlands and Bell were shortlisted for the Turner Prize for
their official art about the Afghanistan war. This is an extract from
the Tate catalogue for the exhibition: Langlands and Bell present
elegant and lasting work in and intelligent, but ultimately impartial,
style The poignant ambiguity of these works ultimately reflects
the stark realities of the aftermath of war (Tate Britain, 2004, p9).
The repetition of ultimately and description of the work as lasting
evokes a romantic idea of higher, timeless values, apparently
achieved through the artists contact with the stark realities of war.
P109

Nash: My war experiences have developed me certainly on the

technical side. I think I have almost discovered my sense of colour
which was very weak before the war. I have gained a greater
freedom of handling, due largely to the fact that I had to make the
rapidest sketches in dangerous positions, and a greater sense of
rhythm. I have been jolted. (Imperial War Museum, 1988). P109
Nash: When Langlands and Bell, for example were commissioned to
visit Afghanistan as war artists, the social and political reality they
observed transformed their practice, producing an important series
of works (Nash, 2006, p49). P109
Tony Blair after the invasion of Iraq: Ours are not Western values.
They are the universal values of the human spirit (Blair, 2003).
P110
Terry Eagleton (1990) argues that the very idea of universal values
is ideological, because it allows the state to dress up its own
interests as being for the ultimate good. The romantic myth of art
reinforces this idea by setting up a realm of value apparently above
society and politics. And official war art provides a link between this
realm of supposedly universal value, and the violence enforcement
of partisan interests in war. P110
A positivist idea of witness restricts the content official war art to
things seen in the war zone, a romantic idea of art suggests that the
extreme experiences encountered there will inspire great art,
achieving higher values invoked by politicians as a justification of
war. P110

Witnessing War: Economies of

Regulation in Reporting War and
Conflict L. Chouliaraki (2009)
http://www.tandfonline.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1080/1071442090
3124077

There have been two versions of the assault on Gaza played out
over the past 3 weeks. One is the moderated account aired in the
West; the other is the unexpurgated account of civilian deaths
filmed in vivid close-up inside Gaza. (Jon Snow, The Independent,
January 2009) p215
This is a snapshot of the controversy around the footage of the 2009
Gaza War over positions of showing and ways of seeing. P215
John Snows commentary refers specifically to the Israeli stationing
of foreign media on the hill of shame, a hill beyond the conflict
territory, where all that could be seen was columns of smoke in the
horizonin his words, you could hear the crumph but you can see
nothing of value p215-216
Indeed, the contrast between the Western networks moderated
footage and the Arab channels shots of dead civilians throws into
relief the work of war imagery in providing distinct ways of seeing
that, in turn, construe distinct political and ethical communities of
viewers (Silverstone, 2007). P216
The symbolic power of war reporting, in this sense, can be
conceptualized as the power of the image to render spectacles of
war and conflict a cause of engagement for media publics and
thereby to constitute these publics as imagined communitiesas
deep horizontal comradeships sharing dispositions to emotion and
action (Anderson, 1989, pp. 67). P216
At the same time, they both capitalize on a significant similarity:
they rely on a set of visual strategies, what we may call strategies
of sublimation (the phantasmagoria of cityscape in flames or the
human body fatally wounded) in order to orient viewers towards
particular imaginations of community. In Iraq War reporting, this is
the transnational community of Western spectators that
contemplating a war without noteworthy victims, whereas in the
Cyprus killing, this is the national community of Western citizens
that glorify the death of a hero. P216

PITY AND THE ECONOMY OF WITNESSING

The analysis of war and conflict reporting can be productively
approached through the concept of a politics of pity (Boltanski,
1999, pp. 67). In line with historical norms that regulate the
mediation of suffering in Western culture, the politics of pity refers

to those choices of image and word that manage the emotional

potential of viewers vis-a-vis the spectacles of suffering in ways that
motivate particular orientations to a response, as if these viewers
were present in the scene of action yet without overexposing them
to the horror of the scene. P217
Operating within the cultural field of Western journalism, these
ethical discourses are routinely produced through, what Campbell
calls, a number of key economies of regulation: an economy of
taste and decency, which bans the imagery of suffering from the
screen, thereby responding to the publics aversion to atrocity, and
an economy of display, whereby images of death are domesticated
by the use of language and montage that frame the meaning of
atrocity (Campbell, 2004, p. 70). Even though these economies of
regulation can be seen as particular manifestations of the
requirement of pity to avoid shocking viewers with spectacles of
suffering, a consequence of their intersection is that the imagery of
death is excluded from Western media. In so doing, Campbell
claims, they come to restrict the possibility for an ethical politics
exercising responsibility in the face of crimes against humanity
(2004, p. 5). P217-218
Witnessing functions as an economy of regulation by drawing on
strong religious and cultural traditions of the West, and thereby,
investing the imagery of war and conflict with a force of authentic
testimony. P218

THE PATHOS FORMULA OF THE GREEK-CYPRIOT CONFLICT

This case study refers to footage on the 22nd anniversary of the
Turkish invasion in Cyprus (August 1996), where protests took place
in the green zone that separates the southern from the northern
occupied part of Cyprus (August 1415). During these
demonstrations, which turned into riots, two Greek-Cypriot were
killed. The footage under study, referring to the second death,
follows the victims, Solomon Solomou, last movements as he broke
away from a protesting crowd and ran into the green zone of the
island, starting to climb up the Turkish flag post. P218
Filmed in medium-range and broadcast in slow motion, the footage
captures some of the background of the scene with the figure of a
gunman standing in the balcony of a nearby building. As the victim
is hit by bullets on the flag post, his body jerks back, the cigarette in
his mouth falls off and his grip of the flagpole is loosened; he slides
down, turns to the side, and falls on the ground. P219
historically, the pathos formula refers to a specific artistic tradition,
whereby visual representation depicts the dying body as something
willingly alienated by the victim for the sake of pleasure and
aggrandizement of the oppressor (Eisenman 2007, p. 16), today the
pathos formula reappears in the repertoire of war photojournalism
as evidence of contemporary forms of martyrdom. P219
it seeks to remove suffering from the order of lived experience,
thereby protecting the spectator from the horror of death, and

presents it as beautiful suffering, allowing us to indulge in its

aesthetic value from a position of safety (Reinhardt, et al. 2007)
p219
MORAL AGENCY
The pathos formula, the denunciatory language, and the
displacement of moral evaluation into external sources show the
way in which the economy of witnessing endows Solomons killing
with a strong claim to authenticity. It does so by appealing to two
different but simultaneously enacted journalistic modes of seeing:
being an eyewitness of the killing and bearing witness to the killing
(Oliver, 2004 pp. 7988; Peters, 2001, pp. 707727; Zelizer, 2004,
pp. 115135). Being an eyewitness to the killing entails watching
the event as it happens and engages with the objective depiction of
historical truth; bearing witness entails watching the event as a
universal truth which transcends the fact of killing and engages with
a traumatic moment that borders the unrepresentable. P220
Bearing witness as a mode of seeing is reflected in the slow motion,
the frontal view, and the focus on detail, in short in the pathos
formula that recognizes death and suffering to be, at once, the
beautification of death as martyrdom and the authentic
manifestation of the national psyche. The regulative economy of
witnessing here relies on the capacity of the pathos formula to use a
traumatic spectacle so as to produce collective imaginations of the
nation as a source of heroic action. It is precisely this productive
capacity of the pathos formula to celebrate the national body politic
as heroic that overrules the norms of taste and decency and renders
the footage of actually occurring death not only legitimate but, in
fact, strategic in the context of conflict reporting. P220
Unlike bearing witness, the eyewitness involves a mode of seeing
that approaches the scene of dying as actually existing reality that
requires an urgent response. The regulative economy of witnessing
here relies on this testimonial dimension of journalism: providing
objective evidence in the service of a just cause.
If the moral claim of a nation traumatized by the death of a martyr
is the prototypical claim of journalism as bearing witness, the
eyewitness proposes an explicitly political form of national
imagination driven by the desire to restore justice in the name of
international law.

THE TABLEAU VIVANT OF THE IRAQ WAR FOOTAGE

The shock and awe bombardments of Bagdad (BBC World, March
April 2003), one of the most visually arresting spectacles of warfare,
were broadcast live on BBC World and they were, subsequently,
inserted as regular updates in the channels 247 live footage flow
the examples described here focusing on the updates common
patterns throughout their 3-week broadcast span. P221
AESTHETIC QUALITY
The imagery of Iraq warfare is the exact opposite of the GreekCypriot footage: devoid of human presence, the point of view is from

afar and above capturing the Baghdad cityscape in its visual

plenitude. Bombing action animates this imagery through camera
tracks and zooms that capture the hectic movement of weapon fire.
P221
In terms of language, both the bomber and the Iraqi sufferer are
represented in nonhuman terms. This happens through choices such
as the plane and the strikes, for the bomber, and the
compound, the city or Baghdad for the sufferer. These
collective wordings parallel the visual effect of the long shot: they
diffuse the figures of pity away from a politics of justice or care and
invite us to indulge in the spectacle of warfare as a game to be
studied. P221-222
MORAL AGENCY
As in the piece on Solomons death, these choices invite us both to
experience reality as it is, in the position of the eyewitness, and to
take a moral stance vis--vis this reality, in the position of bearing
witness to this horrific warfare. P222
The this-is-what-happened function of description uses language in
the first person to put words onto visual action and invite us to
experience the spectacle as-if we were there. This is obvious in
expressions such as . . . we saw this building take a direct hit. . . .;
this is what shock and awe looked like . . .; then we heard . . . we
looked up . . . a combination that both authenticates the report
as objective reality and invites viewers to study the war as
spectacle. P222
This language of eyewitnessing simultaneously allows for sporadic
elements of evaluation to be dispersed across the reports: a
terrible deafening sound as though the earth was being ripped
open . . . . . . anti-missile flare spewing out of its wing . . ., let loose a
ferocious barrage. Such quasi-literary use of adjectives and
metaphors (spewing, let loose and as though the earth)
frames the sight of bombing action with a sense of the horrific and
the extraordinary, moving beyond description to introduce a bearing
witness position towards the warthe proliferation of sound effects
further magnifying the shock and awe experience this spectacle
seek to evoke. P222
the updates construe the war primarily as a cinematic spectacle to
be appreciated rather than a humanitarian catastrophe to be
denounced. P222
Unlike Solomons report, however, which quickly passes from the
aestheticization of death to the denunciation of the killing, thereby
providing the resources for the collective imagination of a national
community, this one insists on presenting the war as a spectacle to
be studied rather than as a political fact that requires a response.
Consequently, whereas the Greek news relies on politics of justice
which enables an action-oriented disposition vis--vis Solomons
death, witnessing warfare as a work of art is founded upon the
condition of inaction. P223

This is because the tableau vivant excludes the presence of civilian

victims from this instance of war imagery. Whereas this elimination
of human suffering, euphemistically called collateral damage, fully
resonates with the Western economy of taste and decency, it
simultaneously construes the Iraqi sufferer as the Wests other, a
figure undeserving of Western pity. P223

WITNESSING AND THE IMAGINATION OF COMMUNITY

The comparative value of the Iraq war and Cyprus examples in the
context of Gaza lies, therefore, in demonstrating how exactly war
and conflict reporting strategically capitalizes on variations of
particular positions of showing. Such positions of showing, the
comparison shows, are embedded in deeper structures of Western
ways of seeing (witnessing) and public morality (pity) that
systematically operate to similar effects: they sublimate the
mediation of human suffering and seek to reaffirm distinctly Western
bonds of belonging along the lines of West and the others. The
moderated accounts of the Gaza war in Western media, in this
sense, are undoubtedly the outcome of positions of seeing,
regulated by Israeli war propaganda, but they also reflect a Western
legacy of aesthetic and ethical dispositions that, embedded as they
are in the global power relations of mediation, privilege a
communitarian sense of feeling for our own victims, while
excluding (unexpurgated) spectacles of the death of others. P224
Western economies for the regulation of war and conflict reporting
are responsible for the creation of such hierarchies of place and
human life. The economy of taste and decency, as I argued in this
article, regulates the public display of human death so that its
imagery becomes legitimate only on the condition that it is elevated
to beautiful suffering. P224
Whereas the Baghdad footage may have promoted a view of the
war as fictional, by turning the bombing of civilians to a cinematic
spectacle, in the Greek-Cypriot footage, the contemplative position
of the death of the hero quickly gives way to politics of justice,
introducing the perspective of denunciation in the name of human
rights, and so imagining a community of action. The crucial
difference here seems to be no longer one between fact and fiction
but between a purely aesthetic politic of pity leading to inaction and
one that makes an explicitly political demand for action in the name
of international law. P224
In the light of such differences in witnessing, we need to critically
revisit the criticism that reporting on war one-sidedly excludes the
spectacle of suffering from Western media, thereby fictionalizing
suffering or blocking an ethical politic of responsibility (e.g.,
Boltanski, 1999; Campbell, 2005). We should argue instead that war
and conflict reporting strategically selects and hierarchies certain
instances of suffering and death as causes for Western action while
annihilating others. P225

The pathos formula, let us recall, is strategically used to sideline

taste and decency offenses and to broadcast the moment of
actually occurring death, in order to reimagine an already existing
national community as a community of political actionof
protesters against the killing of a fellow citizen. The tableau vivant,
in contrast, conveniently stages a controversial war as a spectacle
without victims, at the service of a political agenda which imagines
(a deeply torn) transnational community as united in its silent
contemplation of inevitable evilrather than denouncing this war as
illegal in line with UN Security Council resolutions. P225
In the Gaza footage a similar politics is at play, reflecting and
perpetuating dominant hierarchies of place and human life. Western
media broadcast from positions of showing that exclude the
witnessing of human death and render the reporting of this war an
exercise in military actionthereby reproducing a Western
orientation vis--vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict characterized by
contemplative passivity and inaction. Arab broadcasters, in contrast,
report on-location, placing suffering at the heart of their footage
thereby turning their new spectacles into pleas for humanitarian aid
and political protest, but also, somewhat hypocritically, into objects
of critique and discomfort across Western media. P225

War Mis-reporting H. Stanhop

(1970)
http://search.proquest.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/docview/1305566124/flash?
accountid=7408

Reporting a war is difficult. The job of war correspondent is one of

the most demanding duties, if not the most demanding of all, that a
reporter might be called on to perform. P91

It is difficult because the war correspondent is, almost by definition,

at odds with his environment. P91

The country in which he is based is reluctant to communicate unless

it is winning even then it generally only wants to communicate
only part of the truth. P91

As Mr Knightly neatly puts it, correspondents seek to tell us as

much as possible as soon as possible; the military seeks to tell us as
little as possible as late as possible. P91

In the Abyssinian war, which is admittedly to take an extreme

example, correspondents were forced by high costs of cables, to
invent all manner of bizarre abbreviations. These were then
telegraphed by an Abyssinian whose knowledge even of orthodox
English was limited, with the result that offices in London may as
well have been sent messages in Swahili. P91

the reporters on finding the fiction more in demand than the

facts played along with it. But it is doubtful if the public would have
accepted the truth anyway. P92

The Hateful Self: Substitution and

the Ethics of Representing War
A. Bartly (2008)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v054/54.1bartley.pdf

Representing Contemporary War

D. Campbell (2003)
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=34d26a2d5b96-46e4-84cd-8c1e4ef60214%40sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=106

Despite living in an age commonly understood as being awash with

images of atrocity, there are few writers who theorize the
relationship
between
political
conflict
and
its
pictorial
representation. This relative absence means that various assertions
about the power of pictures have come to dominate popular
understanding. P99
Foremost among these are two fundamentally contradictory claims,
which, Susan Sontag observes, are fast approaching the stature of
platitudes.1 One, the CNN effect, is that the power of news
imagery is such that it can alter the course of state policy simply by
virtue of being broadcast. The other, the compassion
fatiguethesis, argues that the abundant supply of imagery has
dulled our senses and created a new syndrome of communal
inaction. P99
Although it may seem like an anachronistic practice in the
contemporary pictorial economy of international news, photography
remains an important portal through which the politics of images
generally can be considered. While television, with its stream of
video imagery, may be the premier source of news and information
from distant places, its very preponderance may limit its staying
power in the minds of the viewer. . As Sontag argues, photographs
may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a
neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected
images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph
is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep
and look at again. P99
Being a site for contemplation does not necessarily make the
photograph an instrument for political change. According to Sontag,
the image itself cannot create a possibility that otherwise does not
exist: a photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of
misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an
appropriate context of feeling and attitude. The image can,
however, help develop an attitude. While a photograph cannot
create a moral position it can reinforce oneand can help build a
nascent one. p100
As a result, the event or issue has to be identified and named as an
event or issue before photography can make its contribution. This
means the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is
[determined by] the existence of a relevant political consciousness.
Without a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will

most likely be experienced as, simply, unreal or as a demoralizing

emotional blow. P100
As Sontag writes: Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their
appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic
relics, to have the status of found objectsunpremeditated slices of
the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art
and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of
information. P101
This structural undecidability inherent in photography means that a
number ofindeed, almost any number ofresponses to a
particular image is possible. Given the time for contemplation
allowed by the fixing of the image, the construction of meaning
arises from the complex interplay of the photographic
representation, its location, accompanying text, moment of reading,
as well as the frames of reference brought to it by the reader/viewer.
P101
whatever the response, it is not media saturation that leads to
political inaction: People dont become inured to what they are
shownif that is the right way to describe what happensbecause
of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls
feeling. P101
With this observation, Sontag not only challenges the compassion
fatigue thesis; she questions the notion of the CNN effect. With
regard to inaction in Bosnia despite the steady stream of images of
ethnic cleansing that made their way out of Sarajevo, Sontag argues
that people didnt turn off because they were either overwhelmed
by their quantity or anaesthetized by their quality. Rather, they
switched off because American and European leaders proclaimed it
was an intractable and irresolvable situation. The political context
into which the pictures were being inserted was already set, with
military intervention not an option, and no amount of horrific
photographs was going to change that. P101
Up until the Vietnam War, photographs of combat and its
consequencesor, at least those photographs of combat and its
consequences that were released for usewere often positive in
both their intent and effects. In large part, that is because these
images were produced by offi- cial cameramen who were either
commissioned by the military for this particular purpose (as in the
case of Roger Fenton and the Crimea War) or at least had their
presence sanctioned by the authorities (as with Matthew Brady
during the American Civil War). P101-102
The understanding of war among people who have not experienced
war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images. P102
photographs can buttress and expand a previously established
moral disposition, but they cannot create that disposition
themselves out of nothing. This is particularly true in the context of
conflict. When a war is unpopular and that feeling has come to be
prior to the taking of photographs p102

The photographers intentions do not determine the meaning of the

photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and
loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it. P102
Although the details of the arrangements and their effectiveness
have changed over timefrom the combination of accreditation and
daily briefings in Vietnam, the restrictions on access that resulted
from the dependence for transport in the Falklands, to the selected
pools and video briefings in the Persian Gulf War of 199091, and
the embedding of Iraq 2003at no stage in the postWorld War II
period has the U.S. or U.K. military operated without detailed media
management procedures designed to influence the information
(specifically the pictorial) outcomes. P102
While recognizing that many of the now iconic combat images of the
pre-Vietnam period were staged, she sees Vietnam as a watershed
such that the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging
them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art.13
Insofar as Sontag is referring to the likelihood of individual
photographers seeking 102 David Campbell 11 Ibid., p. 21. 12 Ibid.,
pp. 3839. 13 Ibid., p. 58.to deceive, she may be right. There was,
however, at least one notable instance in Iraq of digital
manipulation. This resulted in the Los Angeles Times sacking awardwinning staff photographer Brian Walski, whose altered image of a
British soldier in Basra (he had combined two photos into one to
improve marginally composition) was used on the papers front
page. P102-103
First, even in the age of the digital image, where there is no
negative to secure an understanding of the original photograph,
Walskis case shows there remains a strong sense of the shutter
freezing a moment of reality, such that this moment is privileged as
the original that cannot ethically be altered. Second, and even more
important, the Walski case demonstrates that the larger and more
significant ways in which pictures structure reality through
exclusions are themselves excluded from the discussion about
manipulation so long as the professional responsibility not to alter
what the shutter secures is maintained. P103
Taking this wider view, Sontags belief that the age of inventing and
staging war images is behind us seems seriously misplaced. That is
because in the contemporary period the issue of inventing and
staging dramatic news pictures has escalated from the actions of a
few individuals seeking to deceive to the whole purpose and
structure of the militarys media management operation. P103
Lynchs release was made public through the Coalition Media Center
(CMC) at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar. This $1.5
million briefing operation, with a futuristic, Hollywood-inspired set
replete with plasma TV screens, is housed in a remote warehouse
hundreds of miles from the battlefield, but offering the military
overview desired by its U.S., U.K., and Australian media minders.
The CMC was integral to the strategy of embedding reporters with
military units, for those on the front line provided images and stories

from an unavoidably narrow perspective, while the journalists at the

CMC were given what was said to be the broad overview but in
effect only amplified the narrow perspective desired by the
Pentagon and its partners. As one media critic observed, the five
hundred or more embeds (with one hundred cameras) were close
up at the front while the representing contemporary war six
hundred CMC journalists were tied up in the rear.This meant the
military could be confidant journalists would produce maximum
imagery with minimum insight. P103-104
While the basic coordinates of the Lynch story were not invented
(she was injured, captured, then recovered), the account was
staged, insofar as the particular narrative that was attached to and
derived from the military footage of her release was constructed by
the Pentagons media operation to convey a heroic and redemptive
meaning. P104-5
As New York Times staff photographer Vincent Laforetwho spent
twenty-seven days aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Persian
Gulfwrote afterward,My main concern was that I was producing
images that were glorifying war too much. These machines of war
are awesome and make for stunning images. I was afraid that I was
being drawn into producing a public-relations essay. P105
Large numbers of Iraqi soldiers have been killed, according to the
Pentagon, and more than 2,000 Iraqi civilians, the government of
Saddam Hussein said, many of them in the last week. But when
James Kelly, the managing editor of Time, lays out the 20 pages of
photos intended to anchor the magazines coverage of the war,
there were pictures of soldiers, battles and rubble, but no corpses.
P106
The relatively bloodless coverage of conflict (and not just that in
Iraq) derives from the media outlets invocation of the criteria of
taste and decency. This is most often expressed as a concern for
the anticipated reaction of readers and viewers, now readily
available to newspapers through the offices of ombudsmen and
readers editors. Often this concern is so strong that some U.S.
newspapers have the presumptive principle that intrusive images
containing bodies or blood will not be run, or, at the very least, only
after extensive editorial discussion.25 Their British counterparts
demonstrated similar self-imposed restraints. P106
Television broadcasters are even more bound because of
regulations, so that while their cameramen record the complete
picture of death and destruction in war, and their reporters lament
their inability to convey the full truth, the vast majority of that
footage is simply deemed too gory to be shown. P106
While the International Committee of the Red Cross says any image
that makes a prisoner of war individually recognizable is a
violation of Article 13 of the third Geneva Convention of 1949, this
issue was complicated by a number of factors.31 First and foremost,
al-Jazeera was broadcasting Iraqi TV footage rather than producing
the images. Moreover, it was doing so at the same time as

numerous U.S. and European networks were broadcasting images of

Iraqi POWs, some of which were provided by Pentagon and Ministry
of Defence film crews in Iraq. That made Iraq and the allies (rather
than the broadcasters) equally culpable, because only states are
subject to the convention. P107
The fact that al-Jazeeras images were, in the words of John
MacArthur, too honest, had the paradoxical effect of making alJazeera the story rather than the images and what they represented.
P107
The extensive management of the media coverage of waras a
conjunction of official restrictions and self-imposed standards has
for the most part diminished the verisimilitude of the resulting
images. Constrained by the confines of the Coalition Media Center,
reporters seeking an overview were (in the words of Michael Wolff)
in danger of becoming little more than a series of Jayson Blairs,
constructing colorful accounts of scenes they had never witnessed.
P107
The media was weaponized and the imagery was a forcemultiplier exercising pressure on the Iraqi leadership. P108
Images may only be an invitation to pay attention. But the questions
photographs of war and atrocity pose should be required of our
leaders and us: Who caused what the picture shows? Who is
responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state
of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be
challenged? p108