Plans for next few weeks

Plans for next few weeks • Week 9 Lecture On the Pain of Others and Seminar –student presentations • Week 10 Lecture on the rise of digital photography and social media Seminar– student presentations Next term: The Subject as Photographer • Week 11 No lecture or seminar Thursday Showing of Born into Brothels (Time and place to be announced) • Week 12 Guest Lecture, Director of Photovoice Helen Cammock Seminars to meet as normal

Regarding the Pain of Others: the Abu Ghraib Photographs Visual Sociology Week 9

Outline • Introduction • Who takes atrocity pictures, why, how does it affect them? • The politics of looking: how do we/should we respond to atrocity photographs • The example of Abu Ghraib • How should we interpret the Abu Ghraib pictures and our own response? • Conclusions

Introduction • Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Penguin 2003 • What is the role of photographs in communicating the meaning of war and other atrocities committed against people? • Who makes such pictures and why? • The cultural politics of looking: How do we respond to such pictures, as viewers, and why? How do we regard the pain of others? • Abu Ghraib photographs released May 2004, vicious torture by US male and female soldiers of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison documented by the pictures the soldiers took themselves, as souvenirs and to enhance the humiliation of the prisoners. • Questions of representation involve both questions of truth and ethics, and these are closely linked.

Photographs of suffering • War photography, especially photographs showing death, injury and suffering, sometimes the battle shock and fatigue of soldiers • Atrocity photographs: concentration camps, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and Africa • US lynchings of African-American men accused of raping white women, and killed by vigilantes without trial.

Who makes such pictures, how does it affect them, and what are their ethical responsibilities? • Photojournalists photographing war, such as Robert Capa, Lee Miler, Don Mcullin Don McCullin says, "When you are hanging out with poor people starving, it takes a lot of willpower to stomach that kind of tragedy every day. Watching people die is not a great experience. It takes its toll, and in the end it becomes immensely unattractive. You want to get away from it because you start feeling damaged yourself, and you turn your head to other things. I started doing landscapes to give me the chance to rest. I could have gone on photographing wars, revolutions and disasters all my life, but what kind of person would it have made me now? I wouldn't have any brain left.” British Journal of Photography http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/interview/2291888/don-mccullin-i-could-have-gone-on-photographing-wars-all-my-life-but-what-kind-of-person-would-it-have-made-me#ixzz2laXFyBAK Subscribe to BJP and save money. Click here to save 29% today. • Bystanders, victims, • Produced for other purposes • Perpetrators of atrocities, including ‘trophy’ pictures

Trophy photographs • Lynching photographs, discussed by Sontag now published. Collections of still photographs and postcards. • James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, Twin Palms Publishers http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html • D. Apel (2004) Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob, Rutgers University Press.

‘The horror of the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken’ as souvenirs of a collective action, save in personal albums and sent to friends.

The reception of photographs:‘For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.’ • The role of photographs in communicating the meaning of war is ambiguous at best, dependent on context ‘Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply bemused awareness…that terrible things happen…’ (12) Therefore their capacity to act as evidence for a particular viewpoint is limited. ‘It remains as true as ever that that most people will not question the rationalizations of their government for starting or continuing a war. It takes some very peculiar circumstances for a war to become genuinely unpopular . . . When it does, the material gathered by photographers, which they may think of as unmasking the conflict, is of great use. Absent such protest, the same antiwar photograph may be read as showing pathos or heroism, admirable heroism, in an unavoidable struggle… The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities which have use for it’.(35)

Photographs of suffering can distance us from it: ‘The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and the dying… Thus postcolonial Africa exists in the consciousness of the general public in the rich world… These (terrible) sights carry a double message…. They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing that happens in that place’ (64). Picturing atrocities is yet another aspect of our moral dilemma about cruelty and suffering rather than a solution for it.

Our response depends on an existing structure of feeling, which the picture cannot produce in itself. Our response depends on being able to do something; the photograph may allow us to feel sympathy. But if we cannot do anything about it, then it may lead to a refusal to become involved. ‘It seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.’(105). In other words, we stop feeling because we feel we can’t do anything. Picturing atrocities is yet another aspect of our moral dilemma about cruelty and suffering rather than a solution for it.

What are the Abu Ghraib photographs? • Abu Ghraib is a prison 20 miles west of Baghdad in Iraq where Iraqi prisoners were incarcerated by the Americans using methods of interrogation said to have been already established in Guantánamo and Afghanistan. It was previously a prison for enemies of the Saddam Hussain regime. At time the photographs were taken it housed several thousand prisoners in three categories: common criminals just indiscriminately rounded up on the street, security detainees, and a small number of suspected insurgency leaders.

The images were first revealed publicly on an American television news programme, 60 Minutes, on 29 April 2004 first on the website of The New Yorker, then on 10 May of an article by Seymour Hersc, (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact,accessed 23101/06) .

It later became known that the images had been circulating by email and on CDs by the American soldiers amongst themselves and to their friends at other camps. The pictures were not created to document war by objective reporters or photographers but were intended as instruments of maltreatment and cultural and sexual humiliation, Made to be circulated among prison warders and their friends, Had been the subject of a strong condemnatory report, but not released for some time, by General Taguba These photos and videos, taken by soldiers on own digital cameras and camcorders. took Americans by surprise ‘None of us had ever seen anything like this’ was a frequent comment in the press.

Who takes atrocity photographs and why, and how does it affect them? The Abu Ghraib photographs were produced by ordinary people in the course of their service as soldiers. They are not photojournalism, like most atrocity pictures we see. The horror of the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken’ as souvenirs of a collective action. Not just to be saved in personal albums, circulated as a record of one’s life, the way very ordinary people circulate pictures on their blogs or through email.

One of main points about these pictures is that they challenge the usual distinction between (taking the) the picture and what is depicted. This is because the pictures are part of the story, perhaps one of the reasons the torture took place. They are part of the torture, rather than just a picture of it. • They were used as blackmail, as part of the torture, shown to prisoners, threatened to send to their families. • The taking of the pictures humiliates the prisoners. • They function as an incitement to torture- there is a kind of frenzy of picture taking, as an end in itself, and a spur to further tortures

What role do photographs have in helping us understand events and suffering?

What are they evidence of? • At first most attention was given to them as pictures, as ‘disgusting pictures’ and whether they should be released. Later the attention focused on interpretations of what was going on. • What is happening in the pictures, what is the internal narrative? Is it just the pranks of young people, like student hazing? Is what is going on torture? • Assuming we see it as torture, are the pictures evidence of wide-spread wrong-doing or simply a few ‘bad apples’? President Bush and other American leaders insisted that it was just a few bad apples. • Could the pictures themselves resolve this issue?

What are the pictures evidence of? • For those who took pictures they seem to be evidence that Iraqis are subhuman. • They demonstrate the power of the US, what the US can do • They also seem to indicate that whoever took the pictures assumed that they would not get in trouble for them, so that their actions were more than those of just a few rogue soldiers. • Ironically they are also proof or evidence of torture, and were used in court proceedings as evidence against some of the perpetrators.

Distinctiveness of these pictures Sexual humiliation is central to the destruction of the self which the torture, and the picturing of the torture, aims to accomplish. • Sexual power is part of the power of armed might assumed by the female soldiers as sexual predators.

Joanna Bourke argues • These pictures constructed by a pornographic gaze, the soldiers adopting scenarios that come from pornography, where it is ‘licensed’- and therefore feel they have done nothing wrong. This abuse is also performed for the camera, staged for the camera. This is pornographic gaze, a gaze which makes people no more than their bodies, their genitals, the crucial issue here. Young people increasingly accept and deploy this.

Judith Butler on Abu Ghraib • Previous analysis of video of police attach on Rodney King, which set off LA riots.’Endangered/ Endangering’ in Reading Rodney King/ Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams NY: Routledge, 1993. Available at • http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic543054.files/butler_endangered-endangering-schematic-racism_1993.pdf • On Abu GhrainButler, Judith. ”Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” in: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Vol. 25, No. 6, pp. 951 - 966, April 19, 2007. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/torture-and-the-ethics-of-photography/

Butler rejects the analogy with pornography. We read them in terms of pornography because that is a narrative which we are familiar with, and we should resist that reading. • As bad as what is pictured, what we have to consider foremost is the frame within which the war is conducted and pictured- the refusal to recognise the humanity of Iraqis and other US ‘enemies’. This refusal to see the Iraqis as human is much wider than the perpetrators, and comes from the very top, in the rejection of Geneva conventions. Also in refusal of the US government to talk about the thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed in the war and to take this fact seriously. This is what frames the picture even though it isn’t ‘in’ the picture. • Butler argues that what we see is framed by wider political and social norms, should not get distracted by the pictures from these wider frames. Can look at them again and again, but what need to look at- and can’t necessarily be shown in a picture- is the framing of the picture. • This is very similar to Sontag’s, and in fact Butler’s article is partly a memorial to/ dialogue with Sontag.

Cannot separate seeing and interpretation, since we see in terms of existing frameworks of interpretation. Therefore in showing these pictures (even by way of protest) we cannot help but repeat the interpretation of non-humanity they carry. • Is very wary of showing these pictures, repetition normalises the framework within which they are produced. In showing these pictures to protest the injury to the prisoners we have to repeat the injury, say it again, and open it up again to misapprehension (e.g. as sexual titillation ). We repeat the do-ability of these acts when we show the pictures.

Or we may turn away? • Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance, University of Chicago Press, 2010. • ‘… it is hard to get our feelings “right” when it comes to photographs that bring us news of the unkind things that people do to each other’ (p 25) • ‘We may even feel impatient in the face of bottomless, impotent suffering’ (p. 28)

Conclusions • In what sense can photographs reveal ‘truths’ even when they are not ‘objective’ pictures produced by disinterested photographer?. • The Abu Ghraib pictures are clearly constructed photographs, set up by the ‘photographers’, who posed with their victims. Yet they are still true, although not the whole truth. The worst torture was not photographed. The constructedness of pictures and their truth are not always antithetical. • Or does our understanding of the pictures and what they ‘say’ rest on our frame of reference? • Should we be looking at these pictures, or I to be showing them?

Plans for next few weeks