Picturing Absence: Photography in the Aftermath

Abstract

How to make the unknown victim the protagonist of the story? One of the challenges in current research about the relation between war and culture is how to incorporate in the repertoire of models those strategies devised to account for the experience of the anonymous and forgotten victims of war. One particular instance of this issue is how to represent the absence of the victim, the one no longer there. Photography is not so much the central topic as the vehicle or testing ground for these strategies of representation. The theoretical discussion is illustrated with examples from the work of photographers and artists who explore the limits of the representation of absence in different ways: Alfredo Jaar, Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk, James Bridle, Gervasio Sánchez, and Gustavo Germano. These visual works cover a wide range of conflicts that stress conventional definitions of war, while providing challenging test cases for any examination of the imprint of war in culture.

KEYWORDS:

• war
• photography
• absence
• activism
• art
• victims
• memory
• violence

ORCiD

Antonio Monegal http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0286-5692

Notes on contributor

Antonio Monegal is Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Among other publications, he is the author of Luis Buñuel de la literatura al cine (1993) and En los límites de la diferencia: Poesía e imagen en las vanguardias hispánicas (1998). He has edited Literatura y pintura (2000), At War (2004), Política y (po)ética de las imágenes de guerra (2007). His research focuses on the politics of culture and on the representation of wars in literature and the visual arts. In 2004 he co-curated an exhibition entitled ‘At War’ at the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona.

Notes

1 David Campany's criticism of ‘late photography’ (2003) points to the risk that focusing on the aftermath of events may foster indifference, political withdrawal and ideological paralysis, eliciting only an aestheticized response. Though, as he rightly says, retreat from the event does not guarantee a critical stance, my position is that it does not preclude it either.

2 ‘War is no longer born of the power of states but of their weakness. The main security issue nowadays is not the ambitions of power, but the failure of states' (Delmas, 1995: 9).

3 Black underscores the overlap between armed forces and civilian society in countries such as Afghanistan (2000: 254).

4 See Michael Howard's comments on the different perceptions about the military response to 9/11 (2002: 115–26). In a pre-9/11 context, discussing paramilitary responses to internal violence in the USA (such as the Oklahoma bombing or the Waco siege), Black points out: ‘How far this should be presented as a form of war captures the difficulty of assessing the term’ (2000: 296).

5 Although there are no fully reliable sources for civilian deaths, according to Smith, ‘something between a guess and an estimate’ would be that ‘approximately 75 per cent of those killed in wars today are civilians’ (2003: 38). Recent data at Iraq Body Count (https://www.iraqbodycount.org/) showed a proportion of civilian deaths between 65.5 per cent and 73.5 per cent. For a nuanced description of different categories of war casualties, see Crawford (2011), and for more updated figures for Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Crawford (2015) (http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians).

6 Ignatieff has pointed out that, from the beginning of the RMA, ‘technology was in search of impunity’ (2000: 164). For a discussion of Shaw's argument, see Hammond (2007: 118–121).

7 The trend contrasts with prevalent attitudes: ‘there is now within Western societies a widespread political unease about causing, let alone receiving, casualties. This focuses in particular on civilian casualties’ (Black, 2000: 245).

8 Two relevant discussions on the connection between photography and atrocity can be found in Batchen et al. (2012) and Dean (2015).

9 Campany (2003) measures these images against the standards of traditional photojournalism, but they respond to a different logic, where elegiac and poetic are not necessarily the opposite of political. Nor do they coincide with what he describes as ‘straight’ kinds of pictures.

10 The controversy generated by Luc Delahaye's 2003 exhibition at the Ricco-Maresca Gallery in New York, and his declaration the following year that he was no longer a photojournalist but an artist, illustrate this tension between the documentary role of photography and its artistic status.

11 An interesting example is James Nachtwey's installation The Passion of Islam (2003), a mural of eight photographs he had taken at different conflicts surrounding his own snapshot of the collapse of the South Tower on 9/11. Gilles Peress's books on Rwanda (1995) and Bosnia (Peress & Stover, 1998) are also forms of controlling the discourse of images.

12 Cf. <www.alfredojaar.net>.

13 An internet version of The Eyes of Gutete Emerita is available at <http://alfredojaar.net/gutete/gutete.html>.

14 It was the subject of an exhibition curated by Guerra and Keenan at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, in 2010.

15 See Baudrillard (1991) and Federman (1997).

16 This mass grave was discovered in 2003. The victims were mostly Bosnian Muslim civilians, men, women, and children, killed by local Serb forces between April and June 1992 in the Zvornik area.

17 <http://booktwo.org/notebook/dronestagram-drones-eye-view/> and <https://www.instagram.com/dronestagram/>

18 Disappeared (2011b) is the title of a second project by Sánchez focusing more on spaces, objects and the process of exhumation, identification and reburial, the responses to the demands of remembrance and justice made by survivors.

19 In 2012, Germano did another project, Ausências, on the disappeared in Brazil during the military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985.

20 Rubén Chababo has movingly described these two images of Clara Atelman de Fink as a synthesis of Germano's work: in the second one the mother looks at the camera because she can no longer look at her son, where there was domestic harmony and a future, there is loneliness and a void, in the ‘narrative condensation of the history of a collapse’ (2012: 147–48).

21 For a critical reading of Levinas and the ‘ethics of the face to face’, see Shapiro (1997: 179–201).