A reflection on the ethics and politics of aesthetics in conflict zone photography through Ilkka Uimonen's Cycles

Abstract

This article examines the aesthetics of violence in the context of conflict zone photography by analysing Finnish photojournalist, and former Magnum photographer, Ilkka Uimonen's documentary work Cycles (2004). In part, the series of photographs reiterate imagery that is in the spotlight of transnational mass media and as such it provokes complex reflections that are connected with the epistemological questions on apprehending the ways conflicts are mediated. In pursuance of the experimental execution of the photographs in the exhibition field, the series provides a ground for the critical engagement and reflection on the mass mediated character of violence. The aesthetics of violence gives rise to the social, ethical and political questions of what it is to acknowledge or guard against politically motivated violence. In this context, experimental means are seen as essential in expressing and inquiring complex and emerging knowledge conditions, and may also be transformative. The analysis is focused on the aesthetic means through which the mediation of the conception of intercultural relations can be examined. Experimental documentary photography is seen, here as self-reflective, critical, creative and social practice; documentary practice is investigative in its ways of thinking about what to represent and how in a portrayal of a specific collective and its social relations.

Notes

1 Ilkka Uimonen (b. 1966) has worked around the world for the photo agencies Sygma, Polaris and Magnum. He has won numerous awards for his work, including three prizes in the World Press Photo awards. He works as a contributor for Newsweek and his photographs have been published by The New York Times Magazine, People and Time, among others. In recent years Uimonen has focused on long-term book projects.

2 Bethlehem, Gaza City, Hebron, Jenin, Jerusalem, Khan Yunnis, Nablus, Ramallah, Tel Aviv.

3 In Cycles, for instance, a photograph of three Palestinians, with the one in the middle holding up a blood-covered hand, has been captioned in different newspapers in opposite ways: they are either explained to be the victims of Israeli aggression or taken as part of the bloodletting. The photographer himself has been interviewed because of the case, and he himself did not have evidence whether these particular Palestinians were innocent victims or guilty of the crime (see Sternthal). Hence, photography's evidentiary authority cannot be reduced to its relationship to the real, indexical nature or the photographer's position as an eyewitness. Images that measure up to aesthetic and technical refinement, generalized content, and lack of explicit meaning are most often widely spread and useful precisely because they can be made to convert disparate meanings in varied contexts (see e.g. Hariman and Lucaites).

4 The installation images are taken from the exhibition in the Victor Barsokevitsch Photographic Centre in Kuopio in 2004.

5 In this context, I consider aesthetics to be inextricably related to questions of epistemology —that is, what is accessible to knowledge, and how, in given historical and cultural circumstances. The modalities of aesthetics relate to the rhetorical, narrative, sentient and affective operations of representations. Importantly, the concept of aesthetics is broadened to address the aesthetic of relation; I understand aesthetics as being concerned with how interpersonal relations are produced through visual culture and questioning in what respect visual media reflects and affects the encounters with one another in everyday circumstances. In short, I address the question of what kind of social functions visual culture has.

6 Historically, documentaries have been produced, disseminated and conceived as products that self-consciously come out of social struggles, with the aim of amplifying the critiques of groups struggling for progressive social transformation, spreading awareness and knowledge and being used as resources for activist networks. As a genre, documentary overlaps with issues around knowledge production associated with the social sciences; it is a traditional mode of research but its methods can be mobilized in different ways and different methodologies stress different approaches to knowledge generation (Wayne 84, 91).

7 Intercultural indicates a context that cannot be confined to a single culture; the frames of a culture as a self-evident entity, with definite spatial location, become suspect. This is connected to recent changes in cultural analysis, where the traditional leitmotiv of cultures, which has been profoundly embedded in nationalism, is challenged by the problems caused by the crisis of the nation-state (see e.g. Intercultural Aesthetics). However, issues of nation and nationalism recur throughout the discourse of interculturality. In the context of Israel, the reconstitution of Palestinian nationality through the right for actual land and citizenship is urgent because the stable institutions of a nation state are not at their disposal. At the same time, the dispersion of Palestinians in the Diaspora and their dependency on recognition of other states indicates that the question is transnational and supranational, rather than national (Khalili 7). Focusing on the term “culture” is profitable here since it is something that passes consistently through national borders and transforms nations and their politics from within.

8 Ethics is here conceived as a grounded social relation. The ethical encounter means the attempt to resist the domination, appropriation, objectification and exclusion of the other; the aim is the encounter that affects and alters both sides and allows the possibility of new ways of knowing and critical change. Therefore, the close analysis of ethics becomes also politicized through examining the quality of representation and its evocation of a specific social relationship — or lack of relationship — to people from other cultures.

9 At the same time, Magnum is known for approaches which nourish the personal point of view and the possibility that art and politics could be made to coincide. It has been established to guarantee relatively more freedom for the photographers than visual journalists working within the constraints of media practices have (see Ritchin). When aesthetics is understood in a sense of beautifying, it becomes problematic; aestheticizing tendency may neutralize the violent content, passivate the spectator, and thus will not further ethical and political responsiveness. In this context, Silomäki's project can be seen as a counter strategy that serves as a thrust to reflect and subvert the conventional modes of conflict zone imagery.

10 For theorization of affectivity, see von Alphen. According to Ernst van Alphen, affective reading is a channel for thinking about something we do not know, but which the work invites us to think about. Instead of a conventional interpretation based on recognition, affective works force us to slow down when we process them, and think about new possibilities of knowledge based on the audio-visual expression. An affective reading also enables us to consider ethical issues. When we encounter ethical questions through a documentary, we do not read them as outsiders, but instead process them through thinking that is based on personal experience. In such cognition, the work happens in us, and the ethical dimension of reception is embodied in our ability to process these effects and also to be ready to change our thinking. Affects are social insofar as how they work and what their effects are. As an effective force, affects also have political significance.

11 On the concept of performative narrativity, see Saloul 2008; for performative approach in the context of mediatized conflicts, see Cottle 9, 187.