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Abstract
Press photography often reduces geopolitical conflicts from local or regional political disasters into isolated, simplified and safely communicable spectacles of atrocity. Images of non-Western women in particular regularly function as symbols of the degeneracy and hopelessness of the oppressed, obscuring social and political subjectivities. This article follows two case studies of press photographs portraying women, analysing gender as their key component. The main road of scholarship on photography capturing war and conflict has focused on the empathic responses of the Western audiences to the general category of “trauma photography”, rather than on institutionally-distributed image-making that produces contemporary notions of identity, (non)citizenship and sovereignty. The goal of the article, however, is to point out how these representations, generating ethical and aesthetical responses, simultaneously function as normative devices producing the imagery of certain communities and mediating their distance from the audiences.
Notes
1 Marianne Hirsch, in her essay Nazi Photographs in Post-Holocaust Art: Gender as an Idiom of Memorialization, is one of the few to pay attention to the constructions of gender (19–41).
2 While the photographic portrait in general has been mobilized as a way of celebrating the centred, Cartesian, Western individual (as in portraits of politicians, artists and celebrities) it has also precluded the normative, coherent subject of viewing (often white and masculine) in relation to a passive feminine object (Jones 947–78). On the other hand, the recent enormous success of deadpan portrait photography (practised for example by Rineke Dijkstra, Celine van Balen and Gillian Wearing, representing mostly children, adolescents and women) is a reflection of the growing interest in the decreasing political agency of an individual in the neoliberal society (Stallabrass 71–90).
3 It is worth mentioning here that, although those images were meant to accompany a story in a newspaper, I encountered them as a part of photography exhibition, therefore after they had been moved from their original context, and followed their moves.
4 Caption as given on WPP website <http://www.worldpressphoto.org>.
7 Das (184--205) pays attention to how cultural rituals (like throwing earth over flesh at funerals or lamentation) rely upon the medium of the female body to enact an emotional response to death, contesting death's invisibility. The mourner is the embodiment of the feeling that had been evoked by the act of death-making.
8 Similarly, the AIDS Memorial Quilt conjured by AIDS activism in 1980s and the Women in Black movement have addressed grieving in all its affective, social and political implications, opening spaces for challenging divisions between public and private as well as between affective and political (Athanasiou 40–57; Crimp 3–18).
10 The most famous example here could be Afghan Girl, one of the most iconic child images of all times, relying on the same formal organization as Buddhist nun (sharpness of facial detail, engaging eye contact). It has attained its anterior future when the girl in question was photographed seventeen years later, the two images often presented together.
11 Chouliaraki also gives examples of discursive activism where NGOs reject essentialist representations of non-Western subjects and attempt to educate photographers by mediating reflexive cultural specificity.
12 Similarly, Sontag (Regarding) pays attention to how the same photographs of children have been employed for political propaganda by both sides in the Serbo-Croatian conflict.
13 Hutnyk (77–94) argues that in photographs of children we can witness the double play of aid/war: while looking at the photographs of children's amputated legs or burns, we are assured that the rationale for the military intervention is to ensure the freedom of the women and children.
14 It must be mentioned that there exist alternatives to unproblematic connecting of non-Western women to universal victimhood and oppression — i.e. emergent trope of a woman soldier.
15 Conversation with Luis Sinco at Humanizing Photography conference, Durham, 22 Sept. 2009. Extensive documentary on Miller is available on http://www.mediastorm.com.