Face of Our Wartime¹

Abstract

This paper considers a turn toward portraiture amongst contemporary photojournalists who have covered the War on Terror. A series of wartime faces is examined in order to consider the way prolonged conflict flattens our visual landscape. War appears to restrict our palette, effectively diminishing our appetite for that aspect of experience which does not yield directly to sight. The price of this shrinking surface area is a reduction in our ability and willingness to engage and empathize with others.

Keywords:

• war
• photojournalism
• portraiture
• ethics
• gaze

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These thoughts began their gestation during conversations that took place at McGill University’s symposium Conflict[ed] Reporting: War and Photojournalism in the Digital Age. I would like to extend my thanks to Thierry Gervais, Peter Maass, Louie Palu, Christine Ross, Tamar Tembeck, and Theodora Tsentas I also learned much from sharing the stage with Nina Berman, Mary Panzer, Tanya Sheehan, and Andrés Zervigón during a panel on Documentary Photography Today which took place at Rutgers University.

2. The War on Terror, as it has come to be called, actually represents several different wars in several locations (Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan) with a variety of combatants. This paper is principally concerned with images emerging from Afghanistan, and in particular, when a surge of international troops began occupying the region in 2008.

3. I am following Mary Favret’s use of the term “wartime.” In War at a Distance (2009), Favret describes the ways in which modern forms of war are experienced by those who are not on the battlefield—how distant conflict can be felt in the civilian’s everyday life. She uses the term wartime to distinguish this experience of war from a distance, which, as she shows, was made ever more possible throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the channels of the mass media.

4. Among the most recognizable “faces” of this wartime are surely the “seven bad apples”—the seven soldiers convicted of abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch have written extensively about the legibility and illegibility of these faces and gestures in articles appearing in the New Yorker and the New York Times (Gourevitch and Morris 2008;Morris 2008).

5. This is the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s oft-repeated, enigmatic statement, which is the subject of Hagi Kenaan’s recent study, The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze (2013). I am indebted to Kenaan for much of my thinking here.

6. Shawn Michelle Smith (1999) has traced the ways photography was historically used in US culture to produce a model of subjectivity in which “exterior appearance was imagined to reflect interior essence” (4). Smith’s study problematizes Benjamin’s faith in physiognomy and, more specifically, shows how such catalogs of facial types were integral to the production of a racialized middle-class identity over the course of the nineteenth century. Needless to say, Smith's questions remain pertinent in this catalog of wartime faces.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharon Sliwinski

Sharon Sliwinski is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and a core member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University in Canada. She is the author of Human Rights In Camera (University of Chicago Press, 2011).