Conflict[ed] Reporting

Abstract

This special issue of Photography & Culture is based on an international symposium hosted by Media@McGill in Montreal, Canada, in November 2012. Titled Conflict[ed] Reporting: War and Photojournalism in the Digital Age, the symposium brought together communications and arts scholars alongside war reporters and photojournalists to raise a light to questions including the following: Has digital technology altered the practice of conflict photography? What new ways could professional photographers seek to engage compassion-fatigued audiences? What are the ethical implications of publishing amateur-produced content in the mainstream media? The aim of this special issue of Photography & Culture is to elaborate on this theme, among others, with a collection of essays and images from the participants of the symposium (Susan Carruthers, Donald Matheson, Louie Palu, Sharon Sliwinski), as well as additional contributors (Ariella Azoulay, Reilley Bishop-Stall, Liam Kennedy), whose work tackles the visibility and, subsequently, the optics of contemporary war in a changing digital landscape.

Keywords:

• war
• photojournalism
• conflict photography
• digital photography

As the mainstream media began increasingly to open up its visual coverage of wars and conflicts in the late 2000s to images taken by citizen journalists, and as social media became a pivotal means for galvanizing national and global political movements, Media@McGill¹ set out to address a discernible paradigm shift in the imagery of present-day warfare by hosting a one-day international symposium titled Conflict[ed] Reporting: War and Photojournalism in the Digital Age.² The symposium was held in Montreal, Canada, in November 2012 and brought together communications and arts scholars alongside war reporters and photojournalists to raise a light to questions including the following: Has digital technology altered the practice of conflict photography? What new ways could professional photographers seek to engage compassion-fatigued audiences? What are the ethical implications of publishing amateur-produced content in the mainstream media?

It began with a presentation by veteran war reporter Peter Maass, who explored the images produced by the new players in the field of conflict reporting—not just amateur photographers but the protagonists at the very crux of a conflict, whom Maass calls the “perpetrators and participants” of war (2012). Whereas the most iconic analog photographs of war—those of a wounded US marine advancing to help a fallen comrade in the Vietnam War and of US troops landing at Omaha Beach during the Second World War invasion of Normandy—once relied on the presence and tenacity of the professional photojournalist, the most defining moments of twenty-first-century conflicts have been predominantly captured by civilians or by the soldiers perpetrating the very hostilities being documented. To name but a few—the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib (now known as Baghdad Central Prison) and the execution of Saddam Hussein in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq; the coffins of fallen soldiers at the US airbase in Kuwait in 2004; the death of protester Nada Soltan in Tehran in 2009; the posing of US soldiers with body parts of Afghan insurgents in 2012—underscores the glaring absence of the professional photographer in the most notorious images of contemporary conflict.

The profusion of digital point-and-shoot cameras, video recorders, and smartphones, beginning at the start of the new millennium, has opened up a rarely seen side of warfare from which the professional photographer has been repeatedly absent or censored. It is this widening of warfare’s visibility that earns Maass’s approval and also sees him argue that the very unprofessionalism and imperfection of the images produced—representative of the chaos and obscured visibility of real war experiences—are better able to capture the audience’s attention than the clear-cut shot of the professional.

The notion that a professional-looking photograph determines the authenticity of an image has been equally contested by photographers and photographic scholars.³ Yet, while the traditional parameters of photography have been eschewed and we have entered a postphotographic age—which Liam Kennedy defines in this issue as “the waning of the evidentiary truth claims of visual and news media” and “the evidentiary capacities of photojournalism to critically record” warfare—that is not to say that the death knell of professional photojournalism should be sounded. In the symposium, photography historian Vincent Lavoie documented the use of the iPhone by professional war photographers, in particular Damon Winter’s project A Grunt’s Life and the online platforms Basetrack and A Year at War. Lavoie (2012) concluded that

the mobile phone is no longer a mere purveyor of amateur imagery: it has now firmly established itself as … a tool for the redefinition of photojournalistic skills, not to say the moving force behind a relegitimization of press photography.

Whether or not one agrees with Lavoie’s position that the smartphone has helped kick-start a new wave of appreciation for press photography, it is clear that many in the profession are currently seeking a redefinition—if not a reinvention—of their role and ability to visually represent conflicts to an audience inundated with violent images back home. In his latest book, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (2013), PixelPress director and photography scholar Fred Ritchin writes, “In both old and new arenas, photographers are redefining their roles, experimenting with new narratives and strategies of dissemination while attempting to broaden the photographic enterprise even further” (40). The symposium touched on some of the strides taken in this respect in a talk given by Donald Matheson and a panel discussion with Canadian documentary photographer Louie Palu. The aim of this special issue of Photography & Culture is to elaborate on this theme, among others, with a collection of essays and images from the participants of the symposium, as well as additional contributors whose work tackles the visibility and, subsequently, the optics of contemporary war in a changing digital landscape.

In his article in this issue, “Photography and Warfare in a Postphotographic Age,” Kennedy explores some of the other approaches adopted by contemporary professional photographers who are attempting to redefine their work so as to re-engage their viewers. For Kennedy, the challenge faced by professional conflict photographers lies not only in keeping abreast of ever-changing digital and media practices, but doing so in a state of perpetual and less tangible warfare—particularly that enforced by US foreign policy. At times this has been achieved through the representation of a less-scrutinized aspect of war, where the focus is not on the action but on the soldier’s humdrum daily routine. On other occasions, different visual and audiovisual techniques have been adopted, for instance in the conceptual photography of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Less frequently, as Tim Hetherington did for his 2009 project, Sleeping Soldiers, the photographer resorts to a combination of both. Kennedy’s analysis of works by photographer Simon Norfolk and the late Hetherington reveal the obstacles encountered by image-makers today in modernizing their field and engaging a more varied audience, all the while trying to make visible a state of warfare that is increasingly being played out remotely—through surveillance and drone technology—and behind closed doors.

Another recourse has been the redefinition of the relationship between the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer. A prevailing sentiment among photojournalists is the misconception of objectivity as a driving force or a tenet of their work. Photojournalist and writer W. Eugene Smith expressed as much in 1975: “The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word ‘objective.’” He continues: “My belief is that my responsibilities within journalism are two. My first responsibility is to my subjects. My second responsibility is to my readers” (Smith and Smith 1975, quoted in Ritchin 2013, 15). While Smith’s two instances of responsibility relate to the moment of the photographic event and its immediate publication, Matheson’s contribution to this issue, “When the Photojournalist Returns: Exploring Reflexive Moments in Photojournalism,” examines a third instance of accountability that a photographer may assume to the life of the photographed after the photographic event: specifically, the photographer’s attempt to return and pursue a more profound relationship with the individual whose pain or distress their camera immortalized. Matheson builds on the work of Susan Sontag (1977, 2003), Susie Linfield (2011), and significantly, Ariella Azoulay’s civil contract (2008), to outline four types of returns, each with their own challenges in deconstructing the bond and moral commitments between the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer.

Matheson cites Susan Meiselas’s photography projects Pictures from a Revolution and Reframing History, which mark two separate returns to pictures she took in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution of 1978–79, to underscore how one of the most important uses of the return can be to give back to the person or community whose pictures were taken. This type of return forms the central narrative of Azoulay’s essay in this issue, “The Lethal Art of Portraiture,” which expands on her concept of a civil contract between the photographer and the individual or individuals photographed in states of conflict, originally presented in The Civil Contract of Photography (2008) and later developed in Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (2012). The essay examines Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman’s public release of an old archive of images of the Occupied Territories of Palestine as part of a project on Facebook titled People I Met (2013). Here, the photographer’s return marks an attempt by Kratsman to intervene in a previous photographic event by reinforcing his contract with the Palestinians he photographed—not, as might be expected, with the Israeli state to which he is bound by nationality and citizenship. The choice of posting his images on an open online social platform like Facebook in principle allows Palestinians, as a community, to share ownership of their portraits, establishing a rare correction of the usual imbalance in “regime-made disasters,” as Azoulay points out, where control and access to the photographic portrayal of one’s person and space are so heavily in favor of the governing regime.

Digital technology and media have allowed for more images of wars and conflicts to be taken and shared than ever before, but in her article “Why Can’t We See Insurgents? Enmity, Invisibility, and Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Susan Carruthers challenges the commonplace assumption that they have rendered present-day warfare more transparent. She argues that the visibility of contemporary counterinsurgencies remains just as obscure and one-sided as in past conflicts, with a continued “absence (or near-absence) of images of ‘insurgents’ as sentient individuals.” Although this absence can partly be attributed to a general imbalance in technological and media resources and a will (or instinct) on the part of the insurgent to avoid the enemy’s lens, Carruthers maintains that the invisibility of insurgents in the most recent interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq also boils down to “understandings of legitimacy and illegitimacy broadly shared by the state, media, and segments of the public.” Branded “insurgents,” those fighting against the United States and allied forces have been stripped of their sentience and, as such, cannot be depicted as humane, nor can they acceptably be depicted when dehumanized, for fear of undermining the war effort and inciting anti-American sentiment. In other words, securing the pictorial illegitimacy of the insurgent helps to ensure the political legitimacy of the state’s counterinsurgency efforts.

In the Archive section, Sharon Sliwinski’s “Face of Our Wartime” examines a series of portrait shots of soldiers, veterans, and insurgents taken by contemporary photographers Louie Palu, Larry Towell, Guillermo Cervera, Nina Berman, and Tim Hetherington in a bid to demonstrate how viewers today rarely have the opportunity to experience “face-to-face encounters” with the persons photographed when looking at their images. Similarly to Carruthers, Sliwinski believes that a saturation of wartime imagery has restricted our appetite to see anything beyond what is immediately in our field of vision. She contends that our ability to experience what Walter Benjamin referred to as “the optical unconscious” (1931, 512)—a state of observation that transcends sight—is further hampered by the current trend for taking “flat,” superficial portraits that present the soldier more as a piece of information to be digested than as an individual to be reckoned with, leaving them bereft of an affective dimension.

For this issue’s One Photograph section, Reilley Bishop-Stall’s “Transforming Trauma: Absence as Presence in Ken Gonzales-Day’s ‘East First Street (St. James Park)’” presents one of a series of early twentieth-century postcards digitally manipulated by Ken Gonzales-Day for his 2006 photographic project Erased Lynching. Gonzales-Day’s erasure of the act of violence from the image—in this case, the hanging bodies of two lynch victims—elucidates the disturbing relationship between the crowd witnessing the lynching, the camera lens, the act of violence, and the viewer both past and present. In juxtaposition to the portraits referred to by Sliwinski, Bishop-Stall highlights how the digital alteration of “East First Street (St. James Park),” which removes our ability to see the violence, conversely helps viewers tap into their optical unconscious.

In the Portfolio section, Palu presents six documentary photographs from his project The Fighting Season, taken during his time in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province between 2007 and 2010. Collectively, the photographs are an appeal for the viewer to feel the realities of war: the blood on the floor of a trauma room, the lacerated face of a dead Afghan insurgent, the hollow stare of a wounded soldier. Palu’s images try to impart an aspect of war that is almost exclusive to its sensorial experience: for instance, the texture, sound, and feeling that can be invoked in viewers when they see the blood and dirt-stained swipes of boots on a concrete floor or a soldier breathing through his hands in an effort to keep warm. Whether in his role as artist, documentary photographer, or photojournalist, Palu has found his own way to re-engage viewers with the delicate imagery of contemporary warfare.

Along with Palu’s images, the essays included in this issue share a common concern for understanding photojournalism as relational—something more than a process by which situations of conflict and war are simply made visible. The visuality of the conflict photograph is expanded to include not only the image itself but also the relationships through which it continues to be materialized into existence: between the conflict photographer and the photographed victim, before and after the photographic event (Matheson, Azoulay); between the photographed soldier and the spectator at the moment of viewing (Sliwinski); and between the photographer and the scene of an evolving conflict, during which “an extended photography studio … can spread out at any given moment” (Azoulay). These approaches are indebted to Azoulay’s understanding of photography as a civil contract between the photographed, the photographer, and the beholder. They also partake of the affective turn in image studies initiated in the late 1990s. The essays are especially attentive to the iconographic, contextual, and circulational variations in and by which layers of affectivity (including empathy, compassion, shame, disgust, anger, indifference, horror, and patriotism or antipatriotism) are generated or fail to be generated; are controlled or censored (Carruthers); but also are sometimes renewed (Matheson, Kennedy) or, equally, banalized (Sliwinski). They raise the questions of how and when images of war, conflict, or destruction can be more than what they make visible: that is, how they can elaborate what Barthes has called the pensive dimension of the image—the image’s capacity to think, and the capacity of some images to arrest the spectator’s attention and open a space for reflection and consciousness (1982, 38). This question is pivotal to Sliwinski’s essay, where she examines the conditions in which pensiveness, thanks to the optical unconscious revealed by the camera, occurs in war photography—occurrences that are scarce in mainstream photojournalism. The elaboration of what Raymond Bellour has designated, after Barthes, as “the pensive spectator” (1987)—a spectator who thinks with the image about what that image represents, and who experiences its complex temporality—can be traced in Bishop-Stall’s examination of a photograph that brings forward the reality of atrocity by making invisible (literally erasing) the horror once shown in the image—an aesthetic strategy that invites the viewer to reflect upon what has been left out of the photograph. Kennedy also proposes pensiveness as taking place in photojournalistic practices that strategically show the traces of conflict events rather than the events themselves. As these essays astutely demonstrate, what remains conflictual about war and atrocity photographs today can be attributed not only to the changing technological conditions of their production but also to the encounters from which these images originate, as well as to the further exchanges that play out and the modes of pensiveness that are raised in their subsequent beholding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Ross

Christine Ross is professor and James McGill chair in contemporary art history in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her recent books include The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2012) and The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She has co-edited (with Olivier Asselin and Johanne Lamoureux) Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). She is currently co-editing The Participatory Condition (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Tamar Tembeck

Tamar Tembeck joined Media@McGill in 2012. An art historian and curator, her research has centered on visual and performative representations of illness and pain in contemporary art and visual culture. She is the editor of Auto/Pathographies (SAGAMIE, 2014) and is co-editing The Participatory Condition (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Theodora Tsentas

Theodora Tsentas was Media@McGill project administrator from 2011 to 2013, where she oversaw the organization of the symposium Conflict[ed] Reporting: War and Photojournalism in the Digital Age. Prior to Media@McGill, she worked as a reporter in London, UK. She now works as an operations manager in Paris, France.

Notes

1. Media@McGill is a hub of research, scholarship, and public outreach on issues and controversies in media, technology, and culture, based in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It was created and has been sustained by generous funding from the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation.

2. For a list of the symposium’s speakers and video of the proceedings, visit http://media.mcgill.ca/en/content/conflicted-reporting-war-photojournalism-digital-age-0.

3. See Kamber 2010 and Azoulay’s contribution to this issue.