The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence

THE CRUEL RADIANCE

THE CRUEL RADIANCE Photography and Political Violence

Susie Linfield

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

is director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, the Boston Review, Dissent, and other publications. She was formerly an editor at American Film, the Washington Post, and the Village Voice.

SUSIE LINFIELD

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48250-7 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-48250-2 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Linfield, Susie. The cruel radiance : photography and political violence / Susie Linfield p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48250-7 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-48250-2 (alk. paper) 1. Documentary photography. 2. Political violence in mass media. 3. Violence—Press coverage. 4. Photographic criticism. I. Title. TR820.5 .L55 2010 070.4'9—dc22 2010013705 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For Jay, who can see in the dark; and in memory of E. W.

Driven back and utterly shamed Shall be those who trust in an image. Isaiah 4 2:17

Urgent. . . . Have possibility of taking photos. . . . Send film roll as fast as you can. Jósef Cyrankiewicz and Stanislaw Klodzinski, Auschwitz prisoners, in a note smuggled to the Polish Resistance, 1944

CONTENTS

List of Figures xi Preface: The Black Book xiii PART ONE: POLEMICS

1 A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography? 3 2 Photojournalism and Human Rights: The Calamity of the Kodak 33 PART TWO: PLACES

3 4 5 6

Warsaw, Lodz, Auschwitz: In the Waiting Room of Death 65 China: From Malraux’s Dignity to the Red Guards’ Shame 101 Sierra Leone: Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity 125 Abu Ghraib and the Jihad: The Dance of Civilizations 151

PART THREE: PEOPLE

7 Robert Capa: The Optimist 175 8 James Nachtwey: The Catastrophist 205 9 Gilles Peress: The Skeptic 233 Acknowledgments 259 Notes 261 Bibliography 295 Index 309

FIGURES

1.1

Farnood, protest against reelection of Ahmadinejad. Tehran, Iran (2009) 2 1.2 Jerome Delay, women in cemetery. Baghdad, Iraq (2003) 26 1.3 Ahmed Dhiya, schoolboys. Baghdad, Iraq (2004) 29 2.1 Ulrich Jantzen, burnt woman screaming. Dhaka, Bangladesh (2001) 32 2.2 Unidentified photographer, prisoner of Stalin. Lubyanka Prison, Soviet Union (1931) 55 2.3 Unidentified photographer, child prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. Tuol Sleng, Cambodia (date unknown) 58 3.1 Heinrich Jöst, woman selling Jewish armbands. Warsaw Ghetto (1941) 64 3.2 Mendel Grossman, women kissing before deportation. Lodz Ghetto (date unknown) 80 4.1 Li Zhensheng, Cultural Revolution struggle session. Harbin, China (1966) 100 4.2 Jack Birns, captured Communists. Songjiang, China (1948) 121 5.1 Candace Scharsu, Memuna Mansarah and her father. Murray Town Amputee Camp, Sierra Leone (2000) 124 5.2 Stuart Freedman, boy looking at father’s prosthetic legs. Makeni, Sierra Leone (2004) 146 6.1 John Moore, man after suicide bombing. Rawalpindi, Pakistan (2007) 150

Figures

6.2 Josef Koudelka, woman with bloody flag. Prague, Czechoslovakia (1968) 161 7.1 Robert Capa, POUM fighters dancers. The Aragon front, Spain (1936) 174 7.2 Robert Capa, blind immigrants. Gedera, Israel (1950) 195 8.1 James Nachtwey, starving man. Ayod, southern Sudan (1993) 204 8.2 James Nachtwey, hanging man. Unidentified location, Afghanistan (1996) 220 9.1 Gilles Peress, the Shah’s torture victims. Tehran, Iran (1979) 232 9.2 Gilles Peress, corpse’s feet with shoes and socks. Xerxe, Kosovo (1999) 257

xii

PREFACE The Black Book

When I was about three, my older sister discovered a new game called reading; and, unbeknownst to our parents, she promptly taught it to me. Soon she and I began trolling through my father’s library, and one day we discovered that a second row of secret books existed behind the public ones on the front of the shelves. All sorts of books—about sex, art, politics—were to be found on the hidden rows, and my sister and I delighted in discovering them together. (The lure of the forbidden can never be overstated.) But there was one book in this secret trove that I did not tell her about, and that I returned to many times over the years. I could not, for a long time, understand most of the text, but from the first its pictures transfixed me: they are what I remember best. I am looking at a copy of that book now. It is called The Black Book of Polish Jewry, and it was published in 1943, in New York; it details, in words and photographs, the Nazi destruction of the Polish Jews. It is a grim book to look through, though it does not tell or show the worst: for it could not, of course, document the camps. I had never heard the word “Holocaust” when I first saw this book. But I knew that something I could not understand had been done to the people in those pictures; and I knew that the abject, defeated wraiths in them were Jewish, just like—yet also not just like—me. Looking at those photographs, I felt sadness, indignation, disgust, and puzzlement, but my overwhelming emotion (I can feel it now) was shame. How, I wondered, could I belong to such a wretched group? And how could I place the people xiii

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in those pictures within the context of the people I knew and loved— my family and our friends—who all seemed so energetic, so outspoken, so alive? The Black Book of Polish Jewry was my first introduction to photographs of defeat and atrocity, which is to say to photographs of grievous history. I cannot say that this book haunted me throughout my childhood, but I cannot say that I ever forgot it, either. Still, I wasn’t particularly interested in pictures like these until about a decade ago, when I found myself looking, more and more, at photographs—mostly in newspapers and magazines but sometimes on the Internet or in galleries and museums—of the gruesome slaughters in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Congo and Somalia, Rwanda and Uganda, Bosnia and Chechnya. I wondered what these photographs said, and failed to say, about the new world order that was emerging in the aftermath of the cold war; they seemed to demur from, if not negate, the triumphal rhetoric of universal peace and democracy that was becoming so popular. It seemed to me that these images, so striking and yet largely ignored, were telling me things that I urgently needed to know—and at the same time that the realities they documented could not be found only, or primarily, in the pictures themselves. This book is my response to that paradox. It is also a response to my childhood self who was simultaneously drawn to and humiliated by the photographs of the Polish Jews. It is an attempt to understand, and to wrestle with, the photographs I have seen and the histories of which they speak. This is a book of criticism, not theory. It seeks to claim for photography criticism the same freedom of response championed by film critics like James Agee and Pauline Kael, dance critics like Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce, theater critics like Kenneth Tynan, and music critics like Greil Marcus. It is written, in large part, against the photography criticism of Susan Sontag. This is not because Sontag was wrong about most things; on the contrary, many of her insights remain sharp and true. But it is Sontag, more than anyone else, who was responsible for establishing a tone of suspicion and distrust in photography criticism, and for teaching us that to be smart about photographs means to disparage them. I am writing, even more, against the work of Sontag’s postmodern and poststructuralxiv

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ist heirs and their sour, arrogant disdain for the traditions, the practice, and the ideals of documentary photography. Unlike those critics, I believe that we need to respond to and learn from photographs rather than simply disassemble them; unlike those critics, I believe that we need to look at, and look into, what James Agee called “the cruel radiance of what is.” Photographs help us do that; so would the kind of criticism that believed in their worth. This book is also written, though with great reluctance, against the progressive view of history: against the belief, sustained since the Enlightenment by liberals and the left and taken up more recently by certain neoconservatives, that the arc of modern history bends toward freedom and justice. This is the tradition in which I was raised; I continue to cherish it. But I have come to believe that it is the experience of degradation, immiseration, violence, and defeat that defines the lives of millions, and that in large part defines history. Such experiences do not necessarily lead those who suffer to create a better world when they shake off their chains; on the contrary, suffering is just as likely to warp its victims and turn them, sometimes quickly, into persecutors and tyrants. That is why we cannot talk—at least in meaningful or realistic ways—about building a world of democracy, justice, and human rights without first understanding the experience of their negation. The attempt to forge such an understanding is what I mean by “empathy,” a value I repeatedly return to; without it, the politics of human rights devolve into abstraction, romantic foolishness, and cruelty. In thinking about all this I have been influenced by a number of writers, especially Jean Améry, Hannah Arendt, and Primo Levi, each of whom has wrestled, in lucid and courageous ways, with what we human beings have made of our world. None of those thinkers wrote about, or cared much about, photography. But it is photographs, I believe, that bring us close to those experiences of suffering in ways that no other form of art or journalism can. Yet in bringing us close, photographs also illuminate the unbridgeable chasm that separates ordinary life from extraordinary experiences of political trauma; what was done in the Nazi death camps of Poland, or the ones built by the Khmer Rouge, cannot be easily absorbed into our understanding of how civilizations progress or of what human beings are. In this xv

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sense, photographs teach us about our failure—our necessary failure—to comprehend the human. That, too, is a paradox that haunts this book. Throughout these chapters certain questions recur, though the photographs and historic events that inspire them are quite varied. What does it mean to look at photographs of violence and suffering? Is the refusal to do so a form of respect? Why are such photographs tarred as voyeuristic, exploitative, and pornographic? What would solidarity with the people in such photographs mean? How would we understand the world if there were no photographs, and why do some thinkers believe that an imageless world would be a better one? What does it mean to acknowledge another’s suffering, knowing full well that to embrace it is impossible? And how has the photography of political trauma and political witness responded to the radical changes in how war is made, and what it is made for, in the course of the past eight decades? In the book’s first section, titled “Polemics,” I look at the history of photography criticism and especially at the tremendous, though not always felicitous, influence that Weimar-era writers such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Bertolt Brecht have exerted on it. Here I seek, also, to begin developing a new kind of criticism—a new response to photographs—that rejects the opposition of thought and emotion. In the second chapter I consider the relationship, if any, between the development of human-rights ideals and the practice of taking photographs. In the course of the past century, many pictures of manmade misery have been taken and shown; has the suffering of the world been ameliorated, if only slightly, by those shocking images? The second section, titled “Places,” explores four historic moments and some of the photographs that document them. I start with photographs of the Holocaust, particularly those that were made by the Nazis themselves, and investigate the intense resistance to viewing them. I look at photographs of China’s Cultural Revolution and chart the Chinese revolution’s devastating trajectory from the assertion of dignity—which was, traditionally, a key aspect of Marxist ethics—to the use of shame and humiliation as tools of revolutionary transformation. The following chapter explores photographs of child soldiers and their maimed child-victims xvi

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from the wars in Sierra Leone and other African countries; here I try to understand the increasingly apolitical nature of contemporary war and the responses to it. The last chapter of this section analyzes the cultural debate over the Abu Ghraib photographs and the onslaught of images from the Muslim world that celebrate suicide bombings, beheadings, and other forms of barbarism; I argue that these two sets of presumably antagonistic images are the most intimate of partners. I also consider photographs from the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Israel-Palestine: wars that I hope, but doubt, will be ended by the time you read this. The final section, called “People,” focuses on three photojournalists whose works raise crucial political questions about war and aesthetic questions about photography. The first is Robert Capa, who is widely regarded as the most prominent war photographer ever; in the mid-twentieth century he set the standard for, and altered, the course of photojournalism. The others—James Nachtwey and Gilles Peress—are our contemporaries; and though in some senses they are Capa’s sons, their photographs are radically different from his. (And very different from each other, too.) Here I consider how modern photojournalism has responded to two latetwentieth-century developments: first, the fissure between violence and politics and the rise of non-ideological, astonishingly tenacious wars of disintegration; second, the postmodern assault on the concepts of truth and reality—concepts on which documentary photography has, traditionally, been so dependent. Though much of this book concentrates on photographs per se, I often delve into the historic contexts out of which these photographs grew— and into memoirs, fiction, and works of political philosophy. I trust that readers will not regard these as digressions, for they are central to my project. Put most simply: when we look at a documentary photograph we look at the histories, the politics, the world that gave birth to it; the former makes most sense, and is most meaningful, when it prompts a deeper consideration of the latter. I hope, of course, that people read this book and engage its ideas. But I hope, too, that the book encourages readers to seek out the photographs discussed here—and others that aren’t—and to think about the catastrophic histories of which they speak. For—just as I somehow knew xvii

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when I was a child poring over The Black Book of Polish Jewry—these are our pictures and our histories. And this is so whether or not we choose to look at them, and even if we pretend that they don’t belong to us. History and photography have, alas, created more than one black book. March 2010 Brooklyn, New York

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Polemics

Figure 1.1 Tehran, Iran, 2009: The country was rocked by a series of huge demonstrations after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rigged “reelection” in the summer of 2009. Here, a prodemocracy demonstrator holds up her camera. Thousands of amateur and underground photographs were taken by activists and subsequently transmitted, often via the Internet, to a worldwide audience. Photo: Farnood/Sipa Press.

1 A LITTLE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY CRITICISM; OR, WHY DO PHOTOGRAPHY CRITICS HATE PHOTOGRAPHY? In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a short essay called “What Is the Good of Criticism?” This is something that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that many have had trouble answering; it has been known to evoke hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, he wrote, “passion . . . raises reason to new heights,” and he urged his fellow critics to eschew antiseptic writing that “deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling.” A few years later he returned to the subject, explaining that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”: a pithy, excellent description of what criticism should be. Baudelaire’s American contemporary, Margaret Fuller, held similar views: she urged her colleagues to reject dogma—“external consistency,” she called it—in favor of “genuine emotion.” The critic, she wrote, should create an I-thou relationship between herself and her readers and guide them “to love wisely what we before loved well.” By “pleasure” and “love” Baudelaire and Fuller didn’t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that the critic’s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, or to a genre, is the sine qua non, the ground zero, of criticism. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature— and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most challenging, most 3

Chapter One

meaningful, most vivid when she sat in a dark movie theater, or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? This same sort of intuitive connection was at the heart of James Agee’s approach to writing about the movies. Introducing himself to the readers of the Nation in 1942, he wrote that he had been lovingly immersed in movies since childhood and yet—just like his readers—was “an amateur” who knew little about them; he must, therefore, “simultaneously recognize my own ignorance and feel no apology for what my eyes tell me as I watch any given screen.” A similar emotional affinity led a young woman named Arlene Croce, who knew nothing about dance, to begin writing criticism after a life-changing evening at the New York City Ballet in 1957; that performance, she said, “made an addict out of me.” Croce, who developed an uncannily astute understanding of Balanchine’s modernism, would go on to become the best dance critic of the twentieth century. “All I can tell you is, dance is the thing that hit me the hardest,” she explained. For these critics and others—those I would consider at the center of the modern tradition—cultivating this sense of lived experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Their starting point was, always, their subjective, immediate experience, which meant that they had to be honest with themselves. Randall Jarrell wrote that “criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness . . . All he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses.” Alfred Kazin agreed; the critic’s skill, he argued, “begins by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with perception at the pitch of passion.” For such critics, emotional reactions and critical faculties weren’t synonomous, but they weren’t opposites, either. These critics sought, and achieved, a fertile dialectic between ideas and emotions: they were able to think and feel at the same time, or at least within the same essay. The great exception to this approach is photography criticism. There, you will hear precious little talk of love, or terrible nakedness, or passion’s pitch. There, critics view emotional responses—if they have any—not as something to be experienced and understood but, rather, as an enemy to be vigilantly guarded against. For these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment, and pleasure is denounced as self4

A Little History of Photography Criticism

indulgent. They approach photography—not particular photographs, or particular photographers, or particular genres, but photography itself— with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a “community of interest” with their chosen subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to defang rather than an experience to embrace and engage. It’s hard to resist the thought that a very large number of photography critics—including the most influential ones—don’t really like photographs, or the act of looking at them, at all. Susan Sontag’s On Photography was published in 1977, though the individual essays that comprise the book began appearing, and making an impact, in 1973. The book remains astonishingly incisive, and has been immensely influential on the thinking of other photography critics—and immensely influential, too, in setting a certain tone of photography criticism. Look, for instance, at Sontag’s description of photography in the book’s first chapter, which establishes a voice, an attitude, and an approach, all of which she maintains throughout. Sontag describes photography as “grandiose,” “treacherous,” “imperial,” “voyeuristic,” “predatory,” “addictive,” and “reductive.” Photographs, we learn, simultaneously embody “seductiveness” and “didacticism,” “passivity” and “aggression.” Sontag’s coolness is unfaltering, as is her unfriendliness: photographs are described as “a sublimated murder—a soft murder” and as “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” A typical Sontag sentence reads, “The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.” Metaphor indeed! Three years later came Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. This book, delicate and playful, is a love letter to the photograph (and to Barthes’s dead mother). Barthes celebrates the quirky, spontaneous reactions that photographs can inspire—or at least the quirky, spontaneous reactions they inspire in him: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Still, Camera Lucida is a very odd valentine, and it shares an intellectual approach, if not a literary style, 5

Chapter One

with Sontag. Barthes describes photographers as “agents of Death” and the photograph as “flat,” “platitudinous,” “stupid,” “without culture,” a “catastrophe,” and—the cruelest cut—“undialectical.” The photograph “teaches me nothing,” Barthes insists, for it “completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires.” Continuing this tradition of photography criticism is John Berger, the most morally cogent and emotionally perceptive critic that photography has produced. “My first interest in photography was passionate,” Berger has written; and when you read his work, you know this is so. (As a young man, Berger dreamed of composing a book of love poems illustrated with photographs.) Berger has frequently included photographs in his books. More important, he has argued that photographs represent an “opposition to history” by which ordinary people affirm the subjective experiences that modernity, science, and industrial capitalism have done so much to crush: “And so, hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images, often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy.” Like Sontag, Berger is acutely aware of the central place that photography occupies in modern life; unlike Sontag, he respects the prosaic yet meaningful ways in which people throughout the world use photographs. Yet in Berger’s canonical essays he, too, took a decidedly dark view of photography, and he was especially critical of photographs that document political violence. Such images, he insisted, were at best useless and at worst narcissistic, leading the viewer to a sense of self-conscious helplessness rather than to enlightenment, outrage, or action. Thinking about photographs by Don McCullin of the then-ongoing Vietnam War, Berger observed that “McCullin’s most typical photographs record sudden moments of agony—a terror, a wounding, a death, a cry of grief.” He continued: These moments are in reality utterly discontinuous with normal time. . . . But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy. And as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war. . . . The issue of the war which has caused that moment is effectively depoliticised. 6

A Little History of Photography Criticism

More generally, drawing on a metaphor clearly derived from the atomic bomb, Berger described the photograph—all photographs—as a “fission whereby appearances are separated by the camera from their function.” Yet the particular instance of the Vietnam War that Berger cited undermines rather than supports his thesis. Photographs of that conflict—such as the one taken by Eddie Adams of a streetside execution or by Nick Ut of a naked, napalmed girl—didn’t foster feelings of moral inadequacy. (Neither did McCullin’s.) On the contrary, they mobilized political opposition to the war. Barthes, too, held no brief for photographs of violence. Writing about an exhibit of “Shock-Photos” in Paris, Barthes argued that “most of the photographs exhibited to shock us have no effect at all.” Such images are too finished, too complete—“overconstructed” is Barthes’s word. As such, they deprive us of our freedom of response: “We are in each case dispossessed of our judgment: someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing.” (Walter Benjamin, as we’ll see, also feared that photography impairs independent judgment.) Sontag’s objections went further. Because photographs present us with scenes of catastrophe but can do nothing to explain their histories or causes, she was highly skeptical of the photograph’s ability to be either politically or ethically potent; photographs, she argued, present archetypical abstractions, whereas “moral feelings are embedded in history, whose personae are concrete, whose situations are always specific.” And she insisted—an insistence that has now become the conventional wisdom—that the cumulative effect of such photographs is to create a society of moral dullards: “The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings . . . In these last decades, ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.” Starting in the mid-1970s, the postmodern and poststructuralist children of Sontag, Berger, and Barthes transformed their predecessors’ skepticism about the photograph into outright venom; in an influential essay written in 1981, for instance, Allan Sekula decried photography as “primitive, infantile, aggressive.” Indeed, for the postmoderns, a relentless hostility to modernist photography—and to any belief in the photographer’s authenticity, creativity, or unique subjectivity—was an ethical stance, 7

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though I see it as more of a pathological one. At the same time, the postmoderns were attracted to photography precisely because they saw the medium—with its infinite capacity for mechanical reproduction—as the worm in the modernist apple. In assaulting photography, the postmoderns hoped to undermine modernist “claims to originality, showing those claims for the fiction they are,” as Douglas Crimp wrote; the aim, he continued, was “to use the apparent veracity of photography against itself” and to expose “the supposed autonomous and unitary self” as “nothing other than a discontinuous series of representations, copies, fakes.” These critics weren’t really alive to photographs per se, much less to the world they reveal; what attracted them to photography—especially the postmodern photography of appropriation—was, as Rosalind Krauss wrote, “photography’s travesty of the ideas of originality, or subjective expressiveness, or formal singularity,” its ability to “undermine the very distinction between original and copy,” and its “refusal to understand the artist as a source of originality.” The assault on photography was, in short, a servant to the larger postmodern “project of deconstruction in which art is distanced and separated from itself.” To attack photography, especially high-modern and documentary photography, was to storm the bastions of modernism itself.* In the view of the postmoderns, one of photography’s original sins was its supposedly supine relationship to capitalism. In particular, photography’s admittedly maddening (and obviously false) claims to objective truths—truths divorced from class and culture—made it a particularly dangerous ideological tool that could hinder critical thinking about the prevailing class system. The postmodern refusal of the fiction of objectivity—and of its close cousin, neutrality—was a genuine intellectual accomplishment. But whereas Sontag had written that advanced industrial capitalism requires a ceaseless production of images, the critics who followed her were far more reductive. For the postmoderns, photographs were not just an

* Postmodernism and poststructuralism are, of course, large and complex subjects, especially as they worked themselves out in philosophy and literature; here I discuss, specifically, their effect on photography criticism.

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A Little History of Photography Criticism

integral part of capitalism but its obedient slave. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, for instance, charged that the documentary photograph commits a “double act of subjugation” in which the hapless subject is victimized first by oppressive social forces, then by the “regime of the image.” John Tagg went further, describing photography as “ultimately a function of the state” that is deeply implicated in the ruling class’s “apparatus of ideological control” and its “reproduction of . . . submissive labour power”; he added, in a particularly inapt metaphor, that photography is a “mode of production . . . consuming the world of sight as its raw material.” Martha Rosler proclaimed that “imperialism breeds an imperialist sensibility in all phases of cultural life”; and photographs, it turned out, were the most imperialist of all. Photographers are usually drawn to, and excited by, the new. In contrast, a deep sense of fatigue permeated postmodern photography and the criticism that praised it. In 1986, the critic Andy Grundberg observed that postmodern photography “implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.” Fredric Jameson described this enervated worldview: In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles . . . Contemporary or postmodernist art . . . will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

Postmodern criticism and photography became notable for embodying, indeed celebrating, this sense of weary repetition; as the artist Richard Prince wrote, the way to make it new was to “make it again.” The postmoderns declared war on the formalism of high-modernist critics like John Szarkowski who, they charged, isolated photography from its social and political context. (They reviled Szarkowski as a cold mandarin, yet failed to notice that he wrote about photographs with more empathy and insight than they.) But they were equally hostile to documentary photography that rooted itself in the social and political. Sneering at liberal, socially conscious photojournalists who clung to old-fashioned ideas 9

Chapter One

such as progress and truth became common, if not mandatory; Rosler, for instance, charged that the “liberal documentary assuages any stirrings of conscience in its viewers the way scratching relieves an itch. . . . Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy.” Similarly, Sekula assailed the photographer Paul Strand’s belief in “human values,” “social ideals,” “decency,” and “truth” as “the enemy”—a statement that, I admit, I have always found shocking. The depiction of powerless, vulnerable people is a fraught enterprise that can easily veer into condescension. But from these critics it evoked a tsunami of too-easy scorn. Carol Squiers dismissed photojournalism’s depictions of suffering as the “tableaux of profound abjection.” Rosler, in a rising tide of fury against social documentarians, castigated images of “pathetic, helpless, dispirited victimhood,” “victims-turned-freaks,” “the marginal and pathetic”—enough! She went on to describe contemporary photojournalism as “the petted darling of the monied, a shiver-provoking, slyly decadent, lip-smacking appreciation of alien vitality.” There are, I suppose, some documentary photographs that fit this description; but it’s odd that Rosler and her colleagues ignored the challenging work then being done by, among others, Gilles Peress and Abbas (in Iran), Susan Meiselas (in Nicaragua), David Goldblatt (in South Africa), Eugene Richards (in the U.S.), and Don McCullin (everywhere). One could react in various ways to their difficult, unsettling photographs, but it is doubtful that their images relieved any itches or provoked an epidemic of smacked lips. It is no accident that many of the postmodern critics were women: the fear of sentimentality is particularly potent for female intellectuals, especially those who address a primarily leftwing audience and who write about popular rather than high culture. (Pauline Kael was an invigorating exception: she could write about movies with girlish enthusiasm without losing her edge or seeming too girlish.) Along with this anxiety—this fear of frivolity—comes the mistaken idea that chronic negativity equals fearless intelligence. Mary McCarthy, looking back on her days as the theater critic for Partisan Review, addressed the problem: Aesthetic puritanism . . . has, like all puritanism, a tendency to hypocrisy—based on a denial of one’s own natural tastes and instincts. I remember how uneasy I 10

A Little History of Photography Criticism

felt when I found myself liking Thornton Wilder’s Our Town; I was almost afraid to praise it in the magazine, lest the boys conclude that I was starting to sell out.

Far worse than the postmoderns’ rigid negativity, though, was their utter denial of freedom. They insisted that even a scintilla of autonomy, for either photographer or viewer, was impossible; insisted, that is, that the photographer could never offer, and the viewer could never find, a moment of surprise, originality, or insight when looking at a photograph. To invest a photograph with meaning is always a sad delusion: “The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude,” Victor Burgin wrote. In the view of these critics, it is impossible to see the world anew, for we are all helpless, brainwashed spiders caught in capitalism’s ideological web—which is spun, apparently, of unbreakable iron. Indeed, Burgin condemned the activity of looking itself—an odd stance, one would think, for a photography critic: “Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.” Photography, he claimed, can offer only a grim Sophie’s choice between “narcissistic identification” and “voyeurism.” In short, the postmodern critics viewed photography as a generally nasty business—the photograph is a prison, the act of looking, a crime—which may be why reading their work often feels like trudging through mud. There are fine contemporary photography critics who have rejected the congenital animus of the postmoderns—I think particularly of Max Kozloff, who began writing regularly in the early 1960s, and of younger critics like Rebecca Solnit, David Levi Strauss, and Geoff Dyer, who have responded to the postmodern critique without succumbing to it. Indeed, it may seem as though the “corrosive, hermeneutic irony about pictures” fostered by postmodernism is no longer in fashion. But if fewer essays like Sekula’s and Rosler’s are written now, it is in part because their ideas have been absorbed and accepted by so many in the academy, the art journals, the museums, and the galleries; as theorist W. J. T. Mitchell has written, “reflexive critical iconoclasm . . . governs intellectual discourse today.” Thus, in more recent publications, one bumps up against casual phrases 11

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like “the now-discredited authenticity once attributed to photography,” as if the question of photography’s truth-value has been tossed without regret into the dustbin of history. Even worse are the ways that these ideas have seeped into the general public, encouraging a careless contempt toward documentary photographs. Since such images are cesspools of manipulation and exploitation: why look? It has become all too easy to avert one’s eyes; indeed, to do so is considered a virtue. *

*

*

It is interesting to compare all this—the postmoderns’ obsession with victimization, their refusal of freedom, their congenital crabbiness—to the opening pages of Pauline Kael’s essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” written in 1969. Kael, too, set a certain tone, both for her readers and other critics. Here it is: A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again . . . make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. . . . The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

If On Photography was written by a brilliant skeptic, “Trash, Art, and the Movies” is the work of a smitten lover. And what Kael showed is that the lover can see just as clearly, and be just as smart, as the skeptic. Kael had two great insights in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” One was that trash, far from contaminating judgment, can help the viewer develop an autonomous aesthetic that will lead her to art. Second, she argued that the only truly capacious, truly mature way to experience movies is to combine our deepest emotional reactions, which should never be disowned, with a probing analysis of them. She did not, as some have mistakenly thought, champion unadulterated emotion or unexamined fandom; on the contrary, she insisted that the viewer who approaches movies in such

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unthinking ways “does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully than the person . . . who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities.” Kael urged her readers to reclaim their emotions as a key part of their aesthetic, intellectual, and moral lives: feeling could enhance rather than undermine critical thinking. Yet this, after all, is the same insight that Baudelaire had when he wrote of seeking “the why of his pleasure”; it was the view of Randall Jarrell when he explained that the good critic combines the “sense of fact” with the “personal truth”; it was what Alfred Kazin meant when he claimed that “the unity of thinking and feeling actually exists in the passionate operation of the critic’s intelligence.” This quest for the synthesis of thought and feeling—and the essentially comradely, or at least open, approach to art that it suggests—was the central project for generations of critics, especially American critics in the twentieth century. Yet it is just this project that photography critics reject. The question is: why? Photography is a modern invention: one that, from its inception, inspired a host of conflicts and anxieties in participants, critics, and onlookers. Indeed, when we talk about photography we are talking about modernity; the doubts that photography inspires are the doubts that modernity inspires. Photography is a proxy for modern life and its discontents, which may explain some of the high expectations, bitter disappointments, and pure vitriol it has engendered. From the first, the essential nature of photography was puzzling. It tended to blur categories—which can be exciting, unsettling, or both. Was photography a form of art? of commerce? of journalism? of surveillance? Was it a form of science, or of magic? Was it an expression of creativity, or was its relation to reality mimetic, or even that of a parasite? One thing was clear: photography was the great democratic medium; Ralph Waldo Emerson called it “the true republican style of painting.” And it was viewed, from the first, as a social medium: in 1839, the French Chamber of Deputies declared that Louis Daguerre’s new invention should not be privately patented but, instead, belonged to the French people and to the world. In doing so, France “hoped to turn photography itself into a

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symbol of democratization,” the critic Ariella Azoulay has observed. “Photography had been presented as a gift given to the nation, a blessing bestowed on it, and a right granted to it.” But such newness, and such egalitarian newness, could stir intense anxieties—even in a great modernist like Baudelaire. He hated photography for many reasons, including its general availability and its great popularity. “In these deplorable times,” he warned in 1859, “a new industry has developed,” one supported by the ignorant mob. Like an Old Testament prophet, he railed, Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers. Strange abominations manifested themselves.

Baudelaire feared that photography’s superior ability to capture reality would destroy painting, for “it is simple common-sense that, when industry erupts into the sphere of art, it becomes the latter’s mortal enemy.” He continued: Poetry and progress are two ambitious men that hate each other, with an instinctive hatred. . . . More and more, as each day goes by, art is losing in self-respect, is prostrating itself before external reality, and the painter is becoming more and more inclined to paint, not what he dreams, but what he sees.

Not what he dreams, but what he sees: this is a powerful condemnation of mechanical reproduction, and might give pause to even the most ardent photographer (or critic). And though Baudelaire knew that it would be useless to call for the abolition of photography, he demanded—equally uselessly, of course—that photography confine itself strictly to factual documentation: “Let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer.” Art should be left to the artists, a category that definitely did not include the camera-wielding masses. Flaubert, too, noted the antagonism between the new form of photography and the established art of painting. In his last novel, Bouvard and 14

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Pécuchet, he included a “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas” in which the entry for “Photography” simply read: “Will dethrone painting.” George Bernard Shaw also predicted that photography would defeat art. But Shaw welcomed painting’s demise as a liberation rather than feared it as the revenge of the philistines. Indeed, when it comes to photography, we might think of Shaw as the anti-Baudelaire. Writing in 1901, Shaw derided what he saw as the fussy mannerism of painting, with its “old barbarous smudging and soaking, . . . faking and forging.” He loved the modern, truthful clarity of the photograph, and he heralded its triumph: “The old game is up. . . . The camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation . . . As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.” Shaw reportedly claimed, “I would willingly exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot!”—a statement that, not surprisingly, has endeared him to contemporary photojournalists. Almost as soon as photography was invented, it became clear that every butcher and baker—at least in the industrialized countries like England, Germany, France, and the U.S.—would be able to purchase photographic reproductions; “even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones,” the Scottish writer Jane Welsh Carlyle noted in 1859. They could make pictures, too: “Daguerreotype calls for no manipulation which anyone cannot perform,” the physicist Dominique François Arago explained to the French Chamber of Deputies. “It presumes no knowledge of the art of drawing and demands no special dexterity.” Photo taking, it turned out, was available not just to the butcher and baker but to the governess and schoolteacher. Indeed, photography was one of the few activities in which nineteenth-century women and men could partake on a quasi-equal basis; as Daguerre himself wrote, “The little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” The interest in photography spanned classes, too; photography “has become a household word and a household want,” Lady Elizabeth Eastlake observed in 1857, and “is found in the most sumptuous saloon, and in the dingiest attic . . . in the pocket of the detective, in the cell of the convict.” There are few inventions that have been adopted for so many uses by so many kinds of people so quickly. More startling than the fact that ordinary people could take photo15

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graphs was the discovery that ordinary people could take good photographs; this is one of several things that, from the start, has set photography apart from other disciplines. Most people, after all, can’t paint a wonderful painting or write a wonderful play. But lots of ordinary people—with no training, no experience, no education, no knowledge— have taken wonderful photographs: better, sometimes, than those of photography’s recognized masters. (This is what Sontag meant, I think, when she wrote of the “disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken.”) Yet this, too—and the leveling tendencies it implies—is troubling. For where such egalitarianism dwells, can the razing of all distinctions be far behind? Who can admire an activity, much less an art, that so many uneducated, untrained people can do so well? Photography’s democratic promise has always been photography’s demotic threat. Then, too, photography evokes our ambivalence about technology. Unlike painting, writing, dancing, music making, and storytelling, photography began not thousands of years ago with innocent, primitive man but less than two hundred years ago with compromised, modern man. And unlike other forms of expression, photography depends on a machine and a chemical process. Photography, in short, is an impure, “disconcerting” art (or craft), and we have approached it with that contradictory mixture of expectation and distrust, of glorious hope and tremendous gloom, with which we have approached the machine age itself. Photography is the perfect receptor for both techno-utopianism and technophobia; perhaps inevitably, then, photography criticism has encompassed optimism, disappointment, ambivalence, and contempt. Yet there is something else, something beyond all this, at the heart of photography criticism’s peculiar hostility to its subject. Most twentieth-century photography critics—Sontag, Berger, Barthes, and the postmodernists and poststructuralists—were heavily influenced by the melancholy writers of the Frankfurt School, especially Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, who was Benjamin’s friend and comrade. These men, who were living in the increasingly dark shadow of an increasingly dark Europe, did not write mainly about photography (though Kracauer was a film critic and, later, theorist). But what they did write has been treated by contemporary critics not just with 16

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intellectual respect, which is fitting, but with a kind of fundamentalist reverence, which is not. Though Benjamin was in some ways highly critical of the photographic enterprise, it would be false to say that he disliked photographs. On the contrary: as a dialectician, he believed that the photograph held out liberating, indeed revolutionary, possibilities. In his essay “Little History of Photography,” originally published in 1931, Benjamin argued that photography had created a “new way of seeing,” one that brought masses of ordinary people closer to the world and would enable them “to achieve control over works of art.” Several years later, in his now enormously influential “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he wrote of the ways in which film and photography contributed to the smashing of tradition: “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.”* For Benjamin, photography was part of the descralization of the world, which is to say part of the painful but necessary task of modernity. This new way of seeing could be a kind of truth serum. The photographer Eugène Atget, who “set about removing the makeup from reality,” inspired in Benjamin some of his most appreciative, and most beautiful, writing: He was the first to disinfect the stifling atmosphere generated by conventional portrait photography in the age of decline. He cleanses this atmosphere—indeed, he dispels it altogether . . . And thus such pictures . . . suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.

Equally important, Benjamin understood the subjective power of the photograph—its spooky ability to make us want to enter the world it depicts and even, sometimes, change it. Indeed, it is this potential spur to identification and action that so distinguishes photography from paint-

* The veneration in which this essay is now held was not shared by all of Benjamin’s contemporaries. Brecht regarded it as a kind of mumbo jumbo, writing in his journal: “It is all mysticism mysticism . . . It is rather ghastly.”

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ing. For Benjamin, the photograph wasn’t a fixed, dead thing. On the contrary, it could embrace past, present, and future: the photograph was a document of history and possibility. Looking at a nineteenth-century daguerreotype of a man and his fiancée (she would later commit suicide), Benjamin praised the photograph’s “magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us.” He mused, The beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that longforgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.

But all the negatives were also true. Benjamin was highly suspicious of the passive, aestheticized society that he feared photography was helping to create: mass events—from “monster rallies” to sports competitions to war—were all “intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography,” he wrote. He believed that photography was a form of mystification, for it “can endow any soup can”—did he foresee the age of Warhol?—“with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.” He distrusted photography’s ability to beautify: photography had turned “abject poverty itself . . . into an object of enjoyment” and made “human misery an object of consumption.” Yet he also distrusted photography’s opposite attribute: its facticity. For Benjamin, photography’s claim to depict an obvious, unquestionable reality was a threat to independent, dialectical thought. With the rise of photography, he wrote, “a new reality unfolds, in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions”; instead, “One appeals to the lens.” Benjamin feared that the presumably infallible, objective judgment of the camera would conquer the subjective, flawed judgment of mere men; the simplicity of the photographic world would obscure the complexity of the human world. Even more than Benjamin, Kracauer regarded the photograph as a kind of diminution. Rather than presenting us with the exciting immediacy of a human character, as its advocates promised, Kracauer insisted that “the 18

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photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her. The photograph annihilates the person.” Kracauer could sound almost enraged—almost like Baudelaire, though for different reasons— when he wrote about photography: “In order for history to present itself, the mere surface coherence offered by photography must be destroyed.” And far from revealing previously hidden realities, Kracauer believed that the photograph occludes: “In a photograph, a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow.” In the Weimar years, Kracauer wrote as a journalistic critic rather than a theorist, publishing almost two thousand articles and reviews in the Frankfurter Zeitung, a liberal daily newspaper. Yet he was alarmed by interwar Berlin’s cacophonous, newly uncensored press, in which hundreds of journals, tabloids, newspapers, and magazines—often lavishly illustrated with photographs—flourished. For some of his contemporaries, this press, and especially its new and sometimes startling use of photography, was a glorious herald of modernity (and a source of employment; it was here that a teenaged Robert Capa got his start). “Photography!” the artist-photographer Johannes Molzahn exulted in an article called, “Stop Reading! Look!” published in 1928. “This greatest of the physical-chemicaltechnical wonders of the present—this triumph of tremendous consequence! One of the more important tools for elucidating current problems, for recreating the harmony between the processes of work and life.” But Kracauer was decidedly unimpressed. “The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,” he charged. “Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding. . . . The ‘image-idea’ drives away the idea. The blizzard of photographs betrays an indifference toward what the things mean.” Photographs, Kracauer insisted, fight contemplation; even if the new photojournalism was practiced by thoughtful people, or political radicals, or intellectuals—which it sometimes was—it did not appeal to the intellect, and was therefore highly suspect. Still, Kracauer, like Benjamin, believed that modernity’s cultural disintegration—which these new forms of media represented to him—might radicalize the masses, and he saw photography as a key instrument in this world-historic pro19

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cess. “A consciousness caught up in nature is unable to see its own material base,” he wrote. “It is the task of photography to disclose this previously unexamined foundation of nature. For the first time in history, photography brings to light the entire natural cocoon; for the first time, the inert world presents itself in its independence from human beings.” Kracauer wrote about popular culture—chorus girls, arcades, bestselling books, the circus—with utmost seriousness. But he was no populist; on the contrary, his disdain for the mass audience was palpable. (Especially the female audience, whose “silly little hearts” he disparaged.) The products of mass culture frequently repelled him, or at the very least evoked scorn. Kracauer’s essay “Film 1928,” for instance, is an almost unrelievedly negative overview of that year’s cinematic offerings in which every genre—fictional features, documentaries, newsreels, art films—is attacked. Yet Kracauer’s antipathy grew, I think, more out of dashed expectations than contempt: he harbored the desperate hope that popular culture might help avert the catastrophe-in-the-making that he understood the Weimar Republic to be. Thus the apocalyptic tone of his writings, as when he claimed that photography, by opening up the possibility of a radically altered consciousness, “is the go-for-broke game of history.” Not all of Kracauer’s colleagues on the left shared his antipathy to the mass media. The Communist artists George Grosz and John Heartfield sought to disseminate their work in popular, accessible forms such as pamphlets, posters, book covers, and newspapers: the cheaper and more vernacular, the better. Heartfield’s work was inconceivable without massmarket photographs and mass-market papers, and Grosz was a fan of American pop culture. But it was Kracauer’s mandarin, often censorious tone that would flourish among successor generations of cultural critics who write about photography. Most of all, though, it is Brecht whose shadow hangs over photography criticism and whose sensibility continues to define it. Brecht, I think it’s fair to say, really did loathe photographs, or at best deeply distrust them; in 1931 he wrote, “The tremendous development of photojournalism has contributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about the conditions in this world. On the contrary, photography, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, has become a terrible weapon against the truth.” And in 20

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“Little History,” Benjamin quotes Brecht: “Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG”—the massive German armaments and electric companies, respectively—“tells us next to nothing about these institutions.” These two sentences have been quoted, ad infinitum, with the unquestioning piety usually reserved for gospels; they were clearly influential on the indictment of photography launched by Sontag, Barthes, Berger, and the postmoderns. (Four decades after Brecht—and despite the massive body of photojournalistic work that had been created in the interim— Sekula would make an almost identical claim: documentary photography, he charged, has “contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.”) And on one level, there is no doubt that Brecht was right. Photographs don’t explain the way the world works; they don’t offer reasons or causes; they don’t tell us stories with a coherent, or even discernible, beginning, middle, and end. Photographs can’t burrow within to reveal the inner dynamics of historic events. And though it’s true that photographs document the specific, they sometimes blur— dangerously blur—political and historic distinctions. A photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Barcelona from 1937 looks much like a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Berlin in 1945, which looks much like the bombed-out buildings of Hanoi in 1972, Belgrade in 1999, or Kabul from last week. But only a vulgar reductionist—or an absolute pacifist—would say that these five cities, which is to say these five wars, represent the same circumstances, the same histories, or the same causes. Still, the photographs look the same: if you’ve seen one bombed-out building you’ve seen them all. This kind of deceptive similarity can be found in photographs of people, too. I am looking, as I write this, at two photographs that appeared side by side in the New York Times on January 25, 2009. One shows a Palestinian man, hand clutching his bent head, as he grieves over four Hamas fighters who were killed by the Israeli army in Gaza. The second picture shows a group of Israeli soldiers, hugging each other and crying, as they mourn a comrade killed by Hamas. The iconography of these two images is startling similar, which is no doubt why the Times printed them together; 21

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but the men are sworn enemies who represent antithetical political projects, though one could never know this from the pictures themselves. It is precisely this anti-explanatory, anti-analytic nature of the photograph— what Barthes called its stupidity—that critics, especially those on the left, have seized on with a vengeance and that they cannot forgive. Yet the problem with photographs is not only what they fail to do. I think that a greater problem, for Brecht and his contemporary followers, is what photographs succeed in doing. Photographs excel, more than any other form of either art or journalism, in offering an immediate, viscerally emotional connection to the world. People don’t look at photographs to understand the inner contradictions of global capitalism, or the reasons for the genocide in Rwanda, or the solution to the conflicts in the Middle East. They—we—turn to photographs for other things: for a glimpse of what cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or agony, or love, or disease, or natural wonder, or artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like. And we turn to photographs to discover what our intuitive reactions to such otherness—and to such others—might be. There is no doubt that we approach photographs, first and foremost, through emotions. For Brecht, this was the worst possible approach to anything. His poetry and plays are an assault not just on sentimentality but on sentiment: for Brecht, the two were kin. He regarded most feeling—apart, perhaps, from anger—as dishonest and indulgent; he associated emotion with the chaos and irrationality of capitalism itself. Surely only Brecht could have written—without irony: “I have feelings only when I have a headache—never when I am writing: for then I think.” As George Grosz once remarked, Brecht “clearly would have wanted a sensitive electric computer instead of a heart.” And George Grosz was a friend. There is much that is bracing about Brecht’s emotional astringency; I can only admire a man who, in one of his earliest poems, announces to the women in his life, “Here you have someone on whom you can’t rely.” And it was Brecht who, in five beautifully spare lines, laid out the toll that violent emotions exact, even in causes that are just: And yet we know: Hatred, even of meanness 22

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Contorts the features. Anger, even against injustice Makes the voice hoarse.

What is often forgotten, however, is that Brecht and the Frankfurt critics were particular men who lived in a particular time and place and who observed particular events, not holy oracles who had discovered eternal truths. Their time and place was Weimar Germany, whose daily reality was extraordinarily turbulent and extraordinarily traumatic; as Kracauer observed in 1926, “In the streets of Berlin, one is often struck by the momentary insight that someday all this will suddenly burst apart.” Weimar was embracing, but also reeling from, heretofore unknown forms of mass politics and mass culture; for over a decade it lurched from one calamity to another as Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis battled it out in the press, the Reichstag, and the streets. Weimar was the crisis of modernity, in its most exaggerated, tragic form; Brecht lived within the specter of its unfolding disaster. Brecht’s genius was to understand the role of unexamined emotion in this fatal process, and to create works of art that subverted it. Brecht saw—correctly—that his compatriots were drowning in a bath of toxic emotions: of rage over their defeat in World War I; of resentiment against Jews, intellectuals, and leftists; of self-pity, bathos, fear, and loathing. Brecht saw—correctly—that this poisonous mix of increasingly exaggerated feelings, and the voodoo conspiracy theories to which it lent itself, was the perfect incubator for fascism. Against this tidal wave of irrationality, Brecht sought to entertain, reason, and shock his audience out of its delusions. Brecht and his colleagues lived not just within a unique political moment but at a specific time in the development of photography. Photographs had become an integral part of everyday life and everyday culture, yet they were also alien and confusing; it is no exaggeration to say that Weimar Germans were bedazzled and bewildered by the rush of images. Photographs were used, and sometimes grossly manipulated and altered, by the political parties as forms of propaganda, and were a key part of an increasingly hysterical political scene. Still, there were signs that photog23

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raphy could be more than just another opiate (or thoughtless agitator) of the masses. Heartfield’s caustic, audacious photomontages—one contemporary critic described them as “photography plus dynamite”—undermined the presumed naturalism of the photographic image; they appeared regularly in Communist newspapers and other publications. Equally important, the Arbeiter-Fotografen, or “worker-photographers” movement, was creating a leftwing body of work that documented the harshness of working-class life; its adherents regarded photography as a form of socialist activism. And soon to come were photographs, pioneered by Robert Capa and his colleagues in Spain, that would bring a mass audience close to the horrors of fascist aggression. (Benjamin’s “Mechanical Reproduction” was published in 1936, the year the Spanish civil war broke out.) Brecht charged that photographs were held “in the hands of the bourgeoisie,” but he was wrong. All over the world, the practice of documentary photography would be dominated by liberals and leftists. Like Brecht, we live in dark times: of exploitation, inequality, and violence. And yet there are real differences between our darkness and Brecht’s. We do not live in a society that is the precursor, much less the architect, of Treblinka and Sobibor; the United States of 2010 is not the Germany of 1933, and we lose rather than gain insight by conflating the two. And we are far more adept at navigating mass culture than the Berliners of eighty years ago; photography has grown and changed, as have our understandings and our uses of it. Brecht’s relentless insistence on the necessity of distancing us from emotion was politically and artistically (and, I suspect, psychologically) necessary for him, but it has been adopted in an all too uncritical way by generations of photography critics working in very different times and facing very different challenges. Indeed, today, we are all Brechtians—or, at least, professional ironists; we excel at ridiculing passion and mocking sentiment. We are experts, too—especially in the digital age—at distancing ourselves from photographs: every teenager knows how to manipulate them, tear them apart, dismiss them as lies. What we have lost is the capacity to respond to photographs, especially those of political violence, as citizens who seek to learn something useful from them and connect to others through them. Antipathy to the photograph now takes us only so far; though we can be 24

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inspired by the insights of Brecht and the Frankfurt critics, we cannot simply follow their lead. *

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Brecht and his colleagues feared, and fought against, what they saw as the Pavlovian, conformist responses of the audience; mass culture, Kracauer charged, “creates the homogeneous cosmopolitan audience in which everyone has the same responses, from the bank director to the sales clerk, from the diva to the stenographer.” I suspect that the postmoderns are motivated by an additional, indeed opposite, anxiety: they fear not just the obedient, automatic reactions of the viewer but her disobedient, politically incorrect ones. They worry that our unfiltered gaze—our intuitive reactions—will reveal things about us that may not be good, and that our pesky, potentially uncontrollable emotions will burst out of the armor of ideology they have tried to construct around us. This fear is not unfounded; in fact, it is probably true. Even more than other images, photographs evoke unexpected, unruly responses; as Max Kozloff wrote, photography “displays a wonderfully incongruous tendency to show that life has its own purposes, independent of any scheme.” And sometimes those responses are not so wonderful: we may feel disgusted by the photograph of a starving person, or sexually aroused by the photograph of a child; we may feel bored—or, alternately, too excited—by a photograph of carnage. In looking at photographs, the repressed really does return; it is hard to get our feelings “right” when it comes to photographs, especially photographs that bring us news of the unkind things people do to each other. The discomfiting ability of photographs to conjure unwelcome feelings was brought home to me recently as I looked through a book of pictures, taken by photojournalists from several nations, called Witness Iraq: A War Journal, February–April 2003. One photograph in the book, printed in color as a double-page spread, shows six women in a drab, sand-colored cemetery outside Baghdad. (Cemeteries in Baghdad are busy places; in the background we see two fresh, unfilled graves and the scaffolding for an unfinished structure.) The women are gathered around a wood coffin that is adorned with Arabic writing on two sides. Five of the women face 25

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Figure 1.2 Baghdad, Iraq, 2003: Jerome Delay photographed these women mourning their relative, twenty-two-year-old Mohammed Jaber Hassan; he was killed, along with fifty-two others, in a bomb attack on an outdoor market in Baghdad. The picture raises complex questions about our reactions to loss and victimhood, and to the histories of which they speak. Photo © AP Images/Jerome Delay.

each other, and seem to be in conversation; one rests her open palm on the coffin as her other hand cups her face. The sixth woman, who is in the picture’s foreground, turns away from the others and toward the camera; her head tilts to the left, her arms are folded. All the women wear black abayas; several have covered not only their heads and bodies but parts of their faces too. The picture, dated March 29, 2003, was taken by Jerome Delay, a French war photographer for the Associated Press, and the caption tells us, “Relatives of Mohammed Jaber Hassan weep over his coffin . . . Hassan, 22, died when a bomb fell on a busy market in Baghdad’s Shula district, killing 52 and wounding scores.” This is a portrait of deep sadness that merges into anguish. The woman in the foreground of the photograph, who is clearly part of the group and yet seems alienated from it, has covered her eyes and mouth; we see, 26

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mainly, her flat nose and her plump, deeply creased cheek. But what an eloquent crease! Something in it speaks of bottomless pain. It is as if the accumulated experience of a lifetime—a universe of sorrow—has been compressed into that one carved line. And yet: looking at Delay’s picture, that universe did not encompass me or pull me in; the image created no bond between me and the Iraqi women. I did not feel empathy, or sympathy, or pain or guilt, though I wished I could and thought I should. Instead I felt impatience, even anger: rather than embracing these mourners, I wanted to shake them. The photograph can’t reveal the specific beliefs of these women (the absence of such knowledge is a major shortcoming of photographs), and it is probable that Mohammed Jaber Hassan was simply an innocent civilian who was unjustly killed. But this picture reminded me of countless other photographs of black-draped women as they wail over their sons—and, often, celebrate them as martyrs and spur others on to new, deadly feats. That kind of weeping and that kind of praising have persisted for a very long time and will, almost certainly, continue for a very long time. In fact, I doubt that such sorrows will even begin to abate until the many women in the many cemeteries stop wailing and praising and instead demand entry, as active citizens, into the world; as the human-rights theorist Thomas Keenan has written, “Moaning, lowing, crying—expressing one’s private suffering—makes no claims on others, remains outside of discourse, humanity, the political sphere.” And in the summer of 2009, we saw the making of precisely such claims—and such pictures—when hundreds of thousands of Iranian women took to the streets to demand a political voice and political power: not as Shiites, as mourners, or as mothers but, simply, as citizens. One such picture, taken at an opposition demonstration, shows a young, black-clad woman hoisted above the crowd on the shoulders of a bearded man. Like an angel of victory she spreads both arms wide, and in one hand she triumphantly holds up a small camera. In viewing other photographs of bottomless, impotent suffering, including some from the Holocaust, I have felt the same impatience that Delay’s picture prompted. It is not a pretty reaction; yet why should it be otherwise? Why should our relation to victimhood, suffering, and loss— and to the wrenching histories of which they speak—be less thorny or 27

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less difficult than to anything else? Victims deserve our help and protection, and our compassion if we can muster it; but this does not mean they are admirable or that they have no responsibilities to fulfill. Nor should we assume that suffering ennobles or that it creates empathic identification. On the contrary: as the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya has observed, “Victimhood . . . is the greatest killer of solidarity with others that could possibly be invented.” The picture of Iraq that has struck me most does not refer directly to violence or death, though it was taken in the midst of the war. It is a wideangle color shot, taken by an Iraqi dentist named Ahmed Dhiya, of the spare but sunny yard of a Baghdad school; made in 2004 and published in the small photography magazine Daylight, it is captioned, “Al Hussein with his friends at recess.” In the background we see more than a dozen kids playing and chatting. Many of the girls wear uniforms of dark pinafores and white shirts, and one is munching on a bag of chips; one woman, perhaps a teacher, wears a headscarf, though the girls do not. The picture centers on two young boys in the foreground who stand stock-still in the midst of their classmates’ activity. The boys are neatly dressed in blue jeans and brightly colored T-shirts; they seem to be about ten. Al Hussein, who looks straight at the camera, wears the kind of dark sunglasses that I associate with Los Angeles hipsters. His friend has large, funny ears that jut out a little; his gaze trails slightly, gently sideways. In a pose that is both casual and intimate, he drapes his right arm around Al Hussein’s shoulders. The boys are handsome, but it is their look of utter gravity that arrests me. Al Hussein projects forthrightness, while his friend looks a bit awkward and shy; yet both convey a sense of dignity that must be innate. The unapologetic stance of these boys, and their obvious affection for each other, makes me curious about them. I wish I could know what they think, what they feel, and how they see the world and their futures; I wish I could know if the war has done anything at all for them; I wish I could meet up with them, ten years from today, to find out what kind of men they have become. This is a quiet photograph—not really a war photograph—taken by a nonprofessional; yet more than any other image I have seen from Iraq, it is Ahmed Dhiya’s that has moved, intrigued, and humbled me. 28

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Figure 1.3 Baghdad, Iraq, 2004: These two schoolboys—Al Hussein (on the left) and his buddy—were photographed by Ahmed Dhiya, an Iraqi dentist, as part of a project organized by the American photography magazine Daylight. In the spring of 2004, the magazine distributed disposable cameras to ten Iraqis—amateur photographers—urging them “to show the American public what you want them to see.” Though Dhiya’s picture was taken in the midst of war, it affirms the resilience and the dignity of ordinary life. Photo: Daylight Magazine/Ahmed Dhiya.

It is precisely because the Delay and Dhiya photographs are so open ended—such utter failures at providing answers to the tangled politics of the wars in Iraq—that they are so valuable: by refusing to tell us what to feel, and allowing us to feel things we don’t quite understand, they make us dig, and even think, a little deeper. In approaching photographs such as these, the point is not to formally disassemble them as a way of gaining mastery; nor to reject them as feeble, partial truths; nor, certainly, to deny the sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes unfamiliar reactions they elicit. Instead, we can use the photographs’ ambiguities as a starting point of discovery: by connecting these photographs to the world outside their frames, they begin to live and breathe more fully. So do we. Instead of approaching these images as static objects that we either naively accept or 29

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scornfully reject, we might see them as part of a process—the beginning of a dialogue, the start of an investigation—into which we thoughtfully, consciously enter. With changed circumstances should come changed approaches. Unlike Brecht, we don’t need to view photographs as carriers of a fatal emotional germ; unlike the postmoderns, we don’t need to avoid emotion the way Victorian virgins avoided sex. Nor do we need to regard photographs simply as henchmen of capitalism or tools of oppression: pace Sekula, “the enemy” is to be found in the forces that make people suffer, not in the documentation of their injuries and despair. In approaching photographs with relentless suspicion, critics have made it easy for us to deconstruct images but almost impossible to see them; they have crippled our capacity to grasp what John Berger called “the thereness of the world.” And it is just that—the texture, the fullness of the world outside ourselves—into which we need to delve. Photographs can help us do that. In the Weimar days, antipathy to the photograph was part of a radical, even revolutionary agenda (although not all radicals shared it). Today it is not. Though most contemporary photography critics—or at least those I have discussed—identify themselves with the left, their loathing of photography is not a subversive stance. It aligns them, in fact, with the forces of deplorable backwardness: with, for instance, the frenzied crowds in Kabul and Karachi, Damascus and Tehran, who called for the execution of the Danish cartoonists. Here—in the hatred of images and the lust to police our imaginations—is where premodernism and postmodernism merge. For those demonstrators, too, regard images as an exploitation, an insult, a blasphemy: as an imperialist “act of subjugation” indeed. It is time, and it is possible, for photography critics to come out of the cold. They can join the great critical tradition of Agee and Kael and so many others: not to drown in bathos or sentimentality but to integrate emotion into the experience of looking. They can use emotion as an inspiration to analysis rather than foment an eternal war between the two. They can allow the suffering of the world to enter into them instead of despising it as abjection. They can, in short, permit themselves and their readers to come to the photograph as full human beings: as women and men of intellect 30

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and feeling, immediacy and history. Along with Baudelaire, they can turn pleasure—and its opposites—into knowledge; along with Fuller, they can teach us how to see, and perhaps even love, more wisely. Yet even if criticism could bloom in such ways—if it could, as W. J. T.  Mitchell has written, make pictures “resonate” rather than “smash” them—another set of questions remains. Can photography itself make the world more livable? Can it justify its claims to give a voice to the silent and expose the plight of the powerless? Can it act as a connective tissue between different, even antagonistic cultures; can it illuminate the dark?

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Figure 2.1 Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2001: Thousands of women in Bangladesh and Pakistan have been burned with acid for “crimes” such as refusing arranged marriages or filing for divorce. The Danish photographer Ulrik Jantzen took this picture at Bangladesh Medical College, the only place in the country that treats such women and their children, who are also sometimes wounded in these attacks. Violence against women is only nascently being recognized as both a form of terrorism and a human-rights abuse. Photo © Ulrik Jantzen.

2 PHOTOJOURNALISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS The Calamity of the Kodak

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin famously wrote. When it comes to photography, the opposite is also true. Every image of barbarism—of immiseration, humiliation, terror, extermination—embraces its opposite, though sometimes unknowingly. Every image of suffering says not only, “This is so,” but also, by implication: “This must not be”; not only, “This goes on,” but also, by implication: “This must stop.” Documents of suffering are documents of protest: they show us what happens when we unmake the world. That is the dialectic, and the hope, at the heart of the photograph of suffering. But lodged within that dialectic and that hope is a complicating, devastating paradox. There is no doubt—pace Brecht, Sontag, and Sekula—that photography has, more than any other twentieth-century medium, exposed violence—made violence visible—to millions of people all over the globe. Yet the history of photography also shows just how limited and inadequate such exposure is: seeing does not necessarily translate into believing, caring, or acting. That is the dialectic, and the failure, at the heart of the photograph of suffering. What, then, is photography’s role in revealing injustice, fighting exploitation, and furthering human rights? Photojournalists have been key creators and disseminators of what the historian Samuel Moyn called “the spectacle of blood . . . fastened on extravagant bodily violation and pain.” What, if anything, is there to show for this century-long spectacle of grim 33

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images? And why is there, especially in the present moment, such a backlash against these photographs? A half century before the invention of the camera, the American revolutionists declared the “unalienable” right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the French soon followed by proclaiming the “natural” rights of man and the citizen—rights defined, in the words that still inspire, as “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.” In the nineteenth century, Marx—who, as John Berger observed, “came of age [in] the year of the camera’s invention”—conceived of a worldwide proletariat that transcended national borders. But it is only in the late twentieth century that the consciousness, if not the reality, of something called “universal human rights” takes hold. It is in our era that a new claim is made, a claim that would have sounded strange if not absurd for most of human history. The claim is this: every person—even the pauper, the nonwhite, the stranger, the female, the child, the stateless refugee—is entitled to dignity, safety, and freedom. Yet when the idea of human rights reemerged in the second half of the twentieth century, it was precisely because the vision articulated two hundred years before had not been made real. We know of human rights because we live in a world in which they do not exist for most of the people on earth; as the historian Lynn Hunt wrote, “We are most certain that a human right is at issue when we feel horrified by its violation.” Especially since the Holocaust, suffering rather than idealism has been the incubator of human rights: their epiphany is negative. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the fledgling United Nations in 1948, reflects this failure and this negativity: it was born not in the early, optimistic years of the twentieth century, and certainly not as a direct, unobstructed descendent of the French and American Revolutions, but in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jewish people and scores of millions of others. It was born, that is, amidst the rubble of a stunned world that had descended into a violence so inexplicably depraved that it was forced to consider what, if anything, makes human beings human. The terrible irony is that, as the millions of corpses were being counted and the displaced-persons camps swelled, the now34

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disgraced idea of the human was the only authority to which one could appeal: nature, god, and history had become irrelevant at best. Thus, Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951, “Man of the twentieth century has become just as emancipated from nature as eighteenth-century man was from history. History and nature have become equally alien to us . . . Humanity . . . has today become an inescapable fact.” In 1951, as today, this inescapable fact was not a hopeful one: modern man, Arendt wrote, “has shown us potentialities that were neither recognized nor even suspected by Western philosophy and religion.” The modern human-rights movement, then, grew not out of pride at what we accomplished in the twentieth century but out of shame, indeed terror, at what we destroyed. The Holocaust taught us things about ourselves we did not want to know yet could not afford to ignore. “Human rights is not so much the declaration of the superiority of European civilization as a warning by Europeans that the rest of the world should not seek to reproduce its mistakes,” rights theorist Michael Ignatieff has written. “The Universal Declaration set out to reestablish the idea of human rights at the precise historical moment in which they had been shown to have had no foundation whatever in natural human attributes.” In this light, the idea of human rights represents our attempt to conquer our natures, or at least our histories, in the hope of creating a more bearable future; in this light, the human-rights movement seeks to create something new and artificial rather than return to something old and authentic. The establishment of human rights is a project—a life-and-death project—to build a kind of “species solidarity” that is deeper and stronger than culture, nation, religion, race, class, gender, or politics. Does such a project make any sense? Is it grounded in anything stronger than wishful thinking? The philosopher Richard Rorty pointed out that, for most people throughout most of history, the idea of universal brotherhood has been thought of as ludicrous (if it was thought of at all). “Most people are simply unable to understand why membership in a biological species is supposed to suffice for membership in a moral community,” Rorty wrote. “This is not because they are insufficiently rational. It is, typically, because they live in a world in which it would be just too risky—indeed, would often be insanely dangerous—to let one’s sense of 35

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moral community stretch beyond one’s family, clan, or tribe.” Theodor Adorno believed that an obliviousness to the distress of strangers—he called it “coldness”—was a key part of our human DNA, and a deadly one: “The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred.” Rorty articulated something equally important but less frequently acknowledged: the baffled revulsion with which members of industrialized, post-Enlightenment societies regard those who fail to recognize human rights is matched by their equally baffled revulsion for us: It is of no use whatever to say, with Kant: Notice that what you have in common, your humanity, is more important than these trivial differences. For the people we are trying to convince will rejoin that they notice nothing of the sort. Such people are morally offended by the suggestion that they should treat someone who is not kin as if he were a brother, or a nigger as if he were white, or a queer as if he were normal, or an infidel as if she were a believer. They are offended by the suggestion that they treat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human.

In this view, the obstruction to solidarity, or at least to tolerance and care, is not a dearth of reason but of concerned identification; and if this is so, rational arguments will not do much to further human rights. It was Arendt who saw the fatal paradoxes at the heart of the concept of human rights more acutely than anyone before or since. She argued that the Holocaust, and the years leading up to it, had shown the irredeemable failure of human-rights doctrines. The millions of illegal, unwanted refugees and exiles who roamed through Europe between the world wars were not recognized as fellow humans—not recognized as deserving of life—by the “civilized” countries to which they fled. “The incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocent people was like a practical demonstration of the totalitarian movements’ cynical claims that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed,” she wrote. “The very phrase ‘human rights’ became for all concerned—victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike—the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.” 36

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Indeed, the flood of unwanted exiles revealed the ugly secret at the heart of human-rights doctrines: the only person who makes an appeal— who must make an appeal—to something as vague and weak as human rights is the person who has been stripped of everything and is, therefore, no longer recognizably human. Home, land, family, profession, nation: everything that distinguishes the human from the animal had been stolen from the refugees; what, then, was left? These homeless, stateless people embodied the degraded reality of the abandoned pariah rather than the noble ideal of the rights-bearing person whom the French revolutionists had envisioned. “Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth,” Arendt wrote. And where could one find this scum? In the internment camp, the refugee camp, the ghetto, and, finally, the concentration camp: these were the only places that welcomed the unwanted. (I have always thought of Auschwitz as a kind of demented internationale.) Again, the negative epiphany: “It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.” For Arendt, it is concrete politics embedded in the nation-state, not abstract morality or humanitarian sentiment, that make rights real and protect the holders of them; rights are a political accomplishment rather than a natural attribute. The philosophies that undergird ideas about human rights are, then, built around absence. And photographs, I would argue, are the perfect medium to mirror the lacunae at the heart of human-rights ideals. It is awfully hard to photograph a human right: what in the world would it look like? In fact, rights don’t look like anything at all. What, then, does a person with human rights look like? Well, like a person: that’s it. But what photographers can do, and do peculiarly well, is to show how those without such rights look, and what the absence of such rights does to a person. And they can, and have, shown us what people struggling for rights look like, in victory and defeat. Starting in the late nineteenth century, photojournalists began to document these absences, these defeats, and these victories. Some documen37

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tary photographers, like Jacob Riis, depicted a poverty so debased and all-encompassing that it reduced its victims to an animal-like existence. Others have shown us people fighting for political power: Robert Capa and David Seymour (Chim) in the Paris of the Popular Front, mixing with the socialists and the strikers; Josef Koudelka in Prague, witnessing the socialist spring that turned into the bitterest of Stalinist winters; Danny Lyon in the American South, documenting the stoic dignity of the early civil rights activists; Peter Magubane in apartheid South Africa, recording the revolt of the desperate yet jubilant students of Soweto. They have shown us what whole countries look like in war: Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim in Spain as it fought for the Republic; Marc Garanger in Algeria as it resisted the French; Philip Jones Griffiths in Vietnam as it battled the Americans. They have shown us the shattering grief of war, as in Don McCullin’s searing visual dispatches from Cyprus, Congo, Northern Ireland, and Lebanon. They have shown us nations as they cease to exist: James Nachtwey in Chechnya, Ron Haviv in Bosnia. They have shown us countries in the midst of multiple wars: Ashley Gilbertson, João Silva, and Tyler Hicks in Iraq, photographing everything from burly young American soldiers interrogating terrified civilians to the anguish wrought by the suicide bombers. They have shown us what political madness looks like, as in Li Zhensheng’s newspaper photographs of China’s Cultural Revolution and Abbas’s documentation of the Iranian revolution as it moved from revolt to tyranny. They have shown us mass death, as in Gilles Peress’s disjunctive pictures from Rwanda; and the struggle to resist it, as in Sebastião Salgado’s sorrow-drenched images from the manmade famines of the Sahel. And increasingly, they show us the no-less-political violence that results from the most intimate relationships. Look, for instance, at Ulrik Jantzen’s photographs of Bangladeshi women—screaming, bleeding, blackened, scarred—who have been burnt with acid by their angry “suitors” as punishment for refusing marriage or by their husbands for requesting a divorce; or at the charred girls and women of Afghanistan, for whom suicide-by-fire is the only escape from forced marriages. Photojournalists have shown us a world unfit for habitation. They have enlarged our conception of what human beings do to each other, though often in ways that grieve, surprise, frighten, and disgust us. In doing so, 38

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photographers have forced us to envision what a better world, or at least a less-bad world, would be; but they also suggest how hard it is to create one. Why are photographs so good at making us see cruelty? Partly, I think, because photographs bring home to us the reality of physical suffering with a literalness and an irrefutability that neither literature nor painting can claim. “Hunger looks like the man that hunger is killing,” wrote the Uruguayan essayist Eduardo Galeano as he looked at a photograph by Sebastião Salgado. The very thing that critics have assailed photographs for not doing—explaining causation, process, relationships—is connected to the very thing they do so well: present us, to ourselves and each other, as bodily creatures. Photographs reveal how the human body is “the original site of reality,” in Elaine Scarry’s words. “What is remembered in the body is well remembered.” The body is our primary truth, our inescapable fate. Which is precisely what Jean Améry learned, to his never-ending amazement, when he faced his Gestapo torturers: all those attributes that a man might think of as “his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity, are destroyed when there is that cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints.” Torture—and then Auschwitz—taught Améry, a proud intellectual, just how real his body was (and how equally useless his ideas turned out to be, or so he claimed). Photographs show how easily we are reduced to the merely physical, which is to say how easily the body can be maimed, starved, splintered, beaten, burnt, torn, and crushed. Photographs present us, in short, with physical cruelty and our vulnerability to it. The vulnerability is something that every human being shares; the cruelty is something that shatters our very sense of what it means to be human. “The violation of the human body . . . has a visceral, irrational, and irrevocable quality about it,” Kanan Makiya wrote. “It is the bedrock under all the layers of horrible things that human beings do to one another.” The photograph of suffering presents us, too, with the specific, individual experience of suffering. Victims of human-rights abuses are members of larger groups who are exploited, oppressed, even exterminated. But each experiences her pain and her death, as do we all, through the prism of her unique self. The indictment of the photograph as vague and abstract, made by writers like Kracauer and Sontag, can go only so far. The opposite 39

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is more often true: the photograph singles out the individual from the mass and confronts us with the particularity, and the terrible loneliness, of suffering. (This insistence on the individual’s worth is itself an affirmation of human rights.) And though it is true that we often do not know the names or life stories of those we see in a photograph, the same can be said of a portrait by Rembrandt or by Lucian Freud. The best photographic portraits, like the best painted portraits, present us not with biographical information but with a soul. As we saw in chapter 1, documentary photography’s ability to confront us with powerful images of suffering—images that we do not, cannot, always understand or master—has been the subject of sometimes vitriolic attacks from a range of critics. Particularly in the post–World War II period, photographs depicting violence and poverty, especially in the so-called third world, have been denounced as patronizing, imperialist, and racist. “The image of the subaltern conjures up an almost neocolonial ideology of failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and inevitability,” anthropologists Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman charged, writing of the photograph of a starving Sudanese child; many others have echoed such claims. In particular, the charge of pornography is freely bandied about when it comes to photographs of suffering. This can be traced, in part, to a 1978 essay on documentary photography in which Allan Sekula derided what he called “the pornography of the ‘direct’ representation of misery.” Fredric Jameson’s blanket dictum against looking reiterated this antipathy: “The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.” Sontag, in her last book, restated this truism: “All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic.” Countless others critics and would-be critics have adopted this terminology; indeed, “pornographic photography” has become a stock phrase with numerous iterations. Thus, war photography is casually dismissed as “war porn,” while in the humanitarian-aid world, photographs of the poor and vulnerable are decried as “development pornography.” Jorgen Lissner, a Danish humanitarian-aid worker, summed up this outlook when he charged that the photograph of an African famine victim is a kind of “social pornography” because “it exposes something 40

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in human life that is as delicate and deeply personal as sexuality, that is, suffering.” The use of this term is not totally inapt, but it belies an essential confusion. Pornography strikes many viewers as a betrayal, not an expression, of human sexuality: pornography reveals something that strangers should not see and whose worth is diminished when they do. But photographs of suffering people—of the body in pain—are something quite different: they are the revelation of something that ought not exist. One can make the argument that sex should remain private; when it comes to torture, exploitation, and cruelty, however, privacy is an integral part of the problem. Other confusions in the pornography argument abound. Not all pornography is “bad”—that is, exploitative, degrading, or violent—which is why its use as an epithet makes little sense. Nor is it obvious that a child starving to death is deeply personal and private—or, rather, only deeply personal and private—in the sense that making love usually is; on the contrary, famine is a shared, social condition, as are many other kinds of misery and grief. (War, we might say, is the collectivization of anguish.) What is wrong with revealing such suffering; what is right with hiding it? Why is the teller, rather than the tale, considered obscene—and in any case, aren’t some of the world’s obscenities worthy of our attention? Indeed, the term “pornographic” is now so widely and variously—dare I say promiscuously?—summoned in discussions of documentary photography that it is not at all clear what it is meant to address or how it can lead to deeper understandings. It is used to describe a suspiciously wide variety of contradictory responses: too little concern for suffering and a narcissistic identification with it; inappropriate numbing and inappropriate excitement; lazy carelessness about the pain of others and a creepy preoccupation with it. “Pornography seems to be an infinitely plastic term whose concentration of rhetorical force and explanatory power is such that its meaning is not really held to account,” the historian Carolyn J. Dean has written. “The widespread use of the term ‘pornography’ seems elegantly to account for the exhaustion of empathy, and yet turns out not to explain anything at all. . . . It ‘explains’ without explaining the shattering of the body’s dignity.” Rather than illuminate an actual phenomenon, the term “pornography,” like the term “orientalism,” is used as a weapon 41

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whose main job is to shame the accused and to silence free discussion. Indeed, the obsessive way in which pornography is invoked, and the whiff of prurience that surrounds it, remind me of the Nazi condemnation of modern art as “degenerate.” *

*

*

Ironically, those photographers who have worked hardest and most consciously to avoid objectifying their subjects are fiercely derided as pornographers and exploiters: James Nachtwey, whose work is discussed in chapter 8, is a prime target of such attacks. So is Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian photographer who often lives for long periods with the subjects of his photographs. A Marxist economist before he became a photojournalist, Salgado has spent decades documenting the third world’s peasants, manual workers, refugees, famine victims, and displaced people: the “losers in globalization’s great game,” as David Rieff put it. Some of Salgado’s subjects are famished or live in refugee camps; some work on stony farms and jungle plantations, on ships and railroads, in factories, on oil rigs, in diamond and coal mines. They carry machetes in their hands, heavy sacks on their heads, wizened babies in their arms. Their bodies are often bent, twisted, or strained; “backbreaking” does not seem a metaphor here. Most of them are unimaginably poor. Yet these people, Salgado’s pictures insist, are as central to the epics of our time as are the power brokers in Washington or the masters of Wall Street. Salgado imbues his subjects with an unflagging respect that borders on reverence: these people may be losers, but he praises them like famous men. His velvety black-and-white images are painstakingly composed, dramatically theatrical, painterly in their use of light, gigantic, and eerily beautiful. But the beauty is often fearsome: his subjects are drenched in sweat, dirt, or mud; dressed in rags; starving, homeless, exhausted; overwhelmed by nature in her angriest modes. Some leftwing writers, such as Galeano and the Portuguese Communist José Saramago, admire Salgado and like to write about him. Such admirers often live abroad. In this country his press is less favorable, and his photographs have been attacked as “sentimental voyeurism,” “offensive,” “embarrassing,” “kitschy,” “self-aggrandizing,” “meretricious,” and 42

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even “insulting.” In the pages of the New Yorker, critic Ingrid Sischy, who would go on to edit a celebrity magazine, dripped with scorn: “Salgado is far too busy with the compositional aspects of his pictures—with finding the ‘grace’ and ‘beauty’ in the twisted forms of his anguished subjects. . . . This is photography that runs on a kind of emotional blackmail fuelled by a dramatics of art direction.” It is true that Salgado’s photographs can veer into a kind of nostalgic romanticism that recalls the era of socialist-realism. His monumental scale can seem grandiose, and the chiaroscuro lighting he likes can appear arty. His self-consciously religious references can seem, well, self-conscious. But it is also true that Salgado has documented the workers of the world with more perception, care, and sheer interest than any photographer I can think of: he has visualized the labor theory of value. And personalized it too: the unapologetic, forthright people in his portraits command our attention as equals, not “subalterns.” Yet disparaging Salgado is now the sine qua non of intellectual sophistication—especially, surprisingly, from the (American) left. Sontag accused Salgado’s portraits of being “complicit . . . in the cult of celebrity,” a charge that I find baffling at best. The critic Luc Sante went further, writing that Salgado’s pictures brim with a “vacuous universality . . . of misery” that leads to political passivity, and added: “For a photographer to perpetrate that kind of murderous indolence is unforgivable.” What remains unexplained is how Salgado’s murderous indolence has led him to work in some of the world’s most ravaged places with Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International, and to march with the militant, landless peasants of Brazil, whose cause he has long championed. And it cannot explain how or why Salgado’s subjects trust him, as they must for him to take such intimate pictures. Unlike Gilles Peress, Salgado is not a philosophic or aesthetic radical: he does not make us question how we see or how we know, and his photographs can be criticized on this and other grounds. But the exaggerated vitriol his pictures (and he) inspire demonstrates something else: a fierce animus against the very possibility that beauty—which is to say dignity, tenderness, and grace—can thrive amongst the poor. This fear of finding beauty in all the wrong places is closely aligned with the careless charge of pornography. Both are forms of sanctimony; both are deeply puritanical. 43

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Both stem from a need to impose a diet of “shoulds” and “should nots” on our reactions to images, and from a fear of the unpredictable, complicating things we might find if we look too freely and too openly at the world. This fear, and this puritanism, have resulted in the championing of an insultingly slummy aesthetic: craft, care, structure, and visual power— everything Salgado embodies—are now morally suspect in photojournalism, while sloppiness denotes authenticity and a good heart. The writer Jim Lewis echoed Sischy when he proclaimed in Slate: “I really don’t think that a picture of an atrocity should be a good picture, a beautiful picture, a well-composed picture . . . It should be casually composed, hastily framed, only competently printed.” It is as if we, the relatively safe and relatively well-off, can atone for our good fortune only by delving into the visual equivalent of sackcloth and ashes: if a picture seems sloppy, it’s okay to look. But this is the aesthetic not of commitment but of guilt, tinged with a peculiar narcissism. It confuses moral weight with aesthetic clumsiness, and it is more concerned with the clear conscience of the viewer than with the plight of the injured subject. This, then, is the catch-22 into which photojournalists are thrust today. Some are criticized for taking too-beautiful pictures, while others are chided for images that are too ugly to bear; some are criticized for a gruesome realism, while others are accused of being overly romantic in their approach. Viewers, too, are at fault: critics have told audiences that our reactions are too harsh or too delicate; needlessly complex, or laughably simple; gushing with sentiment, or devoid of feeling. We are voyeurs, or we are uncaring, or perhaps we are uncaring voyeurs. The problem is not that some of these charges are unfair; on the contrary, all of them are sometimes true. The problem is that making, and looking at, pictures that portray suffering will always be a highly imperfect and highly impure activity. Adorno captured this paradox—this no-exit— in which all art, and all representation, finds itself when it attempts to show the unshowable or speak the unspeakable. Writing of Schoenberg’s 1946 cantata A Survivor from Warsaw, he observed: The victims are turned into works of art, tossed out to be gobbled up by the world that did them in. The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of 44

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those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it. . . . The unthinkable . . . becomes transfigured, something of its horror removed. By this alone an injustice is done the victims, yet no art that avoided the victims could stand up to the demands of justice. Even the sound of desperation pays tribute to a heinous affirmation.

Rather than confront this difficulty, which may in fact be impossible to resolve, contemporary critics dismiss problematic images as pornographic and launch ad hominem attacks against photojournalists. These critics seek something that does not exist: an uncorrupted, unblemished photographic gaze that will result in images flawlessly poised between hope and despair, resistance and defeat, intimacy and distance. They demand photographs that embody an absolute reciprocity between photographer and subject, though absolute reciprocity is a hard thing to find even in the best of circumstances. They want the worst things on earth—the most agonizing, unjust things on earth—to be represented in ways that are not incomplete, imperfect, or discomfiting. Is there an unproblematic way to show the degradation of a person? Is there an untroubling way to portray the death of a nation? Is there an inoffensive way to document unforgivable violence? Is there a right way to look at any of this? Ultimately, pious denouncements of the “pornographic” photograph reveal something that is, I think, fairly simple: a desire to not look at the world’s cruelest moments and to remain, therefore, unsullied. It is a contemporary truism, indeed a contemporary cliché, that photographs of suffering desensitize us: the plethora of awful images has, apparently, taken the sting out of horror. Sontag’s warning in On Photography that photographs deaden conscience has been echoed many times; indeed, to dispute this idea is akin to repudiating evolution or joining the flat-earth society. Barbie Zelizer, in her classic study of Holocaust photographs, echoed Sontag: “Photography may function most directly to achieve what it ought to have stifled—atrocity’s normalization. . . . The act of making people see is beginning to take the place of making people do.” Countless other critics have made this point, often blaming photojournalism for the creation of so-called compassion fatigue. Even some 45

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photographers agree; Alfredo Jaar, an admirably self-reflective conceptual artist who frequently uses photographs, has decried the “bombardment of images . . . that has completely anesthetized us.” Yet this claim remains entirely unproven—and lacks basic logic. It implies that a golden age existed in which people throughout the world responded with empathy, generosity, and saving action when confronted with the suffering of others. But when, I wonder, did this utopia exist? The early twentieth century? The nineteenth century, the eighteenth, or perhaps the twelfth or ninth? Where and when can we find it—and the good Samaritans who presumably used to populate our globe? In fact, the desensitization argument is exactly wrong. For most of history most people have known little, and cared less, about the suffering of those who are unknown or alien. “The feeling of humanity evaporates and grows feeble in embracing all mankind,” Rousseau observed. “It is proper that our humanity should confine itself to our fellow citizens.” In Rousseau’s time, it was the family, clan, tribe, ethnic group, religious community, or nation that mattered most. In our time, that is still true. The only difference is that today, in a few parts of the world, those outside one’s immediate circle of concern sometimes matter too; for a very small minority, the conviction that we are morally and practically connected to the suffering of others is the pillar of political and moral identity. And it is the camera—the still camera, the film camera, the video camera, and now the digital camera—that has done so much to globalize our consciences; it is the camera that brought us the twentieth century’s bad news. Today it is, quite simply, impossible to say, “I did not know”: photographs have robbed us of the alibi of ignorance. We know of suffering in far-flung parts of the world in ways that our forebears never could, and the images we see—in some places, under some conditions—demand not just our interest but our response. Far from dulling our senses, photography has been a key component in the creation of what rights theorist Mary Kaldor has called “our growing consciousness of what it means to be human.” Try to imagine, if only for a moment, what your intellectual, political, and ethical world would be like if you had never seen a photograph. Sentiment—that bugaboo, again, of Brecht and Sontag—has been

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central in making this visual encounter with strangers matter. For it is the opportunity, and the ability, to be moved by the plight of others—to understand that they hurt too, and to feel responsible to that understanding— that has made a great difference in the creation of a human-rights consciousness. When Rorty poses the question, “Why should I care about . . . a person whose habits I find disgusting?” he suggests that the best answer might be: “Because her mother would grieve for her.” The camera has been a key tool—perhaps the key tool—in enabling such empathic leaps. Not that photographs stop atrocities, much less prevent them: our innocence on that front ended long ago. The belief in the saving power of exposure qua exposure can no longer be sustained. Journalist Martha’s Gellhorn’s disillusion—journalism’s “guiding light,” she would learn in the 1930s, was “no stronger than a glow-worm”—is widely shared by contemporary journalists, documentary photographers, humanitarian-aid workers, and human-rights activists. Despite more-than-adequate information, for instance, no country was willing to stop the carnage in Rwanda, nor will they do so in Darfur. And yet photography has been central to fostering the idea, if not yet the reality, that barbarous assaults are no longer the private property of the states that commit them. It is impossible to imagine transnational groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or Doctors Without Borders in the pre-photographic age. The internationalism of our time is, admittedly, peculiar. Its focus is not the exploited worker organizing a revolution or the colonial subject fighting for self-determination but, rather, the victim of torture, imprisonment, starvation, or extermination in need of outside help. This subject, for good or ill, could come into being—did come into being—only in tandem with the mass dissemination of photographic images. “What happens in the jails of Kigali, Kabul, Beijing, and Johannesburg has become the business of television viewers across the world,” Michael Ignatieff has observed. The image’s morality, he adds, “is the morality of the war correspondent, . . . who learns in the end to pay attention only to the victims.” This may not be the morality, or the internationalism, that socialists, communists, and anarchists dreamed of for almost two hundred years: it places far more emphasis on the actions of bystanders than on those of the op-

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pressed, and it dangerously conflates political crises with humanitarian ones. But it is the morality, and the internationalism, that we have. The intimate connection between an international human-rights consciousness and the photograph is especially evident when we look at one of the earliest humanitarian movements: the Anglo-American campaign, founded in the late nineteenth century, to stop King Leopold’s crimes in his personal colony, the Congo. Those crimes included slave labor, whippings, tortures, rapes, amputations, and executions; historians have estimated that up to ten million Congolese died from overwork, starvation, exposure, disease, or outright murder in the years 1880–1920. No surprise, then, that it was in the Congo reform movement that the phrase “crimes against humanity” was used for what may have been the first time. As rights theorist Sharon Sliwinski and historian Adam Hochschild have written, presenting what we now call “atrocity photographs” was a key part of the movement’s strategy. Some of the images appeared in Western newspapers; but often, and most dramatically, they were projected as slides in magic-lantern shows at jam-packed lectures and protest meetings in America, England, and throughout Europe. (In the same period, Jacob Riis was using lantern shows to expose tenement poverty in New York City.) The photographs were shocking, indeed literally outrageous, to Victorian audiences and—pace Sontag and Jaar—they are still devastating; the desecrated bodies we have seen from Warsaw and Lodz, Cambodia and Bosnia, Sudan and Sierra Leone have not lessened their power. On the contrary: we look at the Congo pictures in full knowledge of the atrocities that would follow, which makes them more rather than less terrible to behold. Unlike audiences of a century ago, we know that the Congo was an early part of an ongoing story rather than its final chapter. Pictures of these atrocities do not look anachronistic: in fact, they seem sadly modern. One Congo photograph shows two boys of indeterminate age. Their skin is coal-black, their hair cropped short. One youth—who, the contemporaneous caption tells us, is named Mola—sits on a curved wooden chair; his hairless chest is bare, while a white cloth drapes over his abdo-

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men and genitals; the other boy, named Yoka, stands next to him in a white tunic and long white skirt. Each is barefoot. And each, we see clearly, has had his right hand chopped or beaten off just below his wrist (Mola’s left hand is mutilated too); the black stumps, which rest delicately against the ice-white clothes, assault us. Mola and Yoka stare directly at the camera: Mola’s brow is slightly furrowed, as if in suppressed fury; Yoka looks blank and stunned. Another photograph shows a man named Nsala sitting on the ground. His arm wraps around his knee; he is barefoot, almost naked; he stares at something before him, something clumpy and indistinct. The caption tells us what: Nsala is looking, we learn, at the hand and foot of his five-yearold daughter, who had been mutilated, murdered, and eaten by African representatives of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company. Nsala’s wife, too, had been killed and eaten in the attack on their village, which was punished for failing to meet its rubber quota. The Congo reform movement’s ability to force its audiences to visualize Leopold’s cruelty—to see a man staring at the discarded flesh of what used to be his daughter—was a new and powerful tool. No doubt those audiences were in some ways condescending and smug, even racist and imperialist. Their fellow-feeling, like ours, was far from perfect. But they were also genuinely saddened, angered, and, most of all, moved to action: the photographs they saw inspired pity and sentimentality, but not only that. In fact, these photographs created a connective tissue of concern that transcended geography, culture, and race. Mark Twain, in his darkly hiliarious 1905 satire King Leopold’s Soliloquy, recognized as much. Twain’s mad king of the Congo rails against the “sore calamity” of “the kodak,” which has challenged his power in unprecedented ways. Previously, Leopold recalls fondly, tales of atrocities could be refuted as “slanders” spread by “busy-body American missionaries and exasperated foreigners. . . . Yes, all things went harmoniously and pleasantly in those good days.” But the camera, alas, changed all that: “Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible kodak—and all harmony went to hell!” The camera, Leopold sadly realizes, is “the only witness . . . I couldn’t bribe. . . . Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand

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presses are saying the good word for me all the time . . . Then that trivial little kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!” Still, the camera isn’t powerful in itself and it cannot substitute for human will—which is why the king ends on an upbeat note. He knows, he says, that “we do not wish to look” and that most people will “shudder and turn away” from the evidence of his crimes. Leopold has faith in the durability of moral apathy, and who can say he is foolish to do so? “That is my protection,” the king crows. “I know the human race.” The ability of photographs to conjure deep emotion is one of their great strengths. But this power—precisely because it is divorced from narrative, political context, and analysis—is equally a danger. Ironically, the more searing an image—the more easily and quickly it provokes our innate, unreflective sense that “This is wrong!”—the more misleading it can be. Consider, for instance, Don McCullin’s infamous photographs of grotesquely emaciated children taken during the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967– 70. The Biafran children, often shown naked and holding pathetic tin pots, are awful to behold: distorted, distended, deformed, with legs like sticks, bellies like balloons, and eyes like deep, dead pools. Such photographs caused worldwide revulsion and anger, and the war became an international cause célèbre. It was the Biafran war that led to a rethinking of humanitarian aid and inspired the founding of Doctors Without Borders in 1971. But though photographs can do much to expose a crisis, they can do little to explain it—and sometimes they lead viewers astray. Rony Brauman, a founder of Doctors Without Borders and its president from 1982 to 1994, has charged that the Biafran movement’s leader, Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, was a major contributor to the suffering of his people. Ojukwu, Brauman explains, “had declared himself prepared to see all the Biafrans perish” rather than relinquish his political aims, and had refused the delivery of desperately needed aid donations. The unlucky Biafrans had a leader, in other words, who had made a conscious decision to allow them to die; but it was only the dying, not the reasons behind it, that McCullin’s pictures could show. Think, too, of another widely photographed event: the one million Hutus who poured into Goma, Zaire, after 50

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the Rwandan genocide. It is true that they were living in filthy conditions and suffering from cholera. But it is also true that many were mass rapists and murderers: something the photographs of them could not reveal, and that those who sent money to the humanitarian-aid organizations either didn’t, or didn’t want to, know. This does not mean that the images of Biafran children starving or of diseased Rwandan refugees are lies. On the contrary: the suffering such photographs depict cannot, and should not, be denied. But it does mean that we, the viewers, must look outside the frame to understand the complex realities out of which these photographs grew. Like human rights themselves, this expansive kind of vision is not particularly natural but, rather, is something we must consciously create. *

*

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There is a kind of photograph that the early, optimistic practitioners of photojournalism could not have imagined, though perhaps King Leopold could: photographs that celebrate cruelty rather than condemn it. Such pictures have an unfortunately long history. In the United States, thousands of photographs of lynchings were taken, mainly though not solely in the years 1870–1940. They show black men—bludgeoned, swollen, burnt, castrated—as they sway, necks broken, on twisted ropes hung from trees. Even worse, these photographs often show crowds of whites— ordinary people with their children, sometimes dressed in their Sunday best—as they smile, laugh, and cheer at the mutilated corpses. The lynching photographs belong to a large and ignoble genre of pictures taken by perpetrators throughout the world to document and exult in their power. The Nazis and their supporters took millions of photographs; in the following chapter I explore some of these images and the moral implications of looking at them. And though the Nazis were unusually diligent self-recorders of sadism, they were hardly unique. Saddam Hussein’s Baathists documented some of their tortures, rapes, and executions in photographs and films. Members of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front photographed themselves, rather astonishingly, in the act of committing atrocities and murders. The Liberian warlord Prince Johnson filmed his underlings as they tortured his rival, President Samuel Doe, 51

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who would soon bleed to death from his wounds; the resulting two-hour video, which includes the amputation of Doe’s ears as he sat, naked, in a pool of blood, became “the hottest ticket in town,” according to the journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, who reported from Monrovia. The Scorpions, a notorious Serb paramilitary group, filmed themselves as they executed unarmed Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica; the resulting tape was bought by a journalist in an ordinary video store in Sid. All these images undermine the basic tenet of photojournalism: the belief that perpetrators seek to hide the crimes they commit and that exposing those crimes will lead to amelioration or justice. Officials in Stalin’s prisons, and Pol Pot’s too, photographed some of their prisoners before they were executed; in both instances, meticulous records were kept. These photographs are among the most important, and worst, documents of the twentieth century. And while these prison pictures are not, obviously, examples of typical photojournalism, they reveal the great strengths and weaknesses of photographs of suffering. They were taken by perpetrators, yet they speak for the victims and are on the side of the victims. They sabotage their own intent; they are scalding selfaccusations; they twist in upon themselves. But they also epitomize, in especially cruel ways, the inability of photographs to save the people they depict. One devastating set of such images can be found in David King’s 2003 book Ordinary Citizens, a collection of portraits of political prisoners taken by Stalin’s secret police. The setting is Moscow’s Lubyanka prison; most of the photographs, which are grainy and tightly framed, date from the 1930s. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief text, including the prisoner’s place and date of birth, address, occupation, and political affiliation; dates of arrest, trial, and death are also recorded. All of the prisoners had been convicted in sham trials; all would be shot, often on the same day of their trials and sometimes in groups. Their crimes included sabotage, spying, terrorism, “betrayal of the Motherland,” ties to the Gestapo or to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, “political banditry,” praising fascism, and, of course, Trotskyite deviations. Each prisoner was forced to conjure and sign a confession—thus, in a final admission of defeat, approving her own death; after execution, the prisoners’ bodies were thrown into unmarked 52

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mass graves. The photographs, along with organized, neatly typed interrogations and confessions (King notes that efficiency was greatly helped by the arrival of the German comrades fleeing Hitler) were hidden until Gorbachev’s glasnost brought them to light. Those who think of Stalin’s Russia as a dull monochrome will be surprised by King’s book. The prisoners include Hungarians, Poles, Indians, Japanese, Koreans, Finns, Yugoslavs, Lithuanians, Turks, and one Vasily Vasilievich McKibbin; many, though not all, were members of their native Communist parties. There are elderly revolutionaries—old friends of Bukharin or Lenin—who had joined the party years before it was called Bolshevik, and a few prisoners who are in their late teens. We meet factory workers, students, peasants, economists, professors, scientists, journalists, soldiers, artists, shopkeepers, lithographers, bank clerks, doctors, electricians, housewives, a “Hero of the Soviet Union,” secret policemen, and one itinerant monk. Most of the condemned were not widely known—these were, after all, ordinary citizens—though King shows a few who were prominent: Grigory Zinoviev, looking tough, sad, and furious; Osip Mandelstam, head held high, jaw jutting out; Isaac Babel, robbed of sight, for his captors had smashed his eyeglasses. (Babel’s picture is blurred, as if echoing his impaired vision.) None of these prisoners wear uniforms; their clothes and personal artifacts, along with their truncated biographies, offer a hint of the social worlds they inhabited. Some wear the plain, rough jackets and coarse shirts of the proletariat; others sport neat jackets and ties, or an elaborately embroidered shirt, or thin wire-rimmed eyeglasses. Yan Iosifovich Vislyak, a Polish Communist journalist, wears a fur-trimmed coat; Emilya Markovna Shimkevich, a dark-haired actress, still has her beautiful striped scarf; Valentina Dybenko-Sedyakina, a housewife, would go to her death in her pretty polka-dotted dress. Though taken under hideous conditions for hideous purposes, these are portraits rather than hurried mugshots. The jailers used cameras that required long exposure times, and they depended on natural light, not flashbulbs. The prisoners may have been shocked by their fate or by the trajectory of the revolution, by the betrayal of their neighbors or by the paranoia of the party: but the camera, at least, did not ambush them. 53

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These are slow pictures, the opposite of snapshots. And so there is time for a panoply of reactions—time for the victims’ characters—to be revealed. Each Soviet citizen faced imminent death as herself, bringing to this moment all that had gone before. Georgy Vladimirovich Dobrodeev, a Ukrainian artist with a full beard and moustache, regards the camera with a furrowed brow and a proud look, as if he is indicting his tormentors. Ekaterina Alexeevna Zakharova, a farm worker with blazing eyes and wisps of long hair, looks like a haunted apparition. Alexei Grigorievich Zheltikov, a locksmith who had quit the party in a dispute over economic policy, almost explodes with fright. Yudif Gladshtein, a party member and civil servant, has huge, almond-shaped black eyes brimming with sorrow. Emerik Vitoldovich Rozhen-Andreev, a research fellow at the Lenin Library, faces the camera with a mysterious, sly smile. But the hint of a smile on Afraim Mikhailovich Shalyto, a journalist, is quite different, and seems to ask with weary irony: Et tu? The prisoners of Pol Pot’s regime were even more wretched than their Russian predecessors. And in Tuol Sleng prison they, too, were photographed before execution; a small selection of the resulting five thousand photographs was collected in a 1996 book called The Killing Fields. Like Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng prison (also known as S-21) could accurately be described as “anus mundi.” There, in what had formerly been a school, presumed enemies of the state were interrogated, tortured, starved, and killed, often by having their heads smashed. Trials, even the cosmetic kind, were unheard of (the Cambodian word for “prisoner” means “guilty person”); confessions exacted through torture were mandatory, and the condemned dug their own graves before mass executions. The prisoners’ alleged crimes included working for the CIA, praising the old regime, hiding rice, stealing fruit, and “being fond of ‘freedom.’ ” Like their Soviet precursors, the Cambodians were forced to create damning autobiographies and sign wildly fabricated confessions. On its own terms, Tuol Sleng was an extraordinary success: of the estimated fourteen thousand prisoners it received between 1975 and 1979, only seven are known to have survived. When the Vietnamese liberated Tuol Sleng in 1979, they found corpses chained to metal cots, blood-stained floors, shackles, chains, stacks of bodies in shallow graves, and handbooks of torture instruction. 54

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Figure 2.2 Lubyanka Prison, Soviet Union, 1931: Ekaterina Alexeevna Zakharova, a farm worker, was one of many presumed enemies of the state who were photographed in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. Accused of espionage and forced to sign a false confession, she was executed four days after her “trial” concluded. Photographs of the victims of Stalin’s prisons came to light in the Gorbachev era; Zakharova was “rehabilitated” in 1989.

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Even after studying Ordinary Citizens, the S-21 photographs are a shock: there is simply no way to prepare for them. Many of the condemned had just arrived, blindfolded, at the prison, and had no idea where they were or why; some are chained to other prisoners. Illuminated by harsh light or flashes—which lends these pictures a stark, flat, weirdly “pure” look— faces of alarm, terror, and exhaustion stare out at us. There don’t seem to be many scientists or journalists here, if indeed any still existed in Pol Pot’s Cambodia; we see scrawny, weather-beaten peasants, usually wearing loose black shirts and pants. Some look sad or plaintive or angry or scared, but many look like nothing at all: perhaps they had moved beyond recognizable emotion. The Tuol Sleng administration kept extensive records—the Vietnamese found thousands of documents—but the victims here are unidentified. This absence of information makes the photographs more brutal: the disorientation of the prisoners is reprised by the lacunae that surround them. There are no names, addresses, occupations, lists of crimes, or, even, dates of death. There is virtually nothing to tell us who these people used to be: now they are close to pure victims. And yet, even so, each is singular. Number 6,* an elderly man with a full head of gray hair, looks as if he is about to cry, as do several others. Number 573 no longer has a left eye. Number 17 is a young man with no shirt; his number is stuck to his naked chest with a safety pin. Two young men, Numbers 399 and 160, offer oily smiles. A wizened old man, unnumbered, purses his lips, while the deeply lined face of another elder seems to encapsulate generations of his country’s sorrowful history. One of the most astonishing pictures here, in my view, is of a young woman (her number is hidden) with a smooth, unlined face, pale skin, almond eyes, and short black bangs. She looks at her captors with absolute calm, as if daring them to recognize her humanity. Many women were arrested with their babies, who would meet the same fate as their mothers. Number 73 has a dark, sweaty, creased face and looks desolate; next to her, and almost cut off by the frame, her plump, * Numbers referred to the order in which a prisoner’s photo was taken on a particular day; many prisoners could have the same number.

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black-shirted toddler looks up at the camera. Number 462 is a somewhat younger woman with pale skin and a blank look; she holds a sleeping infant in her arms. Number 246 has a wide face and a flat nose; her baby wears a knit hat with an unexpectedly cheerful pompom. Number 320 is a young woman who sits in a dirty cement cell. Behind her, on an iron bed, lies her naked baby, penis exposed; he stares up at the ceiling. But most stunning are the many children, photographed on their own, who would be tortured and killed as counterrevolutionary enemies or as the soiled descendents of such. The Killing Fields opens, after several pitch-black pages, with the serene picture of a girl who looks to be about seven. She wears a neat, button-down gray shirt with a slightly wrinkled, gracefully rounded collar—an innocent, child’s collar; her eyes are clear, her eyebrows slightly full; her jet-black hair is cut off just below her ears, with one side flipping upward. She looks reserved, dignified, and remarkably poised. But to stare at her as she stares at us is to enter into an abyss. As if in a grotesque parody of a children’s parade, she is followed by many others. Number 1 looks to be about seven; he has a full, high head of hair and thick lips; there is a chain around his neck. Number 186 is a skinny, wild-looking boy of perhaps nine whose face has been beaten and whose body is twisted by the adult to whom he is chained. A young girl with no number, who looks about twelve, wears a striped shirt and a frown; her smooth, neatly combed hair is held back by barrettes, as if she is ready for school or a party. Number 438 looks less than ten, and he furrows his eyebrows in bewildered sadness. Number 3, a skinny, almost adolescent girl, looks ravaged. In the aftermath of the Shoah, Adorno wrote that “the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.” The Lubyanka and Tuol Sleng photographs make clear—again—the utter necessity, and utter inadequacy, of all such voices. And this is true whether those voices take verbal or visual forms; whether they are shouts or whispers, strong or strangled; whether they are willingly articulated or, as with the Soviet and Cambodian photographs, produced through force. Description, documentation, testimony: each falls short in the wake of these insane slaughters. Mercy, when it was needed, was absent; reason, when it was called for, disappeared: these are the facts to confront, and these are the facts that resist 57

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Figure 2.3 Tuol Sleng, Cambodia, date unknown: Fourteen thousand people were sent to Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, in the years 1975–79; seven survived. Pol Pot’s jailers, like Stalin’s, often photographed their victims before they were killed; over five thousand mug shots have been discovered. The Cambodian prisoners’ alleged crimes ranged from working for the CIA to “being fond of ‘freedom.’” Children, like the nameless girl here, were executed as presumed counterrevolutionaries.

confrontation. To look at these pictures is necessary, but its only guarantee is failure. The closer one gets, the further a comprehensible world secedes; the more one knows, the less one understands. Here, surely, is the “grief . . . beyond healing” of which the prophet Jeremiah wrote. Nor is simple identification with the victims possible. At the end of The Killing Fields, historian David Chandler writes, “Visiting the photographs 58

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in this book, we may be coming face to face, whether we like it or not, with . . . our shadow selves. We are inside S-21. Leafing through these pages, we become interrogators, prisoners, and passersby.” I think that the opposite is true. One can mourn the people in Lubyanka and S-21— one must mourn, know what happened, and when, and how—but that should not be mistaken for closeness. We are not inside those prisons: they were. Our hells almost certainly are not theirs. Nor should the difference between looking at a photograph and torturing a child be quite so easily elided. (This is, I think, what Adorno meant when he warned against the “cozy existential atmosphere” in which “the distinction between victim and executioner becomes blurred.”) To confuse the torturer with his prey—much less believe that you have somehow become one or the other—is not an expression of solidarity. It is, instead, an evasion of the immense, insurmountable difficulties—the inability to understand, the inability to grieve, the inability to act—that these photographs present. We cannot become the prisoners of S-21 any more than we can save them; it would be inexcusable to imagine that we can or did. That is not an argument for not looking, not seeing, or not knowing, nor for throwing up one’s hands or shielding one’s eyes. Looking at these doomed people is not a form of exploitation; forgetting them is not a form of respect. But it would be good to eschew a knowledge that is easy, an identification that is glib, and a resolution that is cheap. Neither humanism nor history will bridge the chasm between we viewers and Number 5: we cannot become him, switch places with him, or reach back into history to protect him. We are simply too late. The “demands of justice” about which Adorno wrote will never—can never—be met, and the suffering of the victims will never be redeemed. The earliest photojournalists expected images of injustice to push viewers into action; photographs were regarded not as expressions of alienation but as interventions in the world. Delia Falconer’s elegiac 1997 novel The Service of Clouds expresses this hope beautifully. The protagonist, a woman photographer in early twentieth-century Australia, ends the book by telling us: “I have thought, if I find the right place, the right quality of light, I might take photographs so painful that they make people want to look 59

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away; that they will feel the urge to enter and put right the world they represent.” To turn from the image and put right the world: this is the photographic ideal that still lives today. But like so many ideals, it has been chastened by experience. Now we know that pictures of affliction can be easily ignored—or, even worse, enjoyed. Now we know that photographs of suffering can be the start of human connection—and the endpoint to deadly fantasies of revenge. Now we know the fatal gaps that exist between seeing, caring, understanding, and acting. And so the important question, when we think about photography and human rights, is not how many images we see, or how brutal or explicit or “pornographic” they are. Nor can we blame photography for having failed to vanquish violence; as James Nachtwey once argued, “The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians . . . have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?” The real issue is how we use images of cruelty. Can they help us to make meaning of the present and the past? If so, what meanings do we make, and how do we act upon them? The ultimate answers to such questions reside not in the pictures but in ourselves. Photojournalists are responsible for the ethics of showing, but we are responsible for the ethics of seeing. “It is our historic responsibility, not only to produce photos, but to make them speak,” Ariella Azoulay has written. This requires transforming our relationship to photographs from one of passivity and complaint to one of creativity and collaboration, and it means regarding the violators of human rights— not the photographers who document their victims—as the real “agents of death.” It may be as hard for us to understand our new, chaotic visual environment as it was for Weimar citizens to master theirs; we are as conflicted as were Benjamin and Kracauer. Images flood into our world in the old ways—through the printed press, films, and television—but also through cell phones, iPods, satellite dishes, social-networking sites, and the Internet. How to respond? Anxieties abound, and for good reasons. On the Internet all photographs are equal: including doctored, manipulated, or constructed photographs, and those without any meaningful—or with entirely false—contexts. Thus Andy Grundberg has warned that the “lib60

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erty of an unchecked image environment may prove to be less a blessing than a subtle form of tyranny, and the democracy of the camera a perverse kind of fascism.” Certainly the new visual technologies have changed the relationship between information, propaganda, and war. Even the Taliban, which used to ban photographs, movies, and television as ungodly, now has a video production unit that posts its advertisements for jihad— its suicide bombings and executions—on the web. (I explore this development in chapter 6.) Yet digital photography and the Internet might also herald unprecedented possibilities for new, more egalitarian forms of visual participation—as Gilles Peress and some others argue—and be a boon to humanrights activists everywhere. If digital photography has made viewers more skeptical about the reality quotient of photographs—just what the postmoderns had hoped—it has also made the making, transmitting, and viewing of pictures incomparably easier and cheaper. (Baudelaire would be displeased.) This has, admittedly, helped groups like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda (it too runs a media production house). But the new technologies have also led to the emergence of transnational organizations such as PhotoVoice, which teaches refugees and street children to expose the conditions of their lives through photojournalism; PixelPress, a new-media organization and website that collaborates with human-rights organizations to disseminate otherwise unseen documentary work; and Demotix, a “citizen journalism” website and photo agency that promises photographers, whether professional or amateur: “You take the images, we get them out there.” The inspiring, and sometimes bloody, photographs we saw from the 2009 Iranian protests lend credence to the optimistic, prodemocracy interpretation of the new media. Many of those photographs were taken by nonprofessionals on their cell phones, then quickly circulated throughout the world; one could find them everywhere from major newspapers to Facebook. Yet the techno-utopianism these photographs prompted—some writers hailed a “Twitter Revolution” and “a revolution in cinema verité courtesy of YouTube”—strikes me as premature if not vastly overblown. It was the old-fashioned forces—the old-fashioned guns—of the police, the revolutionary militias, and the army that determined the outcome in 61

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Iran. As I write, Iran’s courtrooms are hosting show trials, its jails are filled with members of the opposition, charges of rape and other state-sponsored tortures abound, and political prisoners are being executed. Iran taught us, once again, that democratic images can strengthen a democracy but they can’t create one. In the following chapters, we’ll see how the relationship between the forces of violence and the images of violence has played itself out repeatedly, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. Those forces create a radically unequal dialectic—but not, I would argue, a hopeless one.

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Places

Figure 3.1 Warsaw Ghetto, Nazi-occupied Poland, 1941: Heinrich Jöst, a Nazi soldier in uniform, toured the ghetto on his birthday and photographed its exhausted, dying inhabitants. This woman has become a peddler of the grotesque, selling the armbands that Jews in the ghetto were forced to wear (and to buy). “She looked as though she was about to topple over and die the next moment,” Jöst would note decades later. Photo courtesy Yad Vashem.

3 WARSAW, LODZ, AUSCHWITZ In the Waiting Room of Death

Several years ago a book showed up on my doorstep. It has become a book that I can never fully enter into yet can never definitively put down: this book and I have a troubled, unresolved relationship. Its title is In the Ghetto of Warsaw, and it consists of 137 black-and-white photographs, printed on exactly the kind of heavy matte paper I like, taken by a forty-three-year-old German sergeant named Heinrich Jöst. In September 1941, Jöst spent a day off—his birthday—strolling with his Rolliflex through the Warsaw Ghetto and photographing its frightened, starving, typhoid-ridden Jews. (He canceled his birthday party that night.) I was repelled and grieved by these photographs; I was furious that Jöst had taken them, and grateful that he had. The photograph has long been associated with death. Kracauer, for instance, posited that our attraction to photographs—which seem to freeze time—stems from our desire to deny mortality. But no one has done more to foster this obsession than Barthes. Camera Lucida, a sweet elegy for his dead mother, is mediated through a photograph of her as a five-year-old girl. Barthes ponders this picture, and others, and he concludes, with a good deal of enjoyable melancholy, that every photograph “is the living image of a dead thing”; an “image which produces Death while trying to preserve life”; a foretelling of “death in the future”: in short, a “catastrophe.” Though drenched in morbidity—“the photograph is already dead,” Barthes insists—Camera Lucida is laced with spiky, delightful wit. Heinrich Jöst’s photographs are anything but, and they raise the ques65

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tion of photography’s connection to death in an entirely different way. In Jöst’s book, the “living image” captures the deliberate extermination of the Jews, the effort to “preserve life” is impossible, there is nothing remotely futuristic about death, and the “catastrophe” has attained incomprehensible proportions. Jöst’s photographs are simultaneously haunting and repulsive, and at first glance they make Barthes’s playful abstractions seem almost obscene; perhaps they are. Yet Jöst’s images do not actually negate Barthes’s ideas but, instead, realize them with a vengeance, precisely by transferring them from the realm of the theoretical into that of the harshest reality. Rather than turning Barthes on his head, the German soldier lands the French philosopher firmly on his feet. Jöst’s photographs are far from unique. They belong to what I consider the most morally vexing photographic genre: pictures of people about to be murdered. Such photographs, as we have seen, were taken in the prisons of Stalin and Pol Pot—and, among other places, in the Lodz and Warsaw Ghettos, in some of the Nazi concentration camps, and on the eastern front in World War II. These photographs, or at least the ones I consider here, are not those that show mounds of dead bodies from the gigantic killing projects of our time, although numerous such images exist. The photographs of which I write are not always violent in the strict sense of the word, nor always bloody. Sometimes the people in them look fairly normal. Some of these photographs are simple portraits. These are not photographs of dead people. No, the people in these photographs are still alive, though most won’t be for long. This is something that they, and those who click the shutter, usually know; so do we, always. These are photographs of terror: not as an ideology but as a practice and, most of all, as an experience; they depict human relations based on the unfettered cruelty of the powerful and the utter helplessness of those they have caught. What is so horrible about these photographs, then, is not always the images themselves—though some of them are unbearable—but the contexts in which they were taken, which is to say the histories to which they attest. These are photographs of those who reside in what Jean Améry, writing about the Warsaw Ghetto, called “the Waiting Room of Death.” Such photographs—and this is both logical and counterintuitive— 66

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are usually taken by the victims’ tormentors or by those working for them, which seems to prove, if we need more proof, that not everyone is ashamed of the same things. Yet this absence of a natural, universal sense of shame negates one of the foundational principles of documentary photography. Especially in its early years, photography’s advocates expected it to confirm the family of man by illuminating the essential similarities that bind people, and peoples, to each other. And sometimes photography achieves this: beautifully so. But photographs, especially those discussed here, also show that people are awfully different from one another, and that their definitions of what is unthinkable, criminal, or repugnant—or, alternately, heroic, delightful, or amusing—vary quite a bit. Looking at these photographs of the condemned, I wonder: what kinds of responsibility, if any, do we assume in viewing them? What can they offer, what must they withhold? Why, especially in the case of the Holocaust, are there so many taboos against looking at them; why, alternately, are they sometimes invested with such large, imaginative hopes? In the turbulent years between the world wars, Germany was camera-crazy. As we have seen, it was in Weimar Germany that the first major illustrated magazines and newspapers were founded, and that photographers such as Robert Capa and Alfred Eisenstaedt learned their craft. The Ermanox and the Leica, lightweight cameras that would revolutionize picture taking throughout the world, were German inventions whose production surged in the Weimar era. It was in Weimar Germany that the early, influential theorists of—and against—the photographic image emerged, including Kracauer and Benjamin. Why should this fascination with photography abate with the Nazi ascension to power? On the contrary: the Nazis viewed the camera as a key tool in nation building, and the Leicas continued to click. Families in the Third Reich were urged to compose “racially impeccable” photo albums that would reflect Aryan values and Aryan superiority; as the magazine Photofreund explained in 1933, all true Germans could partake in the creation of a new photography inspired by “the German heart” and “the German spirit.” Even scenes of startling brutality—scenes that, one might think, should not be welcomed as part of the German heart and the Ger67

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man spirit—were circulated by the Nazi government and press; in 1936, for instance, the magazine Illustrierter Beobachter published a photo essay called “Concentration Camp Dachau”: obviously whitewashed, but scary enough. In fact, it is probable that no state and no army have ever been as intent on self-documentation as the Nazi state and the Nazi army: a wellequipped propaganda team of writers, photographers, and filmmakers accompanied every German unit sent to the front. And, far from home, Nazi soldiers met likeminded folk who shared their twin interests in taking photographs and tormenting Jews. Joe J. Heydecker, a German private, would later recall that the massacres on the eastern front were often observed by curious “civilians sometimes dressed only in bathing trunks and frequently with their cameras. . . . The murder squads had no objection.” Many Nazi-produced photographs were accidentally lost or intentionally destroyed, but it is estimated that more than a million still exist; they were sometimes officially sanctioned from on high and sometimes taken spontaneously by soldiers on the ground. There are no known photographs from extermination camps like Chelmno and Sobibor. But thousands of images were produced at Auschwitz: the camp had a staff of two official SS photographers—one of whom would be convicted of war crimes—assisted by a crew of inmates. The Warsaw Ghetto was flooded with German tourists—Heinrich Jöst was only one—who came as members of propaganda units, as soldiers out on their own, or as workers on “Strength through Joy” trips. Michael Zylberberg, a teacher of Jewish history, recorded in his ghetto diary how the German visitors “gleefully photographed the dead . . . particularly . . . on Sundays, when they would visit the cemetery with their girlfriends. This, rather than a cinema, was a place of amusement for them. The bereaved regarded them with scorn and loathing.” As the war, and the war crimes, proceeded, the Nazis banned the taking of unauthorized images. But to little avail: like a criminal who chatters compulsively, the Third Reich produced “an epidemic of images . . . that could not stop. . . . Photographs circulated everywhere.” All of these Nazi photographs—from the ghettos, the camps, the occupied countries, the fronts—are hard to look at; some are excruciating. Consider one that has been widely reprinted and is owned by several research archives. Its ori68

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gins are unclear: it has been variously attributed to Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, and dated anywhere from 1939 to 1944. Here is what the picture shows: standing at the edge of an earthen pit in what appears to be a forest are two naked men. Each clasps his hands before him, probably to preserve some last semblance of privacy by covering his genitals. A bit behind them is an old man, also naked, whose legs are very thin and who stands slightly hunched over; he still wears a shoe or sock. To the left of these three stand two others: a naked man and a naked young boy who wears a cap that is tilted slightly sideways. Only the child holds his hands behind him. Behind the five naked prisoners stand six men, some in uniform, some in neatly attired civilian clothes (coats, ties, a fedora); alongside the victims, in profile, stands a uniformed soldier. Many of the clothed men— that is, the perpetrators—hold what look like canes or sticks; the soldiers of course have guns. To the far right of the frame stands another uniformed soldier on a little mound of earth; he turns his head to look at the camera and points to the tableau below (though it would be hard to miss). Not surprisingly, given its disputed history, this photograph has been captioned in several ways; the version held by the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London reads, translated from the Polish, “Sniatyn—tormenting Jews before their execution. 11.V.1943.” What does it mean to look at such a photograph? Should we? Why? And if so, how? There are many who say we should not. In fact, it is images of the Holocaust that provoke the angriest objections to the very existence of so-called atrocity photographs and to the activity of viewing them. To look at such pictures, some critics argue, is to place ourselves—not just physically but morally, too—in the position of the original photographer, which is to say of a killer. Once we look at such photographs, we too wear coats and ties and fedoras while others are stripped of their clothes, their dignity, their lives; we too have neither pity nor decency; we too watch in smug safety while others crumple in fear. These critics, who might be called the “rejectionists,” claim that such photographs—taken, obviously, without the victims’ consent and designed to degrade—are not just documentations 69

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of cruelty but are the acting-out of cruelty. In this they are surely right. What makes their stance problematic, however, is their further insistence that to look at such photographs, as opposed to taking them, can only revictimize the victims and recreate the original crimes. In their view, we are all Nazis now—or will be if, like Lot’s wife, we dare to look backwards at things we shouldn’t. “The Nazis took photographs of their victims to humiliate and degrade them,” writes the scholar Janina Struk in her book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence. “Are we not colluding with them by displaying them ourselves? Do we have a right to show people in their last moments before facing death . . . ? Must the torment and deaths of millions be replayed on museum walls around the world for millions to watch?” Struk calls for returning these photographs to the archives for use by professionals rather than “flaunting” them before ordinary viewers in museums and other public places. (Such quarantines would, however, effectively limit works like hers, since she opens her book with a full-page reproduction of the death-pit photograph I have just described.) Of the victims, Struk concludes, “They had no choice but to be photographed. Now they have no choice but to be viewed by posterity. Didn’t they suffer enough the first time around?” In this view, the very structure of such photographs, and the sinister circumstances of their making, reproduce the ideology of the victimizers: and can do only that. Such images, the rejectionists claim, are totalitarian in the literal sense of the word, allowing only one possible response. The fascist aesthetic dictates all, just like the fascist state: these images are as sealed as the ghettoes, the cattle cars, and the camps. The German media historian Gertrud Koch, for instance, has written that it is impossible to look at these photographs from an antifascist perspective: “Regrettably, the assumption that something might exist in such images which would form a kind of sacred resistance against its abuse is untrue in the case of Nazi images.” And since the Nazi ideology, and its weird ideas about racial hierarchies, are lies—corresponding not to the world as it is but to the delusions of its adherents—it would follow that Nazi-created photographs are dishonest images, meaningless images, incapable of imparting knowledge or truth. That is why Claude Lanzmann eschewed the use of 70

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conventional Holocaust photographs—indeed, of all documentary photographs—in his 1985 film Shoah. It is impossible to say that Lanzmann was wrong. His decision to forego images from the camps is crucial to his film’s power as a moral excavation of culpability and a meditation on incalculable loss. Still, there are serious, indeed insurmountable, problems with the rejectionist school of thought, which approaches Holocaust images with an odd combination of formal asceticism and intellectual helplessness. For it is far from clear—indeed, it is baffling—why a picture taken by a Nazi can only reproduce what critics call the “Nazi gaze” any more than reading Mein Kampf can only place us under Adolf Hitler’s spell. When I read Mein Kampf I encounter a lunatic, and I find the book repellent rather than mesmerizing. (I would find it silly had it remained merely a book.) When I look at the quivering, naked figures in the death-pit photograph, or at the filthy, dead-eyed inhabitants of the ghettos, I do not see—or see only—images of despicable Jewish weakness, which is what the Nazis intended: I see Nazi barbarism. In fact, while these photographs say something about the Jews—something, that is, about the war of annihilation waged against them—they say quite a bit more about their German conquerors. They are evidence of Jewish vulnerability and Jewish defeat, yes; but they are, even more, evidence of the crimes committed against the Jews, and in this sense they are self-portraits of Nazi degradation. Each of these pictures measures just how far outside the realm of the recognizably human the Nazis had thrust themselves; they depict the photographer as much as the subject. Even—or especially—at the time these photographs were taken, they were used in ways that were entirely unanticipated by the Nazis themselves. Starting in 1933, photographs documenting Nazi crimes had been smuggled out of Germany. But with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and of the Soviet Union two years later, far more photographs were suddenly available: Western governments, embassies, newspapers, and antifascist organizations were flooded with atrocity images. Some of these photographs were taken clandestinely by Jewish and, especially, Polish partisans (the Polish underground ran a sophisticated photography network); others were made by Soviet photographers working for the army. But most 71

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such photographs were snapped by Nazi soldiers, Nazi officials, or Nazi supporters. Then these images were turned against their makers. In Britain, for instance, Victor Gollancz, who was George Orwell’s publisher, produced the anonymously written The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany in 1936. Its photographs were taken by Nazis, as were those in two later anti-Nazi books, The German New Order in Poland and the aforementioned Black Book of Polish Jewry. The 1942 book We Shall Not Forgive!—published in the Soviet Union but addressed to an English-speaking audience—was filled with gruesome Nazi-made photographs and listed, whenever possible, the names of the dead German soldiers on whom they had been found. Newspapers in the Allied countries published photographic evidence of Nazi crimes including public humiliations, beatings, deportations, shootings, hangings, starvation, and mass executions; the “overwhelming majority” of these images came from Nazi sources. As the historian Raul Hilberg drily observed: “Jews are the most frequent figures in Holocaust photographs, but they contributed the smallest portion of the photographic record.”* In short, Nazi photographs were used to expose Nazi brutality when the actual Nazi state was threatening the world. Viewing them was not a form of “collusion” but its opposite: an attempt to spur outrage and action against the killers. Why, then, should the Nazi vision be considered impenetrable now? Why should we twenty-first-century viewers, sitting in comparative comfort in New York, Berlin, or Paris, be more intimidated by the Nazi worldview than were those who organized resistance in the cellars of Warsaw, the mountains of France, or the streets of Stalingrad? Why can we not see through these photographs and regard them as revelations, rather than fortifications, of fascist values? Why can we not view these images actively and critically rather than in mute, stupid obedience? * Throughout the war, though, Western governments and the Western press tended to regard these images of atrocity and the reports that accompanied them as examples of untrustworthy, exaggerated Soviet or Jewish propaganda; only a miniscule portion of the available images was published. And the fact that such photographs, when printed, generally failed to provoke the hoped-for responses should give pause to those who are convinced that it is post-Holocaust publics who have become inured to violence due to an oversaturation of horrific images.

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Consider what might be the most iconic image of the Holocaust: the picture of a small, dark-haired boy in short pants and a cap, his hands raised in the air, as he is rounded up for deportation. It was taken in May 1943 by a Nazi soldier for the photography-laden Stroop Report, which was written for the Nazi leadership and which certified—indeed boasted— that the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jews had been successfully “terminated.” Yet how many people today—indeed, how many people in 1943—would see this boy the way General Stroop did? To me, this photograph protests the boy’s helplessness and terror rather than praises the killers’ admirable efficiency; and in this respect I am, I’m pretty sure, a far more ordinary person than was Jürgen Stroop. If a strangling Nazi vision did exist, it would presumably be easily identifiable. For the Nazi project was not merely a continuation of traditional anti-Semitism or of familiar modes of warfare; on the contrary, it represented the starkest of historic, civilizational, and moral breaches, which is why it still haunts us today. Surely, then, photographs taken in the service of this project would bear a strong and unmistakable mark. And some certainly do: who but a perpetrator—and a sadist—could have staged and photographed the death-pit tableau; the rituals of humiliation forced on old, frail Jews by strapping, laughing German soldiers; the “medical” experiments of Auschwitz? Yet there are many other kinds of Holocaust images, and when viewing some of them—especially those from the ghettos—it is not always easy to tell who shot which photograph, or why. A German soldier? A Jewish slave? A Nazi functionary? A partisan? A photographer’s identity, and his aims, are only two of the many factors that determine the kind of photograph that he will take. Though it may be uncomfortable to admit, Nazi photographers could take good pictures, by which I mean revealing pictures; even more disconcerting, they could take pictures that stir our deepest impulses of empathy, grief, and fury, even though this was not their aim. In fact, the images that were taken as a form of resistance cannot be easily separated from those with a soiled lineage; the two are often mixed. A book published in 1993 called In the Warsaw Ghetto, Summer 1941 combines photographs taken by a Nazi soldier named Willy Georg with ex73

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cerpts from the secret diaries kept by the ghetto’s prisoners. Georg’s pictures are, of course, painful to behold, but it is the Jewish texts that are far worse, for they chart the ways in which Nazi terror made solidarity so difficult to maintain. Perhaps most strange, Georg’s photographs do not fight the revelations of the diaries but, rather, seem to work with them; though some of these pictures are cold and cruel, others seem steeped in sorrow. (Struk displays a Georg photo on the cover of her book.) Similarly, a posthumously published edition of the diary of Lodz Ghetto inmate Dawid Sierakowiak is adorned with a photo of Jewish schoolboys taken by Walter Genewein, the ghetto’s chief accountant—who was, of course, a Nazi official. Genewein had no compassion for his Jewish slaves, and yet his merciless eye reveals far more—about his victims and himself—than he could ever have imagined. His hundreds of pictures—taken, startlingly, in garish, sickly color and carefully labeled—depicted Lodz as a veritable hive of activity, with shops, factories, and tanneries all dutifully producing valuable goods. (Before the war Lodz had been known as the “Polish Manchester,” and the ghetto’s strategy for survival centered on its desperate productivity.) But Genewein’s greed and arrogance find no hiding place in these pictures: in one slide, he shows open suitcases bulging with plundered loot, accompanied by a few scattered, desolate-looking shoes. Genewein’s ruse of normalcy fails again and again. One slide, titled “Ghetto Lodz ‘Commerce,’” shows the camp’s civilian commander, Hans Biebow, as he shops for a tie.* Biebow has a nice selection to choose from— colorful stripes, prints, solids—confiscated from murdered Jews; we see him as he fingers one item that has especially caught his attention. Next to him, and looking suitably deferential, stands the ties’ “salesman”: a scrawny Jewish man wearing a worker’s cap, a dark coat with a bright yellow star, and, yes, a red tie. Behind commandant and inmate we see a chain-link fence. * Primo Levi would later describe Biebow: “The torment in the ghetto touched him, but only indirectly. He wanted the slave-workers to work, and therefore he did not want them to die of hunger: his moral sense ended there. . . . Biebow, a small jackal too cynical to take race demonology seriously, would have liked to put off forever the dismantling of the ghetto, which, for him, was an excellent business deal.”

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Far from suggesting the quotidian, this picture reveals the outrageous circumstances that surround it. Biebow’s thoughtful choice of a tie can only conjure a more deadly selection; the Jewish inmate’s attempt at propriety—embodied, pathetically, by his cheerful tie—can only highlight his shabbiness and obvious gauntness. At every point, this picture undermines its ideological purposes and reveals, as the scholar Ulrich Baer has trenchantly written, “the ludicrous notion of ‘commerce’ under such radically inequitable and exploitative conditions . . . The sun-drenched picture yields a complex, disturbing, and ultimately catastrophic narrative about the Nazis’ murderous exploitation of the ghetto population.” Ironically, those who are closest to the victims seem least interested in assessing the purity of a photograph’s origins. A hard-to-look-at book called We Have Not Forgotten, published by Warsaw’s League of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy after the war, consists mainly of gruesome Nazi photographs, including a double-page spread of the death-pit image that Struk simultaneously published and wants to hide. And it was Israel’s Yad Vashem that snapped up Jöst’s ghetto pictures, and exhibited them worldwide, after the German magazine Stern initially turned them down. The Israeli archive also published a thick book called The Pictorial History of the Holocaust, which promiscuously mixes photographs from Nazi, Jewish, and resistance sources without indicating which is which. Clearly the Israeli curators are far more interested in the tale than the teller—or, more precisely, interested in the multiple tales of the multiple tellers. They realize the terrible conundrum that the purists deny: even after death, executioners and victims, resisters and collaborators, hunters and hunted, remain intimately entwined; there is no vision, and no refusal of vision, powerful enough to divorce them. It is perhaps fitting, then, that the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt owns a set—the only complete set—of Walter Genewein’s odious, invaluable slides. It is true, as the rejectionists have argued, that viewers often have the “wrong” reactions to photographs of cruelty, including contempt for the victims, glib identification, or even a prurient fascination that can border on pleasure. I am not sure, though, what the right reactions would be. Indeed, the impossibility of reacting to Holocaust photographs “cor75

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rectly,” spontaneously, or on the basis of ordinary human intuitions is a key to the most diabolical aspect of the Nazi project. It is a key, that is, to the ways in which the victims were shoved into an indecipherable world where normal human instincts became crimes; where the survival of one was predicated on the deaths of others; where previously unthinkable forms of degradation became common; and where the victims were offered maliciously brutal choices that, if made, would annihilate them spiritually before their physical destruction was complete. The Nazis aimed to destroy the victims prior to their deaths, primarily by eradicating the bonds of self-respect, empathy, and mutual dependence that make civilization possible if not always good. The Nazi project, in short, was something new, something original, something that “did not conform to any model,” as Primo Levi observed. It had two goals: to create a super-man and to create a sub-man; as such, it was an assault not only on millions of individual human beings but on the very idea of the human being. What is a normal, natural, or appropriate reaction to this? Photographs from the Nazi period evoke—though obviously in attenuated form—this demented universe, which is why our typical reactions to suffering are frequently upended when we look at them. To see such images is radically disorienting, for it is often hard to decide which kind of Holocaust image is worse: the ones that reveal the horror or the ones that hide it. A collection of photographs taken by a Polish Jew named Henryk Ross and posthumously published in 2004 under the title Lódz Ghetto Album epitomizes this confusion. Ross was born in 1910. Before the war he had been a sports photographer for a Warsaw newspaper, and after imprisonment in the Lodz Ghetto he was one of two photographers employed by the Department of Statistics; in this capacity he took official photographs for the ghetto’s Nazi administration. Surreptitiously, though, he also took thousands of photographs that documented the real face of ghetto life and death. Ross and his wife, Stefania, were among the 5 percent of ghetto inmates who survived the Nazi onslaught; after the war they remained in Lodz and then, in 1950, moved to Israel, where Ross worked as a photographer and zincographer.

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(He testified at the 1961 Eichmann trial, where some of his photographs were entered into evidence.) He died in 1991. Ross’s crisp photographs look carefully composed, as if the professional standards he had learned in Warsaw had to be upheld at all costs—even if the subject now was the destruction of human beings rather than feats of athletic prowess. In the section of the book the editors have called “Public,” Ross portrays the despair and degradation of the ghetto as it was lived in full view of its inhabitants and its occupiers: the filthy, barefoot people on the streets with their battered tin soup bowls; the unburied corpses strewn on the sidewalks; the public executions; the human mules straining as they lugged heavy wagons of excrement (soon the carriers would die of typhus); the mutilated faces, disfigured by deep and bloody gashes, of those killed in the deportation roundup of September 1942, which targeted the young, the old, and the sick. One especially ugly picture of this event shows Jewish policemen grabbing ill people who, slated for transport to the death camps, were desperately trying to escape through the windows of the ghetto hospital. And everywhere in Ross’s images the “Jewish” stars appear, like crazy little sparks of hatred: we see them sewn onto armbands, and onto coats front and back, and hanging on pendants around children’s necks. (Did the Nazis worry that these children would forget they were Jews?) Even the scarecrow guarding a scrawny plot of ghetto land wears one. But it is another set of Ross’s photographs, called “Private” and previously unpublished, that causes the biggest shock, though at first one eagerly welcomes it. These photographs are filled with dappled sunshine, laughter, health, and love. Here, for instance, is a photo of five children who sit on the floor while they eat. Unlike the other children we have seen—stunted, wrinkled figures draped in rags—these kids look like kids. They have smooth, unlined faces and ample flesh on their bones; they wear clean clothes, including shoes and socks; they do not look cowed or beaten. One girl, a ribbon in her hair, impishly smiles as she opens her mouth wide for what looks—could it be?—like a nice soup dumpling. A later photograph shows a smiling woman in a polka-dotted bathing suit as she feeds her fat, naked child in a leafy backyard, while another intro-

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duces us to a shy little boy with a teddy bear almost as big as he. Children do especially well in these pictures: they smile and play and are frequently kissed. The grownups seem fine, too. In one photograph we see a score of handsome, nicely dressed revelers at a wedding celebration; seated at a long table loaded with bottles, candlesticks, china, and silverware, they smoke, cheer, and smile. At first glance these pictures seem wonderfully ordinary, and might even suggest that the bad was not all bad. But, even apart from the omnipresent stars, something is terribly wrong. The pictures of happy children, we learn from the text, were probably taken in autumn of 1943: almost a year after most of the ghetto’s children had been deported for immediate gassing at Chelmno. It was primarily the children of the ghetto administrators, and those whose parents had agreed to round up others, who were spared. (What would you do?) Indeed, most of the people in these pictures, who still look healthy and human, were almost certainly members of the ghetto’s so-called elite: policemen, members of the Judenrat, those with money. At worst, they betrayed others, hastening the hideous deaths of their brethren; at best, they were protected from, and apparently inured to, the suffering around them. And one more thing: within a year almost all of them, and their children, would be murdered too. How are we to regard such pictures: or, rather, the people in them? Were they monstrously indifferent to others, or tragically ignorant of their own impending fate? Certainly they were victims; were they collaborators too? Do we exult that a few were saved, if only for a short time and at a terrible price? Is it a victory that some were able, almost to the end, to sustain a “normal” family? What does it mean to save one child’s life at the expense of another child’s death? (What would you do?) Do Ross’s photographs show something valiant or something repulsive? In short: how should we act in the waiting room of death? To look at these pictures is to be twisted by such questions, and to know that the answers to them are necessary to seek and yet impossible to find. One of Ross’s most striking images shows his colleague, Mendel Grossman, who also worked as an official photographer for the ghetto administration. It is an expansive, wide-angle shot that, from a formal perspective, 78

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bears a startling resemblance to the Sniatyn death-pit photograph. In the foreground on the right we see Grossman, a young, dark-haired man wearing a gray raincoat. He is photographing a score of men, holding shovels, who stand in a large, stony pit at a great distance below him; scattered among them are men in dark uniforms. The diggers, the caption tells us, are excavating a cesspit; the others are Jewish members of the ghetto police. All look tiny, all stand stock-still, all gaze up at Grossman as if transfixed. The picture resembles a weird and frightening tableau vivant, as if the Holocaust was a performance that could be stopped at will. Grossman was born in 1913 into a Hasidic family in Lodz; before the war he had been a painter, sculptor, and photographer. When the ghetto was liquidated he was deported to a German work camp; he died, at age thirty-two, on a forced march days before the war’s end. (He took his hidden camera on that last trek, and died with it on him.) Like Ross, Grossman took thousands of surreptitious photographs, which he hid; most were found after the war and shipped to Israel. But the kibbutz that received them fell to the Egyptian Army in 1948, and the vast majority of Grossman’s negatives were lost or destroyed. A fraction of his work, under the title With a Camera in the Ghetto, was published in 1970 by the Ghetto Fighters’ House, a museum in the Galilee founded by partisans and Holocaust survivors. Grossman’s photographs, in contrast to those of Jöst and Ross, are rough, grainy, sometimes blurred. (The reproductions in the 1970 book were copied from prints rather than negatives.) His compositions often seem hastily off-centered—Jöst and Ross were more traditional craftsmen—and though his subjects obviously trusted him, he took few portraits. He did not concentrate on the scenes of begging and starvation that fascinated Jöst: neither the grotesque nor the pitiful interested him. Nor did he focus on the ghetto elite. Grossman wanted to reveal how the death-machine worked. The people in his photographs seem always on the move, but theirs is a “motion towards death,” as Arieh Ben-Menahem, Grossman’s assistant, later wrote. In Grossman’s pictures, people dig in hard stony earth for food, haul supplies and shit in bare feet, sell furniture for fuel, distribute bread and relief money, bake matzoh (though not after 1940). Grossman photographed 79

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the new arrivals to the ghetto, the delivery of intraghetto mail, the secret meetings of the underground organizations. There is an urgency to these pictures, as if he knew that he must record everything: not before it was too late—it was already too late—but before the disappearance of every last person. The sun does not shine in Grossman’s pictures. Many were taken in winter: the streets are filled with snow and ice; the weary people huddle in their worn coats and cover their heads with threadbare scarves. In one series—shot, it seems, from very close range—Grossman photographed the farewells of the deportees, and he captures both gentleness and anguish. In one remarkable image, two women, their heads tilted in opposite directions, share a passionate kiss on the mouth through a chain-link fence. In the background, another woman, held tilted as if in mime, watches them

Figure 3.2 Lodz Ghetto, Nazi-occupied Poland, date unknown: A Jewish photographer, Mendel Grossman, captured this kiss before leave-taking at the ghetto’s deportation center; this was one of his underground images, separate from those he took for the ghetto authorities. Before the war, Grossman often argued with his artist friends about the relationship between photography and painting, insisting that the two were compatible. He died on a forced march in 1945, several days before the Germans surrendered. Photo courtesy Yad Vashem.

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with curiosity, while the smiling face of a fourth woman peeks through. But it is the kiss itself—its neediness, its desire, its assertion of life—that compels us. The woman in the foreground is bathed in sunshine, while the neck of her kissing partner is hidden in shadow; and in this play of light and darkness we see eros fighting death. Another image from this series shows two crouching, dark-haired women straining toward the fence (one wears an apron, like an ordinary housewife); on the other side is a young boy, probably a son, to whom the women are speaking. The boy sits cross-legged and faces them, so we view him from the back. His hair is short; his ears a bit too large; his star, sewn prominently onto the back of his jacket, jumps out at us. Across from him, and alongside the women, sits a boy who might be his twin—same size, same ears, same cap; his face is puckered with worry. This picture presents a question that I hope to never solve: how do you say goodbye to a child— your child, any child—before he is led away to be killed? There is an inconsolable bleakness in Grossman’s drab, wintry images, though we never see any tears. These pictures offer no balm or forgiveness, nor do they plead for compassion or pity. (In this, Grossman foretells Lanzmann’s Shoah.) Instead, with an implacable fury, these photographs demand that we pay attention: this is how people, and a people, were destroyed. Look carefully. Heinrich Jöst’s pictures raise issues of a very different sort, though they are not in any sense crude propaganda. Jöst made these photographs for his private use, and he kept them hidden for decades after the war. (He did not, at the time, tell his family about his day in the ghetto or show them the pictures: “I didn’t want to make my wife and relatives feel uncomfortable,” he later explained.) In 1982 he took the photographs to Günther Schwarberg, a German journalist who had written about Nazi war crimes; In the Ghetto of Warsaw, which Schwarberg edited, was published in Germany in 2001. It includes reminiscences of what Jöst’s publisher calls a “walk through Hell” by the photographer, who was eighty-four when Schwarberg interviewed him. These recollections run as captions below the photographs. Jöst’s comments do not support the hope that the generation of Nazi 81

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perpetrators had come to terms with its past. The problem is not that he was a particularly hate-filled man: there is no evidence of that. He seems to have been, simply, a vacant man, strangely oblivious—even decades later—to what he had seen on that day in 1941, and to the relationship between the ghetto’s inhabitants and himself. Jöst recalls wondering, for instance, if he had “the right” to photograph one young, attractive woman, but admits this was only because she was well dressed: “Strangely enough, I didn’t think that about the poorly dressed people.” He writes that one woman “looked at me as if she expected me to help.” (He didn’t.) He notes how passersby don’t stop when someone, even a child, collapses in the street, apparently unaware that death had become the most commonplace event in the ghetto—and that the ghetto’s purpose was death. (The official food ration for Warsaw’s Jews was 184 calories per day.) Like a slightly befuddled anthropologist, Jöst observes the odd habits of the Jews, such as their use of “strange rubber gloves” to bury stacks of naked corpses and their voracious book-reading in the midst of corrosive hunger. Jöst poses clueless questions that suggest that the defining events of his country’s history had—mysteriously, mercifully—passed him by. “I ask myself who were the survivors among those people I photographed . . . ?” he wonders. Looking at a crowd of people on the street, he asks, “What are all these people waiting for?” Watching women trying to sell old underwear prompts the thought, “Who would want to buy things like that?” Jöst takes many pictures of emaciated corpses being flung into mass graves— the gravediggers opened the coffins so he could get a good look—which leads him to an oddly self-referential question: “How could you photograph something like that?” (This is exactly the question the rejectionists ask—and that is frequently posed to war photographers like James Nachtwey.) Jöst’s faux-existential cry is the most disingenuous of all: “My God, what kind of world is this?” But if Jöst is maddeningly obtuse, his photographs are not; here is proof positive of the claim that the camera always sees more than the photographer. Jöst was an amateur photographer before the war, and his pictures are square and often classically composed. In contrast to the sense of restlessness that characterizes Grossman’s photographs, Jöst’s images are far more static: his subjects are frozen in their fate. Often Jöst shoots from 82

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above, as if emphasizing his power over the Jews. But his photographs are unblinkingly graphic in their depictions of the Jews’ bodily suffering and decay—far more than those taken by Ross or Grossman. Jöst may not have understood what was happening to the Jews, but his camera did. Many of Jöst’s images—of the pits stacked with naked corpses, of the bald, barely breathing skeletons expiring on the sidewalks—presage those of the camps. His subjects literally crawl on the pavement: their legs have withered into matchsticks, their faces contort with pain, rage, or madness. The ghetto swarmed with abandoned children and orphans, and Jöst photographed gaunt children trying to care for each other: a pitiful, impossible task. In one such picture, taken from above, two girls sit on the pavement, their heads wrapped in scarves; one looks up at the camera, the other sideways at her sister or friend. But they are like no girls I have ever seen. Their faces look not just hollow but positively smashed: they seem almost feral. Jöst’s portraits are the perfect visualization of a Gestapo memorandum, written in August 1942, which would forthrightly observe, “It is increasingly clear on the faces of the ghetto residents that the Jews of Europe will not survive this war.” One of Jöst’s saddest photographs does not show death or obvious starvation. Instead, we see a man, not yet old (two years earlier, he might have been young), sitting on a chair on the sidewalk as he plays a violin; in the lower left corner of the frame a small, alarmed child glances at the camera as he rushes by in a blur. The musician wears a fedora that seems too big for his newly gaunt face, a dark shirt with a white armband clearly showing,* and a pair of trousers that are baggy but intact. The violin is perched on the man’s left shoulder, the bow held in his right hand; he sits erect, leaning slightly forward from the back of the chair. It is the musician’s expression as he looks at Jöst—and, now, at us—that cannot be forgotten. He grimaces slightly, as if he is aware of how low he has sunk but cannot understand how or why; as if he fears that his music—his last link to the civilized world—will not save him; as if he yearns for a moment of human recognition yet is sure, almost sure, that it will not come. * Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto wore a white band with a blue Star of David rather than the yellow star.

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Struggling for dignity, he is all too aware of his bewildered shame. “This man was playing the same notes on his violin over and over,” Jöst recalls. “His eyes followed me.” An even worse photograph shows a haggard woman with a wrinkled face and short, light-colored hair as she stands on the street; pasted onto the wall behind her are the tattered remains of symphony concert posters. The woman wears a flowered dress under a loose black coat. She is weighed down by a weird assortment of what look like rolled bandages that boomerang off her at odd angles. Some are attached to her clothes with safety pins, others dangle from her left hand, which she holds away from her body; strips of white material hang from her waist. She is a peddler of sorts: the bandages and material are Star of David armbands; she is selling the padded kind. (Though armbands were mandatory, they weren’t free or equal: the embroidered ones were considered the best.) The woman’s eyes are almost closed, though whether from exhaustion, illness, or grief we cannot know. “She looked as though she was about to topple over and die the next moment,” comments Jöst. To my mind, this is one of Jöst’s most disgusting photographs—far worse than those of the bony corpses—for it shows how the Jews were forced to collude in a system whose aim was to humiliate and kill them. I have looked at this weary, defeated, perhaps crazy woman many times, and yet I never want to see her. What I want to see are images of rebellion, resistance, revenge: to see what Edmund Wilson, in a different context, called “the proud human spirit throwing off degradation and oppression.” Such photographs do exist, and to discover them is to be released, albeit temporarily, from overwhelming waves of shame and bereavement. That is why I felt joy and relief when, looking through the otherwise grim Yad Vashem book, I came upon a picture of sixteen well-fed, smiling young men and women wearing jaunty little caps and cradling guns; they are Jewish partisans from Kovno, posing in the forest from which they based their attacks. This picture felt like a belated rejoinder to those I had seen, as a child, in The Black Book of Polish Jewry; I would, if I could, bask in those partisan photographs—in those smiles and guns—forever. The obvious problem, though, is that such photographs are terribly rare, which is due not to a wartime shortage of film but to a wartime shortage of partisans. 84

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(The Yad Vashem book is almost four hundred pages long, and devotes just twenty to the Jewish resistance.) The Holocaust is not a tale of Jewish triumph, and the suffering it caused was not noble. And this is abundantly evident in the ghetto photographs, entirely regardless of who took them. Isolation, starvation, cold, overcrowding, disease, beatings, humiliation, murder, along with a strangling fear of the future: this is what the ghettos meant; this is what defeated the Jews. It was, certainly, an incomplete defeat, and Jöst’s photographs neglect parts of the story. He could not see the secret schools, the underground religious services, the many moments of love, dignity, solidarity, strength; nor, of course, the preparations for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He was hobbled by his Nazi ideology, his Nazi uniform, and his Nazi power. But cruelty and truth are not opposites. On the contrary: it is precisely Jöst’s ideology, his uniform, and his power that enabled him to document a crucial set of realities; in the case of Jöst’s images, their cruelty is their truth. He shows us a process of physical and spiritual disintegration: the same process the ghetto diaries describe. It is an ugly thing to contemplate, but we do not honor the victims by being too delicate—too respectful—to look. Like Jöst, Joe J. Heydecker was a Nazi soldier. Born in Nuremberg in 1916 to a liberal, Christian family, Heydecker trained as an apprentice photographer in Frankfurt. The Heydeckers left Germany in 1933 not because they were in danger but because they were disgusted: “I can’t carry on living in a country like this,” Heydecker’s father explained to him when the Nazis came to power. Young Joe travelled throughout Europe in the 1930s—and, in particular, met many Jews in Poland—reading, arguing, and breathing air that was “still free.” In 1938, however, he found himself in Vienna as the Nazis marched in and, as a German citizen, was drafted into Hitler’s army, in which he served until the German defeat. For part of the war he was stationed in Warsaw, where he worked as a military photo-laboratory technician in a propaganda unit. Heydecker, too, took pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto, though his motives were different than Jöst’s. Heydecker went into the ghetto several times in the years 1941–44 (on his last trip, in November 1944, there was no ghetto and there were no Jews). He considered his photographs to be 85

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forms of protest if not quite resistance; his images were secretly developed with two fellow soldiers and then “smuggled out,” though it is not clear to where. Heydecker claims that he fervently hoped for a Nazi defeat, something I am inclined to believe: in 1945 he made a radio broadcast to the Germans about what he had seen in the ghetto—it was probably the first German-to-German eyewitness account—and he covered the Nuremberg trials. In 1960 he and his family moved to Brazil, though he didn’t publish his photographs for another four decades—a time lapse, he wrote, that “I find it hard to explain. . . . I simply did not have strength enough to write these words . . . I still feel unable to do so.” Heydecker’s most interesting words don’t concern the ghetto itself— we now know much of what he saw and reported—but the question of who knew what, and when, about the genocide. Heydecker’s wife, Marianne, was also stationed in Warsaw, where she held a clerical job in the Nazi civil administration. Remembering Warsaw’s summer of 1942, he recalled: At this time in Warsaw the gassing of Jews was as openly talked about as the war situation. My wife told me that all the officials of the civilian administration, from the highest ranks down to secretaries, talked about Auschwitz and Treblinka and the liquidation of the Jews without the slightest demur. In the course of a day’s work it just came up and was passed over in the same way as any other ordinary subject.

As for the mass murders on the eastern front, where Heydecker was stationed in 1941: What was now happening in the East was in no way secret; it was, to a greater or lesser degree, general knowledge among troops both at and behind the front. . . . Only a soldier who was deaf and blind could have remained in ignorance. It was talked about in typical army jargon . . . In fact even if it had been the intention of the people at the top to keep the whole thing secret, the very extent of the campaign would have made this impossible . . . People knew.

On his photographic trips into the ghetto, Heydecker, unlike Jöst, was acutely aware of what his power—his German-ness—meant: “I marched 86

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through the streets of the ghetto, a grotesque object, a sort of automaton from another planet . . . The mark of Cain, my uniform, burned on my body.” Many of his photographs look like middle-class portraits, albeit taken on the street instead of in a studio, as if he is trying to dignify, or at least normalize, the ghetto’s inhabitants. It is ironic, then, that Heydecker’s sense of shame muffled him as a photographer and make his pictures inferior to Jöst’s; the distance Heydecker kept was a form of respect, but it resulted in less revealing, and less searing, images. Jöst’s false sense of innocence, though infuriating, enabled him to openly stare: the ghastly debasement of the Jews is vividly, nakedly present in his pictures. He lacked the decency to turn away—which is why, decades later, he can show us so much. Heydecker was a better man, but Jöst brought us better pictures. And yet I wonder: a better man? Is the man who possesses moral knowledge, but refuses to act on it fully, superior to the man who lives in an ethical void? I am not sure of the answer, but Heydecker seems to be. Decades after those trips to the ghetto, he wrote: I am guilty: I stood there and took photographs instead of doing something. Even then I was aware of this terrible dilemma. To ask what I could have done then is a coward’s question. Something. Kill one of the guards with my bayonet. Raise my rifle against an officer. Desert and go over to the other side. Refuse service. Sabotage. Refuse to obey orders. Give my life. Today I feel there is no excuse.

*

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If critics like Janina Struk believe that Nazi-produced photographs should not be widely seen or, like Gertrud Koch, that they cannot be effectively subverted, another group of critics argues that even resistance-made photographs are contaminated. In this view, all images of the Shoah are, in a sense, sacrilegious; in this view, all images betray the victims, even if they were made by the victims. This is both the logical outcome of the rejectionist position and its reductio ad absurdum. And yet these critics raise a larger, vital issue: is there any way to depict the negation of the human that does not trivialize the victims’ experience or inflict “an injustice,” as Adorno charged, on them? 87

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The contours of this debate can be most clearly seen in the controversy over a 2001 exhibit in Paris called “Mémoire des Camps,” and in particular over four photographs, taken by Auschwitz prisoners in 1944, that were included in the show. It was a controversy that, in its very French way, involved philosophers, historians, filmmakers like Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard, journals like Cahiers du Cinema and Les Temps Modernes, and even Holocaust deniers, for whom the absence of gas-chamber photographs proves the absence of gas chambers. Most of the debate—described by one critic as “a violent outburst”—was held within the parameters of traditional leftwing thought; but the vitriolic, scornful attacks on photography were reminiscent of those that the postmodernists had launched decades earlier. One could see, once again, the childish extremism that photographs evoke: the insistence that if they can’t tell us everything, they must tell us nothing, and that if they can’t reveal full truths, they must be lies. Most of the photographs shown in “Mémoire des Camps” were, of necessity, taken either by Allied liberators or by Nazis. But the show also displayed a few clandestine images—they are, for obvious reasons, extraordinarily rare—including the aforementioned quartet of Auschwitz photographs. It was their display, and their defense by the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, that polarized and enraged. Didi-Huberman was accused, as one critic reported, of “voyeurism, pagan idolatry, irresponsible aestheticism, and fetishistic perversion.” What was the context in which these four blurry, volatile images were taken? In the summer of 1944, the crematoria at Auschwitz were running at overcapacity, due to the arrival of over four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews in less than two months. Corpse disposal had become a crisis, one that was solved by burning the bodies of gassed victims out in the open. Two of these photographs show just that: a group of prisoners, who belonged to the Sonderkommandos (“Special Squads”), incinerate a mass of naked bodies. In one such image, an inmate holds out his arms as if to balance himself as he wades through the thick pile of corpses, which he seems to kick; the photograph, which is bordered in black, may have been taken from inside a gas chamber. Another, blurrier photograph shows a group of naked women running through a forest on their way to be gassed. The last image is the least distinct and is wildly tilted, and shows sky and trees. 88

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To take these four photographs required a communal effort and, obviously, a life-risking one. The photographs were planned by a small group of Sonderkommandos who had made contact with the Polish underground and, somehow, obtained a camera; the photographer is thought to have been a Greek Jew named Alex. The undeveloped film of the four images was hidden in a toothpaste tube and sent out of the camp; in September 1944, it reached the Cracow Resistance. The two men—they were Polish political prisoners—who smuggled out the film enclosed a note that read: “Urgent. Send two metal rolls of film for 6x9 as fast as possible. Have possibility of taking [more] photos. . . . Send film roll as fast as you can.” The Sonderkommandos occupied a particularly bestial, particularly unprecedented place within Auschwitz. They were the crews, composed mainly of Jews, who herded the victims—occasionally their own families or neighbors—to the ovens. After death, the Sonderkommandos burned the corpses, though not before violating them in various ways: cutting their hair, taking their clothes, extracting their gold fillings. In return for these services, the Sonderkommandos were given extra food and allowed to live for a few weeks or months. But only a few: fearful of what the Sonderkommandos could reveal, the Nazis routinely murdered the squads, each group burning the bodies of its predecessors as its initiation rite. It is the Sonderkommandos, Primo Levi wrote, who represent “an extreme case of collaboration” and yet dwell in the “gray zone” beyond judgment; it is the Sonderkommandos who embody “National Socialism’s most demonic crime. . . . an attempt to shift onto others—specifically, the victims—the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.” (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sonderkommandos figure prominently in Shoah.) And it is the Sonderkommandos, Levi charged, who were recognized by the SS as “colleagues, by now as inhuman as themselves, . . . bound together by the foul link of imposed complicity.” Under conditions of such debasement, to speak of human capacities like resistance, remembrance, or solidarity seems absurd and impossible. But not completely absurd and impossible. In October 1944, a group of Sonderkommandos destroyed crematorium number 3: the only known instance of organized rebellion at Auschwitz. In addition, some squad members kept, and carefully buried, diaries that documented the infernal 89

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process into which they had been plunged, and that they hoped the sane world—if it survived—would discover and reckon with one day. And the August 1944 group of Sonderkommandos who decided to photograph their death-work had to make elaborate collective preparations to do so, a difficult task given their almost total segregation from other prisoners and the outside world. These four pictures, then, represent a moment when the most defiled of men stepped back into humanity: into decision, into visibility, into a demand that the civilized world see the genocide and account for it. The photographs, as Didi-Huberman writes, were “snatched . . . from a world bent on their impossibility.” They are in themselves an act of revolt and an assertion of the human; they are a refusal of absolute helplessness in the midst of an apparently unstoppable death-machine. In this sense, they tell us far more about the people who made them—about human possibility—than they do about the gas chambers. They are important evidence of Nazi crimes, but in my view the fact that they were made is more significant than what they show. Of course, these four photographs do not document the full reality of Auschwitz, much less explain it (whatever that might mean); these four photographs cannot encompass the totality of the genocide (however that could be). The photographs are flashes—quick, incomplete illuminations—of a larger actuality. They are fleeting, fragmented, maddeningly incomplete; they are pathetically small and weak when measured against the power and the crimes of which they speak. They are what Hannah Arendt, in writing of Auschwitz, called “instants of truth”; but such instants, she added, “are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror.” The critics of the Paris exhibit saw it differently; for them, the Auschwitz photographs were both too strong and too feeble. In their view, these photographs suggested that the unrepresentable could be represented and that that the incomprehensible could be understood: as such the photographs were taboo, heretical, an insult to the dead. These critics further insisted that since the Auschwitz photographs don’t show the genocide’s deadly center—which was, of course, the gassings themselves—they must, perforce, show nothing at all (and, in the event, give solace to the 90

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deniers). And if such photographs show us and teach us nothing of value, to look at them is merely an exploitation of the dead. Thus, charged Elisabeth Pagnoux, to view the photographs is an inherently treacherous act that “distort[s] the reality of Auschwitz, which was an event without a witness”: to look is “to fill the silence” that can never be filled, to “perpetuate” the original crimes, and to “continue to annihilate” the victims. Towering over this debate is Claude Lanzmann; indeed, seminal pieces attacking Didi-Huberman and the Auschwitz photographs appeared in Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre that Lanzmann now edits. Lanzmann’s refusal of archival photographs for his film (though Shoah is, of course, a set of images itself) made perfect sense within the context of our overfamiliarity with certain pictures from the liberated camps. Rather than respond to these well-worn images in well-worn ways, Lanzmann wanted us to think—and to hurt—anew. Furthermore, Shoah focused not on the concentration camps in Germany but on the “pure” extermination camps in Poland—including Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka—of which there are no photographs and virtually no survivors. Lanzmzann has explained how the very emptiness of the extermination camps—camps meant solely to destroy human beings and thereby create a void—forced him to engage “the disappearance of the traces: there was nothing at all, sheer nothingness, and I had make a film on the basis of this nothingness.” Shoah is a film that contains images about absence and words about silence. Shoah was meant to shock and to wound, and it does; it was meant to start a new conversation about the Holocaust, and it did. By the end of its nine and a half hours it attains the kind of bleak, furious power that we associate with the Hebrew prophets. Lanzmann is an utterly relentless prosecutor—toward perpetrators, bystanders, and survivors alike—and the film he made is both a devastating indictment and a searing lament. It is also, of course, not a “naturalistic” oral history but a brilliantly constructed work of art. Lanzmann’s rejection of documentary images is central to Shoah, but he has broadened this specific refusal into a more comprehensive iconophobia. Thus he has condemned what he calls the “absurd cult of the archival image . . . I have always said that archival images are images without 91

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imagination. They petrify thought and kill any power of evocation. It is much more worthwhile to do what I did.” In particular, he has dismissed all Nazi-produced photos as worthless “propaganda images” and has sneered at historians and filmmakers who use them.* In place of the archive, Lanzmann relies on people and their words. In Shoah, he seeks not just to transmit the agony of the survivors but to immerse himself in a kind of co-suffering with them. Perhaps because of this affinity, he never addresses the severe limitations of witness testimony, which he seems to regard as a sort of pure, deep, ultimate truth in contrast to photography’s presumed emptiness. Yet even before Freud, we knew how fragmentary, evasive, unreliable, and full of fantasy memory is—especially memory that is formed, and deformed, by trauma. It is true that those who have survived extremity are privileged, in that they can know certain things that the rest of us can’t; it is equally true that those who have survived extremity are crippled, in that they are unable to know certain things that the rest of us can. Suffering can illuminate, and it can blind; often it does both at once. Lanzmann has said that if a Nazi film that showed the gassing of Jews were to be found (no such film exists), “I think that no one human being would have been able to look at this. . . . I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible.” I too would never watch such a film; I too would find it “not visible.” But that cannot be confused with the right to destroy it. Lanzmann seems unaware—though of course he is not—that the Nazis, also, would have burned such a film: that, in a sense, he would do their work for them. Here, ironically, is where opposites embrace: the humanist loathing of atrocity images colludes with the desire of the perpetrators to erase their crimes. A far less parsimonious attitude toward images was taken by Jorge Semprun, a Spanish writer, Communist, and survivor of Buchenwald. His book * In sharp contrast, Lanzmann’s antagonist Jean-Luc Godard has charged that Shoah “showed nothing at all.” The two filmmakers have been embroiled in a long, unfriendly debate over the image’s ethical relation to the Holocaust. For Godard, cinema’s “original sin” was its failure to witness, and expose, the camps. If for Lanzmann there are too many Holocaust images, for Godard there are too few.

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Literature or Life is less a memoir of the camp than a record of his struggle to understand—and to do something with—“what we had lived through: death experienced right up to its blinding limit.” For Semprun, Buchenwald was the “ultimate reality,” the place “I had never left,” and even, astonishingly, “a sort of homeland.” Simultaneously, though, the camp seemed utterly unreal. Semprun had experienced something he could not assimilate—he had experienced something he could not believe—yet it constituted the very core of his being. Pictures help Semprun know his own experience. Several months after liberation, he is sitting in a movie theater in Locarno when a newsreel showing the liberation of Buchenwald appears onscreen. His remarkable description of how he returns to reality through these images—how they return him to himself—is a fascinating contrast to the iconophobia of Lanzmann and the other rejectionists. “Until that winter’s day,” Semprun recalls, “I’d managed to avoid filmed images of the Nazi camps. I had the ones in my memory.” But at the movies, something unexpected happens: All of a sudden, . . . in the quiet of that movie theater . . . where whispers and murmurs died away into a rigid silence of horror and compassion (and disgust, probably), these intimate images became foreign to me, objectified up on the screen. They also broke free of my personal procedures of memory and censorship. They ceased being my property and my torment, the deadly riches of my life. They were, finally, nothing more than the externalized, radical reality of Evil: its chilling yet searing reflection. . . . In becoming, thanks to the film corps of the Allied armies, a spectator of my own life, a voyeur of my own experience, I felt as if I were escaping the wrenching uncertainties of memory. As if—although this might seem strange at first—the dimension of unreality, the context of fiction inherent in any cinematic image, even the most strictly documentary one, gave the weight of incontestable reality to my inmost memories. On the one hand, of course, they had been taken from me; on the other, their reality was confirmed: I had not imagined Buchenwald.

Lanzmann’s antipathy to photographs reignites the longstanding debate about Adorno’s famous (though later rescinded) dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I have always taken this to mean that 93

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to make art out of the Holocaust is a betrayal of the victims. Yet the debate, in my view, frames the wrong question. Adorno’s proscription may have been morally valid, but it is also impossible. Human beings write poetry, tell stories, draw pictures, take photographs, just as surely as we kill our brothers. We take experience—our own and others’—and, then, create things from it (even in some camps, prisoners made art). It is a triumph, not a betrayal, that the Nazis could not destroy this transformative impulse, even if the results falsify—must falsify—the experience itself. Adorno’s attempt to ban poetry is not synonymous with Lanzmann’s attempt to prohibit photographs, yet the two are vitally connected. Both seek to impose an austerity of expression that has not, can not, and should not succeed. For Adorno and Lanzmann, nothing exists between absolute purity (which, for Lanzmann, means survivor testimony) and despicable kitsch (which, for Lanzmann, means photographs). But the space between those extremes is in fact quite large; within it all art and all representation, including Shoah, dwell. Every work that documents the Holocaust, or even addresses it, is flawed and faulty and woefully incomplete; all representations pale, for obvious reasons, before the reality they seek to depict. But that does mean they are all worthless insults. Sometimes images restore the real—or deepen our understanding of it—as they did for Jorge Semprun. To look is not to desecrate, much less to kill. The rejectionists, then, believe that nothing can be gained from looking at Holocaust photographs, or at least from the vast majority that were taken by the killers. At the other end of the spectrum we find those who endow looking at such images, and the act of looking itself, with an elevated spiritual and moral meaning. One might call these critics “transcendentalists,” for they have faith that we can enter into these photographs—and into the experiences of the victims—and then redeem their suffering, at least symbolically. Theirs is a kind of visual transubstantiation in which the agony of the victims is absorbed by the onlooker, and the burden of pain eased if not lifted. If the rejectionists think that a rigid, sacred distance must be kept between our world and that of the camps, the ghettos, and the killing fields, the transcendentalists don’t recognize much distance at all. 94

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For the transcendentalists, efforts to heal the Holocaust’s unhealable wounds often focus on photographic representations. Consider one oftreproduced photo that has inspired widely divergent responses. It shows the following: a woman, in profile, with a scarf on her head—she seems old, for her shoulders are stooped and her back curved—shuffles down a road. She wears a checked jacket and a loose black skirt, and she carries a bundle of rags under her left arm. Next to her is a tiny child with dark hair, in a coat that is too long. Her hand is held (she looks too young to walk on her own) by a slightly older child—a sister, perhaps?—in a shapeless coat and a scarf wrapped tightly around her head; her leggings are mismatched, and she carries a small white bundle. Behind these three trails a slightly taller girl, shoulders hunched, head covered, legs bare, socks drooping. We do not see the faces of the people in this family—if they are a family—for they are retreating from us and their heads are bowed. But we do see a train track running on the side of the road, and then a few iron poles strung with wires. In the far distance a lone, blurry figure sits on the ground. The photograph seems sad and weary—everyone in it looks bent and defeated—even if we don’t know the circumstances that surround it. When we discover the facts, vague sadness deepens into dread and grief. For the time is late May 1944; the place is Auschwitz-Birkenau; the woman and children are Hungarian Jews in their last moments of life, walking to the gas chambers. The photograph was taken by Nazi photographers, and is part of what is sometimes known as the Lili Jacob or Lili Meier Album.* It is hard to look at this photograph, and hard to look away from it. For Janina Struk, the frequent reproduction of this image—and especially its display, in 1999, at the ruins of the camp itself—calls up a visceral rage. “Consider if you would want your last moments of a degrading and unimaginably cruel death to be flaunted world-wide,” she writes. “Returning their image to Birkenau may be their final humiliation.” (Nevertheless, Struk reproduced this picture in her book.) In Reading the Holocaust, the * The album consists of over two hundred photographs taken by Nazi photographers at Auschwitz that document the process from arrival to selection for death of a group of Hungarian Jews. It was accidentally found in another camp at the end of the war by Lili Jacob, an Auschwitz inmate—who, astonishingly, appears in the pictures along with her murdered family. The complete series of photographs has been reproduced as The Auschwitz Album.

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Australian historian Inga Clendinnen ponders the same image—it adorns her book’s cover—but comes to a different conclusion. “I cannot easily bear to look at that photograph,” she writes. But she is drawn, particularly, to the slightly older girl in the picture: “She is walking resolutely, with a slight air of independence,” Clendinnen surmises; “Girls of that age value independence.” She continues, “Had she lived, she would be an old woman by now. As it is, she is forever my grand-daughter, trudging towards death in shoes too big for her.” And for Avner Shalev of Yad Vashem, the photograph should be seen as “a sign and a symbol of love that strengthens all that is human within us and radiates hope.” There is something peculiar about these reactions, though each has an honorable aim. Struk’s attempt to protect the victims from our prying eyes ignores the fact that the time for protection has long since passed, and that the problem for this bedraggled family was not that they were photographed but that they were killed. It is as if Struk displaces the actual event onto the image of the event, hurling her wrath at the former onto the latter. Clendinnen, on the other hand, wants not just to posthumously protect the victims but to rescue them: in her fantasy, at least, she has adopted one of the girls. Yet the very fact that Clendinnen can fantasize this symbolic salvation is an evasion of how utterly abandoned the people in this picture were. Clendinnen may find her imaginary act of adoption soothing—it may bring her closer to the “full imaginative engagement” with the Holocaust that she seeks—but it elides the fact that in real life, as opposed to picture-life, so pitifully few were rescued. (Gentile “grandparents” eager to save Jewish children were hardly numerous in the years 1933–45; would Clendinnen really have adopted a Jewish child?) The little girl in question is not “forever” Clendinnen’s granddaughter, nor will she ever be: only her ugly death is forever. Finally, Shalev’s attempt to find humanist value in this awful picture seems radically misplaced. Only through the most desperately twisted inversion can an image of innocent people trudging to their deaths be read as a source of inspiration. And so: why look? The problems with doing so are admittedly large. Viewing photographs of the Holocaust—the visual equivalent of “comfortless stories”—cannot save, or even help, the victims. Looking at them can 96

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enmesh—though as I have argued, need not fatally trap—the viewer in the hateful perspective of the perpetrators. There is very little that is lifeaffirming about such photographs; indeed, they can easily inspire a range of emotions from disgust for the victims to a kind of species self-hatred, and they seem to prove Semprun’s observation that “nothing of what is called inhuman . . . is beyond man.” Yet the reasons for looking at these images vastly outweigh the objections of the rejectionists. The Holocaust was designed to be an event without witnesses: to exterminate a people and erase the memory of the crime. The Jews’ agony (and, for that matter, their accomplishments) must remain hidden, their screams forever unheard: hence the obsession with killing every Jew everywhere. Language, history, experience, vision: all obliterated; Arendt would describe this as the “holes of oblivion” that the Nazis sought to create. That is why, no matter how searing, repellent, or soul-crushing these photographs, I feel a small sense of grim satisfaction when I look at them. To see, to acknowledge, to study, to know: we cannot bring back the murdered millions, but we can defeat Hitler’s plan for a kind of cosmic forgetting. The victims can never be recalled to life—which would be the only real justice—but the ways in which they become a part of our collective lives, and of the collective futures that we have yet to make, is an open, recurrent question. It remains to be seen how we use their disastrous history in the creation of our own; it is difficult to imagine that we can do that well without a deeper understanding of their suffering. Photographs—especially portraits, though not only they—demand that we encounter the individual qua individual: precisely what totalitarian ideologies forbid. (What is the yellow star, after all, but the insistence that Jews constitute an undifferentiated mass?) In thinking about the Holocaust, it is not easy to think of six million corpses; but it is even harder, I would argue, to consider the experience of one young girl in droopy socks walking toward death. This does not mean that the six million are unreal: only that they become unreal when we forget the experiences of the individuals who comprised that terrible number. (That is why the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert viewed specificity as an ethical trait: “We must not be wrong / even by a single one,” he insisted.) Photographs remind us that it 97

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is not just the numbers of dead but the process of their destruction that we must try to understand. They invite us to approach the Holocaust not as a historic fact that we know but as a human experience that we don’t. And yet the power of photographs is severely constrained. To look at these photographs—like those taken in Lubyanka prison or at S-21— does not resurrect the victims or redeem their anguish. Nor can our vision transform them into martyrs or endow their deaths with choice or meaning. In fact, we cannot transform the dead into anything at all; once again, we are too late. And we can’t conceive of what the victims went through— as Semprun showed, even the survivors can’t do that—or the reasons they were forced to die. By offering us glimpses of a reality we can neither turn away from nor grasp, photographs teach us that we will never master the past. They teach us about human limits and human failures. Sometimes, though, those limits and those failures lead to giving up— and to a mystique of suffering. In the final chapter of her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag considered a digitally assembled picture by Jeff Wall, a leading Canadian artist. Wall constructed this photograph in 1992 and called it “Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986).” Sontag described Wall’s fantastical image as “the antithesis of a document”—it may well be that she had lost confidence in documents—and praised it as “exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power.” Huge and surreal, Wall’s piece shows thirteen actors dressed as Soviet soldiers. Though “dead” and gruesomely bloody, the men seem to frolic: this is war not as tragedy but as play. “The atmosphere is warm, convivial, fraternal,” Sontag wrote. “Three men are horsing around: one with a huge wound in his belly straddles another, lying prone, who is laughing at a third man, on his knees, who playfully dangles before him a strip of flesh.” She concluded: One could fantasize that the soldiers might turn and talk to us. But no, no one is looking out of the picture. . . . These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? “We”—this “we” is everyone who has

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never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. . . . Can’t understand, can’t imagine.

This is a remarkable statement, and remarkably wrong. Sontag confuses the fact that “we don’t get it,” which is undeniably true, with a presumed indifference on the part of the victims. But far from being “supremely uninterested,” those who have suffered through violent upheavals have much to tell us, and they have gone to extraordinary lengths to do so. Throughout the years of the Nazi extermination they kept illegal diaries and archives in the ghettoes, even as they starved to death; they scrawled names and dates, with stones and in blood, on the walls of Gestapo prisons (as men and women do today in torture chambers throughout the world); they made underground photographs and wrote underground reports and printed underground newspapers for as long as they could, despite the near certainty of torture and death; they smuggled messages and photographs out of the camps, though every hope of survival had been smashed. Even under the most, yes, unimaginable circumstances, they beseeched us to know who they were; to acknowledge—and to stop—the crimes committed against them; to find out how they had lived and died (and how different their lives were from their deaths!). After liberation, this need to communicate did not abate. How to tell it? Primo Levi asked. How to tell it? Jorge Semprun asked. This was a question that caused them great pain; yet they were right to keep asking it, and we are lucky that they did. They understood that civilization’s most basic premise is the forging of continuity between generations. Without that, all we have is black holes. “Meditate that this came about,” Levi commands in a tone of uncharacteristic anger at the start of Survival in Auschwitz. Then he delineates the calamities that will befall those who refuse him. There is no guarantee that such meditation will lead to understanding the past, or that it will avert disaster; Levi knew this full well. Still, it is one of the few hopes for a saner future that we have, so there is no use in bemoaning its frailty. Primo Levi got it right far more than Susan Sontag. It is not that the dead have nothing to tell us, show us, teach us; it is that we have trouble listening, seeing, learning.

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Figure 4.1 Harbin, China, 1966: Li Zhensheng, a young newspaper photographer, documented the madness of the Cultural Revolution’s “struggle sessions,” in which hundreds of thousands were vilified, beaten, and sometimes killed. Here, a provincial Party secretary named Chen Lei is denounced. Though Li originally supported the Cultural Revolution, many of his pictures convey the suffering of the victims.

4 CHINA From Malraux’s Dignity to the Red Guards’ Shame

Li Zhensheng’s name means “like a soaring song your fame will touch the four corners of the world.” Li had the luck, and the misfortune, to become a staff photographer for a local Harbin newspaper in 1963, when he was twenty-three years old; three years later the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which would transform and decimate virtually every institution in China, erupted. Li worked at the paper for eighteen years, albeit with a two-year detour at a reeducation camp: like millions of others, he participated in the Cultural Revolution as an activist, a persecutor, and a victim. As a staff photographer—and a brief if enthusiastic revolutionary—Li shot tens of thousands of photographs exalting the wild political upheaval that shook China for a decade. But he shot thousands of other photographs too: these revealed a darker side of the revolutionary experiment, and Li hid their oilcloth-wrapped negatives—what he called his “‘negative’ negatives”—under the floorboards of his apartment for years. In 1988—by then, the Cultural Revolution had been thoroughly renounced—twenty of these images were exhibited in Beijing; in the 1990s Li, who had become a university professor, began smuggling them to the United States. In 2003, 285 of these photographs, along with detailed captions, historic essays, newspaper reproductions, and Li’s reminiscences, were published in a handsome, distressing English-language book called Red-Color News Soldier, which had been the name of Li’s revolutionary brigade. The visuals of the Cultural Revolution are well known yet extremely 101

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limited. Many people, at least of a certain age, can conjure iconic scenes of fiercely chanting Red Guards marching in unison and shaking their “Little Red Books.” Li shows us such scenes, but he shows us much else too, moving beyond the visual clichés into which the Cultural Revolution has been compressed. In Li’s photographs, the Cultural Revolution is not just a political drama that was performed, en masse, by anonymous millions but a human one that was lived by individuals who were attempting to simultaneously make history and survive it. In particular, he brings us close—startlingly, uniquely so—to the phenomenology of the movement’s victims, and especially to their humiliation, physical wounds, and terror. Though the Cultural Revolution has been widely discredited, it raises political and philosophical issues that are worth more than a cursory look. Its distinguishing and most horrific characteristic—the use of public shaming rituals as a tool of political change and social cohesiveness—is not entirely sui generis, and may have something to tell us about our own desires for purity, our own vulnerabilities to the seductions of conformity, and our own capacities for inflicting humiliation. It tells us something, too, about what happens to a society that loses sight of dignity as an organizing principle, and why revolutionary humanists—epitomized by midcentury writers like André Malraux—placed so much emphasis on this trait. The ugliest aspect of the Cultural Revolution is the one we need to look at most closely; and for this, Li’s photographs offer us something more immediate and visceral than either memoirs or historic accounts can. Or, rather, a glimpse of something. Li’s photographs are revelatory, but they illustrate the limits of photographic insight. They propel the viewer searching for the “why” into history, political theory, memoir, and fiction; they exemplify the ways in which photographs are irreplaceable documents of history, yet cannot be understood on their own. There is one more reason why Li’s photographs fascinate me: I feel personally, if unimportantly, implicated in them. In the West, the Cultural Revolution’s angry verve and rebellious spirit appealed to adolescents of all ages; it appealed to me too. I considered myself a kind of Maoist for several years, which means that, as a high-school student, I would enthuse about the Cultural Revolution to the very few who would listen and, later, 102

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would proudly if cluelessly hang a poster of an avuncular Mao in my college dorm. I could not have told you, at least in any meaningful way, what being a Maoist actually meant (though I’m not sure Jean-Paul Sartre could have, either). Li’s pictures are about shame, and they conjure shame in me, too: shame at what I did not know, or want to know; shame at how easy it is to romanticize the militancy of distant others while ignoring the immense suffering that they experience and cause. *

*

*

The Cultural Revolution, which spanned the years 1966–76, does not elicit mild descriptions either from those who lived through it or from scholars who have studied it. Among leading Western scholars, including some who are sympathetic to the Communist revolution’s original aims, the movement has been called “a frightful catastrophe” and “an immense, violent, and tragic upheaval.” One historian has likened China during the Cultural Revolution to a “lunatic asylum”; the Chinese themselves refer to the period as the “ten bad years of great disaster.” But it was a disaster that is pregnant with questions and paradoxes. The movement was vicious, yet it embodied emancipatory hopes; some participants and scholars claim that it represents China’s freest moment since the founding of the People’s Republic. Many of the movement’s foot soldiers were inspired “by a commitment to radical democracy,” as the scholars Craig Calhoun and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom have written. “There was among many Red Guards a genuinely questioning spirit and an excitement in charting new intellectual and political territory.” To reject the movement in toto is tempting, but perhaps just as foolish as the uncritical embrace that many Western intellectuals offered at the time.* And although the Cultural Revolution failed, it decisively changed the course of modern China’s development. It is impossible to understand contemporary China’s turn toward hypercapitalism, its phenomenal rise as a world power, and its intense fears of democratization without

* That embrace was decidedly unrequited. Mao had no great affection for the New Left, and in 1972 he told Richard Nixon: “I [would have] voted for you during your election. . . . I like rightists.”

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looking at the deep imprint of the Cultural Revolution. (The 1989 democracy movement, which ended in the massacre at Tiananmen Square, was both a rejection of the Cultural Revolution and its offspring; some of the movement’s closest advisors were former Red Guards.) To disown something—especially with the fervor with which the current Chinese leadership has disowned the Cultural Revolution—is not to have escaped its influence. The Cultural Revolution represents the repressed unconscious of present-day China. The movement began in May 1966 when Mao urged young people to smash the four “olds”—customs, habits, culture, and thinking—and to cleanse the Party of class enemies, an infinitely expandable category that would come to include capitalist-roaders, revisionists, bourgeois rightists, ultraleftists, upstart royalists, lackeys, spies, snake monsters, devils, ghosts, ox demons, renegades, traitors, scabs, great careerists, emperor protectors, and black gang elements. Soon China’s schools and universities would close, and millions of Red Guards—split into innumerable groups, heavily armed, and opposed by the equally fanatical “rebel factions”—flooded the streets, and the Red Terror commenced. The movement would veer into increasingly grotesque and uncontrollable directions and bring China to the brink of civil war; rebel factions and Red Guards, some of whom were not yet in their teens, would denounce, hunt, torture, battle, and sometimes kill each other. The Cultural Revolution was meant to create what Mao called “great disorder under heaven,” and it did. The calling card of the Cultural Revolution was the “struggle session” and the rituals of public humiliation, which resulted not only in psychic maiming but, sometimes, in physical injury or death. The accusations could be—in fact, had to be—essentially arbitrary; there were no trials in any recognizable sense. This was rule by the mob, which sometimes consisted of intimate groups of villagers and sometimes of immense, hysterically jeering urban crowds gathered in stadiums; in either case, it would have taken a very brave person to oppose them. The sessions were, in at least one crucial sense, the opposite of the secretive Soviet purge trials, for the Chinese rituals derived their power from their public nature: they were regarded not as crimes to be furtively hidden but as propaganda to be 104

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proudly spread. This was the theater of cruelty, the revolution as spectacle; it is unsurprising, then, that the struggle sessions were photographed. Time and again, Li’s newspaper pictures—often snapped in a hurry amidst violence—bring us close to these orgies of vilification in ways that no other pictures I have ever seen do. Shame is a particularly internal phenomenon, far harder to portray than pain, joy, or hatred. Yet these pictures of hunched, bowed “criminals”—defaced, demeaned, despised—could be about nothing else; they suggest the ways in which the loss of respect can be more devastating, and might fester longer, than bodily harm. (Humiliation is alternately defined as an injury to a person’s sense of autonomy or as a forced exile from the human circle; the struggle sessions accomplished both.) And though Li’s photographs of the struggle sessions become repetitive, they never become less bad. On the contrary: it is the accumulation of these scenes, and the irrefutable enormity of the project they document, that lends his book much of its frightful power. Anyone who romanticized this movement—or considers doing so now—should first spend some time with these hapless, hated enemies of the people as they are publicly reviled. The accused were generally middle-aged party officials who had been denounced as “capitalist-roaders” or “counterrevolutionary revisionists.” Li’s photographs show how they are forced to stand, or to balance for long times on a chair without falling, or to twist in the torturous “airplane position” on public stages. The names of the accused, crossed out with a large X, and a list of their crimes are written on placards that hang from their necks, sometimes by heavy chains; according to Li, these transgressions usually boiled down to “having power, knowledge, or wealth.” Red Guards heap abuse: screaming, pushing, hitting. The surrounding crowds of young spectators do not look joyful—this was not Paris in May ’68—or even mocking, but fiercely serious: their brows are furrowed, their mouths are taut. Sometimes they look furious. The accused often wear elongated dunce caps—festooned with slogans and, weirdly, decorated with confetti—that pull their heads forward and force them to bow. The hats, which look as if they’re constructed from paper, have an oddly childlike quality, as if they’ve been captured from a bizarre birthday party. One photograph, which Li took at a rally in Red 105

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Square, shows a provincial Party official named Ren Zhongyi who is forced to wear a cone-shaped dunce cap as tall as he. The long white cone, which pulls Ren forward, slices harshly, horizontally, through Li’s picture, suggesting how the Cultural Revolution ruptured its victims’ lives. There are many ways to torment a person, and young people are good at figuring them out; as Li put it, “There was no end to the malicious inventiveness of the Red Guards.” Sometimes the transgressors were made to smear smelly ink on their faces so that, as Li subsequently wrote when looking at his photographs, “I could not distinguish between blood, tears, and ink.” Li’s photographs document the specifics: one particularly rough set of eight pictures details the public assault on a young man named Ouyang Xiang, who was guilty of defending his disgraced father. We watch as Red Guards, grabbing Ouyang by his hair and shoulders, stuff a glove into his mouth to prevent him from addressing the crowd. Ouyang’s face contorts; he struggles against the guards; he looks as though he is going to choke. (Several days later he would be pushed out a window to his death, though the official report would claim suicide.) Another set of photographs shows the hazing of a provincial governor named Li Fanwu whose haircut—apparently similar to Mao’s—led to his denunciation. Accompanied by cries of “Shave it into a ghost head!” his hair is roughly chopped off by four determined Red Guards, one a frowning girl with the smooth, pudgy cheeks of a child. Li Fanwu would be criticized over two thousand times. One of Li’s most dramatic photographs shows the manhandling of a Party official named Chen Lei by four Red Guards. The picture is skewed— it was obviously taken in haste—and awkwardly framed; the head of one guard is lopped off. What endows it with power, moral as well as visual, is Li’s angle. He has placed his camera in front of, and exactly level with, Chen’s bowed, twisted, ink-smeared face, suggesting that he shares less with Chen’s tormentors than with their victim. Inadvertently or not, this is a photograph that generates identification with the persecuted rather than the powerful. Li presents other, though hardly more comforting, aspects of the Cultural Revolution too. There was the Mao-mania: we see workers making

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Mao plaques and parade-goers holding a Mao-float; commune members preparing for a Mao-inspired swim; moviegoers cheering wildly each time Mao appears on screen. There was the infantilism—not surprising, perhaps, for a movement that had started as a children’s crusade: a group of disgraced monks holds a banner proclaiming, “To hell with the Buddhist scriptures. They are full of dog farts.” There was the anti-intellectualism, and the Taliban-like smashing of libraries and ancient temples; Li shows us both. (The Cultural Revolution’s assault on learning elicited particular scorn from more traditional Marxists in the West, especially those of an older, Bolshevik-inspired generation, who regarded the Maoists as thugs.) There was the bizarre symbolism: Li photographed a flag-festooned parade of demonstrators holding large Mao portraits, a plaster Mao statue, and glass cases bearing . . . mangos. Li explains that this was an homage to “the seven real mangos given to Mao by a delegation from Pakistan the previous August. . . . The bestowal of mangos came to symbolize Mao’s trust in the workers.” Thus began the mango craze: the fruits were pickled in formaldehyde and placed on altars, and their images reproduced on millions of plates, pots, teapots, and towels. But though the Cultural Revolution was vastly coercive—and, as Li’s photographs show, frequently ludicrous (what can one say about a nation in thrall to mangos?)—there is no doubt that millions of its early adherents were motivated by a genuine belief that they were creating a more just and egalitarian society. Li believed that too, and his pictures show it. One simply cannot fake the sense of solidarity, of joy, of excitement and engagement that infuse many of his images and much of his text. He shows us eager schoolchildren on their way to a “Little Red Book” study session; smiling college students painting their bright, dramatic revolutionary posters; the intensity of a group of peasants as they gather together, straining over each others’ shoulders, to read the latest revolutionary missive from the Central Committee; the passengers—men and women, young and old—on a crowded train to Beijing, fists raised in unison as they chant revolutionary slogans. It is easy to dismiss these photographs as propaganda, but they are not only that. The Cultural Revolution was a vast witch hunt that pitted

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Chinese citizens against each other, but it inspired a luminous belief in the possibilities of the future that may be difficult for many of us to even imagine. (Cultural Revolution memoirs, which are known as the “wounded literature,” attest to this sense of utopian idealism.) That is why, two decades later, a former Red Guard could tell the historian Anne F. Thurston that despite his own sufferings at the hands of the movement, “From the bottom of my heart, I loved those days.” And some historians believe that that the Cultural Revolution—with its relentless criticisms of the Party and, later, the painful self-reckonings its failures imposed—left the Chinese with a deepened capacity for independent thought: the prerequisite, most would agree, for democracy. The Cultural Revolution presents us with a puzzle, one that Li’s photographs hint at but cannot solve. That jealousy, resentment, personal vendettas, and the lust for power were motive forces in the purges is sad but not surprising. But how, one must wonder, could tens of millions of people believe that the struggle sessions—so morally ugly—were the building blocks of justice? How was it, as one leading historian of the period asked with notable understatement, that “so many Chinese . . . behave[d] so unusually” during the Cultural Revolution? For what Li’s many pictures of the humiliation rituals suggest is a kind of mass psychosis in which an immense society became dedicated to the deliberate, energetic infliction of humiliation as a social good. Are punishment and humiliation simply variations on a theme? I would argue that, on the contrary, they are antitheses. Punishment based on the rule of law can be the ally of justice, but cruelty and humiliation cannot. Nonviolent punishment—at least when done right, and directed at the guilty—seeks to reconstruct a moral order that has been disfigured by unjust deeds; humiliation, conversely, attempts to destroy the wrongdoer’s self-worth, create pariahs, and solidify a community on the basis of contempt. Punishment can, at least theoretically, lead to authentic insights about guilt and remorse; humiliation leads only to self-hatred or rage. Humiliation is, always, a form of social death. And while the Cultural Revolution might be seen as a prime example

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of totalitarianism, in some ways it was a throwback to the essentially apolitical ideal of what one leading China scholar called a “virtuocracy.” The movement was less a state-building enterprise than a giant purification ritual that aimed to cleanse the party of what Maoist ideologues called counterrevolutionaries and religious ideologues call heretics. The two are not always far apart. For thousands of years—from the time of the Old Testament through Europe’s bloody wars of religion—the concept of purity was a religious one. What was impure was ungodly, and what was ungodly was dangerous, for it might provoke God’s deadly wrath. It was imperative, therefore, that the ungodly be purged—by any means necessary: the survival of the community depended on this. Nothing that was done to further this aim—including torture, beheadings, burnings at the stake, and mass slaughter—could be viewed as wrong. But if the search for purity was so intimately connected to God’s favor, it should, logically, wither away as political life became modern. Instead, as the historian Barrington Moore Jr. argued, the opposite occurred: the French Revolution secularized the idea of moral purity, transforming it from a religious imperative into a political one. The valorization of intolerance, persecution, cruelty, and mass slaughter as an expression of religious piety turned into the valorization of intolerance, persecution, cruelty, and mass slaughter as an expression of revolutionary virtue. “The French Revolution showed for the first time in history that enormous cruelty can exist without religious monotheism yet with intense concern about moral purity,” Moore wrote. “In monotheism’s place we find the moral justification for slaughter in the concept of revolutionary purity.” The obsession with hermeneutical correctness was replaced by the obsession with political correctness, but the murderous loathing of deviators remained. The heretic became the counterrevolutionary; the need to eliminate human pollutants persisted as before. This fearsome zest for purity is visible in many aspects of the Cultural Revolution. It is there in the mad need to dictate every detail of private life, regardless of how intimate (Li shows a beaming newlywed couple who were chastised for making love under the portrait of Mao they had hung in

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their bedroom). It is there in the fanatical search for doctrinal correctness; in the wildly venomous language;* in the untiring quest for vengeance; in the childish belief in perfection; in the peculiar combination of aggression and abjection; in the equation of tolerance with weakness. Most of all, it is there in the self-righteous zeal with which the Cultural Revolutionists pulverized those whom they perceived as transgressors, which is to say it is there in the human relations—the lifeblood of any revolution—that the movement fostered. The lust to degrade others, which would ordinarily be regarded as a form of pathology, became the noblest of Communist traits. And this is a bitter irony. For the Chinese Revolution, in its early years, was viewed as a project of moral reclamation that was inextricably linked to the concept of dignity. Its aims were political and economic, but they were ethical and existential, too. Nobody articulated this vision more than André Malraux, who set his first novel, The Conquerors, and then his masterpiece, Man’s Fate, in the China of revolutionary ferment. The Conquerors, published in 1928, takes place during the Cantonese general strike of 1925; Man’s Fate, which appeared five years later, is set during the 1927 insurrection in Shanghai. But Malraux’s books are not documentary accounts of the Chinese Revolution or even historic novels in the typical sense. Indeed, despite the romantic notions that Malraux encouraged during his lifetime, subsequent biographers have shown that he could not have witnessed the events he wrote about, nor did he work, as has sometimes been suggested, as a Communist agent in China. Malraux once described Man’s Fate as “reportage”; in fact, as one biographer observed, he “never wrote a book more based on imagination.” These China-based novels, and especially Man’s Fate, engage explicitly political, topical themes, such as the relationship between the individual and the Party and the morality, if any, of terrorism and torture. But Man’s Fate is less a political argument than a work of the philosophic imagination in which Malraux delves into the nature of solitude, suffering, and

* A typical missive from one Red Guard faction to another began: “To the fucking bastards of the Beijing University Middle School. . . . you crazy donkey-heads and sons of bitches had better watch out!”

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solidarity, and the tragically paradoxical ways in which they define the human condition. Still, it was not by chance that Malraux chose to address these large themes within the context of China: even in the 1920s he realized that its revolution would be of world-historic import. And it was not by chance that he placed the attainment of dignity at the very center of the revolutionary project. Dignity—the sober, unshakable knowledge of self-worth and the equally unshakable recognition of it in others—is the theme that Malraux returns to again and again as the bedrock of revolutionary ethics. The hero of Man’s Fate is Kyo Gisors, who is an intellectual and a Communist. For Kyo, the revolution’s aim is to end poverty and exploitation; the movement’s ranks will, naturally, be filled by “those of the spinning-mills, those who had worked sixteen hours a day since childhood, the people of ulcers, of scoliosis, of famine.” But far more than economic justice is demanded: Malraux writes that Kyo’s “life had a meaning, and he knew what it was: to give to each of these men . . . the sense of his own dignity.” For Kyo, as for Malraux, a revolutionary movement that was worth its price in sacrifice and blood had to affirm each man’s singular value as a person, not just his economic power as a worker. For Malraux, a perception of one’s own dignity leads to an awareness of others’ pain: dignity is the road to empathy, and vice versa. But Malraux knows that empathy is not necessarily a “natural” attribute—even, or perhaps especially, for those who are victims themselves. Suffering can separate men as well as bind them: this is the real subject of Man’s Fate. In a seminal scene, Kyo, now imprisoned, is tormented by listening to a guard’s whipping of an elderly, crazed man in a neighboring cell. Yet the horror of this scene lies not in the guard’s violence but in the reaction of the other prisoners, who laugh heartily and cheer on the beating. “That men could stand by and watch the flogging of a harmless lunatic,” Kyo thinks, “and approve such torture, called forth in him . . . an all-powerful horror even before the mind had appraised it.” In Malraux’s scheme, the infliction of shame is associated with capitalism—Ferral, the rich industrialist, likes to humiliate his mistresses—while the capacity for concerned identification is a revolutionary trait. Thus, even the character Ch’en—a Communist terrorist who opens Man’s Fate with a merciless act 111

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of murder—feels compelled to aid a man who is tied up and hideously wounded, despite the fact that they are ideological enemies: “The feeling he experienced was much stronger than pity: he himself was that man bound hand and foot.” What is truly “intolerable,” Ch’en discovers, is “the sight of . . . human powerlessness in suffering.” Yet Malraux is cognizant of how fragile empathy and dignity are, of how easily—terribly easily—men can be broken, and of how permanently brotherhood is then foreclosed. König, the sadistic chief of police in Man’s Fate, spits out the word “dignity” with hatred. His own dignity, he avows, resides in hurting others: only then is he a man. Not surprisingly, it turns out that König, too, is on overly intimate terms with humiliation. In Russia, where he served in the White Army, he was captured and tortured by Bolshevik soldiers: “They drove a nail into each shoulder,” he recounts. “Long as a finger. Listen carefully. . . . I wept like a woman, like a calf. . . . I wept before them. You understand, don’t you?” Malraux understands. With a terrible prescience—he was writing, after all, before the twentieth century’s worst events—he predicts that the “wrecks from the civil wars of China and Siberia” will teach us how “a deep humiliation calls for a violent negation of the world.” Malraux knew that the 1920s and early thirties were not Europe’s peaceful decades but its nervous prelude to another war. Man’s Fate was hailed as a work of genius upon publication, and the judgment, though hasty, was right. The key to its power is Malraux’s ability to endow all his characters (or at least all his male characters)—foreign adventurers, Russian revolutionaries, French capitalists, Chinese terrorists, policemen, scholars, fathers, sons, husbands, comrades, enemies, idealists, and opportunists—with a complex, often ambiguous humanity, and his insistence that neither the good people nor the bad will escape the existential fate of defeat, loneliness, and death. Precisely because of this finitude, Malraux had the greatest respect for human imperfection and spontaneity—for human freedom—which is our one great gift in the face of death. Even in the most oppressive circumstances, he insisted, that spontaneity cannot be entirely crushed. This is most clearly shown in an unbearably poignant scene in which Katov, a Russian revolutionary now working in China, recalls a White massacre 112

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during the Russian Revolution. Captured Bolshevik soldiers on the Lithuanian front have been ordered to dig a pit for their mass grave; Malraux describes the scene. It is one of the most wrenching passages in modern fiction, though embedded within it is a seed of hope: In spite of death, the men were hurrying to get warm. Several had begun to sneeze. . . . Behind them, beyond their comrades, women, children and old men from the village were herded, scarcely clad, wrapped in blankets, mobilized to witness the example. Many were turning their heads, as though they were trying not to look, but they were fascinated by horror. . . . “Take off your trousers!” The wounds appeared, one by one, bandaged with rags: the machine-guns had fired low and almost all were wounded in the legs. Many folded their trousers . . . They formed a line again, on the edge of the pit this time, facing the machine-guns, pale on the snow: flesh and shirts. Bitten by the cold, they were now sneezing uncontrollably, one after the other, and those sneezes were so intensely human, in that dawn of execution, that the machine-gunners, instead of firing, waited—waited for life to become less indiscreet. At last they decided to fire. The following evening the Reds recaptured the village: seventeen of the victims who were still alive— among them Katov—were saved. Those pale shadows on the greenish snow at dawn, transparent, shaken by convulsive sneezes in the face of the machine-guns, were here in this rain, in this Chinese night.

It is those “intensely human” sneezes—those uncontrollable, unpredictable expressions of vitality that Walter Benjamin had described as “the tiny spark of contingency”—that totalitarian movements seek to deny. And it is those moments that characterize the best of Li’s pictures. *

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From Li’s photographs: • A sneeze: A peasant exhibits a Mao portrait to his comrades; the year is 1966. They gather around, smiling enthusiastically as they peer intently at the Great Helmsman’s plump visage. But wait: one young boy, apparently more fascinated by the presence of the live photographer than of the dead image, whirls around to face Li’s camera. It’s not the revolution 113

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that interests him, but this intriguing stranger with a camera. The boy is caught in the decisive moment, his mouth open, as if about to tell Li that . . . but alas, we’ll never know what. • A sneeze: Amidst a 1966 demonstration in Tiananmen Square, a teenage Red Guard, Shi Shouyun, records in her “Little Red Book” the exact time at which Mao’s motorcade passed her. One can disdain the cult of personality, but one cannot dismiss the look of radiant delight on her friends’ faces as they cluster around her. (Maoism, at least in this relatively benign moment, might be seen as the Chinese version of Beatlemania.) One grinning, pigtailed, slightly bucktoothed girl leans shyly toward Shi, trying to catch her newly important friend’s eye. But Shi earnestly continues writing, eager to record what, in all likelihood, was the most important moment of her young life. • A very bad sneeze: Seven men and one woman—counterrevolutionaries and common criminals—are thrown onto a flatbed truck and paraded through Harbin. The criminals include an adulterous couple who conspired to kill the woman’s husband. Among the counterrevolutionaries are two factory workers, Wu Bingyan and Wang Yongzeng, who had published a flyer called “Looking Northward,” which was interpreted as a veiled homage to the hated Soviet Union. Li tells us that Wu, upon hearing his death sentence, “looked into the sky and murmured, ‘This world is too dark.’” Li’s pictures of this execution saga are ugly, gritty, and decidedly unheroic, and convey the pitilessness of the event. In an early photograph in this sequence, children on the street stare and point at the condemned; in other images, huge crowds line the streets to watch the procession of the doomed. The prisoners are driven to a bleak field adjoining a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, where we see Wu and Wang up close: Wu’s eyes are clenched shut, his face contorted in pain. The condemned, all bearing their placards of shame, are lined up; behind them is the crowd that has flocked to the execution. The prisoners are made to kneel, hands tied behind their backs; just before death, in a 114

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final act of gratuitous cruelty, a guard tries to separate the lovers. Then the firing squad gets to work. Li stations himself first in front of the prisoners, and then behind the firing line; in his last image, the bound corpses lie facedown in the dirt. “No one asked me to take close-ups of the bodies, but that’s what I did,” Li recounts. “I had to get very close, so close I could smell the fishy smell of blood and brains.” Li supported the Cultural Revolution at this time, but there is no hint of praise in these grim pictures. (For months afterward, he writes, he felt like vomiting.) Even today he speaks quietly to those executed prisoners, begging their souls not to haunt him. Today, China is an economic and political powerhouse that stirs admiration, resentment, and fear in the West. It may be hard to remember that, at the time of the Cultural Revolution, it was one of the world’s most isolated and impoverished countries: barred from the United Nations, embargoed by the United States, and fighting a bitter cold war with both superpowers. (Only in China could revolutionary banners have simultaneously declared, “Down with Johnson!” and “Down with Brezhnev and Kosygin!”) It is no surprise that the immensity of China’s poverty and its social problems— of a scale and kind rivaled only, perhaps, by Russia and India—have inspired the most extreme solutions, both in Malraux’s time and in Li’s. Indeed for decades, if not centuries, China’s immiseration had awed and disgusted outsiders, even sympathetic ones. Here is the horrorstruck, guilt-ridden narrator of Malraux’s The Conquerors: Nothing in Europe can even suggest the misery of these masses, the misery of animals ravaged by some universal mange, gazing dimly out of dull, vacant eyes empty of appeal or even hate. At the sight of them a rude, equally animal resentment rises in me, compounded of shame, fear, and ignoble joy not to be one of them. Pity wells only when I’m out of sight of that emaciation, those mandrake’s limbs, tatters, scabs big as a hand on that greenish skin, and those eyes already glassy and vague, scarcely human—when they aren’t shut.

Fiction, perhaps. But Martha Gellhorn, who reported from China in 1941 during its war with Japan, had similar thoughts. She wrote: 115

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I felt that it was pure doom to be Chinese; no worse luck could befall a human being than to be born and live there . . . I pitied them all, I saw no tolerable future for them, and I longed to escape away from . . . the age-old misery, filth, hopelessness.

China’s poverty is not Li’s subject, yet it is impossible to view his photographs without repeatedly confronting the country’s startling underdevelopment. The so-called rich peasants forced to grovel before the crowds would be considered impoverished anywhere else, bundled in their shapeless tattered jackets, dirty wrinkled pants, and work boots. In a rare still life, Li displays the evidence against a man accused of “hoarding riches”: three watches, one apparently bandless; two brooches; three fake-leather handbags. A “landlord mansion” has a dirt floor, an unfinished ceiling, and a single naked lightbulb. The photographs of farm labor are daunting, as peasants work the sometimes arid, sometimes frozen, always bleak land by hand—this in the mid-1960s!; in one particularly dismal photograph, a pregnant woman lugs frozen soil. And while life in China’s cities was certainly better than in the countryside, it would have been unrecognizable to urban dwellers in the West and, undoubtedly, in much of the Soviet bloc as well. Here is Li almost off-handedly describing his apartment, whose former owner had been denounced for lavishness: “There was no heat or gas or sewage system, and everyone shared a single makeshift toilet with wooden walls and a pit in the ground.” Li’s book reveals, perhaps inadvertently, why China has been so beguiled by fantasies of immediate modernization, of technological magic, of great leaps forward. A revolution must be judged in light of its transformative promises; and in light, too, of the suffering it creates in its attempts to end suffering. But it is easy—too easy—to concentrate only on a revolution’s sins and forget the great pain out of which it developed. Revolutions are harsh, but they don’t grow in kind soil; revolutions are shocking, but so are the conditions that prompt them. This is as true, if not truer, of China as elsewhere, and is illustrated by the pictures of a still-unknown American photographer named Jack Birns. Like Li, his timing was good: Birns found himself in prerevolutionary China in the last, convulsive years of the Nationalist-Communist civil war. 116

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And like Li, Birns was young and ambitious. After World War II he worked as a freelancer for Life; in 1947 the magazine sent him to China, unfazed by his lack of experience and the fact that he spoke no Chinese. “I was hungry, and I worked hard,” Birns recalls of this period. “What drove us was the prospect of an exclusive story, a ‘scoop’ that beat all media competition in the area and, even better, beat the other Life staffers jostling for space in the magazine. . . . I was a rookie, and this was my big chance.” He was twenty-eight. Birns’s negatives, like Li’s, lay fallow for decades—in Birns’s case for half a century, which is a long time for a news photographer. This is in part because his pictures, with their depictions of wrenching poverty and Nationalist violence, failed to please Life publisher Henry Luce, who was a fervent anti-Communist and supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, and in part because Birns’s editors didn’t regard the daily life of millions of ordinary Chinese people as worthy of much interest. Birns is pretty sanguine, if not entirely happy, about Life’s repeated rejections of his pictures: Life editors made no comment in turning down my stories. . . . but these everyday scenes were simply not considered newsworthy. I was irked that my photographs weren’t published, but the view from Rockefeller Center was different from my view in Shanghai. I figured it was their magazine. I got to take the pictures, and they got to choose.

In 2003, a book of Birns’s photographs was published under the title Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution. Shanghai was China’s most cosmopolitan city and among its most militant: the workers’ uprising of Man’s Fate is set there, and the city would become a center of “ultraleftism” during the Cultural Revolution. In photographs as busy as the city they depict, Birns conveys Shanghai’s vibrant energy: the bustling streets clogged with bicycle riders, Western cars, pedicabs, traders, beggars, and pedestrians; the boastful billboards advertising cigarettes and soap (but not, yet, revolution); the vigorous mix—or is it clash?—of Chinese and Western cultures. In documenting the cultural dislocations, the political violence, and the staggering poverty that preceded the 1949 117

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revolution, Birns’s pictures serve as an invaluable prelude to Li’s and as a moving postscript to Man’s Fate. One needn’t have been a Marxist—and Birns certainly wasn’t—to be struck by the vast economic inequalities in prerevolutionary China; in fact, the juxtapositions were so egregious that they could result in visual clichés. Some of Birns’s pictures are almost too easy: a well-dressed Western woman walks her little dog as a Chinese boy in rags follows her; a Chinese woman in a fur coat strolls past a billboard of Lana Turner; a beggar runs alongside a pedicab whose riders ignore her. But other images are more singular and illuminating. In one sequence, which seems like something about which Dickens would have written, Birns shows us the fate of the socalled cotton thieves. First, shot from above, we see a crowd of women and children run after a truck laden with cotton: they are desperate to snatch a few stray tufts, which might earn them a pittance. Then Birns is on the ground, photographing a policeman as he beats one of the thieves, a stout middle-aged woman who sits on the sidewalk as she wards off his blows. In the last picture, another arrested thief and her daughter are led away by a pudgy policeman. The woman’s face is impassive, gaunt, and dark; she looks stained almost brown by the sun. The daughter’s face is filled with fear, and her toes poke through her ragged slippers: Barthes’s punctum in its most pathetic guise. Mother and daughter are tied together, like captured animals, with a rope. As Mao’s army began to surround the city, the Communists organized a series of strikes; Birns’s focus on this intensifying class warfare could not have endeared him to Luce. In one photograph, three striking cotton-mill workers sit in a police van, each holding a towel to his bloodied head. In a nighttime picture with an inky black background, we see a textile-mill worker with a neatly curled hairdo. She stands, arms raised, as two policemen frisk her; both the policemen and the striker have chalk-white hands. Then we notice the raised, white hands of her fellow strikers behind her: eerily disembodied, they evoke a surrealist dream. Even the dancehall hostesses were on strike: Birns caught a jostling, angry crowd of them, white banners held aloft, as they storm a municipal agency to protest rising license fees. Daily life was not always grim, at least for some. We are shown an out118

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door housewares shop manned by a smiling couple and their grinning son; its magical mélange of wooden brushes, twine, and who-knows-what— some objects stored behind glass cases, others cascading from the ceiling—reminds us of the beauty and ingenuity of prosaic things. Birns photographed a courtly, elderly entrepreneur, sporting round wire glasses and a wispy grey beard, who stands before his photography studio, and a sidewalk vendor of snakes and patent medicines whose prospective customers eye him with deep suspicion. We see the bar girls with their callow, grinning American customers; one clasps his “date” on the buttock. In another picture, a Chinese hostess with dark painted eyebrows calmly sits at a table as she plays solitaire (we can see she has an ace of diamonds and one of spades) and puffs on a dangling cigarette. The approaching war, the caption tells us, was no good for business. But much of the everyday was awful. Birns photographed a man with a round hat who casually pulls something from his bicycle cart as he smokes a cigarette. The something is an elongated, emaciated child’s corpse—its ribs painfully visible, its limp head flopped back—that he is delivering to a morgue. Rag-covered lumps line a street; they are homeless people. An ancient, stunted woman, her head covered with a black scarf, sits on the pavement of an outdoor train station in Pukou. She is bent from the waist and sweeps the platform with a straw brush—searching, Birns tells us, for “grains of rice or bits of coal.” Behind her, the expansive sweep of the platform and the tracks leading somewhere seem to mock the open future that will never be hers. Another photograph shows a dismal shantytown of thatch-covered huts; it looks about to topple. And then, a sneeze: in the midst of this slum a somehow-elegant woman wearing a long, quilted black coat stands before an immaculately white shirt that proudly hangs from her clothesline; there is a hint of a smile on her face. Birns’s photographs documenting the civil war’s brutality—photographs that Americans did not see at the time—can now be read as direct precursors of Li’s; in some cases the iconography is almost identical. In a series dated May 1949, Birns shows us flatbeds of prisoners—black marketeers and accused Communists—paraded through the streets, which are lined with crowds. Then, up close, we see one of the arrested Communists, surrounded by a half dozen spiffily uniformed policemen in bright 119

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white helmets. In what might be a foretelling of the Cultural Revolution, the prisoner’s hands are tied behind him and lashed to a tall white paddle, which is illustrated with black letters that elucidate his crimes. In the next photograph, he is shot in the head—the weapon of choice, Birns tells us, was a Colt automatic; the force of the bullet makes his hair whiz upward. The following photograph shows the execution of a second Communist, this time by a rifle; Birns was close enough to catch the grimace on his face at the moment the bullet hit. In the foreground, a policeman bends over the bloody-faced corpse of the first man; he aims his pistol downward, though there’s nothing left to shoot. Birns photographed an even grislier (also unpublished) series in February 1948 in Songjiang. He shows about a dozen executed Communist guerrillas, their corpses trussed and disemboweled, that have been thrown on the edge of a riverbank; they look like garbage the water has washed up. This is followed by a picture of a uniformed Nationalist soldier dangling a severed head on a string—the head, we learn, of the Communist cell’s leader; in the distance, wild dogs wait to attack the dead bodies. In the next photograph the head has been mounted on a brick wall: a warning, one presumes, to the villagers. In front of the wall, the leader’s blood-soaked corpse lies in a heap on the ground (he is carelessly covered with a rag where his head would have been); a small crowd, described as “sullen,” has been gathered for a viewing. Like Li, Birns was sickened by such scenes: “I felt not just anger and revulsion but also nausea,” he wrote. It is the first image in this series that I found most haunting, though it contains no overt violence. A group of six Communist partisans, after their capture and before what they surely know will be their deaths, stare out at us, the uncondemned. (In the background, their comrades surround them.) They seem comfortable, even casual, with each other. One prisoner crouches, one sits cross-legged, four stand; one man, his pants rolled up to reveal a blasted knee, drapes his arm around a comrade. The men are dressed in shabby, quilted jackets, and are bareheaded and barefoot. Some hug themselves: they must be cold, or afraid, or both. Their faces are broad and flat and bony, but their cheeks seem to sag. They seem stunned, yet not surprised, by their helplessness and defeat; they ask for nothing and expect even less. Here, truly, are Kyo Gisors’s people, the men of slave 120

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Figure 4.2 Songjiang, China, 1948: These Communist prisoners were photographed by Time magazine’s Jack Birns before their execution by Nationalist forces—though the magazine, which was staunchly anti-Communist, never published the picture. These are the wretched men of slave labor, starvation, and disease about whom André Malraux wrote in Man’s Fate, his 1933 novel about the Chinese Revolution. Photo: Jack Birns/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

labor, disease, and famine; here is the solidarity of the oppressed, whose sufferings the revolution was meant to redeem. This bereft image should adorn the cover of Man’s Fate. Birns’s most unsettling photograph is not at all bloody. In a double spread, we see fifteen women—they range from teens to the middle aged—standing in an outdoor courtyard; behind them is a brick wall 121

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painted with white letters. The women are arranged in five straight lines of three, suggesting a kind of macabre chorus line. Many are of the same height; all are bareheaded, and each sports the same haircut, chopped off bluntly at the ears. Each wears a thick, quilted, double-breasted coat, pants, and work boots; a few have mittens. The women stand at attention: arms at their sides, legs straight. What in the world has brought them together; what kind of “work” do they do? In the foreground of the frame stands a uniformed soldier wearing glasses and a fur-lined hat; he surveys his charges with a slight, creepy smile (he seems to be looking at a girl in the front row, who shyly grins as she looks down at the ground). This is an ominous photograph, from the militaristic regimentation of the women’s formation, to the severity and uniformity of their haircuts, to the hurt, morose expressions on most of their faces: I felt a pang of fear as soon as I saw it. Birns’s caption doesn’t tell much, yet enough to justify my dread: “A Nationalist officer guards women prisoners said to be ‘comfort girls’ used by the Communists. Mukden, January 1948.” To look at this photograph is an exercise in anxiety: the image becomes more chilling the longer one stares. Birns’s book ends with a photograph of a family in flight from Shanghai one month before the Communists captured the city. A mother and her three young children sit aboard a cart; Birns has photographed them from behind. They are arranged in a pyramid, with the mother on top and the children below her. Their possessions, including rolls of bedding, a cord of firewood, a basket, an upside-down chair, and a wooden desk, tumble crazily in all directions; the precipitous balance of their things suggests the radical uncertainty of their lives. The cart is pushed by a man whose face we cannot see. But we do see the faces of this family: they look at Birns, at us, at what they are leaving, rather than forward to the future. The pretty, frowning, worried young mother looks like a refugee Madonna. She sits cross-legged and clutches a pile of blankets as if they will somehow protect her. The children—two little girls and a boy—have turned around to face the camera; they would have been called adorable in another time and place. Their clothes are torn, but there is nothing abject about them; they look alert and serious and not afraid. The oldest girl, who seems to be about six, wears pigtails and a ragged rucksack dress; 122

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she stares intently at us, her eyebrows slightly raised. She and her siblings would be ready—too ready?—for the Cultural Revolution when it came. The Cultural Revolution shows what happens when ideology runs wild: especially when ideology—and weapons—are placed in the hands of very young people. In the next chapter we look at a more dangerous opposite: what happens when violence—acted out, again, by very young people—is unmoored from ideology, ideas, and a vision of political change?

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Figure 5.1 Murray Town Amputee Camp, Sierra Leone, 2000: Memuna Mansarah and her father were photographed by Candace Scharsu in a squalid camp in Freetown. Thousands of Sierra Leoneans of all ages were deliberately mutilated, often by child soldiers, during the country’s eleven-year civil war. Photo © Candace Scharsu.

5 SIERRA LEONE Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity

Vanity Fair magazine is known to its readers—and even nonreaders—for its star-struck articles about celebrities and Annie Leibovitz’s star-struck photographs of them. But it publishes other kinds of articles, and other kinds of photographs too. In its issue of August 2000, the magazine presented a lengthy piece by Sebastian Junger called “The Terror of Sierra Leone,” which brought us news from the frontline of a notoriously savage civil war. The editors promised to present “new evidence of the coldblooded calculation that fuels the rebels’ insanity,” a claim whose sensationalism made me bristle but whose accuracy I could not dispute. The accompanying photographs were taken by Teun Voeten, a Dutch photojournalist who had first travelled to Sierra Leone in 1998 and had previously covered the wars in Yugoslavia. One of Voeten’s pictures—a full-page portrait—shows a girl who, the caption told us, is named Memuna Mansarah. She was then three years old and was living in a refugee camp in Freetown. Memuna has plump cheeks, short fuzzy hair, and large, lively black eyes. She wears a clean, frilly, sleeveless white dress that contrasts sharply, and quite beautifully, with her deep-black skin; her left ear sports a shiny little earring. Memuna clutches a large piece of soft bread in her tiny left hand with its tiny, perfect fingernails. Her right arm has been hacked off just above the elbow by her compatriots in the so-called Revolutionary United Front (RUF). What should have been her plump, smooth arm is now a short, shocking stump. Memuna’s expression is not entirely easy to discern. Sometimes I think 125

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she is almost smiling, as if, rather than being amused, she is considering being amused. Sometimes, despite her undeniable charm, she looks old beyond her years, as if she possesses a certain knowledge that she might offer to us but that we may not want to have. At other times I have thought her expression is closer to reproach: surely, she seems to say, those of you who have created this world must know better than this. Memuna no doubt has a story, and I hope she will be able to tell it one day; but even without knowing what it is, Voeten’s harrowing photograph is a document of the inexcusable. There is no possible political cause, no possible set of circumstances, and no possible series of events that could justify the violence that has been visited upon Memuna, and with which she will be forced to live for the rest of her life. Memuna’s forever-mutilated body is her J’accuse. I have looked at Memuna’s photograph many times, thought about it, described it to friends, and now I am writing about it; but I am not at all sure how to do these things, much less how to do them right. My thoughts and feelings about this photograph have changed in various ways over time, but the more that happens, the more an underlying desolation—my helplessness before Memuna—becomes ever harder to escape. In a chapter of her book Ordinary Vices—a chapter called “Putting Cruelty First”— the political philosopher Judith Shklar explicates some of the problems this photograph presents for me: Who indeed knows how best to think about victims? Since anyone can become a victim, they are merely a fair sample of all mankind. Victimhood happens to us: it is not a quality. . . . Are we all victims of our circumstances? Can we all be divided into victims and victimizers at any moment? And may we not all change parts in an eternal drama of mutual cruelty?

Such questions extend beyond the victims themselves and challenge our deepest principles. As Shklar observes, “Every question about responsibility, history, personal independence, and public freedom and every mental disposition haunts us when we begin to think about victims. That has become especially so thanks to the great massacres of our age.”

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Yet in certain ways we evade rather than answer Shklar’s questions by looking at Memuna, because Memuna is a three-year-old child and therefore as close to pure victimhood as anyone on earth. Children present us, or at least are supposed to present us, with an absolute demand for protection, which is why political groups that murder children—separatists in Chechnya, suicide bombers in Iraq, the Taliban—meet with condemnation by a wide variety of people who otherwise agree on little else. Memuna is a victim of circumstance but she is no victimizer, and the drama of cruelty in which she finds herself is not at all mutual. That is why her photograph is not just painful but perplexing, and why photographs of violated children are in some ways the easiest, and in others the most difficult, images of suffering to contemplate. When I first saw Memuna’s photograph, I felt shocked, revolted, and angry. (I feel those things still.) The shock and the revulsion were almost physical responses, but the anger was more complicated and unfolded in stages. It was directed, first, at the faux-revolutionaries who had crippled Memuna, and who I knew had done the same to thousands of others. But I was angry also at Teun Voeten, and at Sebastian Junger, and at the editors of Vanity Fair: for my rage against Memuna’s tormentors turned into pity for her, and my pity made me feel manipulated and trapped. What could I do with this pity, which felt so predictable and so useless? And then my dislike of my pity—which was now, alas, self-pity—became the focus of my reaction to this photograph; Memuna herself began to recede. It was only later that I realized I was acting out, almost precisely, John Berger’s claim that when looking at an image of political violence, the viewer’s “sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war.” Though I doubted this argument when applied to images of the Vietnam War (these doubts are discussed in chapter 1), it makes much more sense to me here. Berger urged the viewers of violent photographs to confront their own lack of political freedom rather than the suffering of others; this would lead, he thought or at least hoped, to the making of a socialist revolution in the developed world. But though Berger’s observation is astute in the

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case of Memuna, I am not so sure about his political prescription (a socialist revival doesn’t seem imminent). And so when looking at Memuna, I wonder: is there any place—any useful place—to situate oneself between pity and revolution? Pity has a bad reputation among moral philosophers and moral thinkers. Shklar described pity as “often mean-spirited.” Hannah Arendt posited that Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor sought to rob mankind of freedom out of pity, not malice. The philosopher and human-rights activist Pascal Bruckner has argued that, when it comes to the third world, pity is the flip side of exploitation: “There is sadism in pity and an ostentatious pleasure is derived from the pain of others. . . . Pity becomes a form of hatred when it is the only basis for the image we have of the far-off ‘other.’” Primo Levi knew that pity and kindness are worlds apart; thus he observed of the guards at Auschwitz: “Pity, being a primary and instinctive sentiment, grows quite well if ably cultivated, particularly in the primitive minds of the brutes who command us.” Most of us have learned of pity’s severe shortcomings from our own, more mundane experiences. Anyone who has been the object of pity knows how it breeds resentment, for pity creates a top-down relation in which one person’s power is predicated on another’s weakness; this unequal relationship then presents itself in the maddening guise of generous virtue. Precisely by sustaining the distance between the privileged and the needy, and by dividing people into subjects and objects, pity can too easily become a form of cruelty rather than its foe. But the writers who assailed pity assumed that its alternative was something other than pitilessness, or apathy, or the refusal of another’s pain. Against pity Arendt posed compassion, which seeks to bridge rather than maintain divisions. Most of us know—based, again, on the intimate experiences of our lives—how compassion is both more encompassing and more specific than pity, and how it seeks to create an I-thou relation rather than a hierarchical one. Compassion does not suggest that our experiences or our situations are absolutely equal, but it acknowledges the possibility of a shared human condition. Arendt called compassion a kind of “co-suffering.” But she added, somewhat startlingly, that compassion “remains, politically speaking, ir128

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relevant.” For Arendt, the realm of the political was the realm of reasoned debate, disputation, and rational judgment, whereas compassion was intuitive, emotional, inarguable. It is a sign of the great distance between Arendt’s time and ours that compassion—whose objective form is humanitarian action—has become not only politically relevant but politically central. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, questions of humanitarian intervention have been at the very heart of the fiercest political debates, and humanitarian organizations like Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam are looked to not just for their ability to provide medicine and food but as moral and political arbiters of world crises. Above both pity and compassion Arendt placed solidarity, which, she rightly noted, is not a feeling but a principle through which men and women create a “community of interest with the oppressed and exploited.” Solidarity! It is a frayed ideal, yet it continues to inspire. Solidarity maintains the hope that a powerful human connection will sweep away divisions of nation, race, and class, and that the deepest wounds of history can be healed. Against fragmentation, it posits unity; against loneliness, brotherhood; against abandonment, support; against weakness, strength. Since Marx’s time, solidarity has been the left’s holy grail and its gravest obligation, proclaimed by everyone from the mildest social democrats to the most militant communists. And yet, and yet: we live in the anxious beginnings of the twenty-first century and have witnessed the blasted hopes of the twentieth, and some of us have learned that solidarity is a difficult thing to find or create—far harder, certainly, to attain in imperfect practice than to dictate in glorious rhetoric. What would it mean to create solidarity with Memuna Mansarah? And can Teun Voeten’s photograph, or anyone’s, help us do so? The anger that I felt when I looked at Memuna places me in good company, or at least a lot of company. Anger—and its unattractive sibling, resentment—is a common reaction of viewers in the privileged world when looking at victims of war, famine, and poverty. But the anger is often directed at the photograph, or at the person who took it (think of Salgado), or at the victims themselves. As we have seen, critics such as Rosler and Sekula have repeatedly admonished us that to look at photographs of violence 129

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and suffering is an exercise of privilege and an indulgence in voyeurism. Such critics do not like what photographs of suffering, exploitation, and violence show. But there’s an opposite, equally strong critical response to these images: anger at what such photographs do not show. This critical tradition, developed by Sontag and Berger, argues that because photographs lack narratives, they lack meaning—especially political and moral meaning, which is contingent on causation. Such critics do not like what photographs of suffering, exploitation, and violence fail to show. With photographs of suffering children these two critical traditions, these two responses, and these two accusations of insufficiency merge. Photographs of children simultaneously show us too much and too little. Photographers have always sought out children to represent the most untainted and most natural of human beings: children represent the urhuman. In the world-famous if oft-criticized “Family of Man” exhibit of 1955, for instance, children symbolized what is most uncorrupted and uplifting, and at the same time most prosaic and universally shared, about the human condition.* Precisely because they represent innocence, children—especially hurt, exploited, or mistreated children—can be used to illustrate what is most unjust about a social order or most sadistic about a war. That is why wounded children have been of particular interest to documentary photographers aligned with radical or reform movements: think, for instance, of Lewis Hine’s still-chastening, still-startling photographs of child factory workers, whose exploitation was meant to epitomize the heartlessness of unrestrained capitalism. Similarly, it is no accident that the most iconic photograph of the Holocaust is that of the little boy, hands raised, as he is rounded up in the Warsaw Ghetto; or that the best-known picture from the Vietnam War is of the burnt, naked nine-year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack. Because children are vulnerable and blameless— * A human condition that is, however, expected to be essentially asexual, as shown by the tremendous controversies over Sally Mann’s photographs of her naked children.

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the purest victims—depictions of their suffering have an extraordinarily visceral impact. And so they should. It is not naiveté or sentimentality to be moved, pierced, or outraged by such images. At the same time, photographs of children are no more meaningful— that is, politically explanatory—than any others. Such photographs expose the wounding of innocents, but they do not tell us how such injuries came to be, who inflicted them, or how they can be halted. Still, these images call forth intuitive—almost Pavlovian—responses of pity and outrage, though those emotions may not always know where to land. In fact, the affliction of children is so indefensible that the viewer’s impulse is to want to do virtually anything to stop it—and the discomfort it causes us—most quickly. The disseminators of such photographs know this, and often aim for this response. Here, then, is the paradox of photographs of suffering children: precisely by appealing to our noblest—our most altruistic and protective—selves, such images are perfect conduits for manipulation, vulgar simplification, and propaganda. This is why, as David Rieff once noted, “the one thing tyrants and aid workers have in common is their liking for being posed next to children.” Because photographs of children can so easily weaken the viewer’s capacity to form considered judgments, they are the perfect vehicle for nurturing simple-minded solutions and thoughtless vengeance rather than political wisdom. I remember that, in the lead-up to the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, antiwar leaflets printed by self-described Iraq solidarity committees were frequently thrust at me on the streets of New York. The flyers were often illustrated with starving or screaming children and accompanied by appeals to end the sanctions on Iraq. On a human level, the pictures demanded that the Iraqi children’s pain be stopped: a demand that is, I think, not debatable. It is on a political level that things became somewhat more complicated. The clear implication of the words-cum-photos was that sanctions were causing Iraqi children to starve; to oppose ending the sanctions was to support killing children. I suspected, though, that Saddam’s regime, not the sanctions against it, was the main source of torment for Iraqis young and old. But the images of Iraqi children were designed to foreclose any thought process, any building of a political argument, within the viewer. They aimed to provoke only one 131

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emotion—guilt—that could be alleviated by only one action: opposing the sanctions. I threw these leaflets into the trash. Photographs of child victims have sometimes been used with more care. On November 12, 1936, the Communist newspaper Daily Worker printed an article called “NAZI BOMB KILLS SEVENTY SPANISH CHILDREN,” illustrated with gruesome photographs of a few of the young corpses (one boy’s eye had been blasted out). But just below this headline, the newspaper ran an explanation entitled “Why We Print This Page”: an explanation, the paper obviously believed, that it owed its readers. Previously, the editors noted, it had refrained from printing such pictures “because it seemed that mere horror would not serve our great purpose, which is to harden the determination to fight fascism and defend democracy. But the pictures on this page are not of mere horror. They tell the tale of the most fearful side of the conflict into which fascism has hurled the Spanish people.” The pictures were surely meant to mobilize the Worker’s readers and to inspire equal measures of sorrow and fury. But they were meant, also, to illustrate a key and at that time novel practice of fascist war: its erasure of the distinction between combatants and civilians. These photographs, like those in the Iraqi leaflets, were used for partisan purposes, but they were also used to truthfully illuminate, rather than obfuscate, a salient political fact. Memuna’s picture evokes many of the same reactions—shock, sadness, anger, disgust—that the readers of the Daily Worker almost certainly felt when looking at the broken children of Spain. But there is a crucial difference: the Daily Worker readers of 1936 didn’t feel the helplessness and bewilderment that today’s readers do; they, unlike we, had a pretty good idea of what was to be done. That is why Memuna’s picture is more difficult to come to terms with than those of the Spanish children. The conflict in which Memuna was caught was long and terrible, but—unlike the Spanish civil war—it existed largely outside the realm of traditional political aims and understandings: it is very hard to discern for what “great purpose” Sierra Leone’s war was fought. This does not mean that Memuna has suffered less than did the children of Spain (she may have suffered more), nor that her life is less precious than theirs. But it does mean that it is exceedingly hard to formulate any reaction to her photograph other

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than shock, revulsion, anger, and disgust; it is hard to know how to use her picture, or even how to think about it. And because of this, looking at her photograph becomes an ethical problem. Her picture illustrates the peculiar dislocation of our time: we can know an enormous amount, and might even feel an enormous amount, about what is happening in the world, but our knowledge and our emotions have no natural fulfillment in political action. There is yet another reason why looking at Memuna is confounding. Memuna is a child-victim, and therefore innocent. But unlike the children in Spain, it is possible, indeed likely, that her assailants were children too. Since the end of the cold war and the collapse of the bipolar world, something has changed in the nature of war: violence has become less tethered to political aims, which is to say it has become more nihilistic and more “autonomous.” I believe that this statement is true, yet as soon as I write it I can see what an easily misconstrued, easily mocked generalization it is. War, it will be rightly argued in response, has always been cruel and chaotic; war has always seemed senseless to many if not most of its participants and victims. War has always resulted in the deaths of unarmed civilians, and has always unleashed sadistic impulses. And today’s wars are not necessarily worse than their predecessors; one could even say they are better, for Auschwitz, at least, has never been replicated. All true. And yet: something has changed in the nature of war. The ideologically based conflicts that characterized the 1930s, World War II, and the subsequent anticolonial wars of independence (and that distinguished virtually all revolutions dating back to the eighteenth century) are far less prevalent—or, in some cases, have lost whatever ideological raison d’être they once possessed. The conventional wars have not been replaced by peace, as was hoped in 1989, but by other kinds of conflicts that we might call wars of disintegration. Such conflicts are expressions not of imperial expansion, national liberation, socialist revolution, or even fascist counterrevolution, but are more akin to auto-exterminations. Most of these newer wars are intranational, and they are characterized by “shockingly horrific violence” that explicitly targets women and children. The goal of

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these newer combatants is, of course, to gain power, which is a traditional goal of warriors; but they aim to do so, rather untraditionally, by demolishing their own social institutions—especially the family—and ensuring that future generations will be pathologically damaged. This is, one might say, the ultimate scorched-earth policy, though directed against people rather than land. “Individuals commit suicide,” the French philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy has written of these wars. “Why not countries?” There are some current conflicts that do not fit this description: the various wars in Israel-Palestine-Lebanon, for instance, have definable, if not necessarily achievable, political aims; so did the war in Bosnia. But in looking at many current or recently concluded wars—some of which have lasted ten or twenty years—it is difficult to find the political “why.” The combatants in such wars—in places like Burundi, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Liberia, Somalia, Uganda, Congo—often have no platforms they seek to carry out, no models of government they seek to realize, no institutions they seek to build, no visions of justice they seek to actualize. Liberty, equality, fraternity: none of these seem to be on the agenda, if there is any agenda at all. These are wars of astonishing ferocity whose longevity seems connected to their absence of political aims, and whose systemic atrocities against civilians—amputation in Sierra Leone; vaginal mutilation in the Congo; kidnapping of children in Uganda—cannot be explained as part of any rational political program, or even as part of a scramble for riches. Some of these wars simply last too long: the brutality of their methods has obscured any political motives they may have once possessed. And because they often eschew traditional political aims, the fighters, or at least their leaders, have more to gain—or believe they have more to gain—from the continuation of these wars than from peace, which would surely lead to their disarmament. And so at the beginning of this new century, as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote, we find ourselves in a world of armed confrontations “where the contending parties have no common characteristics, status, or objectives, except the willingness to use violence.” This does not mean that these wars have no reasons: all events have

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reasons. Nor does it mean they should not be analyzed. But the reasons and the analyses can’t always explain the ways in which these wars unfold: can’t explain, that is, the jump from poverty and state collapse to the chopping off of Memuna’s arm, or from the battle over the Congo’s coltan reserves to the carving up of young girls’ vaginas. As François Jean, a leading activist and theorist of Doctors Without Borders, observed as early as 1991, “There is . . . nothing to constrain those carrying Kalashnikovs. . . . There are no politics—at least none that can be readily comprehended . . . The [Enlightenment] values we claim to represent are barely audible.” Photographers have done a better job of documenting these conflicts than have journalists, who sometimes ignore them precisely because of their sense-defying characteristics. Take a look, for instance, at James Nachtwey’s photographs of Kabul in 1996, seven years after Afghanistan’s victory over the Soviets. You will see a spooky, ruined, stone-age city that was reduced to dust by its own inhabitants; you will see a nation that, once it vanquished the foreign invader, energetically proceeded to destroy itself. It is as if the war needed to be perpetuated regardless of the enemy: as if wars, like living beings, struggle to survive. As soon as one set of infidels was vanquished, others promptly took its place. It was the war itself that could not die. Or look at Candace Scharsu’s photographs from the Murray Town Amputee Camp in Freetown, Sierra Leone: a little village of old and young, male and female. We see a crying baby whose arm has been hacked off and an obese woman, hand on head, whose two legs have been severed at the knees. There is a handsome barber named Mohammed Bah, whose good arm—his working arm—was flayed and amputated just below the shoulder. But Bah, Scharsu tells us, is an entrepreneurial man: he has set up a new shop in the camp, and is intent on relearning his trade (he uses his stump to hold a towel). There is a ten-year-old boy named Ibrahim, who rests his head on his mangled arms as he looks out at us; rebels poured gasoline on his hands and set them afire, then raped and killed his mother and slit his father’s throat. There is Issa Sessay, a seven-year-old who was abducted by the RUF when he was four. He is photographed in profile, and he is quite handsome, except for the pustule-like scars on his face

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and mouth: held down to a fire when he refused to fight, his cheek and lips melted together. Issa’s hand was also destroyed—now it is a useless claw—and he doesn’t want it photographed. And here, through Scharsu’s lens, is Memuna once more. She wears a pretty flowered dress with a lace border; her smile, this time, is truly impish, and she firmly rests her good hand on the sturdy thigh of her father, who sits just behind her. He is a strong-looking man with high cheekbones and a slight mustache; he faces the camera straight on, albeit with a rueful look. His right ear has been chopped off, and his right arm, like hers, is a stump. This sea change in war has been observed by political analysts, humanitarian workers, journalists, and photographers. Gilles Peress has noted that before 1989, “conflicts were much more politically motivated—East versus West, communism versus capitalism, class struggle.” Now, he says, wars are expressions of emotion rather than ideology: the aim is not to vanquish the enemy politically but to “wipe him out” existentially. The British political theorist John Keane has termed such conflicts “uncivil wars,” whose protagonists are beholden to no rules “except those of destructiveness—of people, property, the infrastructure, places of historical importance, even nature itself.” Such wars, Keane writes, permanently damage what he calls “the ecology of human personality” and erode the “capacity to . . . act in solidarity” with others. They also erode our capacity to act in solidarity with them, or even to envision what this might mean. In War, Evil, and the End of History, a set of dispatches from these new zones of conflict, Bernard-Henri Lévy writes of his futile attempts to come to terms with the violence he was witnessing. Lévy kept seeking the comfort of what he calls the “old reflexes: where are the good people? the bad ones? where is the border?” But he was forced to realize that he was dealing with a “new and, in our eyes, almost unthinkable reality”: Terrible wars, without faith or law, no less foreign to the logic of Clausewitz than to that of Hegel, and whose victims seem doubly damned because they no longer

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have even the feeble resource of telling themselves that they are struggling for a new Enlightenment, the triumph of democracy and the rights of mankind, or for the defeat of imperialism.

These are the wars “without aim, without clear ideological stakes, without memory.” It is hard to see how they are the continuation of politics by other means, which is why they seem so unsolvable. What is our obligation to such wars, and to those caught up in them? What do they demand; what can we give? Who do we support? Which side are we on? “Can one, under the pretext that they tell us nothing, choose to wash one’s hands of these silent killings?” Lévy asks. The easy—and, frankly, not unreasonable—answer is yes. But Lévy insists, and I am glad he does, on an emphatic no. We do not get to choose our era’s conflicts: our lack of comprehension, or of shared ideals, doesn’t excuse those of us in the developed, privileged world from addressing the victims’ despair. And this is so for reasons first of pragmatic self-interest and, then, of ethical self-respect. The zones of chaos, however far away they may seem, do in fact threaten our safety: especially since 9/11, the world has become pretty small. Equally important, our oft-professed adherence to something we call “universal human rights” means awfully little, and will surely shrivel into nothingness, if it embraces only those whom we admire or who are victims of forces that we recognize and understand. Yet this, too, is a change. Since 1917, political affinity—with the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Loyalists in Spain, the anticolonialists in Algeria, the Communists in Vietnam and Cuba, the anti-Stalinists in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the antifascists in Chile, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the antiapartheid activists in South Africa, the democrats in Bosnia—has been the very basis of leftist internationalism. Its romance was exemplified by the novels of Malraux, the journalism of Gellhorn, and the photographs of Capa; it was inspired by energetic hopes for what might be rather than defensive, baffled revulsion at what is. Internationalists drew their spirit and their energy not only from a protective concern for helpless victims but from a positive identification with fighters for just causes. In the post–cold war conflicts, this sort of connection—this sort of frater-

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nity—is more and more difficult to find. Indeed, it may be a luxury we can no longer afford. In the absence of such idealistic bonds, Western intellectuals in the post-1989 era have often proved indifferent to mass suffering and mass murder; indeed, our era’s guiding principle might be, “Only disconnect.” The Mideast, which is to say the Palestinians, still inspires fervor; so do humanitarian crises like tsunamis and hurricanes. But who really cares about massacres in Burundi, the disintegration of Somalia, atrocities in Algeria, perpetual crises in Haiti, or the enslaved children of Chad? Lévy’s book and Scharsu’s photographs are indictments of the retreats and evasions that characterize our age of dystopia. Both the philosopher and the photographer seek to awaken the West from its night of slumber, but with no false promises of what daylight will bring. “No one wants to see; no one wants to hear,” Lévy writes of the world’s immense swaths of violence and misery. “We have to force them to see it, then. There has to be a terrorism of the gaze.” A terrorism of the gaze: it is a wonderful phrase. It pleads for newfound, or rather refashioned, internationalist convictions; it demands that passionate intensity not be monopolized by the worst. But it is an acknowledgement, too, of our profound, and perhaps irreversible, disenchantment. And nothing epitomizes the appalled bewilderment that these new wars evoke more than the widespread use of child soldiers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are entire countries, indeed continents, filled with children who have been sacrificed to Moloch—but with no avenging god of justice to save them. To call the child fighters of Africa “soldiers” is like calling Auschwitz a detention center: it’s factually true, but misses the essence. And though child soldiers are not a modern invention, what we have seen in recent civil wars—mainly, but not only, in Africa—is something quite extraordinary. The contemporary phenomenon of child soldiers turns on its head the longstanding ethos of most societies and resistance movements, including those in Africa, which have traditionally regarded the protection and nurturance of future generations as the gravest of ethical commitments. 138

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No longer. A photograph taken in Liberia by Q. Sakamaki illustrates the new social contract between generations: a uniformed government soldier shows a small boy how to use an AK-47. The boy—we learn he’s eleven— intently clutches the big gun while his “teacher” helpfully steadies it for him. Beginning in the 1980s (but gaining speed in the following decade), hundreds of thousands of children have been conscripted into wars; often they are in their teens, but some are younger than ten. Usually they are seized from their homes, though sometimes they “willingly” join the combatants to seek food, protection, or revenge for their own losses. They fight for rebel militias, for government forces, and sometimes for both. Stuffed with powerful drugs, beaten, and terrorized, they are forced to commit atrocities—mutilation, rape, and murder via clubbing, shooting, burning, disemboweling—against civilians, other children, and their own families and neighbors. At the same time, the child soldiers are victims of these same crimes, with young girls in particular used as sex slaves who are subjected to rape, gang rape, sexual mutilation, and coerced childbirth. Candace Scharsu photographed one such girl in Sierra Leone: she refuses to show her face and does not want to give her name, but “RUF” has been branded on her chest, probably with acid from cashew nuts. Another girl, named Fatmata Kamara, is more forthcoming. She is thirteen, and was abducted by the RUF when eleven. Photographed by Franco Pagetti, she stares at the camera and raises her striped shirt. We see her small, pubescent breasts and the gentle slope of her stomach over her blue jeans; and we see, too, the ugly white burns on the delicate skin of her chest: punishment for having tried to escape. There are good reasons why, given the West’s history of colonialism and racism, we hesitate to use the word “barbarism” in relation to Africa. But when it comes to the use of children as fighters and sex slaves, that hesitation shouldn’t last too long. The aim of these atrocities, whether perpetrated against or by children, isn’t to win wars: surely there is no military advantage to making a child murder his brother or rape his neighbor or cut off an old woman’s lips. The aim is, rather, to tear these children from any recognizable moral, familial, and social universe; to disorient them through drugs, humiliation, and terror; to bind them through fear, guilt, and even a twisted 139

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gratitude to the commanders who rule over them; and, most important, to transform them into perpetrators even as they are victims. The aim, in short, is to scramble the DNA of human ethics—in particular, the children learn to delight in inflicting pain—and to blur the moral difference between victim and torturer, pushing them into the gray zone of which Primo Levi wrote.* The perverse malice of this experiment cannot be exaggerated. Nor should its success be doubted. Young people may or may not be naturally good, but they are certainly naturally malleable—and, as we saw in the case of the Cultural Revolution, more than capable of enthusiastically inflicting pain. “These children are quite often the hardest, most brutal, wildest, most enthusiastic, craziest of all the fighters,” Lévy observed of the child soldiers he met. The innocence of childhood can turn into the amorality of childhood, as too many Sierra Leoneans have learned. Here is what a woman named Adama, a forty-two-year-old secretary, told Human Rights Watch about the child soldiers who came to her neighborhood in Freetown: We feared them. They were cruel and hard hearted; even more than the adults. They don’t know what is sympathy; what is good and bad. If you beg an older one you may convince him to spare you, but the younger ones, they don’t know what is sympathy, what is mercy. Those who have been rebels for so long have never learned it. . . . They are wicked, those boy soldiers. They spare no human life.

In his memoir A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah tells the story of his transformation, during Sierra Leone’s war, from a Shakespeare-quoting boy whose main problem was his parents’ fractured marriage into an instrument of nonstop atrocity and death. (And in his case, transformed back again: the fact that Beah can write this book shows us that he has come through.) What is most striking here is not the violence he commits—though it is hideous—but the joy that he and the other boys take

* There is a difference, though, between the Nazi camps and the regimes that conscript child soldiers. While the former aimed to create a defeated, passive victim—the perfect slave— the latter prize a vigorous cruelty above all else: they seek the perfect sociopath.

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in it: laughter is the most sinister sound in his book. The nadir of Beah’s book, for me, is his recounting of the pride that he felt when he won a throat-slitting contest. Beah fought for Sierra Leone’s government troops—what he calls “the so-called army”—rather than with the RUF, though there was little difference between the groups’ tactics. Here is his account of his militia as it comes upon a group of rebels; he is about thirteen at the time: “It will be a waste of bullets to shoot them,” the lieutenant said. So we gave them shovels and demanded, at gunpoint, that they dig their own graves. We sat under the huts smoking marijuana and watched them dig in the rain. Each time they slowed down, we would shoot around them and they would resume digging faster. When they were done digging, we tied them and stabbed their legs with bayonets. Some of them screamed, and we laughed and kicked them to shut them up. We then rolled each man into his hole and covered him with the wet mud. All of them were frightened, and they tried to get up and out of the hole as we pushed the dirt back on them, but when they saw the tips of our guns pointed into the hole, they lay back and watched us with their pale sad eyes. They fought under the soil with all their might. I heard them groan underneath as they fought for air. Gradually, they gave up, and we walked away. “At least they are buried,” one of the soldiers said, and we laughed.

But Beah gets out: after two years of fighting, he is transferred to a UNICEF camp, adopted by a woman in New York City, and sent to a private school; he subsequently graduated from Oberlin College, and his book became a bestseller. Like Levi, he is one of the saved. But unlike Levi, Beah is tormented not only by his losses—his family is killed—but by the berserk crimes he committed against others. He is hunter and prey, criminal and victim; he has felt great pain and inflicted it, too. Though safe in New York, he is haunted by nightmares of gushing blood, burning flesh, spilled intestines, oozing brains. Just as the child soldiers’ personalities are scrambled, so too are our responses in looking at photographs of them. Like child prostitutes, there is something innately counterintuitive—something unnatural and ob141

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scene—about child soldiers: the activity and the age cannot mesh.* And the younger the child, the more shocking the sight of their slight figures counterposed to the blunt enormity of the weapons that they carry. None of this fits; it cannot be synthesized, it does not make sense. There is no comfortable way to look at these photographs. It is obvious, though it seems somehow wrong to acknowledge, that many of the child soldiers are beautiful, with coal-black skin, sculpted faces, and graceful, lithe, muscular bodies. But those bodies are often in agony— exhausted, ill, wounded—and are causing agony, too. Simply looking at such pictures can feel morally suspect: the viewer ricochets between the beauty and the violence without finding a secure place to land. Nor is mere sympathy possible: these children are prisoners, but they are predators too. “Child soldiers are photogenic,” Teun Voeten admits with more than a touch of self-criticism. “Little black kids parading around with big guns. . . . Cute little rascals playing war games, lost innocence. . . . Metaphors galore.” Many of the child soldier pictures are stained with sorrow. The giant guns, the bayonets, the bandoliers of bullets, the rocket-propelled grenades, the rags and outlandish outfits: none of this can distract us from the well of sadness in the eyes of these fighters. Sometimes these children seem to be pleading—like the Jewish prisoners photographed by Heinrich Jöst—for an acknowledgement of their still-human status. Sven Torfinn took one such portrait in the Congo: a boy with big ears, a big gun, and deep, liquid eyes gazes at us and tilts his head slightly; he looks as though he is begging for a reprieve. But in other photographs the children’s eyes are apathetic, dead—they have seen too much and done too much; the light is gone. Still other photographs are, simply, terrifying: those pitiless expressions are not metaphors, as Adama and countless others can attest. One such photograph, taken by Chris de Bode, seems like a warning; it is an aggressively tight close-up of a fourteen-year-old Ugandan boy who fought with the Lord’s Resistance Army. His mouth is tightly closed, his

* War and child prostitution are not easily disentangled. A 2007 photograph by Per-Anders Pettersson shows a Congolese girl named Esther Yandakwa; she wears a brightly patterned green dress and puffs on a cigarette while two older girls fix her hair. The text tells us that Esther is a prostitute, aged nine.

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nostrils flare, his yellow-rimmed eyes look very, very hard; underneath them are little puffy lines of worry. The uncompromising bluntness of this picture—de Bode has cut off the top of the boy’s head—adds to its sense of impending danger: one fears this boy might explode. This is a portrait that repels empathic identification; this is not a face you’ll ever see on a “Save the Children” ad. In some of the most frequently published pictures of this genre, the child soldiers seem to play to the camera. Joyfully, audaciously, they brandish their weapons—well aware, I suspect, of the shock and dismay they provoke. This is especially true of Voeten’s photographs. In one, taken in Liberia, he shows us five heavily armed fighters who look to be barely in their teens, perched upon a flatbed truck; the one closest to us cheerfully grins and waves at Voeten, as if this is a holiday snapshot. These kids seem to taunt the viewer: if you look at us, you partake of our horror, though without ameliorating it in the least; if you shut your eyes, you are a sanctimonious coward, shielding yourself from the monsters we have become. Sometimes these warriors seem to mock . . . everything. Consider a color photograph of two teenaged fighters taken by Riccardo Gangale in a deserted Congolese schoolroom. (Scribbled on the blackboard behind the boys we can make out a sentence that starts, “Bonne idée . . .”) The lanky youths sit on a wooden bench, their long legs lazily spread apart. One wears a hooded mesh sweatshirt, electric-blue pants, and orange flipflops; he holds his AK-47 in one hand and a boombox in the other: just a typical teen. The other boy wears a yellow-and-blue T-shirt with a man’s face silkscreened on it, green flip-flops, and blue shorts (his legs are dirty); his gun sprawls across his lap. Each looks steadily at the camera with the barest hint of a smile: “This is what it’s come to,” they seem to say. The picture is a grim—and grimly funny—parody of a typical school portrait; precisely by photographing these youths in a school, Gangale shows us how civilization’s institutions and its bonnes idées have shriveled in the world these boys inhabit. Many of these pictures depict the child soldiers’ insolence, and herein lies a paradox. Although these children have been grievously harmed, they have also lived out a child’s fantasy: the infantile dream of omnipotence. But for these young people, subterranean fantasies were made fatally real; 143

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the children were abandoned to exactly those instincts from which they most needed protection. Some of the photographs hint at this perversity, in which whole societies were turned upside down as children controlled, and terrified, adults and old people. In one photograph by Giacomo Pirozzi, a small, thin boy—he is draped in all sorts of amulets and holds a large gun—checks the papers of a grown man at a roadblock in Sierra Leone; the adult frowns anxiously and obediently at the boy. The toughness and seeming self-confidence of these children make it clear that power— even this cruddy, pathetic power—intoxicates, which is why so many of these children resist being rescued by humanitarian workers, despite the misery of their lives as soldiers. One picture taken in a rehabilitation camp shows a tiny Congolese boy, faced clenched in rage, as he fights two large men trying to take away his knives. Ishmael Beah resisted rescue, too. He writes of his “boiling . . . anger” when he is taken to the UNICEF camp: “It was infuriating to be told what to do by civilians. Their voices, even when they called us for breakfast, enraged me so much . . . A few days earlier, we could have decided whether they would live or die.” The habits of viciousness persist: once in the camp, Beah and his friends beat another boy, perhaps to death—“I wasn’t sure whether he was unconscious or dead. I didn’t care.” The social workers and the “beaming men in the UNICEF shirts” who try to heal Beah evoke his contempt. And there was one thing in particular, Beah tells us, that he hated most of all: being told again and again by well-meaning adults, “It’s not your fault.” Of course, it is not their fault. That is why the United Nations–backed war-crimes court for Sierra Leone ruled that those under the age of fifteen will not be tried for crimes committed during the country’s civil war. But this is, of course, not the end of the matter. There are hundreds of thousands of child soldiers still fighting, and at least one generation of young Africans, living in the world’s poorest countries, in desperate need of rehabilitation. “The injury cannot be healed: it extends through time,” Levi wrote. Ishmael Beah may have escaped this fate; how many other child soldiers will? I am looking at a happy photograph from Uganda: a former child soldier 144

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who has been reunited with his family. He is looking down—it is hard to see his expression—but there is no ambiguity on the part of his mother: her face explodes in a dazzling smile of unfettered delight. But many of the former soldiers will never make their parents smile again: they are orphans or have become permanent pariahs. Many of the girls have born children who, as the progeny of rape, will be outcasts forever. (An ominous photograph from Angola, taken by Chris Sattlberger, suggests the family of the future: two unsmiling teenaged soldiers with their crying baby.) Few of these former warriors have skills or education; some are drug addicts or are permanently crippled. Some loll about in garbage dumps or cemeteries. And some have gone mad. In Angola: a photograph by Stuart Freedman shows a former child soldier who is now a patient at an “informal psychiatric centre.” The boy sits, his back to us, in an empty stone room; he is chained to a piece of machinery. In Chad: a picture taken by Tim A. Hetherington shows a teenaged former soldier in a stone prison cell that looks like a medieval dungeon. His arm looks badly mangled, but it is his face that stops us. His eyes open wide with unfathomable alarm as they stare up at us; “burning eyes” seems literal here. Yet he looks, somehow, strangely familiar, and I realize that I have seen this expression before. This boy is the brother, so to speak, of a little Polish girl named Tereska, immortalized by Chim in 1948. Her similarly startled face, with its suggestion of impossible horrors, has arrested generations of viewers; she had been raised in a concentration camp. The eleven-year war in Sierra Leone ended in 2002. Elections have been held, and the RUF disarmed. Unfortunately, RUF leader Foday Sankoh died while awaiting trial for war crimes, but it is satisfying that Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia and Sankoh’s brother-in-arms, is on trial at the Hague. Still, by any measure, Sierra Leone is a ruin. And it is a ruin for which there is no quick fix. Even before the war, Sierra Leone was one of the world’s most wretched places; a National Intelligence Council Project report described its civil war as “merely the work of the maggots on a dead body.” In 2007–8, Sierra Leone ranked dead last on the United Nations’ 145

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human development index, and the International Crisis Group estimates that the country will require decades of nation-building support—just the kind of sustained attention that donor countries are usually too impatient or too chintzy to offer. A black-and-white picture suggests part of the “human development” story: it is not exactly a war photograph, but certainly not a peace photograph. Taken by Stuart Freedman, it shows a small young boy in a bare room; he perches on a wooden schoolchair, though his legs are too short to touch the ground. The room looks bleak though not totally barren; it contains three other chairs, a pair of scattered flip-flops, and a table stacked with a jumble of items. A hazy, indecipherable figure stands in the room’s sun-streamed doorway; at first glance the photograph seems dreamy and serene. But the boy ignores the visitor, for he contemplates something else: standing upright, in the middle of the bare floor, are two prosthetic legs that belong to his father. The Sierra Leoneans did not, could not, stop killing each other. Nor was the war stopped by the Nigerian-led troops of the West African states or

Figure 5.2 Makeni, Sierra Leone, 2004: Though presumably at peace, Sierra Leone is a ruin. Stuart Freedman captured its bleak “human development” challenge in this photograph: this young boy is staring at his father’s prosthetic limbs. Photo: Stuart Freedman/Panos Pictures.

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by those of the United Nations: the former proved brutal; the latter, inept. It was the invasion of Sierra Leone’s former colonial master, the British— starting in 2000 and continuing for two years—that proved decisive. The interventions were initially controversial within Britain, where they were distrusted by conservatives who feared do-goodism and by leftists who feared neocolonialism. But the British troops proved unexpectedly successful in capturing Sankoh, defeating the rebels, and providing a measure of security to the people of what had become an ungovernable nation. All this is important to remember in thinking about Memuna. To see her photograph, at least with any clarity or insight, requires looking at what it does not show: at the choices and the histories that preceded, yet created, the particular image of her that has caught our attention. To look at Memuna means to look at how she came to be. It means to look at Sierra Leone’s backslide into paroxysms of cruelty, which took place in full view of an uncaring world. It means to look at the high price that colonialism, and then the new world order, have exacted on Africa—and at the devastating failures of so many postcolonial regimes, which have betrayed their peoples time and again. It means to look frankly at the politics, which are really the antipolitics, of groups like the RUF, for whom violence is not an “anticolonial weapon” but a nihilistic end-in-itself; and to look, also, at how the British were able to stop the seemingly unstoppable carnage. Knowledge of such things is the beginning, however inadequate, of solidarity with Memuna. It is a solidarity that falls short, I fear, of Arendt’s vision of community, and certainly of Berger’s hopes for revolutionary change: a certain humility on our part is required. There will be no international brigades rushing to West Africa; there will be no marches through the streets of Paris, London, New York, or Beirut demanding support for the children of Sierra Leone. The solidarity I envision will not restore Memuna’s arm, or her father’s, or the world that they lost. But it asserts that our responsibility toward Memuna does not stop at feeling shocked or disgusted by her mutilation. Solidarity with Memuna means to place her disfigurement within a larger reality to which we are connected, and to remain invested—politically, financially, ethically—in the fate of her country, without sugarcoating the depravity into which it descended or the difficulties it faces in creating a decent-enough future. 147

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This kind of solidarity—partial and inglorious—does not develop within the photograph, regardless of how long or hard we look: it depends on our immersion in the world outside the frame. To understand Memuna’s hint of a smile, we must travel far from her in the hope of return. Even then, to be honest, we can offer neither justice nor salvation nor the impossible righting of the wrongs she has suffered. But we can offer—or so I hope—something stronger, wiser, and more useful than simply horrified pity for her past, lack of interest in her present, or impotent trembling for her future. The brutality of the photographs from these civil wars is undeniable—yet it pales, in certain respects, when compared to a more recent group of images: those of tortures and executions, created by perpetrators, in both the Western and Muslim worlds. These are dueling sets of images, yet they complement each other. They share a mutual aim: to deny, indeed crush, the very idea of solidarity between peoples.

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Figure 6.1 Rawalpindi, Pakistan, 2007: A man grieves in the aftermath of a suicide bombing: in this case, the one that killed Benazir Bhutto and approximately fifteen others. This photograph, taken by John Moore, was published more than once in the New York Times; its depiction of terrorist violence, and the despair it causes, seems to sum up the decade. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images.

6 ABU GHRAIB AND THE JIHAD The Dance of Civilizations

Every documentary photograph records an event. But the Abu Ghraib photographs were an event in themselves. In this, they joined the long, ignoble line of photographs, some of which were discussed in the preceding chapters, that not only depict cruelty but celebrate it. The behavior these photographs document is bad, but the disorientation they cause stems from the very fact that they were made and from the unmistakable happiness of the tormentors that they show. Civilization isn’t contingent on the hope that people will never harm one another—if it were, there would be no civilization anywhere on earth; but it does assume that people will be ashamed, or at least fear the consequences, of the hurtful acts they commit. When that shame and fear are lacking—when sadism and impunity reign—we all feel threatened. It is hard to trust a world in which my pain, or yours, is the pride and joy of another. Billions of people throughout the world have now seen the Abu Ghraib images; they may be the most widely circulated photographs ever made. Within days, if not hours, of their first release in late April 2004, they were internationally recognized. They have appeared in countless newspapers and magazines in the East and West; on innumerable websites and television programs; on signs, leaflets, and posters. They have zipped through millions, if not billions, of emails. They have hung on walls all over the world—including the spare, modern ones of a New York museum and one of ancient, massive stone on a Tehran street—and on gravestones in Gaza City, where they are accompanied by the promise, “We Will Re151

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venge.” They are sold in souks throughout the Arab world. They can, like all photographs, be put to vastly disparate uses: they have been used in the recruiting videos of terrorist groups and in the fundraising literature of human-rights organizations. In fact, they are used for propaganda of all sorts: on the Internet one can easily find the “logo” of an Abu Ghraib photograph superimposed on an Israeli flag. They inspired a global conversation along with global disgust and rage. The political road to Abu Ghraib has now been well documented by investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh, Mark Danner, and Jane Mayer; it is the cultural understandings of the photographs that interest me here. And from the beginning, there were aspects of the cultural debate that struck me as simplistic, unprofitable, and odd. On the left, the torture photographs inspired paroxysms of essentialist self-hate; at a panel discussion on Abu Ghraib in New York, I heard participants describe the United States as a uniquely depraved force of destruction and the photographs hailed, with more than a touch of triumph, for revealing the “real” face of America. The right, conversely, grasped onto a desperate moral relativism, pointing to the widespread use of torture by Arab and Muslim regimes as a supposed counterbalance to American crimes. One Wall Street Journal columnist angrily asked, “TV can run Abu Ghraib photos 24 /7 but can’t find 55 minutes for Saddam’s crimes against humanity?” Both these reactions obscured deeper and more difficult meanings, and both preserved an idea of American exceptionalism, be it for evil or virtue. Yet in my view, what the photographs and the controversies over them revealed is not that the United States is innately more barbaric than the Muslim world, or vice versa. Rather, they showed the many ways in which, since 9/11, East and West have joined together in a diabolical pas de deux of violent images and actions: of planes smashing into skyscrapers as the whole world watches; of powerful missiles and bombs that aim to shock and awe; of medieval-style decapitations brought straight to home computers; of naked prisoners tortured first for their captors’ cameras, then for the world; of suicide bombings diligently photographed and instantly transmitted to eager viewers. These forms of savagery are neither mere images nor mere actions, but are designed to be both: they are propaganda of the spectacle and of the deed. The aim is one of mutual loathing 152

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and mutual fear; we are bound to the hated “other” through the symbols and realities of thanatos. In the American press, there were two schools of thought about how and why American soldiers came to torture Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and how and why they came to photograph the torture. The first explanation was political: the Abu Ghraib abuses stemmed directly from the Bush administration’s unprecedented post-9/11 legal policies, especially its gutting of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post titled one of its Abu Ghraib editorials “A Corrupted Culture,” a reference to President George W. Bush’s abandonment of the standard rules of war. The second analysis also blamed a culture of corruption, or what it sometimes called the culture of permissiveness. In this view the culprit was to be found in the casual brutality of American pop culture—embodied in Internet pornography, video games, rap music, and blood-soaked movies and television shows—which, it was charged, had created a generation of moral cretins immune to, or even delighting in, the horrors of real violence. As soon as the Abu Ghraib photographs were published, these cultural dystopians went into full swing. Paul Vitz, an emeritus professor of psychology at New York University, told the Washington Post that the Abu Ghraib pictures were “a no-brainer,” the clear result of young peoples’ immersion “in the pornography and violence of American pop culture.” Rebecca Hagelin, spokeswoman for the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Abu Ghraib was simply “the latest evidence of a culture gone stark raving mad.” Citing the “cultural rot” that pervades the mass media, Hagelin warned, “We have been sliding down the slippery sewer of cultural immorality for so long that we don’t even realize that we’re covered with stinking sludge.” New York Times columnist Frank Rich mocked these cultural reactionaries as “laughable,” and added, “Some of our self-appointed moral leaders are defending the morally indefensible by annexing Abu Ghraib as another front in America’s election-year culture war.” But adherents of the cultural-poison view were found not only among conservatives and the religious right. Susan Sontag, in one of the most widely read and widely discussed pieces on Abu Ghraib, leaned heavily on the cultural ar153

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gument in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine that was soon reprinted in more than a score of overseas publications from Brazil to the Balkans. “Most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography,” Sontag wrote. “And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet.” Citing video games and hazing rituals, Sontag charged that “America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun. . . . What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.” Sontag herself had never been particularly attracted to fun, and in this essay one could hear the old, censorious echo of the Frankfurt School critics warning of mass culture’s seductions and betrayals. “This idea of fun is, alas, more and more . . . part of ‘the true nature and heart of America,’” she warned. “It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere.” This line of thought was eagerly adopted by other cultural critics, including the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. “Anyone acquainted with the U.S. way of life will have recognised in the [Abu Ghraib] photographs the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture,” he wrote. “The Iraqi prisoners were effectively being initiated into American culture. . . . In the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners, what we get is, precisely, an insight into ‘American values.’” Sontag’s piece irritated me because, despite my dislike of her tone, I found myself agreeing with parts of her argument. For despite what I hope are my egalitarian impulses, much of pop culture either bewilders or revolts me; I live, as I strongly suspect Sontag did, behind a prophylactic cultural shield, dipping into pop culture at will but guarding myself against much that I consider ugly, stupid, or too violent. Still, I am suspicious of those who rail against permissiveness and pop, whether they situate themselves stage left or right. For far more than a century, self-appointed defenders of American morality—which has often been confused with American respectability—have campaigned against mass-produced cultural forms, targeting not just photographs, films, and television shows but also the novel, the play, the comic book, and the musi154

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cal record. Often, though, what these self-appointed commissars objected to wasn’t really the form itself, but rather its availability to the uneducated masses—and, especially in the case of popular music, the sexual abandon that was so convincingly conveyed. Conversely, it is no accident that America’s most astute cultural critics (writers like Agee and Kael, Gilbert Seldes and Greil Marcus) understood the ways in which American popular forms and American fun—which is to say American freedom, spontaneity, and sensuality—are entwined. Frequently the results are junk, but sometimes the results are invigorating works of pleasure and, even, genius. It is striking how closely the cultural conservatives’ condemnation of America resembles the Islamic fundamentalists’ condemnation of America. The Iranian-born writer Rouzbeh Pirouz has observed that Muslim extremists depict Western culture “as degenerate and subversive. . . . a blend of perversity, wickedness and sadism”; this sounds a lot like Sontag and Žižek to me. And while American pop culture often celebrates violence, pop culture is not violence’s sine qua non. The twentieth century, and the early twenty-first, exploded in previously unimaginable forms of violence without any help from Internet pornography, slasher films, or video games. It may well be that Private Lynndie England’s mind and heart had been warped by the lazy trashiness of American popular culture. But clearly something very different warped the mind and heart of terrorist leaders like the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—he of the filmed beheading of Nicholas Berg—and of the suicide bombers of Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, who happily target schools, mosques, and hospitals. While Lynddie England is a pariah in our world, al-Zarqawi is a hero in his. In short, the cultural conservatives—on the right and left—have it wrong. The most pitiless, graphic, celebratory and, yes, lovingly photographed violence in the world today comes from those who are expressly opposed to the hedonism of American popular culture. Major Arab television channels run endless loops of violent footage every day, all day, while Islamic websites post excruciating executions and suicide bombings. These websites are immensely popular; so are their Western counterparts, which, in a wonderful example of global solidarity, post the snuff films of jihad just as soon as they appear. (A few months after Berg’s videotaped 155

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murder, more than ten million viewers had downloaded it.) My point is not to defend “our” violence, evidenced by the Abu Ghraib photographs, as less brutal than “theirs,” but to caution against blaming the too-easy, always-available devil of pop culture when explaining a catastrophe like Abu Ghraib. For it is abundantly clear that those who dwell outside the reach of American cultural dominance—or, at least, would like to do so— are not immune to the delights of the camera, or of sadism, or of combining the two. But while the Abu Ghraib pictures are not good at diagnosing the problems with American culture or the American soul, they do remind us, if we need reminding, of how easily cruelty flourishes when the rule of law is abandoned. (That is why we need laws regardless of how trustworthy we think we are.) The photographs are disgusting, and the disgust deepens rather than abates the more frequently they are viewed. Look, again, at the details: at the defeated, pathetic hunch of the prisoners as they are forced to masturbate; at the peculiar crouch—knees bent, pelvis tilted back, arms bent around his head—of a cornered, naked, panic-stricken man facing a snarling dog that lunges at him; at the prisoner’s face contorted in a howl of pain (or is it rage?) as he lies, naked and bloody, on a bloodstained concrete floor; at the slight tilt of the shiny, ugly black hoods on the heads of the prisoners who are forced into simulated fellatio. The pictures gain a ghastly power when viewed as a series rather than singly. “Never before had such primal dungeon scenes been so baldly captured on camera,” Philip Gourevitch wrote in his 2008 book Standard Operating Procedure, and he is probably right. It is bad that the Abu Ghraib pictures were taken, but it is good that they were revealed to the world. But what, exactly, did they reveal? This is the question that motivates Gourevitch’s book and Errol Morris’s accompanying film of the same name. (Gourevitch’s book is based on Morris’s interviews.) The book in particular takes a Sontagian approach; indeed, it is the clearest attempt I know to realize Sontag’s claim that “Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.” Standard Operating Procedure is meant to illustrate the severe limits of photographic evidence; inadvertently, though, it reveals something else. 156

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Gourevitch praises the release of the prison photographs as “a profound public service”; but he is worried that their sensationalism—or, perhaps, the very nature of photographs—made it “easy to think that they were the whole story.” To this end, he seeks out the stories behind the individual images, and he finds, not surprisingly, that the photographs do not speak for themselves. Some of the most shocking pictures depicted some of the relatively less-horrible actions; some of the most brutal images received relatively little attention; some of the worst tortures weren’t photographed at all. And some of the biggest crimes—in particular, the murder of a suspect named Manadel al-Jamadi—were overshadowed by the chilling sight of the young soldiers gloating and joking. Gourevitch focuses in particular on two pictures that instantly became iconic. The first—which, Lynndie England has complained, made her “the poster girl for this war”—shows England as she stares blankly down on a filthy, naked prisoner nicknamed “Gus”; he lies on the ground, one arm twisting across his chest, as she holds him on a dog leash wrapped around his neck. According to Gourevitch, Gus was being transferred out of solitary into a regular cell; England was holding—not dragging—him for a moment so that her lover and nemesis, Corporal Charles Graner, could take a snapshot. (The England-Graner romance is a recurring theme of Gourevitch’s book, and makes for a guiltily fascinating sideshow.) Gus looks as if he is “writhing in pain,” but Gourevitch convincingly argues that it is the hole into which he had previously been thrown—“a solid-doored, windowless, lightless, waterless, toiletless, unfurnished, concrete isolation cell”—that was worse. Of this, however, there is no photograph. The second image depicts the now-infamous “Hooded Man”; this has become the most widely seen and reproduced of the Abu Ghraib photographs. It shows a prisoner (nicknamed “Gilligan” by the soldiers) who wears a black hood and a loose blanket that serves as a kind of makeshift tunic. He stands on a box, arms spread wide like Jesus on the cross; he is attached to wires that, in the early reporting on Abu Ghraib, were said to be electrically live, and would have killed him had he moved. Indeed, this is what the American soldiers told Gilligan. But the threat was empty: Gilligan was never in physical danger—though he could not, of course, have known that at the time. And his mock electrocution, far from being 157

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the exhausting all-night event that some had originally imagined, lasted about fifteen minutes. Specialist Sabrina Harman later said, “I knew he wouldn’t be electrocuted. So it really didn’t bother me. . . . He was laughing at us towards the end of the night, maybe because he knew we couldn’t break him.” Soon after this incident, Gilligan’s fortunes took a turn for the better: Gourevitch reports that he “became one of the MPs’ favorite prisoners” and “was given the privileged status of a block worker . . . Sabrina Harman said, ‘He was just a funny, funny guy. If you were going to take someone home, I definitely would have taken him.’” Later, back in the States, she had a likeness of Gilligan tattooed on her arm. So with Gilligan, as with Gus, perhaps everything was not what it seemed, at least if one judged by the pictures. But how different was it? Like Shoah, Standard Operating Procedure relies, or seems to rely, primarily on testimonies: in this case, those of the soldiers stationed at the prison.* A major theme of the book is the soldiers’ bewilderment by the uproar over the pictures, and especially by which pictures caused the most furor. For England, the leash photograph was “just a picture”; and it’s true that, in comparison to other abuses, it was not the most degrading, dangerous, or painful. Harman was similarly mystified by the outrage that the Hooded Man photograph evoked. Gourevitch writes, “It was the public’s fascination with the photograph of Gilligan—of all the images from Abu Ghraib—that she couldn’t fathom. ‘I think they thought he was being tortured, which he wasn’t,’ she said. ‘There’s so many worse photos out there. I mean, nothing negative happened to him, really.’” Gourevitch uses all this to show how photographs mislead: to show, that is, how we project stories, explanations, and judgments onto them that may not be apt, while ignoring greater crimes that are perpetrated in the absence of cameras. Gourevitch writes that he refuses to “submit” to the confines of the photograph; it is a stance that Claude Lanzmann would surely endorse. But when Gourevitch, like Lanzmann, steps outside those confines, the

* Standard Operating Procedure’s lack of notes and specific source attributions makes it difficult to assess much of the information in it. The fact that Morris’s film relied on “reenactments” of key events worsens rather than alleviates this problem.

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place to which he goes—the soldiers’ testimonies—turns out to be as partial and flawed as the photographs themselves. We are struck less by the gap between what the Abu Ghraib pictures seem to show and the real stories behind them—after all, in each case, something bad really was happening—than by the severe limitations, factual and moral, of the soldiers’ accounts; struck, that is, by their tedious obtuseness and squirmy rationalizations. Reading Gourevitch’s book, and watching Morris’s film, I was reminded of something Martha Gellhorn wrote from Germany in 1945: “To see a whole nation passing the buck is not an enlightening spectacle.” Actually, the soldiers seem to think there is no buck to pass. “I guess we weren’t really thinking, Hey, this guy has a family,” Harman said of what Gourevitch ironically calls her “happy snaps” with al-Jamadi’s battered corpse. “It was just—Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person,” she added. Of the soldiers’ bizarre, humiliating practice of forcing prisoners to wear women’s panties, Sergeant Jeffery Frost earnestly explains, “It wasn’t a thong, but it wasn’t a full bottom panty either. It was one that showed like half the cheek. . . . So it was kind of skimpy, and it didn’t really look well on men.” The litany of evasion—unenlightening indeed—marches on, as when military intelligence soldier Roman Krol allows: “On pictures it looked so much more horrible. . . . The prisoners . . . had to crawl on the floor, and they were naked, so it was really, really, uncomfortable. I can’t call it torture. It was a really, really bad case of humiliation, but that’s about it. . . . Whatever—I moved on.” What Standard Operating Procedure reveals is not that photographs offer incomplete understandings but that all sources—including eyewitness accounts and participant testimonies—offer incomplete understandings. “Does inadequacy not characterize all that we make use of to perceive and describe the world?” Georges Didi-Huberman has asked. “Are the signs of language not just as ‘inadequate,’ albeit differently, as are images?” Those questions were directed at the skeptics of the Auschwitz photographs, but they could just as well be directed at the skeptics of the Abu Ghraib photographs. Yet Gourevitch, like Lanzmann and Sontag, seems to view photographs as uniquely incomplete and uniquely misleading. Gourevitch’s colleague Errol Morris has gone much further; in “Zoom,” Morris’s New York Times blog, he has argued that photographs contain no truth value—no doc159

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umentary value—at all. In Morris’s view, nothing real exists outside of language: The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity “adheres” not to the photograph itself but to the statements we make about a photograph. . . . All alone— shorn of context, without captions—a photograph is neither true nor false. . . . For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.

Yet the Abu Ghraib photos prove just the opposite; as Gourevitch admits, “Without the photographs there would have been no scandal.” And this is because people know—even after forty years of postmodern theory and two decades of Photoshop—that photographs record something that happened. The Abu Ghraib images shocked the public, and scared the government, precisely because they were photographs; they could not be spun, denied, or explained away, and though they could be interpreted in various ways, they could not be made to mean anything at all. The images evoked intuitive, visceral disgust in millions of people throughout the world; this was not an entirely informed reaction, but it wasn’t a wrong one, either. The Abu Ghraib images—digital images, taken by amateurs—have strengthened, not undermined, the status of photographs as documents of the real. No written account of the tortures could have made such an impact. Pace Gourevitch and Morris, “ocular proof” is still something we expect a photograph to provide. This is why Josef Koudelka, the Czech photographer who documented the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, takes his photographs to Russia: they are his argument against the deniers of history. As Koudelka recently told Aperture magazine, These photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers . . . They say: “We came to liberate you. . . .” I say: “Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.” They say: “No. We never . . . no shooting. No. No.” So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say: “Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.” And they have to believe me. 160

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Figure 6.2 Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1968: Josef Koudelka’s photographs of the Soviet invasion were originally published anonymously; now he takes them to Russia to show what the “liberation” of the country meant for the Czechs. Here, a crying woman holds a bloodstained Czech flag. Photo: Josef Koudelka/MagnumPhotos. 161

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“Listen, these are my pictures”: for all their flaws, photographs still speak to us, even if we don’t always hear them. They can deceive, mislead, and obfuscate, but they also record the visible world. The Abu Ghraib photographs, more than most, did all these things at once. And, as photographs, they will continue to be copied, circulated, stared at—they will continue to humiliate, accuse, enrage, and incite—long after the U.S. troops have gone and the Iraq war, or the American version of it, is over. What, then, of Abu Ghraib’s mirror: the tidal wave of death-pictures emanating from, and flooding through, the Muslim world? These include two main groups of images: first, documentary footage of wounded and dead Muslim civilians from the wars in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and, especially, the occupied Palestinian territories; second, custom-made propaganda videos of suicide bombings, tortures, and beheadings. The former group of images is meant to establish Muslims as the world’s greatest victims; the latter, as the world’s greatest warriors. Does the circulation of such images also perform “a profound public service”? These are not underground images; though Westerners often describe them as pornographic, they operate in an entirely public sphere. Documentary footage of war—of heads exploding, eyes blowing out, corpses disintegrating—runs in continuous loops on popular Arabic TV stations such as Qatar’s Al-Jazeera, Dubai’s Al-Arabiya, Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV, and Hezbollah’s Al-Manar; New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has described this visual carnage as “the Muzak of the Arab world.” In particular, there is a focus on images of babies and children who are bleeding, screaming, maimed, dying, and dead. “It’s pretty hard to adequately describe the level of bloodiness during an average Al Jazeera newscast,” Michael Wolff, then the media critic for New York magazine, wrote. “It’s mesmerizing bloodiness. . . . It’s snuff-film caliber.” And here is the Iranian-American journalist Azadeh Moaveni, who reported, from Cairo, on Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian fighting in the West Bank in 2002: The silently rolling footage reveals [Palestinian] corpses in every conceivable state: lying in pools of blood, eyes still open in the frozen glance before death, contorted 162

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in stairwells, stacked upon shelves, wrapped in floral blankets, awkwardly fit into body bags with limbs poking out, dumped into trucks, lined up in rows of white bags on a dirt road. Even if the day’s news isn’t red-stained, the parade of archived, bloody images marches on. They are everywhere. . . . The ceaseless carnage at times is too much even for veteran viewers.

It is in the past decade, and especially since 9/11, that the second group of images has emerged: images that, like those taken at Abu Ghraib, depict violent acts deliberately performed for the camera. Such images serve several purposes: to intimidate local populations in the Muslim world, especially secularists, women, and democrats; to scare Western viewers; and to inspire adherents to the jihadist cause. Normally hidden events such as executions are, instead, publicized as widely as possible. Reporting from Pakistan in 2008, Steve Coll of the New Yorker observed a public execution of suspected Shiites: “Militants in black turbans parade the victims before handheld cameras and behead them with machetes or knives. The Taliban’s propaganda wing distributes these gruesome videos throughout Pakistan.” Visibility is the meaning of this violence; like the struggle sessions of the Cultural Revolution, this is cruelty that needs to be seen. As for the beheading videos, they have become a bizarre form of entertainment in the West as well as East. In 2004, footage of Islamic terrorists beheading a young Japanese hostage was broadcast on a large screen during a rock concert held in a city east of Tokyo. Spectacles of atrocity— sometimes turned into music videos—air on such Western websites as the Dutch-run Ogrish, which has been described as “a vast supermarket of death and dismemberment,” as well as on YouTube and Google Video, which boast worldwide audiences of hundreds of millions. East and West behold each other in a symbiotically contemptuous, symbiotically transfixed gaze. What is new is not just the ease with which such images are transmitted but the intimate relationship between the acts of violence and their documentation; it is hard to distinguish the two. Some terrorist groups now regularly send cameramen, just as the Nazis did, to film their missions, including attacks in Iraq and Israel; suicide bombings, especially in Iraq, are photographed as they happen and immediately broadcast. As the Financial 163

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Times of London noted, “The use of photography and film has always been central to modern propaganda, but what distinguishes this new variant of Islamic extremism is that its spectacles seem to be choreographed purely so that they can be filmed and distributed over the internet.” The world’s most egalitarian medium is also the world’s most powerful propaganda organ, circulating images of sometimes unimaginable brutality to every corner of the globe. The jihadist-produced videos of beheadings, suicide bombings, and executions operate in ways very different from those of traditional documentary photography. They are not forms of witness but forms of war. And the videos are closer to commercials than to “pure” documents: the tape of Daniel Pearl’s execution, for instance, is intercut with images of dead (presumably Palestinian) babies and children, Ariel Sharon, and George Bush. After viewing the video, journalist Bruce Shapiro wrote: The Daniel Pearl murder video is more grotesque, sickening and disturbing than can possibly be appreciated without a viewing. It’s not only the brutality . . . and not only the spectacle of Pearl’s degrading and futile participation in his captors’ anti-Semitic script. There’s also the video production itself. I expected a crude equivalent of one of those old ransom notes made from pasted-up newspaper headlines. Instead it is relatively slick and professional, a paranoid montage of tangentially related images putting the dead reporter at the center of global Jewish conspiracy and Islamic revenge fantasy. The logic is that of a cult like Lyndon LaRouche, the images those of a snuff film.

The fact that such propaganda consists of moving images rather than stills is one key to its pernicious power. Photographs are, in a sense, a fantasy: though they record time, they also stop it. This is a fantasy that we need—in order to contemplate, to think, to engage; this is especially true of photographs of violence. Photographs can, undeniably, draw us into their worlds, but their stillness creates a space between image and viewer. And this is a space that the viewer can use: to separate herself from, and if necessary resist, the image and its maker. Photographs offer us the possibility of alienation in the best sense of the word. With movies and videos, this is far more difficult; a film’s speed gives 164

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it a powerfully realistic, powerfully present momentum that the frozen, “dead” photograph can never attain. Walter Benjamin observed a similar distinction between paintings and films, and noted the diminished capacity for critical thought that films encourage: The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. [Georges] Duhamel . . . notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” . . . This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind.

Moving images tend, in short, to sweep us into them, sometimes against our will. (Kael described movies as “total and encompassing.”) They are unique in their ability to make us surrender—which is why they are so effective. And this is so even when a viewer is consciously antagonistic to the message a film conveys. The documentary photographer Danny Lyon, on visiting the holocaust museum in Washington DC, noted his unwilling seduction as he watched Hitler on film: He is speaking in German of course, and if you have grown up with it, as I did, German can be a warm, comforting language. . . . Now he is yelling. “The Party is the Führer and the Führer is the Party!” Now everyone is screaming. They love Hitler. Golden-haired girls with braids love him. Children love him. More German marching music is seeping in from somewhere. I find that I’m tapping my foot. I can’t help it. . . . I want to swear allegiance to Hitler too. Everyone else is doing it. At last, a great leader for a great Germany!

This does not mean that one can’t be revolted while watching an Islamist death-video or that one can’t resist a cinematic Hitler. But it does mean that the viewer often abandons herself to the action in front of her and must struggle, after the fact, to reassert her autonomy and reconnect to what she knows. She must undo the process of dissolving; she must reassert her separateness and her “heightened presence of mind.” 165

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John Berger once asked whether looking at photographs of the Vietnam War could ever make the viewer stronger; such a question is, I think, far more pertinent in the case of the jihadist commercials. Indeed, there is a large and vociferous debate in the Western media about whether the beheading videos should be viewed at all (Shapiro’s piece on the Pearl execution was titled, “By All Means Look Away”). For some, to look at these videos is to participate in the perpetrators’ barbarism and submit to the jihadists’ plans: to watch is to collude, just as it was with the Nazi photographs. For others, such viewing is a necessary lesson in what the New Republic called “the facticity of evil.” What interests me here is the assumption—frequently made by both sides—that for a presumably civilized viewer, only one reaction to these videos is possible. Thus, in writing of the Pearl video, the New Republic insisted, “What remains in the mind once the ‘credits’ have rolled is not merely disgust, but also the conviction that the only right and proper response to this variety of anti-Americanism is American power.” Boston Phoenix publisher Stephen Mindich defended his controversial decision to link the Pearl video to his paper’s website in similar terms: “If there is anything that should galvanize every non–Jew hater [sic] in the world . . . against the perpetrators and supporters of those who committed this unspeakable murder, it should be viewing this video.” This attempt to dictate viewers’ responses reflects the intense anxiety such videos evoke even among those who urge watching them. The anxiety is understandable, yet the effort to control reeks of sanctimony. Younger viewers are, I think, far more honest about the shameful lure of forbidden violence and their impure reactions to it. One young writer, Becky Ohlsen, observed, No one is supposed to say so, but watching videos like the Daniel Pearl beheading is on some level thrilling. You’re getting away with something, seeing something you shouldn’t, something that shouldn’t exist at all, much less be watchable, much less be watchable from the safety and isolation of your own room. As the audience, you can watch Pearl’s murder risk-free, you can watch it without having done what a person must do to create a recording like this. You don’t need to act on your politi-

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cal convictions in order to be at the scene of a political execution; you don’t even need to leave the house. You can hide behind the camera, which has already done its work, and just watch.

And for another young critic, Charly Wilder, viewing the video was inherently unethical precisely because it spoke to her repressed desires instead of awakening any sort of political resistance: “It may be uncomfortable to admit, but our negative enthrallment as we watch that grainy, grizzly footage is closer to a kind of twisted perversion of desire than it is to conscientious awakening. The Pearl video subverts conscience.” Watching the video as a form of political education or of bearing witness is, Wilder writes, “the stuff of delusion and self-rationalization,” for the video speaks to “a fascination fueled not by the desire for truth but by masochistic lust.” Does this mean that these videos should be dismissed as pornographic? Should they be banned—or destroyed, as Lanzmann might urge? My answer on both counts is no. Watching these death-films demands scrupulously honest responses rather than moralism; and it requires, subsequently, the ability to scrutinize those responses while knowing that they might lead to ignoble truths. Just as Kael argued that trash can lead us to art, young writers like Ohlsen and Wilder insist on exposing themselves to the world’s worst images—and, then, constructing their own versions of ethical vision. I admire their bravery, and I hope they are right. From the start of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration attempted to sanitize images of those wars, a project that became especially absurd in light of the Abu Ghraib pictures. Thus the administration’s ban on photographs of American soldiers’ flag-draped coffins, based on the nonsensical argument that such pictures violate familial privacy. Paired with such governmental actions, many have charged, is the American press’s unwillingness to make clear, at least in pictorial terms, the bloody costs of these wars for Afghans, Iraqis, and Americans alike. There is truth to this claim—indeed, the New York Times admitted as much in a 2008 piece titled “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images.” The authors noted:

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If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists—too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts—the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a halfdozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.

But it is also true that dramatic, grim images documenting the toll of war and terrorism on Iraqis, Afghans, and others have appeared:* Tyler Hicks’s five-column color photograph of two blood-splattered boys in Tyre, Lebanon, taken during the 2006 war with Israel; the wounded man, head and nose encased in bandages, who survived a car bomb in Iraq, photographed by Hadi Mizban; Max Becherer’s bright, color photograph of the man in a Kirkuk hospital who has, apparently, bled to death—another car-bomb victim. Most infamous, perhaps, is Hicks’s 2001 sequence documenting the gruesome execution of a half-naked, bleeding Taliban soldier by Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan—especially disturbing since the Northern Alliance was fighting on “our” side. Even more important, in my view, are the images not of actual violence but of the bleak sorrow it causes, as in John Moore’s large color photo of a Pakistani man. Arms spread wide, face tilted toward the sky, mouth howling in lamentation, he stands amidst the remains—the shoes, the jumbled corpses, the overturned bicycle, the charred bits of something—of a suicide bombing in 2007. This glimpse of the grief and sheer helplessness that terror sows is, for me, the iconic image of the post-9/11 decade. I do not know if there are enough of these images—what would enough be?—nor how, or even if, other Americans see them. But the salient question is not one of graphic content, which is neither good nor bad in itself. Nor can the issue be one of “taste.” The real question to ask is why such images are shown, and what contexts for debating them are possible. This is precisely the issue that Brecht and the Frankfurt critics raised—and

* I concentrate here on the New York Times, which sets standards, and agendas, for much of the U.S. press.

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worried over—some eighty years ago: what is the civic arena in which such photographs are disseminated, critiqued, and understood? The crucial factor here is not aesthetic rawness—more blood is not necessarily more honest—but intent. The website of the feminist-secular Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), for instance, regularly posts gruesome images of women who have been beaten or killed by Islamic fundamentalists, or who have tried to burn themselves to death to escape forced marriages; of children blinded and maimed by U.S. bombs; of public executions by the Taliban. “Our apology for publishing such material,” RAWA courteously notes on the site. “This is the reality of life for the people of Afghanistan.” The photographs and videos are linked to written texts and placed in a context that is not, clearly, one of violent incitement; the aim is awareness, empathy, protest, and political support. RAWA airs executions to condemn them; the Taliban airs executions to celebrate them. The Israeli press, which is by far the freest and most contentious in the Mideast, largely abjures printing or broadcasting explicit photographs of the victims of Palestinian suicide bombings (though such images are available on the Internet). This should not be mistaken for squeamishness, much less forgiveness. But there is a sense within Israel—rightly so, I think—that such images would do nothing to educate the public (is there an Israeli not highly versed in these matters?) or to further the political debate; on the contrary, they could only encourage a potentially uncontrollable lust for revenge. There is a longstanding taboo, too, against showing what the Israelis refer to as “dancing on blood.” Thus, in the spring of 2004—just after the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs—a debate erupted in Israel over whether the media should broadcast grisly images of Palestinians celebrating the explosion of an Israeli tank. Six soldiers had been blown to smithereens and their charred body parts then joyfully displayed. Haaretz reported, Gazans, starved for vengeance after the Israeli assassinations earlier this year of Hamas leaders . . . poured into the streets of Gaza’s Zeitoun quarter in a frenzy,

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triumphantly holding up shards of the shredded APC, and displaying with pride the severed head of one of the six victims. Palestinian television and channels elsewhere in the Arab world aired the crowd response in detail, at one point showing an exhilarated member of the crowd placing a body part in a home refrigerator for safe-keeping. . . . Later, as news emerged of the deaths of the soldiers, Israel’s main television networks . . . showed footage of militants brandishing the grisly remnants they had gathered from the site of the blast, the details blurred out of recognition for Israeli viewers.

In the Arab press, the 2008–9 war between Israel and Hamas, with its terrible toll on Gazan civilians, led to the circulation of some of the most graphic images ever; the Palestinian paper Al-Ayyam, for instance, ran pictures of bloody child “martyrs”—some look decapitated—on its front page. But whether in print or on screen, these images seemed to hail rather than protest the agony of victimization: it’s hard to imagine that they deepened anyone’s political thinking. Thus Abdelwahab Meddeb, a Tunisian-born writer, condemned “the horror fuelled by Arab television networks (in particular Al-Jazeera) which complacently zoom in on bloody and disfigured faces which are sometimes contorted with pain and sometimes inert. These images succeed one another according to the morbid logic of editing designed to excite Arab opinion . . . By resorting to emotionalism such media avoid the political and strategic analysis.” In any other context and in any other place, this hysterical outpouring of death-images would be called fascist. Instead, the pictorial reticence of the U.S. press has led some Westerners to romanticize the Arab media’s love of gore; Wolff noted that American journalists have developed a “big crush” on Al Jazeera. But the Arab press’s wanton loops of death and mayhem are no truer or less manipulative than the finickiness of the American press. In fact, both extremes foster dangerous fantasies in their viewers. The U.S. media shields us, far too much, from the bodily reality of the wars we are fighting (and war is, first and last, a bodily truth). The Arab press, conversely, bathes its viewers in the kind of feverishly lurid violence that the Frankfurt critics so rightly feared: in this case the “image-idea” truly does drive away thought, just as Kracauer warned. Each approach precludes the development of analytic abilities, historic understand170

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ings, and political maturity at precisely the time they are so desperately needed. In the end, the question of what to see and what to watch is not just political but personal too. Every American, I would argue, is obliged to look, and think about, the Abu Ghraib photographs: these tortures were committed by an American army in an American war launched by American leaders. We need to feel in our guts, and think carefully about, what these images show (and what they don’t); we do not have the option of ignoring, denying, or disowning them. The beheading videos, and our relationship to them, are different: viewing them is a matter of choice. Those who are bleakest about the present political situation may be the most loath to do so; journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrote that he had not viewed such tapes “because to watch would be to lose the last shreds of optimism left in this pessimist’s soul.” I, too, have assiduously avoided them, not because I think it is politically wrong to watch them but because I don’t think I can bear to. And so Pearl’s killers and their comrades have taught me something. This book argues again and again that we need to look at the violence of the world we inhabit; but there is a limit to the visual cruelty that I want to let in. I do not want to watch Daniel Pearl, or piteous others, as their heads are sliced away from their bodies; I do not want to watch Iraqis or Afghans or Israelis as the suicide bombers transform them from whole human beings into fragments of flesh. This is not a matter of complex morality or political principle but one of simple breakage. Here is the point at which I find myself saying not just “enough,” but: “Too much.”

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PART THREE

People

Figure 7.1 The Aragon front, Spain, 1936: Robert Capa took this picture in the early days of the Spanish civil war; these men are members of the Marxist militia POUM. Capa was an ardent antifascist, but he considered war to be a grievous necessity rather than a glorious quest. After Franco’s victory, he never returned to Spain. Photo: Robert Capa; © Cornell Capa/ Magnum Photos.

7 ROBERT CAPA The Optimist

In a war you must hate somebody or love somebody, you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on. Robert Capa

Sometimes, when I am feeling sad, I look at a photograph of Robert Capa’s that I especially like. You could call it a war photograph, though it shows two men dancing instead of two men fighting. They wear overalls and white shirts; they are almost certainly peasants or workers, and poor. The one who faces us has a black beret and a moustache and a smile, and he flings his arms wide as he dances. In a semicircle behind the dancing couple stand seven other men, their faces lit with pleasure as they watch. The photograph radiates an ebullient generosity, and it does what every good news photograph should do: draws us in and, simultaneously, makes us want to go outside the frame to learn more about these men and their lives and the cause for which they fought. Capa shot this picture on the Aragon front in August 1936, during the early, optimistic days of the Spanish civil war; the men it depicts were members of the Marxist but anti-Stalinist POUM, with which George Orwell would fight. Capa covered the war as an exciting news event, and it was. But he covered it too because—as a Jew, a refugee, a leftist, and a democrat—he was passionately pro-Loyalist and passionately antifascist, and because he believed that the outcome of the war was of crucial impor-

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tance far beyond the borders of poor, marginal, backward Spain. He turned out to be right. Robert Capa was the world’s quintessential war photographer from the 1930s until the mid-1950s, which is often referred to as the heyday—that is, the pretelevision day—of photojournalism. His political commitment, his easy camaraderie, and his courage made Capa not just a famous photographer but a deeply admired one. In 1938 the British magazine Picture Post ran a handsome portrait of Capa, taken by his lover Gerda Taro in Spain. He is shown in profile looking through a movie-camera viewfinder, with a caption that reads: “He is a passionate democrat, and he lives to take photographs.” The many publications that ran Capa’s pictures—whether mainstream American magazines like Life, liberal British ones like Picture Post, or the Communist-affiliated Regards and Ce Soir in France—had a proudly possessive relationship to him. They referred to Capa as “our special envoy,” heralded his triumphs on their covers, and devoted page upon page to his avowedly partisan pictures. Unlike today’s photojournalists, Capa was not derided as a voyeur, a leech, or a pornographer. When he died in 1954—he was only forty—while on assignment in Vietnam, tributes poured in from around the world. Immersing himself in battle with seeming fearlessness became Capa’s specialty. Life boasted that he took his camera deeper into battle than had ever been done before; Regards lauded him as “audacious”; the journalist Vincent Sheean would write of his friend’s pictures: “You wonder, when you see them, how anybody could have photographed them and still be alive.” Capa brought viewers to risky new places: into foxholes, behind sandbags, onto battlefields as the bullets whizzed by. He was on intimate terms with danger and death: he filmed the war in China after the Japanese invasion, slogged through a freezing Europe with Allied troops in the winter of 1944, parachuted into Germany with the Seventeenth Airborne Division in 1945, and accompanied the first wave of infantrymen onto Omaha Beach on D-Day. Capa was in Israel on the day it declared independence, which means he witnessed the first Arab-Israeli war, and he photographed Vietnam a decade before the war there became an American project instead of a French one. His most famous photograph, “The Falling Soldier,” shows a Loyalist partisan, gun in hand, caught in the very mo176

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ment of being shot; it became the classic war image, as well as the classic antiwar image, of the twentieth century. Yet there is a paradox at the heart of Capa’s work: he was a war photographer who was not primarily interested in physical suffering, atrocities, battles, or death. The gruesome pictures of human wreckage with which we are now so familiar were essentially anathema to Capa, and his best photographs are not those of warfare itself. What did he show instead? In Spain, he shot many portraits of Loyalist militiamen. Their faces—sometimes shockingly old or shockingly young—are, at first, lit by radiant smiles and radiant hopes; they are also worn, lined, earnest, purposeful, worried, and, eventually, heartbroken. These are people, Capa’s photographs suggest, who view war as a grievous necessity rather than a splendid adventure. Capa showed terror-stricken civilians in the cities and the countryside, looking upwards as they flee the bombs (for Spain was a new kind of total war); two laughing women and a man washing clothes together, a symbol of egalitarian social relations (for Spain was a new kind of revolution); a Barcelona militiawoman sitting on a chair, her gun propped before her as she reads a fashion magazine; ragged soldiers on the Madrid front, bundled against the cold as they calmly play chess; crowds in Barcelona hanging from their balconies on the crushing day that their international allies were forced to depart. He showed peasants who had formed collective farms and soldiers who held open-air meetings to debate what kind of army they wished to create. Capa showed a new society being built and he showed it being destroyed. He depicted fear and grief and, eventually, defeat; in particular, his photographs of hounded, staggering, utterly bereft refugees achieve a shaming, accusatory power. But he did not document nihilism or moral implosion: the Spanish, Martha Gellhorn reported, remained “intact in spirit” even as their republic was crushed, and that is how Capa presented them. Whether soldiers or civilians, Capa’s subjects always looked recognizably human, never alien, freakish, or disgusting. The contrasts between Capa’s pictures and those of contemporary war photographers are stark: graphic portrayals of wounded, mutilated bodies have radically increased in kind and quantity since Capa’s time. And while this intensified depiction of atrocity seems to illustrate a shift in the na177

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ture of photojournalism, it is more telling, I think, of shifts in the natures of war, of violence, and of politics themselves. To look at Capa’s work is to realize how distant his world was from ours: his first published photographs, taken in Copenhagen in 1932, were of an agitated Leon Trotsky speaking on “The Meaning of the Russian Revolution.” Yet Capa is also inescapably modern, and some of the essential political issues that his photographs reflected are very much with us today. Robert Capa was born André (or Endre) Friedmann in Budapest in 1913; his parents were secular Jews who owned a prosperous dressmaking shop. Capa didn’t excel in school, but interwar Budapest was an education in itself: a politicized, impressively literate city that incubated a vibrant community of artists, scientists, and intellectuals, many of whom would flee the country and profoundly influence the modern culture of the West. (In later years, Capa would quip, “It’s not enough to have talent; you also have to be Hungarian.”) One could say that the intelligentsia was Hungary’s main export in the 1920s and thirties, especially as political repression and anti-Semitism intensified. As a teen, Capa was drawn to the Munkakör (Work Circle), a group of socialist and avant-garde artists, photographers, and intellectuals, and he was a regular participant in the demonstrations, sometimes violent, against the protofascist Miklós Horthy regime. Political commitment didn’t rule out irreverence, though: at one demonstration, Capa led the crowd in a nonsensical demand for “Scrap iron! Scrap iron!” just to see, he said, if he “could get them to shout anything.” In 1931 he was arrested by the secret police, beaten, and jailed; a police official’s wife—who happened to be a good customer of the Friedmanns’—won Capa’s release on the condition that he leave Hungary immediately. He did, moving to Berlin to study at the liberal Deutsche Hochschule für Politik; it was, ironically, more welcoming of Jews than the Hungarian universities, which had instituted anti-Jewish quotas. Capa enrolled as a journalism student, and throughout his life he regarded photography as a form of journalism rather than of art. In Berlin, Capa knew hunger for the first time. As the worldwide depression spread to Hungary, the Friedmanns’ business went bankrupt and 178

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they could no longer subsidize their son. Capa needed a job, badly, and he decided to switch from journalism to photography because, he would later explain, photography “was the nearest thing to journalism for anyone who found himself without a [widely spoken] language.” Besides, photography seemed easy: with the introduction of the new, lightweight cameras, anyone could do it . . . couldn’t they? Perhaps—though not necessarily well. Capa, however, could do it very well indeed: he had what we might call a natural eye for dramatic impact, narrative drive, emotional insight, and the revelatory detail. This was an ethical capacity more than an aesthetic one: Capa was, quite simply, extraordinarily alert to the world. But it is also true that Capa’s photographs are not formally perfect (as are James Nachtwey’s) or formally daring (as are those of Gilles Peress). At a party in Paris in 1950, Eve Arnold, then a young Magnum photographer, admitted to journalist Janet Flanner that she didn’t think Capa’s photographs were “very well designed.” Flanner looked at Arnold with pity and replied, “My dear, history doesn’t design well either.” Capa arrived in Berlin as the Weimar Republic was imploding. Two news photographs (not Capa’s) from 1932 suggest the intensity, and the contradictions, of that terrifying collapse. One blurry image shows a large, chaotic hand-to-hand street battle between Communists, Nazis, and the police on the outskirts of Berlin—though one might argue that the far greater tragedy was the ferocious antagonism between Social Democrats and Communists, which prevented them from uniting until far too late. A quieter but more startling photograph shows the alleyway of a tattered Berlin tenement and a few of its inhabitants, including several children and a man with a baby carriage. The tenants of this building were waging a rent strike; we see their slogan—“First Food!—and then rent”—painted on the wall of the courtyard. And we see, too, the flags of the building’s tenants hanging from their windows. Swastikas and hammer-and-sickles fly side by side, as if in some grotesque parody of coexistence; apparently both parties supported the strike. Weimar was modernity’s workshop, and much has been written about its explosion of creativity in social mores, sexuality, intellectual life, and the arts. Less frequently noted is what a wonderful town Berlin was for journalism and press photography in the Weimar years. Germany’s ab179

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olition of press censorship in 1918 unleashed a torrent of newspapers, magazines, and tabloids; by the 1920s Berlin alone boasted a phenomenal forty-seven daily newspapers and approximately fifty weeklies. A photograph of the time suggests the rich abundance of the Berlin press: it shows a wide Potsdamer Platz newsstand veritably dripping with papers, like a plump bourgeois lady loaded down with jewels. Photographs became a key part of the new journalism, which documented everything from the latest fashions and film stars to social problems, natural catastrophes, and political convulsions. As we have seen, many criticisms can be, and were, lodged against these publications. It is true that they were slow to understand the political dysfunction, and the depth of anti-Semitism, of the later Weimar years (although many of those publications were liberal and, often, edited by Jews); that they flooded their viewers with an undifferentiated mass of images, as Kracauer charged; and that they often sought the most sensational rather than the most meaningful images. In 1932, for instance, editor Kurt Korff of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung challenged the photographer James Abbe to “get me photographs of Hitler coming out of a synagogue!” But the illustrated magazines also taught their readers new ways to see, and they made their readers’ worlds wider and more cosmopolitan. Political events became more like news and less like history: cataclysmic upheavals, such as the Communist revolt of 1919, were brought to readers almost in real time. Politicians were shown as never before: unposed, candid, flawed. Political demonstrations, revolutions, even executions—as well as life inside mines, factories, slums, homeless shelters, drug clinics, and progressive schools—were documented; so were events in far-away countries, which now seemed not quite so far away. Pioneering editors like Korff at the BIZ and Stefan Lorant of the Münchner Illustrierte Presse developed a new form, the photo essay, which used photographs to create filmlike narratives rather than viewing them in isolation. (Fittingly, one such series was called “Spellbound by the Newspaper.”) And to feed this voracious new press, photo agencies sprang up; one of the most prominent, called Dephot, was founded by another Hungarian émigré, Simon Guttmann, who was close to both the Dadaists and the Sparticists and who gave André Friedmann his first job. Unlike Kracauer and Brecht, Guttmann 180

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viewed photography as a politically progressive force; Dephot, he wrote, was “committed to cross[ing] all frontiers between nations and classes” and to “siding with anyone who did something new and non-conformist.” For two crucial years—before the triumph of barbarism—Capa was nurtured by this experimental, democratic culture of journalism: a culture where words and images, radical politics and the avant-garde, reporters and intellectuals, fluidly mixed. (Capa and Egon Erwin Kisch, a Communist journalist known as the “rampaging reporter,” frequented the same café as Walter Benjamin.) Weimar was home to members of the astonishingly fertile Hungarian diaspora of photographers, including László Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkácsi; of famed editors like Lorant, Korff, and Theodor Wolff; and of prominent photojournalists like Erich Salomon, Tim Gidal, and Alfred Eisenstaedt. Hitler set out to eradicate this vital, rambunctious press, which he considered far too Jewish in its skepticism, its creativity, its personnel, and its ownership. Starting in early 1933, many of Berlin’s journalists and photographers became marked men and women; in August of that year, a list of working photographers identified as Jewish or foreign was published in the magazine Deutsche Nachrichten, leading to mass purges. The journalistic community scattered with rapidity, though by the standards of the time—a time when, as Brecht would write, refugees changed countries “oftener than our shoes”—many of its members were lucky, eventually settling in Palestine, England, or the United States. Many, but not all: Wolff was killed by the Gestapo; Salomon and his family were murdered in Auschwitz. And as the Reichstag’s embers glowed, Capa—then only nineteen, still called André Friedmann, and decidedly unknown—fled to Vienna, where he found fascism gaining strength; moved back to Budapest, where anti-Semitism was flourishing; then went to Paris, where he would come of age as a photographer and a man. In Paris, Capa met the three people who would become most important to him: Gerda Taro, David Szymin, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Taro, née Gerta Pohorylle, was a German-Jewish refugee, a leftist activist, and a budding photographer who became Capa’s great love and his workmate. Szymin, who changed his name to David Seymour but was known as Chim, 181

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was a Polish-Jewish intellectual who would document many of the same struggles as Capa, and who Capa always regarded as the better photographer of the two. Cartier-Bresson was an haute-bourgeois Frenchman, drawn to surrealism and to the left; many consider him to be the greatest photojournalist of the century. Taro’s photography career, and her love affair with Capa, were brief: in July 1937, at age twenty-six, she was accidentally crushed by a Loyalist tank in the wake of the Battle of Brunete; it was a death from which Capa never recovered. Chim and Cartier-Bresson, along with George Rodger, would found the Magnum cooperative with Capa in 1947; nine years later, Chim was killed by an Egyptian machine gunner while covering the Suez Canal conflict. And in Paris, André Friedmann became Robert Capa. The idea for the transformation came from Taro, who had become his manager—though there wasn’t much to manage: penniless Hungarian photographers were hardly a rarity, and editors took scant interest in Capa’s pictures. (His Leica spent a lot of time in the pawnshop.) Shrewdly intuiting that persona could be as important as product, Taro came up with the idea of transforming Friedmann into Capa, whose name was probably taken from the film director Frank Capra. She assured potential employers that Capa was a rich, famous, “fabulously successful” American—which would, presumably, be more attractive than a poor, anonymous, failed Hungarian—whose pictures she was generously offering to them. Even after the ruse was discovered, Capa kept the name; Taro changed hers too, taking the short, sharp, modern-sounding surname of a Japanese painter living in Paris. Capa never became rich—among other things, he loved to gamble and was tremendously generous with his friends—but he would become famous, successful, and an American citizen. Throughout his life observers were fascinated by the contradiction between the self-creation of Capa’s personality and the stubborn realism of his photographs; in 1947, John Hersey would write, “Capa, who has spent so much of his energy on inventions for his own person, has deep, human sympathy for men and women trapped in reality.” The Paris years were key to Capa’s growth: as a photographer who sees the world, as a politically committed person who tries to change it, as a man who loves deeply and, therefore, would know inconsolable loss. 182

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Throughout his life, Paris—not Budapest, Berlin, New York, or even Madrid—was Capa’s lodestar; as he trudged with Allied troops through a decimated Europe it was, above all, a liberated Paris that he wanted to reach. And he did, riding into the city on a tank with some of his old Spanish Republican comrades on August 25, 1944. His photographs of that day record something simple yet rare: the particular exuberance of people who have regained their freedom and who, therefore, need no longer grovel. “Never were there so many so happy so early in the morning,” Capa would later write. By then he had seen a lot, by then he was very tough, but on that day his viewfinder blurred with tears. If in the Paris of the 1930s Capa found his soulmates, he found something else that, I believe, sustained him through the many wars and the many sorrows he would document. Capa was an ardent Popular Frontist—especially after witnessing the German catastrophe—and the French front’s electoral victory in 1936 gave him, and Chim, a great subject. Capa, still largely unknown, and Chim, already a staff photographer for Regards, were everywhere: out on the streets for the massive demonstrations; in workers’ cafés for drink and debate; at meetings and conventions, polling stations and workers’ funerals; and with the strikers as they occupied their workplaces. A particularly affectionate photograph of Capa’s from this time shows five neatly dressed shopgirls—the “demoiselles des rayons”—staging a sit-down strike against the fancy department store Galeries Lafayette. One can see Capa developing his distinctive style, including his love of motion and his eye for illuminating details, in his photographs of the Popular Front. In Paris, he learned how to get inside the demonstrations, some of which were by no means placid, much as he would soon do with battles in Spain. (These demonstrations are a pleasure to look at, for the marchers carry portraits of Zola, Voltaire, Diderot, and Gorky rather than of brooding old ayatollahs or teenaged suicides.) And one finds Capa, again and again, documenting ordinary people as they scrutinize newspapers and wall posters, march arm in arm in the streets, sleep in occupied factories, and, perhaps most of all, animatedly argue: all Paris, it seems, couldn’t stop talking. These pictures explore what I believe were Capa’s favorite 183

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themes: the expression of democracy, the uniting in brotherhood, the attempt to create a new kind of history. French politics, of course, were no picnic: the left was torn over the Soviet Union; another world war seemed imminent; the nation lurched from crisis to crisis as the Great Depression, and the desperation it engendered, deepened; and fascist and anti-Semitic groups were gathering strength. A picture taken by Capa in the spring of 1936 shows a young man with a jaunty hat and a bicycle, photographed from behind. He has stopped to read a Communist Party wall poster. “Against That!” it exhorts above a caricature of Adolf Hitler, who, staring out at us, grips a large knife in his teeth. Capa and Chim were optimists, but as stateless Jewish refugees they couldn’t afford to be foolish ones. They knew what was at stake if fascism succeeded; indeed, within a few years, each would have family and friends murdered and his old world obliterated. Yet there is a feeling of zesty pleasure rather than danger in their photographs from this time. One can almost hear the singing of songs, feel the pounding of feet, and sense the building atmosphere of excitement and hope; John Hersey would later describe Capa’s Popular Front photographs as “amazing,” and they are. Capa and Chim lived in dark times, but the Popular Front years gave them something invaluable—something that many present-day photojournalists lack: the lived experience of belief in the future, of politics as solidarity, and, at least for a brief time, of victory. This lived knowledge of political possibility marked Capa forever. For it was politics—broadly defined as the ways in which people try to make their world more free, more just, more their own—that, I think, interested him most. Capa was no pacifist: he believed that war was sometimes a necessity and that the earlier one learned this, the better. But war was never a goal, nor a cause for celebration: war was what happened when politics failed. This doesn’t mean that war didn’t engage Capa, challenge him, even excite him; as he once wrote, “For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner after completing a five-year stretch in Sing Sing.” And Capa clearly believed that fighting back—and fighting for—could occasion pride: this is abundantly clear in his pictures

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from Spain and other parts of Europe, China, and Israel. Yet Capa could never have said, as has James Nachtwey, that he wanted to be a war photographer per se. For Capa, it was imperative that war be documented, witnessed, and exposed, especially as it became the main fact of life and of death for millions of people between 1936 and 1945. But it was the lives people lived and the societies they built that compelled him most strongly. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Nachtwey, or indeed any contemporary photojournalist, passing up the chance to photograph the death camps, a choice Capa made in 1945. In his memoir Slightly Out of Focus, Capa explained, “From the Rhine to the Oder I took no pictures. The concentration camps were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect.” But this is not, I suspect, the whole story. Capa was not a socialist-realist or a triumphalist: he did not shy away from depicting suffering or defeat. Like Malraux, Capa never evaded the fact that human beings can be easily crushed. But from all the evidence of his work, he was innately averse to photographing the absolute powerlessness and utter humiliation of those who, tortured beyond recognition, had become pure victims, musselmen, the living dead— those who Primo Levi would remember as “the slaves, the worn-out . . . broken, conquered.” It was not that Capa denied the horror of the camps or turned away from them—as a Hungarian Jew, if nothing else, that would have been impossible; it was just that, in the camps’ flat negation of all that is human, he could make no sense of them. “In classical tragedy,” Irving Howe wrote, “man is defeated; in the Holocaust, man is destroyed.” It was the vein of tragic meaning, not of nihilist emptiness, that Capa mined. Though Capa’s D-Day pictures are his most famous of the war, it is the pictures he took behind the front that demonstrate his greatest skills and most nuanced understandings. Two photographs from the Italian campaign illustrate this best. On October 1, 1943, Capa entered a decimated Naples with the Allied forces. The next day he photographed the funeral of twenty teenaged partisans who had taken up arms in the days preceding the Allies’ arrival. The funeral took place in a school; a teacher had been the boys’ leader. Capa focused on the faces of the black-clad women mourners, and the intensity

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of this image is so great that we feel almost hushed, as if we have entered into the event. The most striking aspect of this photograph is its ability to convey grief in specific, variegated ways. In the foreground are three women, their black hair pulled away from their faces, their hands knotted together more in torment than in prayer, their faces contorted with pain. One woman epitomizes grief as utter desolation: the wide stretch of her sobbing mouth tells us that she will never again know comfort. Next to her is a woman holding a photograph of a young man who must be her son; her mouth, open in a rounded O, suggests not just devastation but disbelief too. Beside her stands another mourner: but this one does not cry. Her eyes squeeze into slits, her mouth stretches tight into a sneer of pure rage. Here is the avenging angel of death, the Jean Améry of Naples, for whom forgiveness is not just an impossibility but a sin. Capa later wrote: I entered the school and was met by the sweet, sickly smell of flowers and the dead. In the room were twenty primitive coffins, not well enough covered with flowers and too small to hide the dirty little feet of children—children old enough to fight the Germans and be killed, but just a little too old to fit in children’s coffins. . . . These children’s feet were my real welcome to Europe, I who had been born there. . . . I took off my hat and got out my camera. I pointed the lens at the faces of the prostrated women . . . Those were my truest pictures of victory.

Another picture, taken in Sicily, is a visual reminder of why the war was fought. Had the world forgotten what ordinary decency and everyday freedom look like? They look like this: a middle-aged man and woman, probably in their fifties, almost certainly husband and wife, stroll down a sunny street in the town of Cefalù two days after its liberation. The woman, with her wide shoulders and large bosom, is pleasantly plump. She wears a polka-dotted dress with a white collar, and white platform shoes; her jet-black hair, neatly combed and parted, shines in the sun. Beside her is her smaller, slimmer, nattily dressed partner. He sports a white straw hat with a black band; his suit is neatly buttoned, his tie is perfectly straight. The man’s left arm is bent at the elbow, and in his upturned left hand he delicately but firmly carries a piece of bread, which he holds 186

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like a precious jewel. The woman’s left arm mimics his exactly, and her small, clasped black pocketbook drapes over it. In her other hand she too carries bread. The couple stands perfectly erect, staring directly and confidently at Capa’s camera; the woman squints slightly at the sun. Here is an image of people who, in their quiet but unhesitant pride, have maintained a sense of themselves, of their world, of their place in the universe, even through the degradations of fascism and war. Their simple promenade is more moving than a victory parade: theirs is the heroism of everyday life. And that is what Capa celebrates in Death in the Making—which, despite its title, lauded the birth of a new Spain. The book was published in 1938, a bad year for the Republic; but its photographs were taken in 1936 and 1937, before the fall of Madrid and the expulsion of the International Brigades. Death in the Making was Capa’s book, but it was also a group effort: the photographs were taken by Capa and Taro (and, it is now thought, an uncredited Chim), with brief, simple texts written by Capa; the introduction was written by the Chicago Tribune’s Jay Allen, who had covered the war from Spain; the design was courtesy of Capa’s friend and fellow Hungarian, André Kertész, by then one of Europe’s most famous photographers. Capa’s dedication reads, “For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front, and who stayed on,” and is accompanied by a small picture of her. If there is such a thing as a typical book of photojournalism, Death in the Making is not it. The book was meant not just to illustrate a problem but to propose a solution, and a specific one at that: it was meant, that is, to convince Europeans and Americans to actively support Republican Spain. Essentially an extended photo essay, the book was designed to inspire hope and fear in equal measure, and so it constructs a visual dialogue between destruction and creation, tragedy and possibility. Most of all, though, Death in the Making was meant to make readers connect with—even bond with—the Spanish people and their cause, and to do so out of respect, solidarity, and self-interest rather than pity or guilt. Capa attempted this in several ways. First, through portraits, he introduced readers to the Loyalist militias, who were depicted as members of an organic people’s army fighting to defend their freedom. He showed the meaning of “totalitarian war,” in which there are no real front lines and 187

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no real civilians, and in which all civilized institutions are under assault: thus his photographs of Loyalist gunmen holed up in the philosophy department of the University of Madrid. He showed the worn, anguished civilian refugees strafed from above—a mode of warfare that, at the time, was novel—which he described as “the ingenious death from the skies.” But Capa also, and pointedly, showed Spain as a still-functioning country and a cause worth fighting for, not just a victim in need of salvation. He photographed the poor, dusty farmers of the new collectives, their fists proudly raised, and the literacy campaigns in which grown men, hunched over children’s desks, learned how to read. He showed the distribution of bread to those who had known so much hunger; animated debates among those who had never before enjoyed free speech; the new assertiveness of women, who had been subjugated for so long. Most of all, though, Capa showed resistance: Spain, he insisted, was not yet lost. In both pictures and text, he extolled the toughness of Asturian miners and Basque fighters, of the sailors aboard the “Potemkin of Spain,” of the militias in Madrid who insisted “no pasaran.” Death in the Making ends with a celebration of the Loyalists’ new, professionalized army (just the thing Orwell had adamantly opposed). Capa wanted Spain to be seen not as Europe’s basket case but as its future: “In Spain a new army has been forged. In Spain a new nation is being forged.” Capa closed Death in the Making with the hope of international intervention: “There are answering vibrations from without,” he wrote. It was a hope that had been, and would be, repeatedly betrayed during the three long years of increasingly brutal war; this betrayal, along with Taro’s death, may have been the biggest disappointments of his life. Capa stayed in Spain until the Republic fell, but he never returned to the country— Franco’s country—again. “Nothing, not the victory / will erase the terrible bloody hole,” Pablo Neruda wrote of the war; he spoke for Capa, too. Though the politics of Capa’s time seem very far from ours, his photographs remind us of political quandaries that are surprisingly contemporary. The modern left’s Pavlovian aversion to military action—its “vulgar pacifism,” as the cultural critic Ellen Willis tartly wrote after the U.S.’s overthrow of the Taliban—would have been unrecognizable to Capa. He 188

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knew that war was always horrible, and he knew that it was not always avoidable. The interwar left of Capa’s youth, profoundly repelled by the carnage of World War I, was deeply antimilitarist. Indeed, staunch aversion to another world war was a bedrock principle of leftists, who distinguished themselves from the glorified militarism espoused by the right. This is clear not only from writings of the time but from pictures too: a 1929 photograph of a Communist-led antiwar demonstration in Berlin, for instance, shows six protestors facing the camera in costumed gas-mask goggles; they look both deadly and carnivalesque. One of Chim’s most striking photographs from this time shows a 1936 peace rally in St. Cloud, France, in which we see a series of larger-than-life, starkly modern, graphically powerful posters. One shows a helmeted soldier, head drooping, nailed to a cross; another insists, accurately, that “War Is Insanity!” A third poster shows a huge, muscular man with a naked, bulging chest— a modern-day Samson—who breaks a rifle over his knee. Above him is a single word: “Disarm”; behind him are various national flags, including those of Japan and the United States. Yet the left in Capa’s time was not pacifist, isolationist, or suspicious of using military power, especially as the right-wing movements gained strength; Capa’s left made a sharp distinction between the exultation of violence that characterizes fascism and the just uses of armed force. Looking back at the post–World War I period, Gellhorn spoke for many others when she wrote, “We believed that there could be no peace in Europe without Franco-German rapprochement. We had the right idea, but the Nazis arrived. . . . By 1936 . . . I had stopped being a pacifist and become an antifascist.” Certainly, with the outbreak of the civil war in Spain, it was the left that demanded international military intervention—or, at the very least, an end to the arms embargo—and the right that was associated with isolationism. There is no doubt that Capa was a militant interventionist, both for moral reasons and strategic ones; he saw clearly, as did journalists like Gellhorn, Orwell, Malraux, and Sheean, that a far worse war was inevitable if the Spanish Republic fell. The kneejerk antimilitarism of so many contemporary “progressives” was simply unknown to him. And on a more personal level, Capa spent much of his time with—and 189

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liked to photograph—members of armed forces: Spanish Loyalists, Chinese anti-imperialists, American privates, French résistants, Israeli soldiers. The relaxed intimacy of these photographs reveals how much Capa enjoyed these men and women and how utterly at ease he felt with them; as one colleague recalled, “He simply made friends with all the soldiers— with fascinating stories and with the brandy flask he always carried in his hip pocket—and so he went everywhere.” Capa yearned, deeply, for a world without war: “I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life,” he wrote when World War II ended. But he was a political realist, and he admired good fighters who defended good causes. One cannot look at Capa’s war photographs without engaging the thorny problem of how to be pro-peace and anti-tyranny, and without understanding that to be both at once is sometimes impossible. Capa’s photographs from Spain plunged viewers into the heart of battle in ways that now seem iconic, even clichéd, but at the time were radically new: unsettling, nerve-wracking, scary. His photographs were closer, faster, denser than any that had been seen before; Capa wasn’t a witness to war so much as a visual participant in it. But it was also in Spain that Capa learned that the real story, the best photographs, and the meaning of the war were to be found not in a hail of bullets but away from the front. Capa’s photographs zipped around the world and made him a star. And his images had a moral and political impact that may be hard for us to imagine, living as we do in an atrocity-glutted, picture-glutted age. Capa’s viewers lived, in contrast, on the cusp of mass-produced death and massproduced images, and his new kind of photographs documenting a new kind of war impressed themselves deeply on his intensely engaged viewers. As the media historian Caroline Brothers has written, “With seemingly everyone from writers to politicians to the Liverpudlian unemployed taking sides over Spain, the civil war took on an unprecedented urgency in the way it was lived and believed in and represented. More than in any previous war and possibly any war since, photographs of Spain became images not just of but in conflict. And none of them was indifferent.” In Spain, Capa perfected his distinctive ability to endow seemingly mundane details and prosaic moments with symbolic import. His pictures 190

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are more specific and somehow fuller than those of others. In one photograph, he shows us a group of civilians camped out in a Madrid subway station, where they hide from the bombs or, perhaps, have been made homeless by them. A beleaguered man holds a baby; a woman hides her bent face with her hand; several people sleep on blankets spread on the floor. A hodgepodge of cheerful posters behind these sad, tired people advertises everything from luxury automobiles to the abolition of prostitution, cruelly mocking their present misery and their past hopes. A Bilbao photograph from 1937 shows how amiability and fear, the everyday and the abnormal, coexist in war. Four women and a child sit on a sandbag,waiting to see if the danger suggested by a warning siren (there were sometimes twenty per morning) merited going underground; the women pass the time knitting and chatting, their feet dangling, their heads protected from the sun by paper napkins made into pointy hats. As the war dragged on, though, amiable moments became rare. Capa’s 1939 picture of two bedraggled women refugees—one wipes away her tears and stretches out a beseeching hand, the other holds a crying baby and the baby’s bald-headed doll—suggests how war creates a sisterhood of suffering. In a Capa photograph, even physical ruin could be endowed with subjective meaning. Capa understood that people need a place in which to make their lives with each other; when that place is destroyed, so is the social fabric that bound them. Thus his 1936 interior view of a bombed Madrid apartment: its floor is piled high with rubble, its ceiling crumbles, and the drawers of its once-proud bureau are flung open, apparently ransacked. But its intact wall of beautiful, intricately patterned wallpaper and a smiling family portrait remind us of what civilization used to be. Yet when it came to style, Capa denied that he had any; in Spain, he insisted, “The pictures are there, and you just take them.” This may have been false modesty on his part, or deliberate oversimplification, or antiintellectualism, or perhaps all three. But it was also an accurate assessment of how it felt to work, quickly and instinctively, in a place where everyday life was endowed with high drama and high stakes. And where, Capa felt, right and wrong were so obvious. He and Taro had rushed to Spain less than three weeks after the war broke out, and their stance toward it was unabashedly partisan. Much, though certainly not 191

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all, of Spain’s native intelligentsia was anti-Franco, as were virtually all the foreign intellectuals who flocked to the war. (The Spanish civil war may be one of the few events whose history was written—and photographed—by the losers.) For Capa, partisanship wasn’t a problem: it was the solution. “In a war,” Capa told Gellhorn, who would become a good friend, “you must hate somebody or love somebody, you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.” A political stance didn’t occlude vision but instead made it possible; politics was the purpose of his work, not an obstacle to it. Spain became Capa’s template. Virtually every subsequent war he covered—China’s fight against the Japanese, Europe’s fight against the Nazis, Israel’s fight against the Arabs—was viewed through the Spanish prism: viewed, that is, as a contest between democracy and fascism, or between freedom and tyranny, or between justice and oppression. Capa never doubted, or even had to ask, which side he was on, and he sat out conflicts, such as the one in Korea, that didn’t speak strongly to his conscience. The exception, ironically, may have been the war in French Indochina, about which he was not known to have strong beliefs; some friends were surprised that he went there, and the reasons he did so are still in dispute. (The job paid well and he needed the money; there has also been speculation that, in the midst of the McCarthyite hysteria and faced with an unfriendly State Department, Capa needed to prove his anti-Communist credentials.) Capa had great respect for the French army and affection for the French, but it’s doubtful that he supported their colonial project. Still, in 1954 he was not necessarily a “premature anti-colonialist” as he had been an early, unwavering opponent of fascism. In any case, he arrived in Vietnam just after Dien Bien Phu had fallen: the war in Vietnam, he thought, was over. *

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The battered but idealistic remnants of European Jewry streaming into Israel after the Second World War reminded Capa of the Spanish Loyalists and the fight for Spain; so did the sense of camaraderie, the fierce political arguments, the informality of the army, the desperate shortage of arms, and the fearfully stacked odds. It is unsurprising, then, that Capa’s pictures from Israel most clearly evoke, and sometimes almost replicate, 192

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many of those he took in Spain. Israel’s fight for independence was “Capa’s most personal war,” according to one biographer; Capa considered settling in the nascent nation, and made three trips there between 1948 and 1950. (In 1948, though, he was slightly wounded during the Altalena battle on Tel Aviv’s beach, and he was later heard to complain, “That would be the final insult—being killed by the Jews!”) Some of these photographs were published in the 1948 book called This Is Israel by I. F. Stone, the country’s most prominent leftwing journalist; others appear in Report on Israel, which was written by Capa’s poker buddy, Irwin Shaw, and published two years later. Stone’s book, in particular, is fiercely critical of what he viewed as the imperialist, anti-Zionist policies of Britain and the U.S., and is a potent reminder of how, in its early days, Israel was very much a cause of the left. These books might well have been called Life in the Making, as authors and photographers exulted in the transformation of the Jewish people from hounded pariahs to citizens of their own land. In Israel, as in Spain, Capa’s photographs celebrated the building of democratic and cultural institutions, the creation of a people’s army, physical labor, and military prowess. Perhaps most important, Capa once again found, as he had in Spain, a kind of tenacious hope illuminating the faces of everyone from confident Sabras to the stooped, prematurely aged survivors of the camps.* As an exile and a perpetual wanderer, Capa had documented the travails of countless refugees, and in Israel he was especially interested in the new nation’s immigrants—especially since these refugees were moving with hope toward a new life rather than fleeing in terror from (or to) death. In one photograph, an old Turkish couple walks through a transit camp; the buxom, black-haired, thick-ankled woman wears a flowered dress and looks down at the ground, while her husband—still somehow stylish in a suit, vest, fedora, and sunglasses—holds his prized guitar in a sack as he looks directly at Capa. And an exceedingly odd photograph—so strange it foretells those of Diane Arbus, though it is far kinder—shows a sprightly

* Capa tried to photograph in Arab-held Jerusalem during the 1948 war, but was prevented by Israeli authorities from doing so; as a Jew, and a famous one, he almost certainly would have been killed had he been captured.

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little girl in a flowered dress who leads a promenade of three mismatched, dark-haired men holding hands. One wears a military uniform, but is barefoot and holds a walking stick; one is neatly dressed in a diamond-patterned sweater, pants, and a worker’s cap; one wears torn, patched rags. The caption tells us that they are living in a village built for the blind. As in Spain, the essence of Capa’s Israeli photographs is to be found in his individual portraits; many were shot head-on and fill out the frame. The people in these photographs do not always seem happy, but they always look open to Capa and, therefore, to us. An ancient-looking man with a white beard and a deeply creased forehead wears a knotted bandanna on his head; it turns out that he is only forty, and somehow survived nine years in concentration camps. An unsmiling, dignified gentleman with a bald head and wire-rimmed eyeglasses sits on the ground, his open suitcase beside him; surrounded by the intricate toys he sells, he holds a child’s pinwheel in his hand. A young, dark-haired Sabra who stands in the sun— he wears a funny little cap, a stubble of beard, and a gentle smile—is a dead ringer for one of Capa’s Loyalists. A young woman soldier has wrapped her blonde braids around her head, which she tilts, coquettishly, to one side; she wears a uniform, a cameo necklace, and big sunglasses, and she graces Capa with a smile that dazzles. One of the last images in Report on Israel sums up many of Capa’s longstanding attitudes, including his admiration for physical strength and his political affinities. It is a full-body photograph that shows a young man, in profile, tilling the soil. His head is gracefully bent toward his hoe, which absorbs his attention: this is a portrait of agricultural labor as an honorable, engrossing activity. The man wears a small white hat to ward off the sun, jeans, and a sleeveless white undershirt; the rippling muscles of his forearms and shoulders stand out. This man was a member, we learn, of the French Resistance; now he prepares the ground for the growing of grapes. Yet my favorite image here is more mundane, and does not speak to ideas of strength as traditionally encapsulated in war or work. Taken in 1949, it shows four women (a fifth is partially cut off by the frame) who sit at an outdoor café in Tel Aviv. They range from what looks like their late thirties to their fifties. Each has short, dark, neatly curled hair; one wears a pearl necklace, one a small hat, one a pair of little pearl earrings. 194

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Figure 7.2 Gedera, Israel, 1950: In Israel, Capa was especially interested in the new state’s refugees; these immigrants were living in a village built for the blind. Though Capa is known as a brilliant battlefield photographer, he was far more interested in civilian life; many of his Israeli photographs echo those he took in Spain. Photo: Robert Capa; © Cornell Capa/Magnum Photos.

Their nails are painted with dark polish, and their short-sleeved dresses erupt in flowers and stripes. Placed on the small table before them are one glass, one pack of cigarettes, and one pair of eyeglasses. It is probable that these women are European emigrés (native Israelis tended to dress more casually and roughly); this means that each, in all likelihood, had untellable stories to tell and unbearable losses to bear. Yet here they are, 195

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in their pretty sundresses at an outdoor spot, passing the time in each other’s conversation. The very ordinariness of this scene, and its sense of easy camaraderie, is the key to its quiet triumph. Capa’s pictures, especially those from Israel and Spain, raise in a particularly pointed way the question of how much a photograph can tell us versus how much we endow it with our own subsequently gained knowledge—or, alternately, project onto it our beliefs, prejudices, and feelings. As we have seen, a long line of critics—stretching from Brecht to the postmoderns— has argued that photographs contain no inherent meaning, especially when it comes to political ethics. “What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness,” Sontag wrote. In the absence of that consciousness—or before its creation—can photographs tell us anything at all? In some respects this is an impossible question: separating the dancer from the dance is particularly hard when it comes to photographs. Certainly it would be hard to discern who is who—not to mention what he did, or why—from some of Capa’s portraits. Capa’s autobiography contains, for instance, a shot of a young Resistance fighter taken on the day Paris was liberated. He is handsome, with high cheekbones, a strong chin, and a shock of thick hair, and he stares with a slight frown at something in the distance. He looks determined and thoughtful; perhaps he is remembering the many things he wishes he had never seen or done. In age, facial type, and even expression, he looks strikingly similar to another young man pictured in the book: an equally handsome, equally chiseled, equally serious officer; this one, though, is a member of the SS who was captured at Normandy. We can safely surmise that Capa did not harbor identical feelings for the partisan and the stormtrooper; indeed, in his memoir he recalls how his “spirits revived” when, marching with the Allies through southern Italy, he realized that “all the Germans [soldiers] were either dead or prisoners.” But there is little in his portrait of the young German soldier to suggest this; the youths look as if they could be brothers. Capa’s portraits from Spain are, I think, the best test of this question; these are the photographs with which he is most associated, and that are reproduced in books and exhibits worldwide. And these are among his 196

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most moving pictures; indeed, they are among the most stirring images I have ever seen. These amateur soldiers range from craggy, wrinkled old men to those who, with their smooth skin and hesitant smiles, could be at most in their early teens. Their faces suggest humility without submission, strength without rancor, conviction without cruelty. These are men who had lived hard lives—Spain was among the poorest, most repressive countries in Western Europe—but they do not look hardened or enraged. They seem, somehow, rooted in themselves and yet generously open to the world: if brotherhood had a face, this would be it. But do these men look like this to me because my political loyalties are set and my historic judgments formed? Taking away the ragged clothes, primitive guns, and improvised outfits, did photographs of fascist soldiers or their supporters look any different? In some sense this too is unanswerable. Vast numbers of images were taken during the Spanish civil war—Spain was the first conflict to be covered by the press in the modern sense—and any generalization invites refutation. Some avowedly pro-Franco papers, such as Le Matin, sent photographers to document the war, though I know of no pro-Franco photographer with a body of work to compare to Capa’s or Chim’s (or to that of their contemporaries like the Spanish photographer Agustí Centelles and the antifascist German photographers Hans Namuth and Georg Reisner). Certainly, though, photographers supporting the fascist side portrayed their soldiers as courageous, committed, strong, and stoic: they too were fighting for a cause. Orwell himself claimed that “photographs of groups of defenders” of the Alcazar—a reference to pro-Franco troops and civilians—“are so like groups of Government militiamen that if they were changed round no one would know the difference.” This was sometimes true. But it was not always true, and it was especially untrue of photographs that did not depict battles. In fact, pace Orwell, photographs taken of and by Loyalists, and certainly those by Capa and Chim, are often distinct from those of profascist photographers in subject matter, composition, and subtext. In Capa’s iconography, a Loyalist soldier is not a warmonger—whether ruthless or heroic—but an ordinary worker or farmer who has been forced to defend what he loves. These are men and women who, certainly, fight 197

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and kill, and Capa lauded their ability to do so. But his photographs never suggest that fighting and killing—or, for that matter, dying—is man’s greatest calling or main source of pride; there is no fetishization of the gun, no exaltation of death. (“The Falling Soldier” is a cry of protest, not of joy.) Capa’s Loyalists were willing to die for a cause, but they much preferred to live for it; these were people, to paraphrase Malraux, who waged war without loving it. Capa’s aim was to persuade outsiders to actively, indeed militarily, support Loyalist Spain. But this was persuasion of a particular kind: he sought to “repersonalize war” rather than to dazzle us with the might of the army or the triumph of the will, as fascist images aim to do. It was the strength of a certain kind of spirit, rather than that of overwhelming numbers or sophisticated weapons, with which Capa hoped to impress his readers. Capa wanted viewers to aid Spain’s cause by sensing the prosaic realities of the individuals caught up in it: by sensing, that is, the beauty, the dignified hardship, the decency—and, most of all, the human connections—of their lives. No doubt fascist soldiers, just like Loyalists, kissed their babies before leaving for the front; but they probably didn’t take photographs of themselves doing so or, if they did, display them prominently, as did Chim on the cover of the 1938 book War in Spain and Capa on the frontispiece of Death in the Making. The tenderness of human relationships, even at the front, was a key motif for Capa; thus his 1938 photograph of a blanket-draped soldier, holding pencil and paper, as he bends over a bandaged, bloodstained comrade who dictates a last letter before death. In Capa’s view, war is not a natural disaster, a mythic adventure, or an inevitable fate: it is a human activity that must be visualized in human terms. Fascist art, Walter Benjamin observed, “puts a spell” on both subjects and viewers, “and under this spell they must appear to themselves monumental, i.e., incapable of well-considered and independent actions.” Capa’s Loyalist portraits, in contrast, show the army as a collection of ordinary yet unique individuals who have freely come together—not as a giant, impersonal war machine. These soldiers—they look frankly, intimately, unguardedly at Capa—not only fight for the people, they are the people. Pro-Franco photographs, on the other hand, stressed uniformity and hierarchical relations and were notable, as Caroline Brothers wrote, for 198

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the lack of connections drawn between the [Francoist] Insurgents and the people of Spain. . . . Instead these publications promoted a paternalistic ideology. The army was a class apart; it fought and was unquestionably responsible for the people’s own good, requiring only that the civilian population demonstrate approval . . . Pro-Insurgent propaganda concentrated unremittingly on the qualities of its soldiers while their rapport with the rest of the nation went virtually unexplored.

And whether taken at the front or among civilians, Capa’s photographs from Spain are a celebration of spontaneity: they suggest that the experience of being human—even in wartime, even under duress—is full of surprises, and that this is good. (We return, again, to Malraux’s sneezes.) Especially in the early, hopeful days of the war, Capa’s images almost burst with infectious energy. Look, for instance, at his 1936 photograph of Loyalist troops atop a car in Madrid. They are an eclectic group: some wear uniforms, others don’t, and they don an odd assortment of headgear. These young men do not like look like part of a “mass.” They spill out of the car at various angles, their fists held high, their smiles broad and friendly, their mouths open in shouts or cheers or jokes or songs. Who would not want to join them? This spirit is even more evident in the 1936 photographs of militias leaving for the front. In one such picture, which Capa took in Barcelona, two exuberant, dark-haired, strikingly pretty women laugh with excitement as they cling to the departing trains (the expectation, at the time, was that the war would be brief); the slogan painted onto another train reads, “Swear upon these fraternal letters that you will sooner die than consent to tyranny.” The Loyalists, one feels, wanted to share their freedom with the world, not stamp it out in others. Contrast these spontaneous pictures of Capa’s with a photograph from Falangist Malaga—it could only have been taken by a pro-Franco photographer—that shows a crowd of women raising their right arms in the fascist salute. The women look not just somber but grim, their mouths taut, their eyes wary; some have draped their heads in long black scarves. A tiny girl, wearing a frilly white dress and a frown, stands in the front row; she too salutes, though her arm is bent rather than straightened in the proper fascist way. Next to her is a woman with a narrow, sad face and high cheekbones; her hair is severely parted; she wears a long, tightly buttoned black 199

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coat and a cape draped over her head. She looks like a Spanish Madonna. But this is a Madonna of obeisance, not love: chillingly, she kneels on the ground as she salutes. The photograph seems to honor not just a victory over the Republicans—Malaga fell to Franco in July 1937—but the crushing of liberty itself. In fact, it seems to be an almost perfect example of fascist aesthetics, which fixate, as Sontag observed, on “situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. . . . Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.” What could have interested Capa less? What distinguishes Capa’s Spanish photographs most of all, though, is the singular, haunting blend of tenderness, humility, determination, and sorrow that illuminates his portraits of the Loyalist militias and the International Brigades. I have never seen that look reproduced in fascist photographs; indeed, it has come to be synonymous with the cause of Republican Spain itself. Despite Orwell’s claim, one does know the difference between the opposing sides when looking at these photographs: far from being interchangeable with other images, they are unique. And this is no accident. Despite the tragic internecine fighting within the left, the Spanish Republic inspired rare kinds of commitment and ideals of fraternity; those who were in Spain, whether as fighters or observers, would never be able, or want, to forget it. Octavio Paz, who witnessed the war and was fiercely pro-Loyalist, would later write that the expression he had seen on the faces in Spain was “a revelation of ‘the other man’ and of another kind of solitude: not closed, not mechanical, but open to the transcendent”; it was an expression, Paz added, that he would never see again. This was the expression that Capa captured so passionately and so often, and that he so desperately wanted the world to see; it is the expression that, with its peculiar combination of pain and possibility, draws us to these pictures today. Still, faces don’t tell us everything, and they can be notoriously deceptive. Criminals can look innocent, liars can look honest, cowards can look brave, bad people can look good (especially when they kiss their babies). But while appearances don’t tell us everything, they must tell us something; if not, 200

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who would ever bother to look at a photograph—or, for that matter, at the world? What photographs offer us—and this is true of no other form of either art or journalism—is a unique, and uniquely powerful, dialectic between immediate appearances and the longer-standing, sometimes unconscious associations, subtexts, and bodies of knowledge that we bring to them. It’s not what’s in the frame or what’s outside the frame that matters most: it’s in the relation between the two that the meaning and strength of documentary photographs can be found. That relation, however, is neither linear nor simple. Consider Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1933 portrait of Joseph Goebbels, taken at the League of Nations meeting in Geneva. Goebbels sits outside on a chair, a pleasant lawn with a gracious white building behind him. But the picture is neither pleasant nor gracious and suggests, at the very least, intense anxiety. Goebbels tightly grips the chair’s arms; behind him stands an aide, looking down, while on his right another underling, bending from the waist, hands his boss a piece of paper. Shrunken and enclosed, Goebbels looks up at Eisenstaedt (who was, perhaps not incidentally, a German Jew) with a forbidding scowl; his eyes are hooded, his cheeks hollow. It’s no wonder that this picture has been said to show, as one viewer put it, “exactly what educated evil looks like.” Certainly Goebbels looks creepy and morose. Yet what strikes me eight decades after this photograph was taken is how far it falls short, as it must, of personifying Goebbels’s malignance; rather than showing “exactly” what evil looks like, the image reveals how inadequate photographs are. For what facial expression—what scowl, what sneer, what glare—could possibly convey the depravity that would culminate in Auschwitz? The human face is simply not that capacious: there are some human actions it cannot express or foretell. The Goebbels portrait is unpleasant and chilling, but it cannot, in itself, reveal the demented hatred that produced the gas chambers. Still, it seems churlish to continually deride photographs, as so many critics have, for their inability to tell us more than they do. Photographs cannot express complete truths, and in this they are radically imperfect; photographs sometimes mislead and deceive us, just as people do. Such imperfections, and such deceptions, are deeply disappointing. But many things in life are deeply disappointing; in this sense photographs, far 201

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from being magic, are pretty much like everything else, and the attempt to punish them for their shortcomings seems less and less fruitful. Why choose between the unique emotional immediacy of the photograph and the larger, more complex histories at which it hints? Why choose between a naive trust in the world of appearances and a paralyzing suspicion of it? Better, instead, to recognize what each form of testimony, and each kind of document, can offer to us as we try to make sense of our poorly designed world. Capa’s images help us do that, which is why we return to them again and again. His photographs record the twentieth century’s moments of militant humanism; and they do this by how he, working at the time, made them and by what we, in the present, bring to them. His images are antifascist because they document a flawed, deeply scarred humanity, and because they honor rather than scorn those flaws and those scars. Capa’s photographs show us that human beings suffer, and make us want to know why; they show us that human beings endure, and make us want to know how. They show us that striving for a more-just world can sometimes succeed but more often fails, yet that to do so is never absurd or inconsequential. Capa gave us scenes from a broken world, yet he never suggested that destruction is our natural state. He knew that men and women could unite on the basis of camaraderie, hope, and intelligence rather than hate, fear, and stupidity: after all, he had seen it himself. His pictures document those invaluable times when politics encompassed freedom and solidarity, individuality and brotherhood, the unique and the collective. Capa had learned that change, especially the good kind of change, is made from the bottom up—democracy really was in the streets; and he wanted, naturally, to show what this type of democracy, and the free people who made it, look like. He was the chronicler of a history that believed in its possibilities: a history, that is, that believed in itself. Decades later, that belief may strike us as foolishly, even unforgivably, romantic; perhaps it was. But it’s also possible that Capa lived through things we haven’t and therefore knew things that we don’t; when I look at his photographs, I am certain of it.

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JAMES NACHTWEY STUDIO DENIED PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS PHOTGRAPH. IT CAN BE FOUND IN JAMES NACHTWEY, INFERNO, PAGE 174.

Figure 8.1 Ayod, southern Sudan, 1993: James Nachtwey’s startlingly graphic photographs of the body in pain can induce shock, disgust, and political confusion. Nachtwey’s work has attracted fierce criticism on formal, political, and moral grounds, and some critics compare him unfavorably with Capa. Here, a famine victim at a feeding station.

8 JAMES NACHTWEY The Catastrophist

Maybe the gods themselves are depraved. James Nachtwey

In Robert Capa’s photographs, violence is framed within a context that is both political and moral: pain is shown, but it is not meaningless pain. In this sense Capa, despite all his innovations, was working within a centuries-long tradition of the West in which the slaughter of innocents, and those who defended them, represented ideals of religious purity, bravery, patriotism, political principle, or sacrifice for others. In the photographs of James Nachtwey, we see what happens when the agony of the body is ruptured from such ideals. Nachtwey’s images are not nihilistic or, as many have charged, pornographic. But they are extraordinarily difficult images, and they are new kinds of images, because the atrocities they so nakedly depict are almost completely divorced from religious, political, or historic redemption. In Nachtwey’s photographs it is actually a relief to come upon a squinting sniper in Bosnia or Chechnya, or Croatian mourners at a funeral, or even India’s untouchables performing their grueling work. The people in these photographs may be bereaved, terrorized, exhausted—they may even be killers—but at least they stand upright, they wear clothes, they look reasonably fed, and they seem to exist within some kind of human circle. This is far more than can be said for many of the people Nachtwey has photographed: naked Somalis and Sudanese, holding their heads as 205

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they writhe on the ground and starve to death; Rwandans hacked to pieces by their neighbors or expiring of cholera in refugee camps; grotesquely deformed, sore-encrusted Romanian orphans (Ceausescu’s children, really), driven mad through abandonment or dying of AIDS; and the stunned, mutilated, almost-dead child victims of assorted civil wars and famines. These are the outcasts and victims, the “scum” of whom Arendt wrote, depicted with a new level of graphic intensity that is often shockingly cruel and viscerally repulsive. Nachtwey’s photographs show us how images have become more extreme as political clarity has dissipated; this is, I think, no coincidence. His photographs raise the question, in a particularly heightened way: what happens to documentary photography— to the photography of witness—when it no longer has a politics it can support? What happens to documentary photography when the wars of nihilism—Memuna’s wars—become its subject? James Nachtwey is, in many ways, Robert Capa’s heir. Nachtwey is the quintessential, fearless war photographer of our time, and the one whose images are disseminated to a mass audience. He has a highly prized contract with Time magazine, which offers him a tremendous amount of exposure and an unusual amount of freedom. He is a former member of Magnum, the photo agency that Capa founded, and he has won many awards, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal itself, five times over. Though Nachtwey’s name and face are unknown to a wide public, it is fair to say that his vision of the world has seeped into the consciousness, or at least the awareness, of millions. Yet the contrasts between Capa’s and Nachtwey’s photographs could not be starker. I never look at Nachtwey’s photographs when I am sad; in fact, I find his pictures harrowing in the best of times. Nachtwey’s subjects are, more often than not, severely deformed through various forms of violence, and they seem disconnected from history and politics. I do not think their spirits are intact. In showing us the many ways that the human body can be destroyed, Nachtwey’s pictures can inspire revulsion more easily than empathy. I have been shaken, shocked, and moved by some of Nachtwey’s photographs, but the man has never taken a picture that I love. The places in the cultural imagination that Capa and Nachtwey occupy are as different as their photographs. Like Capa, Nachtwey is famed 206

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among foreign correspondents and photojournalists for his skill, bravery, and luck. Yet where Capa was a star and an international bon vivant— drinker, lover, racetrack gambler—Nachtwey is a virtually anonymous ascetic. More than that: his work is actively reviled by a large group of critics. Capa was hailed as a “passionate democrat,” but Nachtwey is disparaged as a “grim reaper” and a “sniper” and his work described as “hideous.” He is a lightning rod for the current disputes over photojournalism: in large part, I believe, because his pictures raise troubling questions about the nature of modern war and about what it means for us to look at it. Pauline Kael once wrote that watching Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris is “like seeing pieces of your life, and so, of course, you can’t resolve your feelings about it—our feelings about life are never resolved.” I think about this when I think about Nachtwey. He presents us with unforgivable crimes that we do not want to see but that we should; and yet the form in which he presents them often undermines his stated intent. Nachtwey’s images, unlike Capa’s, can get under our skins in ways that seem unhealthy, unproductive, just plain wrong. Still, I consider him to be among the half dozen indispensable photojournalists at work in the world today. Nachtwey is a paradox that cannot be solved. James Nachtwey was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1948 and grew up in Leominster, Massachusetts. He attended Dartmouth College, where he studied art history and political science in the tumultuous years of the late 1960s. Nachtwey has said that his decision to become a photographer was influenced by civil rights and antiwar photographs (in particular, those from Vietnam by Don McCullin and Larry Burrows). Photographs from Vietnam, he believes, “not only reported history but changed the course of history.” After graduation Nachtwey worked at a variety of jobs, including as a merchant marine cook and a truck driver. He taught himself the craft of photography, working as a news photographer for four years in the late 1970s for the Albuquerque Journal, where he shot events like pumpkin-carving contests at state fairs. (He has said it took him ten years of preparation before he felt ready to take a good picture.) In 1980 he moved to New York and began freelancing; his first “conflict assignment” was to 207

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cover the school-busing crisis in Boston, and in 1981 he went to Northern Ireland to document the Irish Republican Army hunger strikes. In 1986 he joined Magnum; fifteen years later, he and six colleagues founded a new photography collective called VII. Unlike contemporaries like Salgado and Peress, and unlike predecessors like Capa, it is war itself that fascinates and inspires Nachtwey. “I became a photographer in order to be a war photographer,” he has flatly stated. “From the very beginning, this was my goal.” Nachtwey has said that if he could go backwards in time, he would want to photograph the Crusades, where “the chances of surviving would be very slim.” He has said, too, that there is no picture in the world he would not take, and none that he has ever regretted taking. This means that much of his work is almost impossible to look at. It requires a person as tough as he—or, alternately, entirely obtuse—to scrutinize, or even glance at, many of his photographs. Nachtwey’s images walk a fine line between the sorrow that suffering calls up in us and the disgust, scorn, and fear that the disfigured body evokes. And this is most true not of his actual war pictures but of those that focus on war’s civilian detritus. Consider Nachtwey’s people: A young Chechen bomb victim, who looks about eight, lies in a hospital bed, naked; we see his bare chest with its delicate child’s skin, his plump bellybutton, his small penis, and then . . . the amputated stumps of his legs, each cut off at the upper thigh. A starving, naked Sudanese man—his thighs no wider than your wrist, his white teeth jutting out of his jet-black, stretched-thin face, his bony, bumpy back covered with either flies or sores as he crawls, beastlike, toward a feeding station—is a study in stripped-down humanity that conjures the barely living skeletons discovered by surprised Allied troops in 1945. An anguished toddler—one of thousands imprisoned in what Nachtwey has called Romania’s “gulag” of orphanages—peers through the bars of his iron bed, his face contorted into a scream of rage that seems as if it will echo forever; other children—naked, starved, weirdly contorted—cower on filthy mattresses. “The ghoulish cruelties in [Goya’s] The Disasters of War are meant to awaken, shock, wound the viewer,” Susan Sontag observed in Regarding the Pain of Others; this is Nachtwey’s strategy too. The difference is that the photojournalist of modern life, unlike the nineteenth-century painter, ad208

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dresses an audience that has been visually assaulted many times over and that lives with the ever-present knowledge of industrialized mass murder, nuclear weapons, and genocide. All of the photographs described above, along with a few hundred more, were collected in Nachtwey’s 1999 book Inferno. It was an intimidating tome: 480 pages, more than a foot high, and weighing eleven pounds; one critic called it “the black slab.” The pictures were printed in deep, rich black-and-white tones on luxurious matte paper; like a tombstone, the book was awe inspiring and dreadful at once. It was expensive ($125), and it was relentless: a visual archive of Nachtwey’s tours through the worst places on earth. Perhaps most surprising, it appeared at the end of a decade that, in the West, was viewed as largely peaceful and prosperous but that, Nachtwey insisted, was “terrible”; Inferno showed us, as the critic Richard Lacayo wrote, that in the post–cold war world, “history is still being made the old-fashioned way, with land mines and machetes.” And though Nachtwey had been taking and showing such pictures for years, the book provoked a storm of critical venom, often from the liberal publications that would seem to be its natural constituency. (Inferno is the work with which Nachtwey is still most associated today.) Some of this antipathy was a case of blaming the tale’s teller: nobody really wants to see the things that Nachtwey shows. In a tone both world-weary and resentful, Henry Allen of the New Yorker castigated Inferno for bombarding us with “chaos,” “impossibility,” and “gruesome hopelessness”; “there’s a sense of cosmic burnout, as if even the freshest air in Nachtwey’s world smelled of ozone,” he complained. Writing in the Village Voice, Richard B. Woodward charged that Nachtwey’s “ruthless attitude” toward his viewers forces us to look but “punishes us” for doing so. Woodward accused Nachtwey of “holding a gun to our heads” and demanded, “Should we be grateful? Admire his eye? . . . If we don’t send a check to Oxfam after a visit with these ghosts, are we complicit in their terrible lives?” Nachtwey meant for the book to be bad; he has said on more than one occasion that he aims to “ruin” the day of his viewers. And it is hard to sympathize with the resentful cries of these too-tender critics, who seem offended not by the obscene things people do to each other but by pictorial 209

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representations of those things. Yet in some ways Nachtwey set himself up for such attacks. His photographs offer no way out: no hint of solutions to what we are shown or even, sometimes, a context for them. And they are—at least for many viewers—somehow, disconcertingly, beautiful. Nachtwey is known for making photographs that are formally riveting, but his formal power is also his problem. And this is true even, or especially, when he presents the grotesque. Consider his picture of a famine victim in Ayod, Sudan, from 1993. The woman (I think she is a woman: she has no breasts, but she wears a tiny earring) is propped up on the ground; she leans on one elbow, which looks as though it will break, and she is so emaciated that it seems impossible she is still alive. The picture is austere, but it is also a visual dialogue between sharp and soft: we see a small fold of crepe-y skin covering her abdomen; her bony hip and elbows create angular counterpoints; a burlap sack drapes softly over her, as if it were silk. The woman’s white teeth, and the white of her eyes, jump out of her deep-black skin. In the upper left-hand of the picture’s frame a man’s suited arm and black hand extend toward her, offering a voucher that says “Unicef”; the woman has just enough strength to reach it (her arm remains bent). Her eyes fix, with a desperate intensity, on her benefactor. The woman’s emaciation and her utter helplessness are equally shocking, but what lends this photograph an extra soupçon of cruelty is that it seems to parody Michelangelo’s painting of God creating man. The visual sophistication of photographs like this have led to the charges of “disaster pornography”—of aestheticizing the unacceptable, of caring more for form than content—that have dogged Nachtwey (like Salgado) throughout his career. Writing in the New York Times, critic Sarah Boxer accused Nachtwey of “atrocious artfulness,” adding that the “gorgeously produced” quality of Inferno’s images is “almost grotesque.” Woodward unfavorably compared Nachtwey’s elaborately structured photographs to Capa’s “scrappy, often blurry pictures.” The Danish critic and artist Peder Jansson—after describing both Nachtwey and Gilles Peress as “heartless opportunists”—wrote, “I find it hard to understand how anyone can think either about composition or style when they are in the middle of a war

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situation, among physically and mentally dying and murdered people.” For such critics, Nachtwey’s aesthetic prowess is a moral lapse and his refusal of stylistic self-effacement a form of corruption. Nachtwey’s aesthetic is a complicated and sometimes contradictory one—far more than his critics allow. Though his pictures are often taken quickly and in extreme circumstances, they never seem rushed: even when off-kilter, they look consciously off-kilter. (He likes to cut off people’s heads.) Unlike Salgado’s statelier, centered images, many of Nachtwey’s are stark and contain dramatic, harsh geometric juxtapositions; he is especially interested in what goes on at the outer margins of his frames, and he favors details that jolt the viewer. But some of his images embody a counterintuitive sense of eerie calm. Some of Inferno’s pictures, especially those of families in mourning and of mothers cradling dying children, evoke Renaissance paintings and religious icons; they look like minimalist-inspired tableaux vivants. Nachtwey’s photographs are an odd, compelling combination of misery and serenity, of edginess and supreme control, of horrible content and stylized form: they are, in short, visual oxymorons. But the perfection of their compositions—their so-called beauty—should not deflect us: Nachtwey’s photographs are brutal, and they show us more than we can bear. But not more than we need to see. Nachtwey is not a sadist: his images do not exult in suffering. Still, the beauty—if by that word we mean a kind of structured unity—that characterizes some of his photographs is disconcerting. But is it unethical? Does the poetry of Natchwey’s vision overwhelm the prose of his subjects’ distress? To this I can give no definitive answer—or, rather, no answer that can encompass all of his work. But to dismiss Nachtwey as a pornographer, a voyeur, or an opportunist simply evades the perplexities about contemporary violence that his work raises. There are times, certainly, when the formal impressiveness of Nachtwey’s pictures overshadows all else. A striking example is a photograph he took in Kukes, Kosovo, in 1999. It shows two men, one with his head almost shaved, behind barbed wire; in the foreground we see two hands grasping each other through a fence. The hands are clear, the men are blurry. But what catches your eye—really catches your eye—is the hori-

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zontal braid of the barbed wire itself, which looks spiky and interesting rather than fearsome and oppressive. Do we—and do the Kosovars— really need a mannerist study of an internment camp? Other Nachtwey images ask much more of us and offer more, too. Consider his 1992 photograph of a famine victim being prepared for burial in Baidoa, Somalia. It is both pitiless and tender. Positioned from above, Nachtwey’s camera stares down at the dead child, who lies, square in the middle of the horizontal frame, on a thin plaid sheet. The photographer’s angle allows us—indeed forces us—to see how the agony of starvation etches itself onto the body. The child’s ribcage juts out in stark and ugly relief, showing us bones that most of us don’t know we have and that, in any natural order, we would never see; his limp penis flops to one side; his legs, slightly bent, are twigs. It is clear that this was a very bad death. And yet the boy is surrounded by love, which is to say that even in a wretched camp in a country that is no longer a country, civilization has not quite died. On the fringes of the frame we see a pair of hands cradling the child’s head; another pair gently holds his ankles; at the top of the frame, a woman crouches as she holds a leg and an arm. Perhaps no one cared enough—or, more likely, was quick enough, rich enough, or powerful enough—to save this boy’s life. But he will be given the dignity of a proper burial. Look, too, at Nachtwey’s photograph of an Afghan woman mourning her brother in a Kabul cemetery. Her face and body are entirely hidden by her burka, which flows onto the parched, cracked ground as she kneels at the primitive tombstone; her head is bent forward; one gnarled hand reaches out to rest on the grave. The photograph was taken in 1996, in the midst of Afghanistan’s post-Soviet civil wars but years before the wretchedness of that country had, courtesy of 9/11, grabbed the attention of the West. In this photograph, meaning and appearance fight each other at every turn. Though the burka is a grotesque, indeed totalitarian garment that imprisons its wearer behind a face grill, the loveliness of its billowing pleats cannot be denied. Though grief is a harsh master, the woman’s pose suggests a gentle humility that is very close to grace. Though the dryness of the stony earth and the pocked, misshapen graves tell us that this is a country where immiseration and violence have fatally embraced, a strange 212

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peacefulness pervades the photograph. In short, though everything we know about this scene bespeaks pain and devastation, their opposites are undeniably present too. The loveliness of this picture might suggest that Nachtwey is a cold aesthete, as Boxer and others have charged. But perhaps it tells us, instead, that beauty—and its attendant, tragedy—are not the sole property of the peaceful, prosperous West; stubbornly, defiantly, they insist on appearing even in those places where the social world has been vanquished. (Nachtwey has said that this woman was mourning her brother, a civilian killed by the Taliban; after Nachtwey took the picture, she greeted him by lifting her burka.) The more interesting critique of Nachtwey centers not on his formal powers, which are undeniable, but on the kind of power he achieves and at what cost. Sontag wrote that Disasters of War “seems a turning point in the history of moral feelings and of sorrow. . . . With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art.” The philosopher J. M. Bernstein has argued that this is because Goya secularized suffering: “Lamentation, which once seemed only possible from a religious perspective, suddenly becomes with Goya an intense human possibility.” For Bernstein, it is this sense of possibility, of openness to the contingent—the human attribute so highly valued by Capa and Malraux—that Nachtwey’s photographs so sadly lack. (And it is true that even when Nachtwey’s photographs include surprising details, they often look as though he has placed them there.) In Bernstein’s view, Nachtwey’s precise compositions are a prison in which the people that he photographs are trapped—quarantined from history, from each other, and from us. “His modernist formalism finds a moment of stillness, completeness, finality in the image that makes its isolation from time seem natural and inevitable, and in that way invites us to linger with the image rather than imagine its before and after,” Bernstein argues. “These are the opposite of ‘pregnant’ moments: they are moments of perfect poverty.” The French critic Pascal Convert agrees: Nachtwey’s emphasis on “lines, frames, cut-offs, use of symmetry and asymmetry” creates an “authoritarian” relationship to the viewer; rather than offering “the possibility of a critical reading of history,” Nachtwey’s images “close in on a history that has already been written.” For Bernstein and Convert, 213

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the problem with Nachtwey’s photographs is not their unflinching realism but, rather, their constricted relation to the viewers looking at them and the people suffering in them. In this view, Nachtwey’s images are less a cry of protest than a denial of freedom. Nachtwey’s photographs are didactic: the stance he takes toward his viewers is like that of a brave, morally anchored teacher trying to prod his sometimes wayward pupils. (He quotes Dante at the opening of Inferno: “Through me is the way to join the lost people.”) And it is true that Nachtwey’s particularly potent blend of graphic, sometimes disgusting subject matter and bold, imposing compositions makes it hard to maintain, or even establish, a free reign of emotions, much less of ideas. His images are overwhelming; they can make the viewer feel very small. (I sometimes think of Nachtwey as the Richard Serra of photography.) His photographs’ great value—their utterly uncompromising depiction of physical suffering—is also their limitation. Nachtwey’s images are astonishing, but they are also inflexible. One could, therefore, view the finality, the stillness, of which Bernstein and Convert write as Nachtwey’s unpardonable flaw. But I would argue the opposite. The modernist formalism and the sense of completeness are there: but they constitute the strength of Nachtwey’s project, not its downfall. In the realm of the virtual—the realm of the photograph— Nachtwey insists on finding order. Amidst chaos, he hints at unity; amidst nihilism, he discovers form; amidst fragmentation, he finds connections; amidst cruelty, he discerns grace. Nachtwey has sometimes described himself as a witness—indeed, a servant—who merely conveys the travails of others. But that is the opposite of what he does. His photographs are less a direct presentation of his subjects’ experiences than a transformation of them; he is distilling, structuring, cohering the conditions of their lives and deaths rather than simply transmitting them. Like Primo Levi, who recited Dante as he slaved away in Auschwitz, Nachtwey’s insistence on structure reminds us of an alternate, saner world even as he ruthlessly plunges us into anarchy: one might say that his documents of barbarism are also documents of civilization. Nachtwey is shaping pain, molding it into something (almost) recognizable in the hopes that we might receive it; he presents every particular suffering as a human fate and every par214

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ticular fate as human. This is not an empty or exploitative impulse but, rather, a life-affirming one. In making his photographs so formally precise, Nachtwey is rebutting the naturalistic—that is, the “scrappy, blurry”—aesthetic of earlier photographers like Capa as well as the spontaneous look of later, essentially apolitical street photographers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and William Klein. He is also refusing those critics who want the documentary photograph to ape the chaos and randomness of life, and who mistake that aping for honesty. (Adorno, in a different context, once derided this as “the theatrics of utter simplicity.”) Nachtwey’s aesthetic selfconsciously and unapologetically acknowledges the gap between life and pictures of it. Yet the critics whom Nachtwey irks—and there are many—are right when they suggest that the contrasts with Capa are not merely aesthetic. Nachtwey is less inspiring than Capa, in his images and in his stance. One can easily say who Nachtwey defends: the victims. And what he protests: their violation; as David Rieff observed, Nachtwey draws a “moral line in the sand . . . that is based on suffering alone.” Take, for instance, Nachtwey’s pictures (and those of his colleagues from VII) in Forgotten War, a 2005 book about the Democratic Republic of Congo. That country’s civil war, which has also involved troops from at least six African nations and a slew of paramilitary forces, has been called “the deadliest conflict since World War II”; an estimated 5.4 million “excess” Congolese deaths have occurred in the past decade, and hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been irreparably damaged through rape. Nachtwey shows us, among other things, the agony of a man undergoing genital surgery without anesthesia, and a seventy-year-old rape victim. I am grateful that he took these photographs, and more grateful that Doctors Without Borders, which collaborated on Forgotten War, has not given up on that tormented country. Still, Forgotten War bears scant resemblance to Capa’s Death in the Making. After looking at Nachtwey’s Congo photographs, and at many others, it is hard to say what, as opposed to who, he is for; Woodward is right when he charges that unlike Capa, “Nachtwey doesn’t have causes.” Yet this says less about Nachtwey’s failings than it does about the 215

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Congo. It is a difficult place in which to be a partisan, not just for Nachtwey but for you and me too. This is the heart of the matter. Nachtwey’s stance doesn’t resemble Capa’s stance, and Nachtwey’s images don’t look like Capa’s images, because Nachtwey’s world isn’t Capa’s world. This doesn’t mean that good people are scarcer today than in Capa’s time, but good causes—political causes, as opposed to humanitarian ones—are. What Nachtwey and his contemporaries photograph—what they must photograph—is the savage nihilism that, as we have seen, defines many of the conflicts of the past two decades; the frenzy of religious “martyrdom”; the depravity of terrorist attacks on civilians; the sexual torture of women and girls. The post-1989 American, unlike the midcentury Hungarian, has no Popular Front, no general strike, no Spanish anarchists or International Brigades or Holocaust survivors building a kibbutz in the sun. James Nachtwey can’t shoot like Robert Capa any more than Robert Stone can write like André Malraux. Capa lived at a time when political and humanitarian impulses fused; we live in the time of their fragmentation. Capa insisted that you must have a cause; Nachtwey can’t afford that insistence. Those Chechen guerrillas may be fighting for self-determination, but in Beslan they deliberately murdered hundreds of children. Those “revolutionaries” in Sierra Leone did not build schools or clinics; they specialized in rape, amputation, and murder. Those brave Congolese soldiers and militias have ripped the vaginas of baby girls and gang-raped their grandmothers; it is hard to discover (much less advocate) their political programs or principles. And even in cases where one might oppose something—say, the American invasion of Iraq—it is hard to support the suicide bombers and fundamentalist death squads who presumably embrace the same aim. Nachtwey’s photographs don’t—can’t—take the kind of stand that Capa’s did because for Nachtwey to do so would require romanticizing barbarism. This he refuses to do. And I suspect that Nachtwey’s photographs don’t point to an openended, optimistic future in the way that Capa’s did because Nachtwey— like many of us—has no such future in which to believe; liberal internationalism in our time rests, as Michael Ignatieff has written, “less on 216

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optimism about the human capacity for good than on dread of human capacity for evil.” It is true that Nachtwey sometimes seeks out the human gesture and the moment of dignity; more often, however, he focuses on the ways people die and the worlds that they ravage. In this sense Nachtwey is Capa’s antithesis rather than his heir. Capa brought his viewers news of the world that they wanted to know; Nachtwey is the despised messenger knocking on a slammed door. This is the key to why Nachtwey infuriates so many critics: he presents us with a family of man that we are desperate to disown. Nachtwey compounds his problems of reception by the often frustrating ways in which he presents his photographs. In Inferno and the New York show that accompanied its publication, he supplied viewers with only the scantest information about the brutalities he was exposing. Even worse, that information was largely compartmentalized from the photographs, so most people probably had little idea of what, specifically, they were looking at. If this purposely difficult presentation was meant as a sort of Brechtian gesture, it failed, for it created irritation and confusion rather than the kind of thoughtful, radicalizing alienation that Brecht sought. This is not simply a stylistic problem. By segregating text and pictures, Nachtwey undermines his self-proclaimed intention to promote understanding and inspire action—to help his viewers “translate their feelings into an articulate stance,” as he wrote in Inferno. Instead, he makes it far too possible for the information-deprived viewer to fall into impotent hopelessness: in the absence of knowledge, all starving people, all massacred people, all degraded, defeated, abject people begin to look sort of the same; even worse, there seem to be no reasons for their predicament. And it is a very short journey from bewilderment and hopelessness to disgust and contempt. Perhaps Nachtwey believes his pictures will be more powerful—or closer to the values of “real,” that is, abstract art—if readers concentrate solely on his visuals, undistracted by supplementary text. If so, he has made exactly the wrong choice. When Mark Rothko called a painting Light Red over Black, or when Cindy Sherman calls her self-portrait film stills Untitled, they invite the viewer to discover richer, more capacious mean217

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ings in their work by refusing to limit our imaginations. Photojournalism works in the opposite way: meaning—moral, political, aesthetic—is deepened through specificity; only when we know what we are looking at can we begin to engage the why and how. (It matters whether those refugees are fleeing a genocide or have fomented one.) Such knowledge wouldn’t enable us to master the cruelties Nachtwey presents, but it would help us begin to ask the right questions. Nachtwey’s separation of image from specific context is not new or unique; the virtually textless photo-document is often preferred by even the most overtly political photojournalists. (Benjamin’s hope that words would save photographs by endowing them with context has not been realized.) Nachtwey is working in the tradition not just of abstract painters, but of the pioneering Weimar photojournalists whose photo essays in mass magazines usually ran with scant text. This offered the reader, especially the German reader who had been stunted by decades of censorship, a new freedom of creative interpretation—and of dangerously ignorant misinterpretation. It was exactly this paradox that provoked worry in Benjamin, scorn in Kracauer, and fury in Brecht. *

*

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Journalists sometimes ask Nachtwey questions that seem less than helpful in understanding his work. One writer wondered if he has ever taken “happy” pictures. (Answer: “Not often.”) Still another wondered how he functions in the face of so much violence. (Answer: “My job is not to go someplace and fall apart.”) And he is asked, over and over, if he intervenes to save the people he photographs; the fact that Nachtwey has witnessed particularly barbaric violence without stopping it makes his interlocutors, and his viewers, profoundly uncomfortable. How can he just stand there? they wonder. And they wonder this more often, and more angrily, about Nachtwey than about any other photographer; he inspires what Max Kozloff once called “the classic moral distaste” for the “useless . . . observer.” It is as if all the vexing debates about humanitarian intervention are played out here, in the realm of picture making. Nachtwey’s answer is that he has on occasion stepped in (specifically, to confront lynch mobs and take famine victims to feeding stations). But, like Capa, he makes clear that he 218

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considers himself a journalist rather than an aid worker, doctor, soldier, or Good Samaritan. Asked if he has ever felt “morally anguished” by photographing suffering, he answered simply, “No.” Nachtwey is right, I think, to reject the demand that he become a savior or that he prove his goodness through anguish and guilt. Still, to record violence and suffering is a thorny, morally complex business, and there are some photographs—especially those of executions—that seem to cry out for intervention (though in most such cases this would be utterly useless). One such photograph—one of the cruelest I have ever seen—was taken almost five decades ago by Don McCullin. Three young black men—actually, they are closer to boys—wearing torn clothes and bandages, and almost certainly beaten or worse, face the camera. One stares at McCullin, one looks down, one’s head is cut off by the frame. A uniformed black soldier standing behind them, sporting glasses and a tilted beret, aims a large gun at the head of the boy on the right. The ominous caption simply says, “Congolese soldiers ill-treating prisoners awaiting death in Stanleyville, 1964.” Nachtwey himself has taken us closer than we may ever want to similar scenes, as in his 1996 photographs of a triple execution in Afghanistan. In the last shot of a grueling eight-page spread, one of the condemned men stares out at us, eyes wide open, as he hangs, neck broken, from a rope. Though they share Nachtwey’s lack of sentimentality, some of the most talented and committed conflict photographers have questioned the morality of their craft and the toll it takes on them. McCullin wrote of the price he paid for his immersion in catastrophe and the undeniable attraction that immersion held for him: “You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery and death. You have to wade through to record them. . . . I felt I had seen so much horror that it was likely to destroy me. . . . Yet . . . I cannot do without the head-on collision with life I have when I am working.” Capa told of how, in England during World War II, he once put down his camera when challenged by an indignant, slightly wounded pilot who felt he was being exploited. Capa thought about the situation: “On the train to London, . . . I hated myself and my profession. This sort of photography was only for undertakers and I didn’t like being one.” But then he thought some more: “Next morning, after sleeping it over, I felt better. While shaving I had a conversation with myself about the incom219

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JAMES NACHTWEY STUDIO DENIED PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS PHOTGRAPH. IT CAN BE FOUND IN JAMES NACHTWEY, CIVIL WARS, PORTFOLIO BIBLIOTHEK DER FOTOGRAPHIE, NO. 6, PAGES 74–75.

Figure 8.2 Location unknown, Afghanistan, 1996: Nachtwey’s closeness to extreme violence often provokes demands that he intervene—which, rightly, he rejects. This photograph, part of an eight-part spread that was printed in a German monograph, recorded a triple execution in Afghanistan under the pre-Taliban regime of Burhanuddin Rabbani. The convicted men had been sentenced for stealing sheep and murdering a shepherd; thousands gathered to watch the executions.

patibility of being a reporter and hanging onto a tender soul at the same time. . . . The pictures of the dead and wounded were the ones that would show people the real aspect of war, and I was glad I had taken that one roll before I turned soppy.” The most interesting treatment of this subject is to be found in the book The Bang-Bang Club, written by two South African photojournalists, Greg Marinovich and João Silva. (Silva currently works for the New York Times, photographing mainly in Africa and Iraq; Marinovich, who won the Pulitzer Prize, continues to produce some of the most revealing images from South Africa.) Marinovich and Silva—along with their “club” colleagues Kevin Carter and Ken Oosterbroek—cut their teeth and made their names covering the ferocious fighting in the black townships between supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) and of the Inkatha Freedom Party in 1990–94, which was the stormy transitional period between the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the country’s first democratic elections. The authors 220

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make clear that a dizzying confluence of factors motivated them, including a desire to record history in the making, the need to escape unhappy love affairs, competitive rivalry, a hatred of apartheid, and a craving for action. You could say they were drawn to the violence-drenched townships because something singular, epochal, world-historic was happening there, and that would be true; you could say they were drawn to the violence-drenched townships because that’s where the excitement, the juice, and the “powerhouse pictures” were to be found, and that would be true too. The four photographers, all of whom are white, were dubbed “bangbang paparazzi” by a South African magazine; the book’s title is at once brash and self-critical. Marinovich and Silva loved their work and believed, rightly, that it was important to do. But they also knew that they were feeding off the violence—the bang-bang—of their countrymen, and they feared there might be a payback. And there was: Marinovich was severely wounded, and Oosterbroek killed, as they covered a shootout in a township days before the 1994 elections; Carter committed suicide in July of that year, three months after winning the Pulitzer Prize. (Though the South Africans generally scorned foreign photographers as naive dilettantes, they considered Nachtwey an honorary club member, and he appears intermittently throughout the book. Nachtwey was with Marinovich and Oosterbroek at the shootout; there is a famous picture of a bullet whizzing through his hair.) The Bang-Bang Club is a compelling, down-to-earth adventure narrative, but its real subject is the perpetual tension between the humane impulse, the journalistic imperative, and the demands of the photographic craft. At the beginning of the book, and of his career, Marinovich witnesses the lynching of a suspected ANC supporter by pro-Inkatha Zulus. “The Zulus and I took off after him, a pack hunting its terrified prey,” Marinovich writes. “After just a few dozen steps he went down . . . My ears picked out the slithering, whispery sound of steel entering flesh, the solid thud of the heavy fighting sticks crushing the bone of his skull. These were sounds I had never heard before, but they made sickening sense.” Marinovich does not try to stop the mob; the murder proceeds, and so does his work: “I was one of the circle of killers, shooting with a wide-angle lens just an arm’s length away, much too close. I was horrified, screaming inside my 221

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head that this could not be happening. But I steadily checked light readings . . . I was as aware of what I was doing as a photographer as I was of the rich scent of fresh blood.” And when he comes upon a nine-month-old baby mutilated by a “gash in his head where a blade had been driven deep into his soft little skull,” Marinovich writes: “I knew that of all the gory and heart-wrenching scenes I had already photographed that morning, this dead baby was the image that would show the insane cruelty of the attack . . . But the light sucked.” The larger struggle against apartheid was surely a just one, but the unofficial war these young men documented was anarchic, sadistic, devoid of glory—though, to their credit, the authors never retreated into nihilism or racism. Still, the cruelty of the combatants is often shocking: and proof, once again, that oppressive political systems tend to dehumanize their victims. One day while driving in the township of Thokoza, Silva spotted a group of women chasing another, younger woman. She was bleeding from her head and losing ground fast. In seconds they had caught her, hacking at her with whatever weapons they had . . . The low cries of pain from the woman on the dirt pavement were almost drowned out by the attackers’ triumphant ululating. João was scared, confused. This was not the kind of war photography he had imagined himself doing—this was too weird, but he shot off frame after frame . . . Just then a man walked into the right-hand side of his frame, patronizing the female killers with a broad smile. João instinctively . . . pressed the shutter.

And there it is, the picture we see: the handsome man with the dazzling, even joyous smile in the foreground, the female killers continuing their hard work behind him. As members of the press, and especially as whites, the photographers were in a privileged position vis-à-vis their subjects. This privilege did not paralyze them, but they grew increasingly aware of it. In early 1994, a colleague, photographer Abdul Shariff, was killed while on assignment in the township of Kathlehong. The authors mourned Shariff ’s death, but when they returned to the township a month later, their sadness was wrenched into sharp perspective: “We stopped at a shack . . . to see what was going

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on. There we met Distance, a hardened ANC fighter . . . It was a quiet day and one of us mentioned Abdul. Distance looked at us and then said: ‘I am not sorry your friend Abdul was killed. It is good that one of you dies. Nothing personal, but now you feel what is happening to us every day.’” In the end, the authors come to a dispassionate analysis: “We had not personally suffered like some of the people we photographed, but neither were we responsible for their suffering—we had just witnessed it.” Like the struggle they documented, their work was necessary and right, but that doesn’t mean it was either innocent or altruistic. And the four South Africans almost certainly would have agreed—a bit shamefacedly, perhaps—with their friend and colleague James Nachtwey, who once admitted that “you are never freer than in that moment when you decide to expose yourself to sniper fire.” As luck—or at least his particular, peculiar luck—would have it, Nachtwey was on the scene with his camera as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, unfolded. He happened to be in New York, which is rare for a man who is usually on the road, and his downtown Manhattan apartment was so close to the World Trade Center that he could feel the first attack before he saw it. Within minutes he was on the street: just in time, it turned out, to photograph the south tower as it “vaporized” before him. (Nachtwey has said that he thought of Osama bin Laden as soon as the second tower was hit.) He took some of the most remarkable photographs from that day. One is a landscape of apocalypse: a grey-toned, wide-angle shot of a blasted Ground Zero—so wide-angled that it suggests an entire city had been destroyed. Another shot shows survivors, drenched in soot and dust and some sort of liquid, as they stagger through the rubble to safety; in the foreground, a woman and a rescue worker hold hands. Since then, Nachtwey has been in many of the hard places where the American wars and their jihadist counterparts are waged, especially Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq; not surprisingly, he has brought us distressingly, unsparingly close to the costs of those conflicts for fighters and civilians. And he has articulated a political position that, in its recognition of the connections between these various conflicts, is rare, even unfashion-

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able, among most leftists and some liberals. Yet it is a view that Capa, who regarded the struggle against fascism as the unifying story of his time, might well have shared. This view is best expressed, in words and pictures, in an imposing, 416page book that Nachtwey’s photo collective, VII, published in 2003. Marching across an opening page, in tiny type, are the words, “USA, Afghanistan, Iraq”; the next page simply reads, in large thick letters, WAR. The book starts with a double spread of a photograph Nachtwey took on 9/11. We see the eerie, burning rubble of what had been the World Trade Center but was now Ground Zero, framed by the black slash of a still-extant wall; amidst the rubble stands a rippling American flag that looks simultaneously proud and forlorn. By opening the book in this way, its authors strongly suggest that 9/11 represents not just an isolated terrorist attack but, rather, a declaration of war against America. And while many reject the idea of a worldwide clash between Islam and the West, Nachtwey apparently does not. On the contrary: 9/11 seems to have clarified his thinking, placing the work he had done for two decades in places such as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Israel, and Chechnya in a new context—or, rather, in a context. “At the time, I thought I was photographing separate stories,” Nachtwey wrote, in War, of this previous work. “On September 11 history crystallized, and I comprehended that I had actually been photographing different phases of the same story for over twenty years, the conflict between two worlds, between two value systems, Islam and the West.” Not surprisingly, Nachtwey has been subsequently criticized—wrongly, I think—for adopting a presumably “Manichean” and “anti-humanistic” view. Continuing in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, War eschews the news photographer’s customary black and white for a veritable riot of vivid colors: the brilliant hues of intricately woven carpets, the almost unnaturally cerulean skies of Iraq, the blindingly bright white clothes worn by Pakistani men, the cherry red of a Shiite banner held aloft. The extremes of physical suffering, the sense of pure victimhood, that dominated Inferno are not as prevalent here. These are, indeed, pictures of war: which is something different than starvation or genocide. Different, however, doesn’t mean kinder. In one appalling photograph, 224

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taken in the morgue of a Baghdad hospital, Nachtwey shows us barely recognizable pieces of charcoal that had once been a person: the victim, he tells us, was “blown apart” by U.S. bombs. Two family members—one bends toward the ground as if to steady himself, the other shields his eyes with his wrist—have come for the body; a third man, wearing a face mask and plastic gloves, hovers nearby. In another picture, taken in black and white, we see a Taliban fighter mortally wounded by Northern Alliance troops in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The man, whose skinny bare feet peek out from his pants, lies on his side on the bloodstained ground, a flowered blanket under his head. His embroidered cap has fallen off; his mouth is open, his face twisted in pain. In the right of the frame, a large gun is thrust at him. But this seems redundant: according to the caption, he is already bleeding to death. Like Capa, Nachtwey knows how to get inside the action of war. His photographs in War are sometimes extraordinarily, and fittingly, aggressive; the calmness we could sometimes sense in Inferno is now largely gone. In Baghdad, he thrusts his camera into the sweaty face of an Iraqi looter as he is caught by a smiling U.S. Marine; the soldier covers the Iraqi’s eyes with a blunt, black leather glove. (Salgado would never take a picture like this.) In another shot, taken from above, Nachtwey photographs a marine subduing a bloody-nosed Iraqi, whose body is spread flat on the pavement. The Iraqi’s arms are tied behind his arched back; a gun digs into his spine, as does one foot of the marine; the captive’s mouth opens in a cry of surprise or pain. In the foreground of the picture is a typical Nachtwey touch: we see the Iraqi’s prosthetic leg—its foot covered in socks and a sneaker— which has fallen off in the midst of his capture. Unlike Capa, Nachtwey records the action on more than one side of a conflict. On the eve of the U.S. invasion, he’s there with the Baathists as they burn the hated Israeli flag and raise their banners, their photograph of a smiling Saddam, and their guns in midair—triumphantly, or so they think. In Charsoba, Pakistan, he’s at a giant anti-American rally, a swirl of bright white robes, brilliant red banners, and fury. Later, back in Baghdad, he’s on a search mission with U.S. Marines as they charge through a building; weighed down by bulky gear and brandishing enormous guns, they look simultaneously powerful and clueless. 225

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The most ominous picture here is not of a political rally, a battle, or a death. It is a Crayola-bright double spread of a Shiite religious procession and was taken in Karbala, Iraq, in April 2003. Three men in the foreground—one hoists a large, sharp knife as he shouts, another holds his hand on his head—lead a procession of religious pilgrims; behind them we see a sunny blue sky filled with gentle, fluffy clouds. The men are dressed in pure white, but they are drenched in shiny, almost greasy, bright red blood: they have sliced their heads and beaten their chests bloody in honor of Imam Hussein’s “martyrdom” fourteen centuries ago. Nachtwey has photographed them close up, silhouetted from below, and they might look heroic if they didn’t look so horrific. An essay in War describes radical Islam as the linkage of “fervency to religious insanity” (a major theme, as we’ll see, in Peress’s Telex Iran): here is the visualization of that thought. Amidst this masochistic glory in blood: what compassion can there be for the pain of others? Amidst these eternally stoked memories of past defeats: what hope can there be for a more tolerant future? Talk of democracy, of modernity, of reconciliation and human rights seems not just far away but ludicrous when looking at this photograph. Nachtwey is not known for a sense of humor, and war is not funny. Yet there is one photograph here that I find hilarious, albeit in a darkly absurd way. Taken in June 2002 in a photographer’s studio in Kabul, it shows two women posing for their pictures. They stand in front of a painted scrim; two large black klieg lights face them. On the wall of the studio is a poster of a dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty—a singer? an actress?— wearing a low-cut black top, eye makeup, and lipstick. The two customers stand upright, with seeming pride, as they face the bright lights, the studio photographer, Nachtwey, and us. Each wears an embroidered, bright-blue burka that conceals her; not even an eyelash peeks through the grills. Who would have thought that feudal Afghanistan would produce a postmodern joke? Yet here we have it: the portrait—that great document of individual expressiveness—recreated here, without a face. Nachtwey has said that a guardian angel must watch over him in zones of conflict; how else could he immerse himself in such violence and emerge 226

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largely unscathed? (He is already older than Capa and Chim when they were killed on assignment.) In Iraq, his angel went on leave. Nachtwey dreaded the thought of going to Iraq, and expressed the hope that there would be no war. But there was, and he went. At the end of 2003—in the war’s first year—he was riding through Baghdad with Time magazine correspondent Michael Weisskopf and two U.S. soldiers. A hand grenade was thrown through their window; Weisskopf quickly tossed it out, but it exploded as he did so and his hand was blown off. The two soldiers were also seriously wounded; so was Nachtwey, in his knees and his abdomen. Nachtwey was sent to several military hospitals and operated on; he didn’t return to Iraq until early 2006, which is a long time for the world’s most prominent war photographer to be away from the world’s most prominent war. The experience of his wounding and his healing, and his obvious admiration for those who helped in the latter, was the inspiration for “The Sacrifice,” a modest exhibit of Nachtwey’s photographs that was mounted in 2007 by a small gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village. The title of the show refers in part to the U.S. Army’s doctors, medics, and nurses, both stateside and in Baghdad, as they try to heal, or at least save, gravely wounded Americans and Iraqis. But “The Sacrifice” refers, too, to the soldiers themselves, many of whom are now amputees, and whose stoicism and courage clearly moved Nachtwey. He photographs them with his usual sober care, but also with something that feels closer to comradeship— closer, indeed, to Capa. “Support the troops” has become a slogan de riguer even among antiwar activists, but it often seems less like a heartfelt commitment than a public-relations ploy.* Not so with Nachtwey: he shows us these young men and women as they struggle with their bodies and their pain, and as they become acquainted with their new, maimed, but still dignified selves. If Lynndie England’s blank, stupid sadism has become the international face of the American army, Nachtwey presents us with a far different one.

* Journalist George Packer has noted that the Iraq war has produced a slew of American films in which U.S. soldiers are depicted “as psychopaths who may as well be wearing SS uniforms.”

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Some of Nachtwey’s hospital images are intimately brutal, such as a close-up of the shredded, pitted, pulverized legs and still-booted feet of a soldier blasted by a roadside bomb. Others are more distanced, as in the waterfall of blood raining down from the wounded leg of a soldier in an operating room (an odd echo of the waterfalls of blood self-created by the Shiite celebrants). These are hard pictures, and the knowledge that these soldiers died makes them harder; every armchair warrior should take a good look at them before he praises the glory of battle. Still, these are not the images of inexplicable cruelty that abounded in Inferno: a soldier who chooses to fight for his country is different than a hounded, helpless, unarmed civilian. Nachtwey’s “Sacrifice” pictures might evoke sadness, admiration, anger, or pride; they could encourage support for the war or opposition to it. But it is doubtful they would inspire sheer, bewildered revulsion. Except one. Titled “Collateral Damage,” it shows a fourteen-year-old boy named Hassan. He lies on his back, though he is propped up and faces us; Nachtwey has placed himself at the foot of the bed. Hassan’s skinny chest is covered with bandages; his eyes are closed; his legs splay stiffly apart; tubes run in and out. He is tended by two male nurses of the American army, who carefully lift him from the bed. Hassan, the caption tells us, has been “gored by shrapnel,” the gift of a suicide bomber to an outdoor market in Baghdad. Hassan isn’t a man who chose to fight but a boy who was drafted by the fanatics of terror. His pain isn’t greater than the pain of the soldiers, but it wounds us in a different way: this isn’t sacrifice, but butchery. In Nachtwey’s earlier work, the almost excessive drama of his photographs suggested that he was looking for the one iconic image—the ur-image— that could encapsulate the particular crisis he was documenting and the more general nature of suffering and violence. This endowed his photographs with dramatic power but also, at times, with grandiosity. Increasingly, Nachtwey seems less interested in the single representative image— the perfect moment—than in the relationship between past and future, which is to say in the extended photo essay. (Capa, too, developed in this way.) Inferno, War, and especially the 2003 book Rethink: Cause and Conse228

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quences of September 11 show the benefits and limitations of this form as Nachtwey uses it. Rethink was compiled in the unique period between the overthrow of the Taliban and the ousting of Saddam: compiled, that is, in that uncharted, urgent time between 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq war. All sorts of options and all sorts of hopes that are now defunct were then very much in play. It is a provocative, sometimes startling book that includes material—speeches, essays, and other kinds of documents—by an array of contributors from George Bush to Noam Chomsky, along with hundreds of unnerving photographs made by VII photographers. It is alternately angry, sober, despairing, cold; its analyses range from uncannily prescient to laughably wrong. Smack in the middle of the book stands Nachtwey’s work, represented by a sixty-page spread of his images spanning the years 1992 to 2001; the section is titled “The Passion of Allah.” I wouldn’t exactly call this a journey through hell, but it is a journey through some of the most extreme, ruthless, and sometimes intractable conflicts—or, if you will, “passions”—of our era. Nachtwey is on the streets with the masked men of the West Bank during the second intifada; with the antigovernment demonstrators of Indonesia; with the shooters, the mourners, and the corpses of Bosnia during its civil war; with the heroin addicts of Pakistan. In Afghanistan, photographs from the years 1996–2001 show the otherwordly ruins of Kabul; the victims of land mines, who are now amputees; the prayers and the gunners, who are often one and the same. In Chechnya, we see two drab, elderly women bundled against the cold as they flee Grozny under fire; in Kashmir, an Indian soldier with a big gun checks frightened bus riders for papers and weapons; in Somalia, we are presented with the human bone-heaps. Do such pictures help us “rethink” 9/11? In some sense: of course. September 11 was an unrequested history lesson that forced us to reevaluate a supposedly closed past. It taught us that the dream of reversing modernity is very much alive for millions of people, and that a series of apparently separate wars, movements, and events might not be so separate at all. September 11 was the great harbinger of negative globalization, a warning that there may be zero degrees of separation between the citizens 229

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of the developed, secular world and those experiencing the torments of failed modernity (whether self-inflicted or not). It brought home to New Yorkers—and millions of others—that the world of the enraged Pakistani mullah, the immiserated Afghan peasant, and the rootless Saudi student is our world too. “It’s come as a shock to the citizens of New York and London and Brussels that decisions directly and immediately affecting their own security can be made in the Hindu Kush,” Gareth Evans, head of the International Crisis Group, wrote in Rethink. Michael Ignatieff put it even more simply: on 9/11, he wrote, “terror . . . collapsed distance.” This collapse—which is also, strangely, a connection—is made vividly present by Nachtwey’s extended photo essay: he is insisting that we see his pictures not as a series of isolated shots but across an integrated continuum of geography, politics, and history. But to discover connections can mean losing sight of crucial distinctions. Not every war involving Muslims is a war about Islam. What are Nachtwey’s pictures from Bosnia doing here—or doing here, rather, without more explanation? That war was waged by Muslims to preserve a secular, multiethnic country, not to establish an Islamic state. Similarly, the anti-Suharto demonstrators of 1998 were fighting against a repressive, corrupt military dictatorship, not for Shariah law. The wars in Somalia, now entering their third decade, are about many things, of which Islam is only one. Nachtwey’s great achievement in his post-9/11 work is to reject fragmentation. In War and Rethink, he insists that the hurricanes of violence, especially in the Mideast and Southeast Asia, are irreversibly connected: bound to each other, and to us. Nachtwey’s great failure in his post-9/11 work is to elide vital distinctions and to insist, still, on a certain aesthetic abstraction. He sweeps us into the spectacular whirlwind of the Islamic world—into its confrontations with the West and with itself; but he sometimes gives us little to go on other than the dramatic, even thrilling, visuals of this passion. His work is now surrounded by all kinds of documents, yet he seems weirdly intent on disclosing the absolute minimum about his images (captions, again, are frustratingly stingy). He offers so much, yet we still feel deprived; he dazzles us and moves us, yet we still feel lost. James Nachtwey remains a conundrum: as perhaps he should. The tor230

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ments he presses upon us cannot be mastered, but they can’t be avoided either. He can’t find the right way to present his “ghoulish cruelties,” but that is because there is no right way. The crimes, the catastrophes, and the wars he witnesses can never be undone, but showing them is not wrong or useless. His gifts and his shortcomings sometimes infuriate, but they force us to look closer and, at the very least, fail better. And so we need James Nachtwey’s photographs: even though, almost surely, we don’t want them.

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Figure 9.1 Tehran, Iran, 1979: Gilles Peress photographed the Iranian Revolution in its early days as it splintered, imploded, and became increasingly fundamentalist. Peress’s edgy, perplexing photographs conveyed his confusions about what he was witnessing; though widely lauded now, they attracted little interest at the time. These men had been tortured by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, and had gathered for a demonstration of the wounded. Photo: Gilles Peress/Magnum.

9 GILLES PERESS The Skeptic

We are in a tension between the speed of history—which happens very, very fast—and progress, which happens very, very slowly. Gilles Peress

Gilles Peress, whose photographs are known for being puzzlingly cerebral, is an almost exact contemporary of James Nachtwey: born in 1946, Peress began taking pictures in 1970 and joined Magnum the following year. He, too, was profoundly influenced by the political ferment of the 1960s—in Peress’s case, by the revolutionary events, or what seemed to be the revolutionary events, of May 1968 in France. But unlike Nachtwey, Peress was not inspired to become a photographer by the pictures of that, or any other, era; asked to name his photographic influences, he answers, “None.” It was the movies that obsessed Peress, particularly those of JeanLuc Godard. And though, like Nachtwey, Peress has photographed some of the world’s fiercest conflicts—in Iran, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq—he does not consider himself a war photographer, and he rarely talks about photography’s power to change the world. At Paris’s elite Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Peress studied politics and philosophy in the years 1966–68 with leftist icons such as Michel Foucault and Étienne Balibar. “It was a time of cross fertilization—between psychoanalysis, Marxism, sociology, ethnology, philosophy, epistemology, linguistics,” he has recalled: a productive, exciting period. But in the wake of the left’s defeats after May ’68, French Marxists, postmodernists, and 233

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poststructuralists began to think, speak, and write in a language that was increasingly, infuriatingly, hermetic. “The spirit of unmasking, of rebellion against authority, was transposed in defeat into a far more limited sphere,” the critic Morris Dickstein has observed of this period. “Now the strategies of confrontation that had failed in the streets succeeded on the page.” Reality—the interior reality of the self, the exterior reality of history—became “dim referents in a ghostly allegory of texts about texts, language about language.” And this was probably truer in Paris than anywhere else. All this had a life-altering effect on Peress. “Language started to disconnect from reality,” he has said. “By 1971, language entered into a momentum that reached the point of madness.” Political language became “more and more like an intellectual disease,” a substitute for engagement with reality instead of a tool for changing it. In response, Peress fled the world of words for that of images. Whereas Robert Capa became a photographer because he didn’t possess the language to be a journalist, Peress became a photographer because he no longer believed in language. For Peress, photography is a way to think about the world. His photographs seem to be arguments with and about what he is seeing rather than documentations of it. Peress’s philosophical background, with its reverence for critical inquiry, seeps into, even defines, his images. As David Rieff observed, “Peress’ photographs are exercises of mind as much as of sensibility. Looking at his pictures, one often has the sense that, if the occasion seemed to call for it, he would put down his camera and write or make a film.” Peress’s pictures are often hard to decipher, but they are never about the absence of reality. His subject is more complex: the difficulty of finding, conveying, and, most of all, making meaning from reality. And because that is a hard, indeed often impossible, thing to do, Peress’s photographs are about failure: not as an individual shortcoming that can be fixed but as an inescapable aspect of the human condition that can only be endured. For Peress, to take pictures is to enter into what he calls “a methodology of self doubt.” And whereas Nachtwey’s sense of control suggests that the unbearable can be grasped and perhaps even mastered, Peress offers something very different. His seemingly unmoored images immerse us in his bewil234

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derment about the histories-in-the-making that he observes; Peress is a witness, but he’s not always sure to what. Like a detective, he tries to discover where the bodies are buried, and how, and by whom; like a historian, he seeks to understand the forces behind political upheaval; like a philosopher, he hopes to decipher the why of violence and cruelty. Yet he rejects the conventional wisdom that remembering history prevents its repetition. Peress is immersed in a harder-to-escape nightmare, one he has called “the curse of history”: “You are damned if you remember—condemned to relive, re-enact the images of your fathers; you are damned if you don’t—condemned to repeat their hypocrisy.” Peress was born in Neuilly, France. His mother was American, his father a French Jew who lost an arm fighting in World War II. Like many children growing up in postwar France, Peress was taught little about the war and its moral compromises. But he recalls a flow of impressionistic images: “I remember my father, his amputated arm and his pain, his descriptions of addiction to morphine, . . . [of] the German occupation, and the concentration camps.” The knowledge of living in the wake of an unfinished, fragmentary history of trauma—a very European, decidedly un-American knowledge—haunts Peress and his work. So does the sense that the truths of the war were hidden from him: “It was as if the Jews went to Switzerland for vacation, and the goldfish never die but go to paradise,” he told an interviewer. “Reality wasn’t really dealt with.” In 1999, he participated in a group show at the International Center of Photography in which eight artists were asked to create works based on the photographic archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a humanitarian group. Peress created an “album of fears”: a giant scrapbook that included photographs, documents, and anti-Semitic propaganda that he titled “A Few Things My Father Never Told Me.” This immersion in history has deepened over the years. Peress photographs foreign wars and crises not as sudden eruptions but as the result of complex, slowly poisoned political processes. Thus, in 2007 he co-curated a show at the Musée Picasso called “1937 Guernica 2007.” It showcased Picasso’s studies for his painting, photographs from the Spanish civil war, selections from Brecht’s photography book called War Primer, and Peress’s 235

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own work from Rwanda and Bosnia: a tapestry of twentieth-century failures and twentieth-century agonies. For Peress, the present is the unresolved past, and in his photographs we see how a repression of that past exacts its due. Questions of collaboration, appeasement, and indifference that date back to the 1930s are a key part of Peress’s worldview. In the 1990s, he took a staunchly pro-intervention stance vis-á-vis Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and despaired at the West’s fecklessness. “We, the Europeans, are floating in the vomit of our own past, refusing to confront our responsibility for non-intervention,” he wrote. “We are caught in a time warp . . . with the ghosts of Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Warsaw Ghetto, swirling around in a whisper: ‘Remember us?’” There is a deep, inconsolable melancholy in Peress’s work, as well as a rejection of the bravado that characterizes much leftist photography. His first photographic project, made in 1971, was not a jubilant celebration of proletarian strength but, instead, a sober examination of a failed strike in a coal-mining village in France. “I kept hearing this whole political language of the late ’60s about . . . huge victories of the working class,” Peress has recalled. “So the first project I did was actually about a great working-class defeat.” Unlike most socially committed photographers, and despite his work with various humanitarian and human-rights organizations, Peress denies that the primary object of his work is political change. Photography is “a tool and a vehicle to understand . . . my relationship to reality,” he has insisted. “My primary goal is to make up my own mind as an individual as to what’s out there.” Still, there is nothing solipsistic about Peress’s work, and it’s clear that, for him, photography has uses that go well beyond the personal. Indeed, he has assailed photography’s inward turn, which he calls “the postmodernist incapacity for dealing with the world, which is [based on the belief] that there is no accurate description of the world, so there is no point in going out to look at the world. And if you’re not going to look at the world then certainly you’re not going to change it.” Peress is best known for his body of photographs from Iran, the Balkans, and Rwanda (though he has also photographed everything from electoral campaigns to ballet dancers): however much he may demur, this is highly political work, though not necessarily in ways that are easily clas236

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sifiable. What seems always present, though, is the urgency with which he wants to convey the bad histories—the sectarianism, the fanaticism, the cruelty—of the post–cold war world. (He once thought of titling a series “Hate Thy Brother.”) Peress is a man of passionate political convictions; they clearly dictate his choice of projects. And he has a strong, indeed unmistakable visual style. But he is the opposite of an ideologue, either political or aesthetic, which means that the histories he has witnessed have changed the ways he makes photographs. The “postmodernist incapacity for dealing with the world” that Peress disparages refers in large part to the stance of the critics discussed in chapter 1. They not only assailed photography’s ability to truthfully depict reality; some denied that there was any reality to depict. They scoffed at photography’s capacity to document a world that exists independent of the image; Allan Sekula, for instance, derided the concept of photographic truth as a “particularly obstinate bit of bourgeois folklore.” If earlier generations of photographers and writers had taken a naive view of photography’s objectivity—James Agee, for instance, had described the camera as “incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth”—the postmoderns clung to an equally exaggerated view of photography’s subjectivity. Jean Baudrillard’s declaration, made in the early 1980s, that “truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist” is a pared-down version of the antireality position, but an influential one. The postmoderns and poststructuralists saw themselves as the heirs of Walter Benjamin, but his dialectical imagination eluded them: they never grasped his way of seeing. They could not understand that a photograph is objective and subjective, found and made, dead and alive, withholding and revealing. They could not see that although a photograph—like a novel, a poem, a work of journalism, or a painting—is often created by a person of relative privilege, it might nevertheless foster ideas of human connection and a vision of a less unjust world. But Peress could. His genius has been to accomplish just what the postmoderns couldn’t: to incorporate a critique of photography’s objectivity into that obstinate bit of bourgeois folklore formerly known as truth. He embraces postmodern skepticism, but uses it to enlarge photographic pos237

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sibilities rather than to discredit the medium. Peress has taken the alienated sensibility typical of, and prized by, modern photographers and fused it to a passionate engagement with the world outside himself. Like a good psychoanalyst, he knows that reality is fluid, contested, indeterminate. But a good analyst also knows that though diverse viewpoints complicate actuality, they can’t unmake it. Peress’s photographs reject the transparent, positivistic realism subscribed to by some earlier photographers and critics, but they never veer into the moral, political, or epistemological relativism on which so many postmoderns insist. Peress doesn’t live in Baudrillard’s world; he knows, as did Capa, that we human beings are trapped in reality. In Peress’s view, the photograph is a democratic process that lives and changes; photographs, he has said, are open documents “where half of the text is in the reader.” The viewer must work to complete the photograph by digging into what it suggests and endowing it with deeper insights; the photograph is the “moment where my language finishes and yours starts.” Every image, Peress has said, has four authors: the photographer, the camera, the viewer, and reality. But it is reality, he insists, that “has a way of speaking the loudest”: that speaks, in fact, “with a vengeance.” All these ideas—about images, about history, about the tenacity of reality and the difficulties of comprehending it—were realized in Peress’s first, remarkable book, Telex Iran: In the Name of Revolution, which is both a political document and an expressionist one. Originally published in 1983, Telex Iran doesn’t look like any other book of photojournalism I’ve ever seen. The pictures, printed in a large, unconventional page size, are jumbled and strange; each seems to spill out of its frame, bursting with too many people, too much activity, too many contradictions. This may be the closest we’ll ever get to how the witnessing of a violent political event actually feels: jittery, nervous, disorienting. Rather than capturing the decisive moment that Henri Cartier-Bresson defined as the essence of good photojournalism, Peress’s photographs from Iran acknowledge the medium’s essentially incomplete nature. He opens the book with an unusual viewer warning: “These photographs, made during a five-week period from December 1979 to January 1980, do not represent a 238

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complete picture of Iran or a final record of that time.” For Peress, history, and the photography that records it, is a series of unanswered questions. Peress’s stay in Iran coincided with the takeover of the United States embassy by the militants of the Revolutionary Guard, but Peress was less interested in that extraordinary drama than in the revolution as it imploded, splintered, betrayed itself. (Ryszard Kapuściński’s 1982 book Shah of Shahs documented the same process, and can be read as a companion piece to Telex Iran.) Peress’s stark yet crowded photographs are edgy, jarring, weirdly cropped. Some are framed through windows of buses or shops, reminding us that these are images rather than direct or “natural” transmissions of life; in contrast to Nachtwey’s cooler, more dispassionate stance, Peress never lets us forget that everything we see here is filtered through his lens and his sensibility. He shows us angry demonstrations and jubilant funerals, veiled and wary women, drug addicts, beggars, smoky tea shops, glittering mosques, bleak cemeteries—and guns, guns everywhere. These are images that are simultaneously confused and confusing: images on the brink of a breakdown. Though made by a man of the left, Telex Iran is not John Reed with a camera: the sense of revolutionary élan, of third-world solidarity, is noticeably missing. The claustrophobia of these images mirrors the increasing paranoia of the Iranian militants as they hunted down enemies on the right and, especially, the left. In fact, Peress’s photographs here are so lacking in the conventional, celebratory rhetoric of revolution that he has been accused of an “implicit abandonment of any moral position.” That is a serious misreading of these images. Death stalks this book—not the metaphorical death of which Barthes wrote, but the real thing: firing squads, mass executions, revenge killings. And the death, too, of traditional revolutionary ideals like freedom, progress, and women’s emancipation: all trampled into extinction by the mullahs. Peress’s subject here is the difference between revolution and liberty. The cult of the martyr, the rule of clerical tyrants and fundamentalist thugs, the frenzy of religious suffering: all the tendencies that increasingly dominate world politics were first observed by Peress in 1979. His Iran images have—unfortunately—become deeper, thicker, truer as time has passed. What had been viewed as a mutant political event— 239

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the world’s first revolution that explicitly sought to restore a premodern regime—has become the ruling political ideology for millions of people across the globe. A photograph that appears early in the book, taken in a Tehran amusement park, suggests the fierce cultural contradictions in which the Iranians were caught, and which the revolution would seek to solve through the certainties of religious orthodoxy. A tiny girl, already draped in a black chador, glances at the camera with the barest smile (one of the very few we will see). Behind her looms a painted mural of a huge, wonderful fairytale monster complete with horns, clawed hands, and a tail. He is draped in jewels, and is naked except for a short skirt; his chest is broad, his thighs strong. He sticks out his tongue with lascivious pleasure as he holds his captive—a tiny woman dressed in a bikini top and a long diaphanous skirt—in his paw. From the left of the frame, a man’s hand tries to pull the girl away; on the right, an automobile juts into the frame. Peress’s unconventional, often startling framing makes it hard for the viewer to know where to look and what, exactly, she’s being shown—or what, at least, is most important to see. The pictures are the opposite of news photographs: they seem layered rather than flat, and they require time and concentration. In one photograph, Peress depicts a demonstration in Tabriz as a mosaic of fragments. The faces of two demonstrators, prominent in the foreground, are cut off just below the nose (they have no mouths), while a large portrait of a cleric is chopped off just above the mouth (he has no eyes); the photograph suggests that in the new Iran, as in the old, the people cannot speak and their leaders cannot see. In the background, young men, looking simultaneously relaxed and threatening, stand atop a tall brick wall as they survey the scene, while their comrades in the distance hold bullhorns and guns. Peress’s photographs are crammed with visual information, though what’s portrayed on the edge of a frame, almost as an afterthought, is often most striking: Barthes’s punctum, again and again. In one such picture, we see an almost blurry close-up of a middle-aged man on the street; he wears a black fedora and an unhappy look, and he stands in front of an ancient, carved stone statue of a bull. On the far right of the picture is an odd, shabby, slightly tilted wooden cabinet with bars—through which, 240

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unexpectedly, peers a photograph of Yasser Arafat, whose dark sunglasses make him look like a louche tourist of revolution. The pictures of women are particularly elliptical; several suggest that the revolution has wedded the presumably protected realm of the female to the male arena of violence. One double spread, taken at a political rally in Tabriz, shows a group of young women, shot from above. They look tiny and, somehow, lonely. (Though they appear at a distance, we can see that some wear American-style sneakers under their chadors.) In the foreground of the picture—so close to Peress that it’s blurry—is the sturdy arm and hand of a man clutching a gun; is he the girls’ protector or their jailer? Another photograph shows a score of young women sitting together on a stone staircase; draped in their gloomy black chadors, they look like a gathering of seals. But what’s this? One woman, in the foreground of the picture, wears a light-colored chador imprinted with flowers; amidst the sea of black, this seems close to blasphemy. So does the way she looks straight at Peress with her dark, droopy eyes. The revolution’s anguish is always palpable, though sometimes it’s restrained and sometimes it boils. We see the ways in which the savagery of the Shah’s regime has stamped itself—indelibly, eternally—on its subjects. One dark, skewed picture, which looks like a sort of crazed collage, shows a man’s hand holding a smooth prosthetic leg; next to him stands a turbaned man with a bare chest and the hideous stump of a shoulder where his arm should be. They are victims of Savak, the Shah’s notoriously sadistic secret police. Their mutilation, like Memuna’s, testifies more eloquently than words: their bodies constitute the fiercest of indictments. Burials and cemeteries are a main location for Peress, as they clearly were for the revolutionaries. Thanatos is the engine of this revolution, and every funeral is an emotional catharsis, a religious rite, a political protest, and an incubator of revenge. “The mullahs are propagandists of death and martyrdom—death and martyrdom for others,” Iranian intellectual Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi wrote in the book’s accompanying essay. “In the Islamic republic death is the remedy for every problem.” One photograph depicts the burial of a “martyr” in Tabriz. A group of bearded young men— and some boys too young to be bearded—raise their fists and chant; a white-turbaned mullah toting a microphone leads them; some of the 241

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mourners dance. The energy of this photograph recalls Capa’s: once again we are not only viewing a funeral but feel transported into it. What Kapuściński called “the wheel of death” was in full spin during Peress’s visit; in particular, the machinery of revolutionary justice was up and running. In one picture, Peress shows two Savak agents on trial for their alleged role in a massacre. Like mirror images, each bows his head and pinches the base of his nose: in fatigue? in worry? in pain? Behind them stares the jury: a wall of implacable headshots of nice-looking young men who were tortured to death. The trial is being held at Evin prison, a place as feared and hated today as it was under the Shah. Telex Iran closes with a double spread—a dramatic, panoramic shot— of a pro-Khomeini demonstration taken, again, in Tabriz. We see a vast sea of faces and raised fists (men and veiled women separated, of course), interspersed with occasional photographs of the Ayatollah. Each demonstrator’s face is tiny, but the cumulative effect of this image is astonishingly powerful. Against my better judgment—against, that is, all I know of the revolution’s subsequent repressions and injustices—I could not help but find this picture thrilling, and could not help being appalled that I did. Peress published his next book, Farewell to Bosnia, eleven years later; it too is sui generis. This is a book about “the refugees heading nowhere,” as the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski wrote, and about the “mutilated world” that the Bosnian war created. There is subtle dialectic at the heart of this book: in showing us a society as it is torn apart, Peress makes visible, or at least imaginable, the bonds of human connection—the communities of citizens—that existed before the slaughter. We feel the loss not just of scattered individuals but of the vibrant, coherent social worlds they inhabited; in this sense, Farewell to Bosnia is far closer to Capa’s Death in the Making than to Nachtwey’s contemporaneous work in the Balkans. Peress’s people hold each others’ bodies, tend each others’ wounds, teach each others’ children, farm each others’ land, bury each others’ dead, and share each others’ fates. The farewell of Peress’s title refers to many things: to the Bosnian Muslims who lost their families, their homes, their country, their lives; to 242

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the multicultural nation that was dismembered in favor of ethnic purity; to the credibility of the Western democracies, which failed to translate their talk of human rights into action. “It’s Munich all over again,” Peress laments at the book’s conclusion. “We are the ones who do nothing. . . . There is a diabolical beast at work out there, reemerging from the marshes of our history, looming over our landscape. We have blood on our souls. I feel sick, alone, scared.” Part of the impact of these pictures is that they documented a current event—an ongoing event—rather than a presumably finished history. (The Dayton Accords that ended the war, albeit unjustly, were signed in 1995, the year after Peress’s book was published.) These were photographs of the present: those who saw them at the time were not too late to stop the slaughter. This endows these images with a special sense of urgency, and leaves us viewers with a special sense of shame. The Bosnian photographs are readily recognizable to those who have seen Peress’s work in Iran: here, again, are the shots framed by windows, sometimes smashed or cracked by bullets; the pictures that overflow with baffling information; the jarring juxtapositions and off-center compositions. Peress, far more than Nachtwey, seems to have been searching for a new style to convey the new kind of wars: the wars that aim, as Peress has said, at extermination. But Farewell to Bosnia is, as it should be, a far more sorrow-drenched book than Telex Iran. The Iranians were making their own history, however traumatic; the Bosnians were losing theirs. Farewell opens with a double spread of two hands pointing to a map (again, unfortunately, there are no captions), and hands—waving, pleading, clinging, praying, carrying, beseeching, connecting—are highlighted throughout the book. There are grim pictures of mutilation, especially toward the book’s end, but Peress’s real subject here is the utter desolation of those who have been abandoned by the world. This means that the subject of these photographs is “us”—what we did and failed to do— as well as “them.” One photograph shows a young woman, wearing a white embroidered headscarf and a peasant dress, who holds a sleeping, swaddled baby in one arm; behind her is a thatched cottage and a treelined country road. It’s a bucolic scene, almost kitschy and sentimental, except that the woman’s other hand—and this is what we notice most— 243

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covers her mouth and nose in horror, as if she’s seen or heard something too incredible to take in: something we want, and don’t want, to know. A series of morgue photos—similar to the ones Gerda Taro took in Valencia—evokes clammy fear, then sorrow. The first image is a study in the cold finality of death: we see a dirty white sink, a light and a mirror, and a wall of shiny white tiles with a few drips of blood. A white-shrouded corpse—only the feet are visible—lies upon a black cot. The icy stillness created by this picture is exploded by those that follow, in which a grown man, faced with a line of corpses, holds his head and weeps. First he looks down at a body; then, bent even further, he turns away. But neither vision nor blindness can save him from grief. Another series consists of close-ups of corpses as they lie on their slabs. One man is still neatly dressed in a suit and tie, his eyes closed; another, whose death looks to have been much rougher, stares up at us. In a third picture, we see one almost naked corpse, face covered—it is the eyes, not the genitals, that need protection—and the naked, tagged feet of another. A fourth photograph presents a corpse’s still-good shoes rather than his face. And then there is the violence that—pace Sontag—is still shocking, even if we’ve seen it before or think we have. Peress shows us bombsplattered children, bewildered and bloody as they lie in hospital beds. One’s arm has been amputated and his face has been wrecked (something terrible has happened to his mouth); he challenges us to see his ruin, just like the children in Sierra Leone. Nor does Peress spare us—why should he?—the child who has lost both arms; the bloody stitches on a stump where a man’s leg used to be; the boy with no hands and the men with no legs and the woman who peers at the large bloody crater where her thigh used to be. “This is war,” Peress seems to say: not glory or honor or grand dreams of power but the familiar reality of the human body—now ugly, deformed, and in agony. Peress returned to Bosnia in 1996 and 1997, working with doctors and forensic teams to photograph the exhumations of mass graves in Srebrenica and Vukovar. Their work is documented in The Graves, a small, compact book whose photographs are integrated into a thoughtful text by Eric Stover, former director of Physicians for Human Rights. Peress’s photographs bring us close, again, to the wretched sorrow of the survivors, 244

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while also documenting the painstaking process of the forensic teams. He brings us close, too, to the mass graves, whose obscenity is to be found not just in the fact that these people were murdered but in the contempt with which their bodies were mutilated and dumped. But though these photographs contain Peress’s trademarks—one human-rights journal hailed their “alarming and sublime realism”—they are noticeably different, too. Like the book in which they appear, Peress’s work here is tighter, more direct, less expressionist than before; these photographs lack the wildness, and the confusion, of Telex Iran. It is as if Peress felt there was no time—or at least less time—for the stylistic, epistemological, and even political questions that absorbed him in Tehran: a different kind of urgency drives him now. Peress himself has acknowledged this change. “I work much more . . . like a police photographer,” he observed in 1997. “The work is much more factual . . . I don’t care that much anymore about ‘good photography.’ I’m gathering evidence for history.” And back again to the Balkans: in July 1999 the New Yorker published a piece by Peress and Philip Gourevitch called “Exile and Return,” which documented the mass return of the Kosovar refugees to their ruined homeland after NATO’s bombing had forced Milosevic’s hand. Peress took particularly chilling pictures in a Serb police station: we see the chainsaw used for torture, the playing cards and tequila used for fun. But it is a plainer picture from Xerxe that struck me most deeply, for it forced me to contemplate the lonely, terrible moments that preceded it. Peress shows us the bare feet of an executed man, who lies on a leafy patch of ground. His pants lie folded on top of his legs, while beside him are his shoes— leather shoes with laces—into which he had neatly folded his socks before being murdered. The careful, poignant humbleness of that gesture—its prosaic sanity amidst terror—is by far the worst thing here. Peress travelled to Rwanda in April 1994, when the genocide was in full swing. He stayed through July, documenting the mass influx of Hutus— many in flight from the crimes they had committed—into Tanzania and the Congo (then called Zaire). The resulting book is called The Silence, and Peress divides it into three sections: “The Sin,” “Purgatory,” and “The Judgment.” Aesthetically, the pictures are distinctly “Peressian”: these jumbled 245

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images must be his. Yet in many ways The Silence is unlike anything Peress had done before, for the events were unlike any he had seen before. The Rwanda pictures are unceasingly brutal, hopeless, and repellent; they refuse easy emotional identifications and neat political explanations, and they call less attention to Peress’s visual style than much of his previous work. The Silence is compact and modest where its precursors on Iran and Bosnia were large, almost overwhelming; it is as if Peress wanted to contain the Rwandan horrors within the book’s covers rather than broadcast them. If Telex Iran depicted the making of a strange new political world and Farewell to Bosnia the death of a familiar one, The Silence seems to show the end of the world. It is a book about a kind of deranged hatred that knows no limits, and about the inability of language—our great, distinguishing feature—to explain this hatred to ourselves and, therefore, to tame it. The book testifies to another kind of silence, too: that of the international community, which was deaf to both the screams of the victims and to the executioners’ joyful songs. Because The Silence virtually dispenses with captions, it almost begs the reader to reach beyond its pages—to works like Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and, especially, to Jean Hatzfeld’s chilling Machete Season, his book of interviews with a group of unrepentant génocidaires. Despite the lack of text, however, Peress indicates his political intentions early on, for The Silence opens not with a victim but with a killer. He is a middle-aged man who crouches on the ground; he wears a striped shirt, black pants, and no shoes; his face is deeply creased; his arms are crossed, each hand resting on a shoulder; he stares, downward, with eyes that suggest a kind of deep nothingness; and he frowns. The book ends with a photograph, taken three minutes later, of the same man, who now eyes Peress with smoldering resentment. “As I look at him he looks at me,” Peress writes. Peress has been criticized for these pictures of a killer and for the way they frame the book. These are not compassionate images—and are not meant to be; certainly they embody no I-thou relation between photographer and subject. “Troubled and troubling,” one critic described them, for they serve “more to confirm than challenge the alterity of ‘foreign bodies.’” 246

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Another critic protested, “The look of the camera presumes itself to have moral right on its side, accusing and judging. Needless to say, there is no place for a sympathetic view of this person as such, but as someone as yet only accused and not convicted, he nonetheless has rights.” These criticisms of the establishing photographs miss what I believe to be the central point of Peress’s book. He opens The Silence not by offering us pity or outrage for the victims (there will be time for that), but by forcing upon us a more challenging task, one that Hannah Arendt undertook in Eichmann in Jerusalem: how do we view people whose crimes have catapulted them outside of our normal categories of comprehension? Peress wants us to confront not just the crimes but the criminal, and to see not just the victims but the perpetrators too. He is reminding us that the atrocities he will document were the result of conscious human endeavor. By showing us this killer, Peress shows us the real author of his book. The Silence opens with a few pictures of the prosaic: machetes, knives, the simple tools of an agrarian people. But we know that these primitive, banal implements have been used for extraordinary purposes. It is as if the world of Agee and Walker Evans, who found such beauty in the worn articles of rural life, has been horribly turned on its head, for here we see how easily the mundane becomes murderous. These early pictures are forbidding, but they are calm and harmless compared to what follows. The book’s first section, called “The Sin,” documents the immediate aftermath of the killing orgies. What can be done to a human body? Many things, it turns out. The Silence is a thesaurus of destruction, instructing us in the ways that human beings can be beaten, hacked, and carved to death. Peress shows us other things, too, such as piles of putrefying, bloated corpses with hands that still look as though they’re clawing the ground. He shows us the churches and schools that became charnel houses, and are still stuffed with the bodies of those they failed to protect. He shows us the uncomprehending, suddenly aged children who somehow survived, though barely. The rhetorical device of “The Sin” is to juxtapose pictures that suggest the extent of the carnage (a genocide is big, for it erases an entire people) with those that show individual suffering and death (a genocide is small, for its victims die one by one). In one photograph—all of the im247

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ages are double spreads—Peress shows a tangled mound of corpses that stretches into the frame’s distance. In the foreground we see a shoe and a random foot; next to that is a bony, almost naked corpse. Its ribcage juts out; the fingers of one hand bend inwards; a large hole has been hacked in the center of its chest, while its abdomen seems cleaved apart. I think this person may have been disemboweled. And then, the final indignity: a flimsy pair of dirty, once-white underpants has been pulled down below the corpse’s pelvis bone. This corpse is surrounded by many others; some still have faces, others have decomposed into bare skulls. One’s hand flops over what used to be a face, as if the victim could not bear to watch her own murder or, equally likely, the murder of those she loved; even now, in death, she tries to shield herself. Bits of rubble pop up here and there, but it’s the bodies themselves that are garbage. The photographs of individuals are worse than those of groups, for they offer no choice as to where to look; these pictures, cruelly but rightly, refuse all exit strategies. In one, a dead woman, still clothed, lies next to a slaughtered pig. Her arms are flung open, as are her legs, suggesting she had been raped (massive sexual violence accompanied the genocide, with many women and girls gang-raped before they were killed). Her brows are creased, her eyes closed. But her mouth is open: we see a bottom row of teeth and her tongue lolling out. “Purgatory” charts the trek of the Hutu refugees across the border and into the refugee camps in the summer of 1994, when the genocide had been halted by the arrival of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. One photograph shows a score of shabby people standing obediently in a line. The men are dressed in baggy jackets and pants; some of the women wear flowered skirts or shawls. In front of them, on the straw-covered ground, lies a child. He is on his side, facing us, with his knees bent; one hand holds a skinny thigh. This boy may be sleeping, ill, or dead, but he is definitely on his own. A later picture shows a small girl—she could only be about four— in a refugee center; she is surrounded by several other children who sit in front of a bleak cement wall. But though she is tiny, she stands tall, almost valiantly—the only child in this group to do so. Her only item of “clothing” is a white ID tag on her slim right arm. Aside from that she is strikingly, vulnerably naked: we notice, especially, the bulge of her protruding belly 248

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button above her clearly exposed vagina. Her hands are clasped in front of her as if in prayer, and her cheeks are stained with tears. The final chapter, called “The Judgment,” depicts the huge, squalid refugee camp in Goma, Zaire, to which a million Hutus fled in July 1994. Many of the people in these photos look ill—staggering, hunched over, unable to stand, perhaps wretching: cholera had swept the camp. Their faces are grim and hard; even the children never smile. In one picture, a man drags the body of another, whose mouth is slightly open and whose eyes are halfclosed: he looks near death. Next to them stands a little boy carrying a big stick and wearing an oversized coat; he stares stoically ahead, refusing to acknowledge the half-corpse beside him. Other photographs depict people of various ages writhing on the ground: to die of cholera is a terrible thing. “The Judgment” ends with several photographs of heaps of corpses being bulldozed into mass graves that recall the Nazi death camps. In naming this last section “The Judgment,” Peress makes clear that he is not documenting a humanitarian crisis involving innocent civilians. On the contrary: the title strongly implies that the refugees’ suffering was deserved, at least by some. And this is true, for the camps were filled with mass murderers fleeing arrest and indictment. Even worse, the camps were being used by Hutu militias for regeneration and rearming in preparation for what, they hoped, would be another—a completed—genocide. And while the world community had refused to either prevent or stop the genocide, it moved with alacrity to help the refugees. “What made the camps almost unbearable to visit,” Gourevitch wrote, “was the spectacle of hundreds of international humanitarians being openly exploited as caterers to what was probably the single largest society of fugitive criminals against humanity ever assembled.” One lesson of Rwanda is that it is apparently more satisfying to feed and clothe people after a great crime than to stop them from killing each other. The Silence presents us with physical defilement without respite. There is a choked, clotted feel to the book: it testifies to a kind of unalloyed cruelty that makes us feel stupid. It is difficult to find a recognizably human world here, or even a single moment of kindness. The Silence shows us a world without pity; it is hard to look at, or to know how to look at. Peress has 249

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said that while assembling the book, “I had this feeling that I was going to vomit all the time.” I am not sure what it might mean to like such a book, but there are certainly those who dislike it. One critic called it “excessive and relentless . . . we are simply shown too much.” Yet what, I wonder, would be just enough? Another writer accused Peress of playing into Westerners’ presumed ideas of Africa as a place of “pre-political formless chaos.” But as in Iran, it is the experience of chaos that Peress attempts to convey: the experience, that is, of the victims. And that is the sense that these pictures evoke: formless chaos, it seems to me, is just right. Many of those who were in Rwanda during or soon after the genocide have spoken of how it shattered their conceptual frameworks. “Ours was an inarticulacy borne of sorrow, fear, incomprehension,” wrote the renowned Irish foreign correspondent Fergal Keane, who is no stranger to bad things. “In Rwanda we had stepped into a place in which all previous experience of death and conflict paled into insignificance. . . . To this day I am at a loss to describe what it was really like.” Peress, too, has spoken of the rupture in his worldview. “My whole youth was permeated with Rousseau-ist ideas . . . [that] man is fundamentally good,” he said in 1997. But he emerged from Rwanda with a “kind of notion of 50–50: man is fifty percent good and fifty percent not good.” And with another thought as well: “Well, maybe God is 50–50 also.” How, then, are we to understand the religious framework—sin, purgatory, judgment—that Peress uses to frame his Rwandan photographs? I believe that, like Nachtwey, Peress is attempting to give shape—some shape—to the nihilism he has witnessed. He is striving to contain the flood of barely possible images within a narrative—some narrative— that is ancient, comprehensible, and morally redemptive. The attempt, of course, fails: there was no redemption in Kigali, just as there was none in Lubyanka, in Sobibor, or in Tuol Sleng. And there is something particularly disconcerting about Peress, a child of the secular Enlightenment, falling back on this quasi-religious framework to explain mass murder. Yet precisely for these reasons, the last section’s title must be read with irony. Dying of cholera is painful, but it is not an appropriate punishment for those who have committed genocide, because there is no appropri250

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ate punishment for those who have committed genocide. The cholera epidemic harmed some of the guilty, and it harmed some of the innocent, but in either case it was an act of nature, not of man. It was caused by germs and chose its victims randomly; it was not the result of the human capacity to judge, to punish, or even to hate. Yet here, perhaps, is where Peress’s meaning lies. Peress never suggests—nor, I suspect, would he ever suggest—that “judgment” and “justice” are one. And in the absence of the latter: silence falls. *

*

*

“We are in a tension between the speed of history—which happens very, very fast—and progress, which happens very, very slowly,” Peress wrote in 1999. On the morning of September 11, 2001, history happened fast, and the pace hasn’t let up since. But it was within this calamitous event that, I believe, Peress realized his vision of photography’s democratic possibilities. 9/11 turned out to be a defining moment in Peress’s work, though in indirect and unanticipated ways. And what it showed is that there are no aesthetic answers to the questions he has been posing about photography’s place in the world, only democratic—which is to say, political—ones. A week after the 9/11 attacks, Peress and three friends—curator Alice Rose George, photography professor Charles Traub, and writer Michael Shulan—opened a storefront exhibition of photographs in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. Their aim was to gather and show images that portrayed the array of experiences that we now call, in a kind of shorthand, “9/11.” This meant documenting not just the attacks themselves—those still-breathtaking pictures, taken from so many locations by so many people, of the planes crashing into the buildings and the subsequent conflagrations—but all that surrounded them. It meant portraying the reactions—horrified, scared, anguished—of witnesses on that day. (As the attacks unfold, onlookers grip their heads, clutch their throats, or lay their hands over their hearts in what must be unconscious, universal gestures of fear or disbelief.) It meant documenting the ubiquitous, increasingly forlorn “missing” posters, with their poignant revelations of intimate details (“tattoo of heart in pelvic area”); the exhausted yet indefatigable rescue workers; the exodus of hundreds of thousands of workers 251

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across the Brooklyn Bridge. (One photograph, taken by Peress, offers a stunning aerial view of this trek.) It meant showing the enormous scale of the twisted rubble, which could conjure comparisons only to war sites or sci-fi movies; the memorials, and the gatherings of strangers around them, that sprouted spontaneously as expressions of grief; the graffiti that articulated a range of feelings and solutions from universal love to war without mercy. One such photograph shows a young woman who has spray-painted “PAY BACK” in thick black letters on her white undershirt; in another, someone has etched “Welcome to Hell” on the back window of an ash-covered car. Documenting 9/11 meant, also, documenting the look of the city itself: not just as an agglomeration of buildings, bridges, sidewalks, and street signs but as a living, breathing, achingly vulnerable actor in this drama. It meant portraying the city’s residents, stunned and hurting, yet unified in ways we lifelong New Yorkers had never experienced. (Among other things, New York suddenly became a third-world town: out on the sidewalks, people huddled over shared radios and TV sets.) Never before had the identities of New Yorkers as individuals fused so intimately, and so tenderly, with the place itself: the city was—we were—wounded, fearful, fearless, furious, proud. The city’s “body politic” became literal. Peress and his colleagues called their exhibit “Here Is New York,” an homage to the 1949 essay by E. B. White in which he noted New York’s new vulnerability in a suddenly nuclear world: “The intimation of mortality,” White wrote, could now be heard “in the sound of jets overhead.” The organizers put out an open call for photographs from “anybody and everybody”: not just professional photographers but all the amateurs—all the citizens—who had become documentarians of the city’s crisis on 9/11 and in the strange, unprecedented days that followed. Here Is New York was a refutation to years of critical cant about the exploitative, voyeuristic, alienating qualities of documentary photography. On the contrary: as Michael Shulan wrote in the exhibit’s book, “Photography was the perfect medium to express what happened on 9/11, since it is democratic by its very nature and infinitely reproducible. . . . To New Yorkers this wasn’t a news story: it was an unabsorbable nightmare. In order to come to grips with all of the imagery that was haunting us, it was 252

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essential, we thought, to reclaim it from the media.” More than five thousand pictures poured in to the exhibition, which displayed them without attribution (photographs by Magnum stars were mixed with those by unknowns). Photographs made real our own experiences, and let us see those of others; photographs were the beginning of individual understandings within a collective context. I remember going to the Here Is New York exhibit several weeks after 9/11, and it is the sense of place more than the individual pictures that has stayed with me most. The exhibit’s atmosphere, simultaneously lively and bereft, was like no other I had ever felt in a museum or gallery. We were not just lookers, we were discoverers; and this activity of discovery was intertwined with—was dependent on—the presence of others. September 11 was not only an unusual political event, but an unusual visual one too. There is little evidence of the dead, because most were burnt into dust: Ground Zero was a mass grave, but one without bodies. (In this, the 9/11 terrorists accomplished something the Nazis had fervently desired but failed to achieve: the almost complete obliteration of the dead.) This is why the event lacks the usual atrocity photographs, such as mounds of corpses; there are relatively few images of bloodied or wounded people, either. One picture in the Here Is New York book shows a severed, bloody, shredded leg and foot lying on pavement; the image is shocking because it is so grisly, but also because it is so rare. This means that the overwhelming number of 9/11 photographs portray onlookers, those who escaped from the collapsing buildings, and rescuers. There is one major—and hugely controversial—exception to this: photographs of those who killed themselves by jumping from the burning towers. These are, in my view, the most powerful images from the event for they bring us closer, more than all others, to imagining the experience of the victims. They are also among the least reproduced, least seen images of 9/11; indeed, they are despised. There are an unknown number of such photographs, taken by different people from different spots. Here Is New York includes one, as a vertical double spread. It shows four bodies, silhouetted in black against the sky, as they tumble through the air: an acrobatics of death. The New York Times also printed one such image, taken by Associated Press photographer 253

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Richard Drew, on September 12 (though not on the front page, and never again). These photographs and others like them have been published all over the world, but in this country they have been vilified, for reasons I don’t quite understand, as an insult to the dead. The images have become, as the journalist Tom Junod wrote, “at once iconic and impermissible.” Yet not until I saw Drew’s picture in the Times did I realize—a realization that hit me, almost literally, with a dread-filled thud and a mounting sense of panic—that those who were trapped in the buildings had been forced to choose between being burned alive and jumping to their deaths. Not until then did I allow myself to contemplate the last minutes, and maybe hours, of the victims; not until then did the true horror of the event, which had nothing to do with burning buildings and everything to do with burning people, begin to penetrate my numbness and shock. “The desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism,” Junod rightly observed, “as though the jumpers’ experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten.” The word “taboo” is overused, but it accurately describes the status of this wrongly reviled, wrongly hidden set of photographs. New York seemed more racially unified on 9/11 and the days immediately following than it had ever been, at least in my lifetime. For those of us who have grown up within, and are ever conscious of, the city’s racial drama—often brutal, sometimes funny, occasionally uplifting, frequently guilt-ridden, reliably hypocritical—this was a welcome relief. It was as if Art Spiegelman’s heretical New Yorker cover, in which a Hasidic man and a black woman amorously kiss, had been realized; this time, though, unity was born of violence rather than of love. Some of the photographs in Here Is New York allude to this (temporarily) changed racial dynamic. In one picture, a young black couple, who have matching almost-shaved heads and wear matching white tunics, sits on a park bench; the woman clutches a tissue and sobs; the man’s right hand is placed protectively on her head. Next to them, a young Asian woman leans toward the woman while a white man kneels on the sidewalk in front of her; he clasps her hand as if begging her, willing her, into some kind of solace. September 11 changed perceptions of class, at least for a while. Firemen and policemen were the new heroes, and many of Here Is New York’s pho254

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tographs document their backbreaking but almost entirely futile efforts to find survivors in the rubble. In addition, the event produced a subtler, yet still distinct, change in attitudes toward the commercial life of the city, and a new appreciation for it. In Here Is New York, the ubiquitous advertising and business signs that adorn the city’s storefronts, billboards, and bus stops don’t look ironic, as they have in photographs dating back to Walker Evans; nor can they be read as sardonic critiques of consumer culture, as in so many postmodern works. Here, on the contrary, every shuttered store seems like a defeat: not of capitalism, but of us. A humble coffee-and-bagel cart—an image taken, as it happens, by Peress—looks like a poky, dear friend whom we want to awaken; a crowded, brightly lit coffee shop boasting, probably falsely, of “gourmet muffins” and “gourmet croissants” is suddenly a delight; an eerily deserted West Broadway—its obnoxiously overpriced stores now closed—seems unutterably sad. After 9/11, even Marxists yearned for the city’s rough, garish world of capitalism to spring back to life. Here Is New York was a promiscuous exhibit, as is the resulting 864page book. That is its strength. Spreading its arms wide, it takes in as much as possible, as if its organizers understood that only by doing so could we begin to see ourselves and each other, and to confirm our experiences while simultaneously questioning them. It is a remarkable document: a conversation in images, a visual dialogue between citizens, a Whitmanesque vision constructed from sorrow. Shulan wrote that the exhibit’s organizers had hoped the photographs would be “allowed to speak for themselves, to each other, and to the viewer directly”; the project was premised on the idea “that wisdom lies . . . in the collective vision of us all.” As a book and, especially, an exhibit, Here Is New York justified the belief that this democratic ideal still lives: even, or perhaps especially, amidst catastrophic loss. That is the opposite of silence. Since 9/11, Peress has photographed in Iraq, Israel, and Afghanistan, though he is no more of a war photographer than before. And he returned to Rwanda, where, he says, “I tried to drop every element of style, to be as simple as possible.” One of his photographs from Iraq, taken for the New York Times Magazine in 2005, was a visual summation of the post-Saddam 255

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war: Peress depicted the Sunni insurgency, and the Iraqi commandos fighting it, as blurry shadows on a bullet-scarred wall. Peress also turned his attention homeward, documenting what he called the “wake” of Wall Street as the financial system crashed in the summer and fall of 2008. But nothing was as difficult as the photographic journey into the economically depressed heartland that he took during the Obama-McCain presidential election. “It is far easier to be in Iraq with the Special Forces than to be in the post-industrial, post-consumer landscape of Ohio,” he said several weeks after Barack Obama’s win. “The current economic landscape of the U.S. is a far greater challenge. How do you build a language that changes our interpretation of reality? That’s a big one.” In the weeks before the election, Peress drove through rural Ohio and made a series of videos, composed mainly of still images, that he posted on the web. In one, called “A Sleep of Reason,” Peress finds himself in Cleveland—or, as he says, “I think I’m in Cleveland, I don’t know where I am.” His sense of bafflement recalls, at least to this viewer, that trip he made decades ago to revolutionary Iran: once again Peress is the stranger in a strange land, wandering through a landscape of confusion. But there is no energy, no fury, and certainly no revolution in Cleveland, only a bleak, spooky solitude: empty streets, empty roads, empty factories. “There’s nobody, nobody out,” Peress phones home to a friend. “It’s like the place has been nuked.” (He also phones his wife to complain, “I’m fucking lost, in the middle of nowhere,” though she doesn’t seem particularly sympathetic.) Later, Peress returns to the city searching for signs of life. First, he meets four African American men who work as seafood packers: “Do anything but go to prison,” one of them explains. Then he encounters three shyly smiling young men—attired in ill-fitting black jackets, black bow ties, white shirts—employed as valet parking attendants. It turns out that two are Iraqis from Basra, the other a Serb from Sarajevo. Even in desolate, deserted Cleveland, history catches up with you. For Peress, the new media landscape in which we all live—defined, especially, by the Internet—opens up all sorts of possibilities for photographers and viewers. This is not to say that Andy Grundberg’s previously discussed fear that the new technologies will create “a perverse kind of fascism” is wrong, only that this is not an inevitable outcome, or the only 256

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one. Peress envisions the Internet as a potentially antiauthoritarian tool in what he calls our “post-postmodern” era. “We are entering into an age in which visual language is defined by a dialogue between photographers and audiences,” he says. “This means not just the democratic posting of images but the democratic interpretation of images.” The viewer is no longer the passive, grateful student, the photographer no longer the all-knowing, all-seeing teacher who chooses which decisive moments will live or die: “There is no longer a voice of authority, with univocal images created from above,” Peress argues. Goodbye, then, to “the notion of the creator of images as a Nietzschean demi-god. We need deep humility, humbleness, in relation to our formulation of reality now.” It is that formulation—that search—that still drives Peress, be it to Kigali or Cleveland; like Capa, he knows that history is made by all sorts of people in all sorts of places in all sorts of ways. And despite Peress’s experi-

Figure 9.2 Xerxe, Kosovo, 1999: Peress returned to the Balkans several times to photograph the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its attendant wars; this image of an execution victim is simultaneously shocking and gentle, and ran as part of a New Yorker series. Peress’s distinct visual style is simultaneously jarring and empathic, and he is especially interested in the human aftermath of cataclysmic violence. Photo: Gilles Peress/Magnum.

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ments with video, the photograph, he insists, is “still a space to reorganize our thoughts about reality and our place in the world. How do you disentangle the surface of reality?” That question has recurred throughout photography’s lifespan; it has haunted, angered, and inspired generations of thinkers, going all the way back to Benjamin and Brecht. Yet after a century of astonishing images, and a century of astonishing violence, Peress proposes no answers. Instead he poses another, more basic question, one that presses not only on documentary photographers but on journalists, filmmakers, and human-rights advocates; indeed, it challenges every inhabitant of our shared, wounded world. “How do you make the unseen seen?” Peress asks.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I started writing about photography about a decade ago, and would probably not have continued if my editors hadn’t encouraged to me to do so. In particular, I am deeply grateful to Michael Walzer and Mark Levinson at Dissent; Josh Cohen and Deb Chasman at the Boston Review; Alessandra Mauro at Contrasto publishers in Italy; and Steve Wasserman at the sorely missed Los Angeles Times Book Review. Every writer yearns for editors like these. Some of the chapters in this book began as shorter essays in their publications. At the University of Chicago Press, I owe so much to my editor, Alan Thomas, who forced me to make this book better and showed me how; to photo editor Anthony (Abu Elsa) Burton, who has a wonderful eye and knows how to find everything; and to Kate Frentzel and Levi Stahl for all their fine work. At New York University, my deep thanks go to former dean George Downs, who has always supported my work, and to the Humanities Initiative’s Jane Tylus and Asya Berger, who helped make this book possible. Thanks also to my graduate researchers, especially Hailey Eber and Frieda Klotz, both fine young journalists in their own right. And many thanks to all the brainy, funny, immensely talented students in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program: they are a joy to teach, and their care for the world gives me hope for the future. Friends and colleagues at NYU and elsewhere kindly read portions of this book and always had insightful things to say. (All of the book’s flaws

Acknowledgments

are, of course, solely mine.) Thanks to Kiku Adatto, Jay Bernstein, Craig Calhoun, Shimon Dotan, Dennis Lim, Jed Perl, and Lawrence Weschler. And special thanks to Ann Martin, who is as perceptive an editor as she is a friend. At the International Center of Photography, curator Kristin Lubben and publicist David Appel were always helpful, answering my many questions quickly and making hard-to-find documents available. Thanks to my mother, Trudy, who taught me that grammatical errors are close to sins; and to my father, Jordan, who taught me to always take the long view of history. Finally, this book is for Jay Bernstein—he knows all the reasons why; and for the late Ellen Willis: thinker, writer, feminist, friend.

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NOTES

PREFACE

Page xv. “the cruel radiance of what is”: James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 11. Agee continued, “This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time; and is why in turn I feel such rage at its misuse.”

CHAPTER ONE

Page 3. “passion . . . raises reason to new heights”: Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), 51. Page 3. “deliberately rids itself”: Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” 50. Page 3. “to transform my pleasure”: Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 7. Page 3. “external consistency . . . genuine emotion”: Margaret Fuller, “A Short Essay on Critics,” in The Writings of Margaret Fuller, ed. Mason Wade (New York: Viking, 1941), 227. Page 3. “to love wisely”: Fuller, “A Short Essay on Critics,” 229. Page 4. “an amateur . . . simultaneously recognize”: James Agee, Agee on Film (New York: Perigee, 1983), 1:22–23. Page 4. “made an addict out of me”: Susie Linfield, “Interview with Arlene Croce,” Dance Ink 7, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 19. The performance to which Croce refers was the premiere of Agon, starring Maria Tallchief, Diana Adams, and Jacques d’Amboise.

Notes to Pages 4–7

Page 4. “All I can tell you is”: Linfield, “Interview with Arlene Croce,” 19. Page 4. “criticism demands of the critic”: Randall Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism” (1952) in No Other Book: Selected Essays, ed. Brad Leithauser (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 294. Page 4. “begins by noticing his intuitive reactions”: Alfred Kazin, “The Function of Criticism Today,” in Contemporaries (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), 500. Page 5. “community of interest”: Kazin, “The Function of Criticism Today,” 494–95. Page 5. “grandiose” . . . “reductive”:Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor, 1990), 3, 4, 7, 11, 14, 14, 21. Page 5. “seductiveness” . . . “aggression”: Sontag, On Photography, 6, 7, 7, 7. Page 5. “a sublimated murder”: Sontag, On Photography, 14–15. Page 5. “the most irresistible form”: Sontag, On Photography, 24. Page 5. “The camera doesn’t rape”: Sontag, On Photography, 13. Page 5. “A photograph’s punctum”: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27; italics in original. Page 6. “agents of Death” . . .”undialectical”: Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92, 106, 106, 4, 90, 96, 90. Page 6. “teaches me nothing”: Barthes, Camera Lucida, 107. Page 6. “completely de-realizes the human world”: Barthes, Camera Lucida, 118. Page 6. “My first interest in photography”: John Berger, in Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Vintage, 1995), 83. Page 6. “opposition to history”: Berger, Another Way of Telling, 105. Page 6. “And so, hundreds of millions of photographs”: Berger, Another Way of Telling, 108. Page 6. “McCullin’s most typical photographs”: John Berger, “Photographs of Agony,” in Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 280. McCullin was one of James Nachtwe’s inspirations; for more on this, see chapter 8. Page 6. “These moments are in reality utterly discontinuous”: Berger, “Photographs of Agony,” 280–81; italics in original. Page 7. “fission whereby appearances are separated”: Berger, “Uses of Photography,” in Berger, Selected Essays, 288. Page 7. “most of the photographs exhibited”: Roland Barthes, “Shock-Photos,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 71. Page 7. “overconstructed”: Barthes, “Shock-Photos,” 71. Page 7. “We are in each case dispossessed”: Barthes, “Shock-Photos,” 71. Page 7. “moral feelings are embedded in history”: Sontag, On Photography, 17. Page 7. “The shock of photographed atrocities”: Sontag, On Photography, 20–21. Sontag would rethink—and partially retract—this idea in Regarding 262

Notes to Pages 7–9

the Pain of Others, but her original statements on this subject have made a far greater impact. Page 7. “primitive, infantile, aggressive”: Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 101. Page 8. “claims to originality”: Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 98. Page 8. “to use the apparent veracity”: Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 99. Page 8. “the supposed autonomous and unitary self”: Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 99. Page 8. “nothing other than a discontinuous series”: Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 99. Page 8. “photography’s travesty of the ideas of originality”: Rosalind Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 22. Page 8. “undermine the very distinction between original and copy”: Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” 22. Page 8. “refusal to understand the artist”: Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” 22. Krauss is referring specifically to Cindy Sherman. Page 8. “project of deconstruction”: Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” 24. Page 9. “double act of subjugation”: Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Who is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography,” in Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 176. Page 9. “regime of the image”: Solomon-Godeau, “Who is Speaking Thus?” 176. Page 9. “ultimately a function of the state”: John Tagg, “The Currency of the Photograph,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: Palgrave, 1982), 122–23. Page 9. “mode of production”: Tagg, “The Currency of the Photograph,” 123. Page 9. “imperialism breeds an imperialist sensibility”: Martha Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 321. Page 9. “implies the exhaustion of the image universe”: Andy Grundberg, Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography since 1974 (New York: Aperture, 1999), 9. Page 9. “In a world in which stylistic innovation”: Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 115–16. Page 9. “make it again”: Richard Prince, Why I Go to the Movies Alone (New York: Tanam Press, 1983), 63; italics in original. 263

Notes to Pages 9–12

Page 9. more empathy and insight: See John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (Milano: Idea Editions, 1980). Page 10. “liberal documentary assuages”: Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthoughts,” 306. Page 10. “human values” . . . “truth”: Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Burgin, Thinking Photography, 108. Page 10. “the enemy”: Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” 108. Page 10. “tableaux of profound abjection”: Carol Squiers, “Class Struggle: The Invention of Paparazzi Photography and the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales,” in OverExposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography (New York: New Press, 1999), 272. Page 10. “pathetic, helpless, dispirited”: Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthoughts,” 306. Page 10. “victims-turned-freaks”: Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthoughts,” 307. Page 10. “the marginal and pathetic”: Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthoughts,” 319. Page 10. “the petted darling of the monied”: Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthoughts,” 325. Page 10. many of the postmodern critics were women: Photographs (and films) were also accused by some feminist critics of embodying the “male gaze”; see, for instance, Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 piece “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (collected in Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989]). For a wonderful counterexample of how that gaze can illuminate rather than objectify, see John Berger’s “The Hals Mystery” in Berger, Selected Essays. Pages 10–11. “Aesthetic puritanism”: Mary McCarthy, “Introduction,” in Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles, 1937–1962 (New York: Noonday Press, 1963), xii–xiii. Page 11. “The wholeness, coherence, identity”: Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” 147. Page 11. “Our conviction that we are free”: Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” 148; italics in original. Page 11. “narcissistic identification” and “voyeurism”: Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” 148. Page 11. “corrosive, hermeneutic irony”: W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 369. Page 11. “reflexive critical iconoclasm”: W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26. Page 12. “the now-discredited authenticity”: Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Invisible Again: Rwanda and Representation after Genocide,” African Arts 38, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 89. 264

Notes to Pages 12–15

Page 12. “A good movie can you take you out of your dull funk”: Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” in Going Steady (New York: Warner Books, 1979), 106–7. Page 13. “does not respond more freely”: Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” 154. It’s not that Sontag disagreed with this approach to art or criticism in general: after all, she had made her name in the early sixties by urging “an erotics of art” in Against Interpretation. And in a 1979 interview with Rolling Stone, she insisted, “One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling . . . which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. . . . Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.” It’s just that, for reasons that we’ll see later in this chapter, she abandoned this insight when it came to photography. Page 13. “sense of fact . . . personal truth”: Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism,” 294. “Sense of fact” comes from T. S. Eliot. Page 13. “the unity of thinking and feeling”: Kazin, “The Function of Criticism Today,” 500. Page 13. “the true republican style”: Miriam Horn, “Image Makers,” U.S. News & World Report, October 6, 1997, 60. Pages 13–14. “hoped to turn photography itself into a symbol”: Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 519. Page 14. “In these deplorable times”: Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” in Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 295. Page 14. “Our loathsome society”: Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” 295. Page 14. “it is simple common-sense”: Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” 296. Page 14. “Poetry and progress”: Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” 296–97. Page 14. “Let it adorn the library”: Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” 297. Page 15. “Will dethrone painting”: Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Illinois State University: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), 316. Page 15. “old barbarous smudging”: George Bernard Shaw, “On the London Exhibitions” (1901), in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 224. Page 15. “The old game is up”: Shaw, “On the London Exhibitions,” 231. Page 15. “I would willingly exchange every painting of Christ”: The quote is attributed to Shaw by Philip Jones Griffiths, in William Messer, “Presence of Mind: The Photographs of Philip Jones Griffiths,” Aperture, no. 190 (Spring 2008): 60. Page 15. “Even the poor”: Jane Walsh Carlyle, quoted in Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography: From the Camera Obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 239. Page 15. “Daguerreotype calls for no manipulation”: Dominique François Arago, 265

Notes to Pages 15–19

“Report,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 19. Page 15. “The little work it entails”: Louis Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 13. Page 15. “has become a household word”: Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 40. Page 16. “disconcerting ease”: Sontag, On Photography, 115. Page 17. “new way of seeing”: Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard), 519. Page 17. “to achieve control over works of art”: Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 523. Page 17. “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art”: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 224. Page 17. “set about removing the makeup from reality”: Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 518. Page 17. “He was the first to disinfect”: Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 518. Page 18. “magical value”: Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510. Page 18. “The beholder feels an irresistible urge”: Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510. Page 18. “monster rallies” . . . “intimately connected”: Benjamin, “Mechanical Reproduction,” 51. Page 18. “can endow any soup can”: Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 526. Page 18. “abject poverty itself”: Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Burgin, Thinking Photography, 24. Page 18. “human misery an object of consumption”: Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 25. Page 18. “a new reality unfolds”: Benjamin, The Arcades Project, quoted in David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), 170. Pages 18–19. “The photograph is not the person”: Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 57. Page 19. “In order for history to present itself ”: Kracauer, “Photography,” 52. Page 19. “In a photograph, a person’s history”: Kracauer, “Photography,” 51. Page 19. “Photography!”: Johannes Molzahn, “Stop Reading! Look!” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 648. Page 19. “The flood of photos sweeps away”: Kracauer, “Photography,” 58. 266

Notes to Pages 20–27

Page 20. “A consciousness caught up in nature”: Kracauer, “Photography,” 61–62; italics in original. Page 20. “silly little hearts”: Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” in Kracauer, Mass Ornament, 300. Page 20. “is the go-for-broke game of history”: Kracauer, “Photography,” 61; italics in original. Kracauer’s 1960 book Theory of Film, written in the far more benign atmosphere of postwar New York, adopts a kinder—and more limited— view of the role of film and photography. Page 20. “The tremendous development of photojournalism”: Douglas Kahn, John Heartfield: Art and Mass Media (New York: Tanam Press, 1985), 64. Page 21. “Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality”: Brecht in Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 526. But with Brecht, nothing was simple. In 1955 his Kriegsfibel (War Primer), a book of assembled mass-market photographs that he had begun working on fifteen years previously, was published in East Germany. Page 21. “contributed much to spectacle”: Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” in Sekula, Photography Against the Grain, 57. Page 22. “I have feelings only when I have a headache”: Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (London: Methuen, 1984), 209. Page 22. “clearly would have wanted a sensitive electronic computer”: Martin Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971), 257. Page 22. “Here you have someone on whom you can’t rely”: Bertolt Brecht, “Of Poor B. B.,” in Poems: 1913–1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1979), 107. Pages 22–23. “And yet we know”: Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” in Brecht, Poems: 1913–1956, 320. Page 23. “In the streets of Berlin”: Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” in Kracauer, Mass Ornament, 327. Page 24. “photography plus dynamite”: Adolf Behne, in Grosz and Heartfield, Grosz/Heartfield: The Artist as Social Critic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1980), 39. Page 24. “in the hands of the bourgeoisie”: Kahn, John Heartfield, 64. Page 25. “creates the homogeneous cosmopolitan audience”: Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” in Kracauer, Mass Ornament, 325; italics in original. Page 25. “displays a wonderfully incongruous tendency”: Max Kozloff, “Terror and Photography,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 26, no. 2 (2002): 41. Page 26. “Relatives of Mohammed Jaber Hassan”: Marcel Saba, ed., Witness Iraq: A War Journal, February–April 2003 (New York: powerHouse Cultural Entertainment, 2003), pages unnumbered. Page 27. an innocent civilian: Because this photo is dated March 2003, it is almost certain that the market was bombed—accidentally, though not 267

Notes to Pages 27–35

forgivably—by the U.S. However, Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid has written that Iraqi antiaircraft fire may have caused the blast. (Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War [New York: Henry Holt, 2005], 88.) Page 27. “Moaning, lowing, crying”: Thomas Keenan, “‘Where are Human Rights . . . ?’ Reading a Communiqué from Iraq,” in Nongovernmental Politics, ed. Michel Feher and others (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 65. Page 28. “Victimhood . . . is the greatest killer”: Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 259. Page 28. “Al Hussein with his friends at recess”: “Iraq from Within: Photographs by Iraqi Citizens,” Daylight (Summer 2004): 42. Page 30. “the thereness of the world”: Berger, Another Way of Telling, 87; italics in original. Page 30. pre-modernism and postmodernism merge: W. J. T. Mitchell has noted that iconoclasm—which is really, in the case I am discussing, iconophobia— tends toward the “draconian” and the “lurid.” Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 21. Page 31. “resonate . . . smash”: Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 9.

CHAPTER TWO

Page 33. “There is no document of civilization”: Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 256. Page 33. “the spectacle of blood”: Samuel Moyn, “Spectacular Wrongs,” Nation, October 13, 2008, 34. Page 34. “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression”: “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 1789,” in Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 221. There is a longstanding debate, of course, over exactly what—if anything—the term “human rights” means, and over whether the right to property should be considered a human right or, as per Marx, an obstacle to them. Page 34. Marx “came of age”: John Berger, “Uses of Photography,” in About Looking (New York: Vintage, 1991), 52. Page 34. “We are most certain”: Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 26. Page 35. “Man of the twentieth century”: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962 [1951]), 298. Page 35. “has shown us potentialities”: Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 298. Page 35. “Human rights is not so much the declaration”: Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 65. 268

Notes to Pages 35–40

Page 35. “The Universal Declaration set out to reestablish”: Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 80. Page 35. “Most people are simply unable to understand why”: Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 125. Page 36. “The inability to identify with others”: Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 30. Page 36. “It is of no use whatever to say, with Kant”: Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” 125; italics in original. Page 36. “The incredible plight of an ever-growing group”: Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 269. Page 37. “Once they had left their homeland”: Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 267. Page 37. “It seems that a man who is nothing but a man”: Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 300. Page 38. They have shown us what whole countries: None of these photographers showed the wars within the wars. Capa, for instance, ignored the Red Terror against the church and the internecine fighting among the left in Spain, while Jones Griffiths ignored the civil war between North and South Vietnam. Page 39. “Hunger looks like the man”: Eduardo Galeano, “Salgado, 17 Times,” in An Uncertain Grace, by Sebastião Salgado (New York: Aperture, 1990), 7. Page 39. “the original site of reality”: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 121. Page 39. “What is remembered in the body”: Scarry, The Body in Pain, 152. Page 39. “his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness”: Jean Améry, “Torture,” in At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (New York: Schocken, 1986), 40. Page 39. “The violation of the human body”: Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence, 22. Page 40. “The image of the subaltern”: Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” in Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. Page 40. “the pornography of the ‘direct’ representation”: Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” in Sekula, Photography Against the Grain, 62. Page 40. “The visual is essentially pornographic”: Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), 1; italics in original. Page 40. “All images that display the violation”: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 95. 269

Notes to Pages 40–48

Pages 40–41. “social pornography” because “it exposes something”: Jorgen Lissner, “Merchants of Misery,” New Internationalist 100 (June 1981). Page 41. “Pornography seems to be an infinitely plastic term”: Carolyn J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 20, 38. Page 42. “losers in globalization’s great game”: David Rieff, “Migrations,” Rolling Stone, May 25, 2000, 44. Page 42. “sentimental voyeurism”: Flavia Costa, “Beautiful Misery,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2003): 215. Page 42. “offensive,” “embarrassing”: Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2001), 299. Pages 42–43. “kitschy” . . . “insulting”: Ingrid Sischy, “Good Intentions,” New Yorker, September 9, 1991, 94, 91, 92, 93. Page 43. “Salgado is far too busy”: Sischy, “Good Intentions,” 92, 95. Page 43. “complicit . . . in the cult of celebrity”: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 79. Page 43. “vacuous universality . . . of misery”: Luc Sante and Jim Lewis, “The Book Club: Regarding the Pain of Others,” Slate, February 25, 2003. Page 43. “For a photographer to perpetrate”: Sante and Lewis, “The Book Club.” Page 44. “I really don’t think that a picture of an atrocity”: Sante and Lewis, “The Book Club.” Pages 44–45. “The victims are turned into works of art”: Adorno, “Commitment,” in Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? 252. Page 45. “Photography may function most directly”: Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 212. Page 46. “bombardment of images”: Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, Erina Duganne, eds., Beautiful Suffering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 65. Page 46. “The feeling of humanity evaporates”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On Political Economy,” in Rousseau, The Social Contract, ed. Charles M. Sherover (New York: New American Library, 1974), 266, 267. Page 46. “our growing consciousness”: Mary Kaldor, “Gaza: The ‘New War,’ ” opendemocracy.net, February 18, 2009. Page 47. “Why should I care”: Rorty, On Human Rights, 133. Page 47. “guiding light . . . glow-worm”: Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), 2. Page 47. “What happens in the jails of Kigali”: Michael Ignatieff, “Is Nothing Sacred? The Ethics of Television,” in The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 22. Page 48. “crimes against humanity”: Sharon Sliwinski, “The Childhood of Human Rights,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 3 (2006): 334; also Adam Hoch270

Notes to Pages 49–59

schild, King Leopold’s Ghost (New York: Mariner, 1999), 112. The two Congo photos I discuss are reprinted in Sliwinski’s article. Page 49. “sore calamity” of “the kodak”: Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 73. Page 49. “slanders” spread by “busy-body American missionaries”: Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 73. Page 49. “Then all of a sudden came the crash!”: Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 73. Pages 49–50. “the only witness . . . I couldn’t bribe”: Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 73–74. Page 50. “we do not wish to look”: Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 75; italics in original. Page 50. “shudder and turn away”: Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 76; italics in original. Page 50. “That is my protection”: Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 76. Page 50. “had declared himself prepared to see”: Rony Brauman, “From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/ Summer 2004): 407. Page 51. photographs of lynchings: See James Allen and others, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). Page 51. Saddam Hussein’s Baathists: See the Iraq Memory Foundation, http:// www.iraqmemory.org/EN/. Page 51. Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front: See Sebastian Junger, “Terror Recorded,” Vanity Fair, October 2000. Page 52. “the hottest ticket in town”: Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun (New York: Vintage, 2002), 248. Page 52. The Scorpions . . . filmed themselves: See Justine McCarthy, “Fight for Justice,” Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2009, 10. Page 54. The Killing Fields: A much larger selection of these photographs can be found on the website of Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Project, http://www.yale.edu/cgp/photographs.html. Page 54. the Cambodian word for “prisoner”: David Chandler, “The Pathology of Terror in Pol Pot’s Cambodia,” in The Killing Fields, by Chris Riley and Douglas Niven (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 1996), 104. Page 54. “being fond of ‘freedom’”: Chandler, in Riley and Niven, The Killing Fields, 104. Page 57. “the need to lend a voice to suffering”: Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 17–18. Pages 58–59. “Visiting the photographs in this book”: Chandler, in Riley and Niven, The Killing Fields, 107–8. Page 59. “cozy existential atmosphere”: Adorno, “Commitment,” in Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? 253. In his book on four photographs from 271

Notes to Pages 59–66

Auschwitz, Georges Didi-Huberman makes a similar point: “There is nothing . . . that allows us to claim that while they are fellows, the victim and the executioner are indistinguishable, substitutable, or interchangeable.” (Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, trans. Shane B. Lillis [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], 154; italics in original.) I discuss DidiHuberman’s views in the following chapter. Page 59. “demands of justice”: This does not mean that legal redress is impossible. In the spring of 2009, Kaing Guek Eav, the commandant of S-21, finally went on trial. Pages 59–60. “I have thought, if I find the right place”: Delia Falconer, The Service of Clouds (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 316. Page 60. “The greatest statesmen”: Peter Howe, Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer (New York: Artisan, 2002), 186. Page 60. “It is our historic responsibility”: Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 122. Pages 60–61. “liberty of an unchecked image environment”: Andy Grundberg, “Point and Shoot,” American Scholar 74, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 109. Page 61. incomparably easier and cheaper: This opening up of the media might also create a more participatory, less hierarchical relationship between image and viewer. “The power relationships among author, subject, and reader will evolve,” photography theorist Fred Ritchin argues, “and the linear narrative, based on a single voice, is up for grabs.” For more on this see Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), especially 109. Gilles Peress puts forth a similar view in chapter 9. Page 61. “a revolution in cinema verité”: Washington Times, “Iran’s Twitter Revolution,” June 16, 2009. More recently, the movement itself has criticized its reliance on the Internet and social-networking sites. See Robert F. Worth, “Opposition in Iran Meets a Crossroads on Strategy,” New York Times, February 15, 2010, A4.

CHAPTER THREE

Page 65. “is the living image of a dead thing”: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 79. Page 65. “image which produces Death”: Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92. Page 65. “death in the future”: Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. Page 65. “catastrophe”: Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. Page 65. “the photograph is already dead”: Barthes, Camera Lucida, 79. Page 66. in the prisons of Stalin and Pol Pot: There are numerous other photographs in this genre; one of the best known is a pre-execution photograph taken in Bosnia by Ron Haviv that shows a man begging for his life before a 272

Notes to Pages 66–79

Serbian death squad. For a pre-death photograph taken by Don McCullin in the Congo, see chapter 8. Page 66. “the Waiting Room of Death”: Jean Améry, “In the Waiting Room of Death,” in Améry, Radical Humanism: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 21. Page 67. “racially impeccable”: Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 24. Page 67. “the German heart” and “the German spirit”: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 23. Page 68. “civilians sometimes dressed only in bathing trunks”: Joe J. Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Photographic Record 1941–1944 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 23. Page 68. “gleefully photographed the dead”: Ulrich Keller, ed., The Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1984), x. Page 68. “an epidemic of images”: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 23–24. Page 69. “Sniatyn—tormenting Jews”: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 2. Page 70. “The Nazis took photographs of their victims to humiliate”: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 215. Page 70. “flaunting”: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 215. Page 70. “They had no choice”: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 216. Page 70. “Regrettably, the assumption that something might exist”: Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 138. Baer’s perceptive reading of Nazi photographs is, in fact, a good refutation of Koch’s claim. Page 72. “overwhelming majority”: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 56. Page 72. “Jews are the most frequent figures”: Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 16. Page 73. “terminated”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 8. The Stroop Report itself makes fascinating if sickening reading, as when it praises the “devil-may-care valor” of the Nazi troops who destroyed the ghetto. Page 75. “the ludicrous notion of ‘commerce’”: Baer, Spectral Evidence, 160, 162. Some of Genewein’s slides are reproduced in Baer’s book. Page 76. “did not conform to any model”: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 38. Page 77. like a nice soup dumpling: This photo does not appear in the “Private” section but seems to belong there; according to the caption, these were children of ghetto “dignitaries.” Page 79. “motion towards death”: Mendel Grossman, With a Camera in the Ghetto, afterword by Arieh Ben-Menahem (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1970), afterword unpaged. 273

Notes to Pages 81–88

Page 81. “I didn’t want to make my wife and relatives”: Günther Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw: Heinrich Jöst’s Photographs (Göttingen: Steidl, 2001), unpaged. Page 82. “Strangely enough, I didn’t think that about the poorly dressed people”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 41. Page 82. “looked at me as if she expected me to help”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 62. Page 82. “strange rubber gloves”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 122. Page 82. “I ask myself who were the survivors . . . ?”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 65. Page 82. “What are all these people waiting for?”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 72. Page 82. “Who would want to buy things like that?”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 80. Page 82. “How could you photograph something like that?”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 109. Page 82. “My God, what kind of world is this?”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, unpaged. Page 83. “It is increasingly clear on the faces”: Baer, Spectral Evidence, 146. Page 84. “This man was playing the same notes”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 25. Page 84. “She looked as though she was about to topple over”: Schwarberg, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 16. Page 84. “the proud human spirit”: Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 352. Page 85. “I can’t carry on living in a country like this”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 9. Page 85. “still free”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 9. Page 86. “smuggled out”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 10. Page 86. “I find it hard to explain”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 11. Page 86. “At this time in Warsaw the gassing of Jews”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 26. Page 86. “What was now happening in the East was in no way secret”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 23–24. Pages 86–87. “I marched through the streets”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 18–19. Page 87. “I am guilty”: Heydecker, The Warsaw Ghetto, 13. Page 87. “an injustice”: Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? 252. For more on this thought, see chapter 2. Page 88. “a violent outburst”: Bruno Chaouat, “In the Image of Auschwitz,” diacritics 36, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 86. Page 88. “voyeurism, pagan idolatry”: Chaouat, “In the Image of Auschwitz,” 87.

274

Notes to Pages 89–96

Page 89. “Urgent. Send two metal rolls of film”: Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 16–17. Page 89. “an extreme case of collaboration”: Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 50. Page 89. “National Socialism’s most demonic crime”: Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 53. Page 89. “colleagues”: Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 54. Page 90. “snatched . . . from a world bent on their impossibility”: DidiHuberman, Images in Spite of All, 3. Page 90. “instants of truth . . . are in fact all”: Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 31; italics in original. Page 91. “distort[s] the reality of Auschwitz”: Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 55. Page 91. “to fill the silence”: Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 55. Page 91. “perpetuate” and “continue to annihilate”: Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 72. Page 91. “the disappearance of the traces”: Marc Chevrie and Hervé Le Roux, “Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah,” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39. Pages 91–92. “absurd cult of the archival image”: Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 93. Page 92. “propaganda images”: Chevrie and Le Roux, “Site and Speech,” 40. Page 92. “I think that no one human being”: Claude Lanzmann, “Seminar with Claude Lanzmann, 11 April 1990,” Yale French Studies, no. 79 (1991): 99. Page 93. “what we had lived through”: Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Viking, 1997), 181. Page 93. “ultimate reality” . . . “a sort of homeland”: Semprun, Literature or Life, 154, 153, 154. Page 93. “Until that winter’s day”: Semprun, Literature or Life, 199. Page 93. “All of a sudden”: Semprun, Literature or Life, 199–200. Page 93. “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”: Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 34. Page 95. “Consider if you would want your last moments”: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 215–16; italics in original. Page 96. “I cannot easily bear to look”: Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10. Page 96. “She is walking resolutely”: Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 10. Page 96. “Had she lived, she would be an old woman by now”: Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 10. Page 96. “a sign and a symbol of love that strengthens”: Israel Gutman and

275

Notes to Pages 96–103

Bella Gutterman, eds., The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002), 9. Page 96. “full imaginative engagement”: Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 3. Page 96. “comfortless stories”: The phrase is from Geoffrey Hartman, in Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege (New York: Viking, 1989), 512. Page 97. “nothing of what is called inhuman”: Semprun, Literature or Life, 163. Page 97. “holes of oblivion”: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994), 232. Page 97. “We must not be wrong”: Zbigniew Herbert, “Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision,” in The Disappeared, by Laurel Reuter (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2006), 9. I thank Lawrence Weschler for introducing me to this poem. Page 98. “the antithesis of a document”: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 123. Page 98. “exemplary in its thoughtfulness”: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 123. Page 98. “The atmosphere is warm”: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 124. Pages 98–99. “One could fantasize that the soldiers might turn”: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 125–26. Page 99. “Meditate that this came about”: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 11.

CHAPTER FOUR

Page 101. “like a soaring song”: Li Zhensheng, Red-C0lor News Soldier (New York: Phaidon, 2003), 19. Page 101. “‘negative’ negatives”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 204. Page 102. placed so much emphasis on this trait: For a lengthier discussion of the social value of dignity, see Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Page 103. “a frightful catastrophe”: Simon Leys, “After the Massacres,” New York Review of Books 36, no. 15 (October 12, 1989). Page 103. “an immense, violent, and tragic upheaval”: Jonathan D. Spence, “China’s Great Terror,” New York Review of Books 53, no. 14 (September 21, 2006). Page 103. “lunatic asylum”: Steven I. Levine, “Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China: Commentaries on ‘Mao’s Last Revolution’ and a Reply by the Authors,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 105. Page 103. “ten bad years of great disaster”: Lucian Pye, “Reassessing the Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly, no. 108 (December 1986): 597. Page 103. “by a commitment to radical democracy”: Craig Calhoun and Jeffrey N. 276

Notes to Pages 104–110

Wasserstrom, “The Cultural Revolution and the Democracy Movement of 1989: Complexity in Historical Connections,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust, ed. Kam-yee Law (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 251. Page 104. “great disorder under heaven”: Yafeng Xia, “Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China: Commentaries on ‘Mao’s Last Revolution’ and a Reply by the Authors,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 109. Page 105. “having power, knowledge, or wealth”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 74. Page 106. “There was no end”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 74. Page 106. “I could not distinguish”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 74. Page 106. “Shave it into a ghost head!”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 110. Page 107. “To hell with the Buddhist scriptures”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 99. Page 107. The Cultural Revolution’s assault on learning: Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, wrote, “Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus . . . created lasting values, which were not to be overthrown in any ‘cultural revolution.’ . . . Only savages, or petty bourgeois, half-baked ultra-radicals, or bureaucratic upstarts can make bonfires of the works of the great thinkers and artists of the past. The Maoists . . . commit moral harakiri.” For Deutscher’s critique of Maoist anti-intellectualism, see his pamphlet The Cultural Revolution in China (Nottingham: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1969), especially 17. Page 107. “the seven real mangos”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 227. Page 108. “From the bottom of my heart”: Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 297. Page 108. “so many Chinese . . . behave[d] so unusually”: Lynn White, “Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China: Commentaries on ‘Mao’s Last Revolution’ and a Reply by the Authors,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 100. Page 109. “virtuocracy”: Lucian Pye, The Tragedy of the Cultural Revolution (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1991), 7. Page 109. “The French Revolution showed”: Barrington Moore Jr., Moral Purity and Persecution in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 131. Many of the early members of the Chinese Communist Party (though not Mao) lived in Paris in the 1920s; the older generation of Maoists selfconsciously aligned itself with France’s revolutionary traditions. Page 110. despite the romantic notions: An “About the Author” note on Malraux in my 1990 copy of Man’s Fate claims—inaccurately—that “between 1923 and 1927 he participated in the revolutionary movements then taking place in China.” Page 110. “never wrote a book more based on imagination”: Jean Lacouture, André Malraux, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 146. 277

Notes to Pages 111–120

Page 111. “those of the spinning-mills”: André Malraux, Man’s Fate (New York: Vintage, 1990), 18. Like other Marxist movements, the Chinese Communists originally concentrated on the urban proletariat. Page 111. “life had a meaning”: Malraux, Man’s Fate, 65. Page 111. “That men could stand by”: Malraux, Man’s Fate, 297–98. Page 112. “The feeling he experienced”: Malraux, Man’s Fate, 98. Page 112. “intolerable . . . the sight”: Malraux, Man’s Fate, 98. Page 112. “They drove a nail”: Malraux, Man’s Fate, 279. Page 112. “wrecks from the civil wars”: Malraux, Man’s Fate, 281. Page 113. “In spite of death”: Malraux, Man’s Fate, 71. Page 113. “the tiny spark of contingency”: Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, 2:510. For more on this, see chapter 1. Page 114. “looked into the sky”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 139. Page 115. “No one asked me to take close-ups”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 140. Page 115. “Down with Johnson!”: Yuan Gao, Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 144. Page 115. “Nothing in Europe can even suggest the misery”: André Malraux, The Conquerors, trans. Stephen Becker (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1928), 155. Page 116. “I felt that it was pure doom”: Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War, 70. Gellhorn’s program for China—much of which would be adopted by the Communist government—included clean drinking water, sewage disposal, government-sponsored birth control, agricultural reform, universal health care, and the building of schools. Page 116. “hoarding riches”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 114. Page 116. “landlord mansion”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 53. Page 116. “There was no heat”: Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 204. Page 117. “I was hungry”: Jack Birns, Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), ix. Page 117. “Life editors made no comment”: Birns, Assignment Shanghai, x. Page 119. “grains of rice”: Birns, Assignment Shanghai, 109. On a trip to China in 1972, the writer Simon Leys observed, “I was struck to see a ragged old woman [in a Canton restaurant] gleaning crumbs of food from under the tables and carefully putting them one by one into her sack.” For more on the poverty in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, see Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows (New York: Viking, 1977), especially 38. Leys, the pseudonym of a Belgian Sinologist who was fiercely anti-Maoist, castigated leftist intellectuals in the West who supported the Cultural Revolution. Page 120. “sullen”: Birns, Assignment Shanghai, 61. Page 120. “I felt not just anger”: Birns, Assignment Shanghai, xi.

278

Notes to Pages 122–133

Page 122. “A Nationalist officer guards women prisoners”: Birns, Assignment Shanghai, 46.

CHAPTER FIVE

Page 125. “new evidence of the cold-blooded calculation”: Sebastian Junger, “The Terror of Sierra Leone,” Vanity Fair, no. 480 (August 2000): 110. Page 126. “Who indeed knows best how to think about victims?”: Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 17. Page 126. “Every question about responsibility”: Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 17. Page 127. political groups that murder children: See, for instance, a 2008 article in the New York Times in which the Taliban proudly claimed responsibility for a suicide attack next to a school in Khost Province (Adam B. Ellick, “Bomb Kills 16 Afghans; 13 Are Children,” New York Times, December 29, 2008, A8). The Taliban have also executed children, as reported by Anand Gopal, “Many in Afghanistan Oppose Obama’s Troop Buildup Plans,” Christian Science Monitor, March 2, 2009; see also Kristen L. Rouse, “The Children of Asadabad,” New York Times, March 17, 2009, A27. Some jihadi groups in Iraq specifically attack children; see Marc Santora’s report on a female suicide bomber who targeted women and children on a pilgrimage to Karbala (“Suicide Bomber Kills 35 in an Attack on Shiite Pilgrims in Iraq,” New York Times, February 14, 2009, A6). The interested reader can, alas, find many more examples. Page 127. “sense of shock is dispersed”: Berger, Selected Essays, 281; italics in original. Page 128. “often mean-spirited”: Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 9. Page 128. “There is sadism in pity”: Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, trans. William R. Beer (New York: Free Press, 1986), 79–80; italics in original. Page 128. “Pity, being a primary and instinctive sentiment”: Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 99. Page 128. “co-suffering”: Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 85. Pages 128–129. “remains, politically speaking, irrelevant”: Arendt, On Revolution, 85. Page 129. “community of interest”: Arendt, On Revolution, 88. Page 131. “the one thing tyrants and aid workers have in common”: The idea is attributed to Rony Brauman of Doctors Without Borders, in David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 25. Page 132. “because it seemed that mere horror”: Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1997), 177. Page 133. “shockingly horrific violence”: Mary Kaldor, “How to Free Hostages: War, Negotiation, or Law-Enforcement?” opendemocracy.net, August 29, 2007.

279

Notes to Pages 134–144

Page 134. “Individuals commit suicide”: Bernard-Henri Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, trans. Charlotte Mandell (London: Duckworth, 2004), 69. Page 134. “where the contending parties have no common characteristics”: Eric Hobsbawm, “War and Peace,” Guardian, February 23, 2002. Page 135. “There is . . . nothing to constrain”: François Jean, From Ethiopia to Chechnya: Reflections on Humanitarian Action, 1988–1999, ed. Kevin P. Q. Phelan, trans. Richard Swanson (Doctors Without Borders, undated), 50. Page 136. “conflicts were much more politically motivated”: David Tuller, “Through a Lens Darkly,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1997, 3. Page 136. “wipe him out”: Tuller, “Through a Lens Darkly.” Page 136. “except those of destructiveness”: John Keane, Reflections on Violence (London: Verso, 1996), 137. Page 136. “the ecology of human personality”: Keane, Reflections on Violence, 156. Page 136. “capacity to . . . act in solidarity”: Keane, Reflections on Violence, 157. Page 136. “old reflexes”: Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, 6. Page 136. “new and, in our eyes, almost unthinkable reality”: Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, 6. Page 136. “Terrible wars”: Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, 6. Page 137. “without aim”: Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, 4. Page 137. “Can one, under the pretext that they tell us nothing. . . . ?” Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, 6. Page 138. “No one wants to see”: Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, 310. Page 138. “We have to force them to see it”: Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, 311. Like Arendt, Lévy writes of the forgotten “black holes.” Page 138. something quite extraordinary: Child soldiers are also used in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanamar, Colombia, Yemen, and the Philippines, among others places, and are recruited as suicide bombers in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka. Page 140. “These children are quite often the hardest”: Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, 202. Page 140. “We feared them”: Human Rights Watch, “Sierra Leone: Getting Away with Murder, Mutilation, Rape: New Testimony from Sierra Leone,” World Report 11 (1999). Page 141. “the so-called army”: Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 133. Page 141. “It will be a waste”: Beah, A Long Way Gone, 151. Page 142. “Child soldiers are photogenic”: Teun Voeten, How de Body? trans. Roz Vatter-Buck (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 14. Page 144. “boiling . . . anger”: Beah, A Long Way Gone, 130. Page 144. “It was infuriating”: Beah, A Long Way Gone, 138. Page 144. “I wasn’t sure whether he was unconscious”: Beah, A Long Way Gone, 135. Page 144. “beaming men”: Beah, A Long Way Gone, 131. 280

Notes to Pages 144–155

Page 144. “It’s not your fault”: Beah, A Long Way Gone, 145. Page 144. “The injury cannot be healed”: Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 24. Page 145. “informal psychiatric centre”: Stuart Freedman, http://www.panos .co.uk, SFE00755ANG. Page 145. “merely the work of the maggots”: National Intelligence Council Project, “Case Study: Intervention in Sierra Leone,” http://www.cissm.umd.edu/ papers/files/sera_leone.pdf.

CHAPTER SIX

Page 151. “We Will Revenge”: Viewed by the author in the show “Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib,” International Center of Photography, New York City, September 17–November 28, 2004; see also Sarah Boxer, “Torture Incarnate, and Propped on a Pedestal,” New York Times, June 13, 2004. Page 152. souks throughout the Arab world: Phillip Carter, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” Washington Monthly, November 2004. Page 152. “TV can run Abu Ghraib photos 24/7”: Daniel Henninger, “Wonder Land: Want a Different Abu Ghraib Story? Try This One,” Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2004, A12. Page 153. “a no-brainer”: Caryle Murphy, “Grappling with the Morals on Display at Abu Ghraib,” Washington Post, May 29, 2004, B9. Page 153. “in the pornography and violence of American pop culture”: Murphy, “Grappling with the Morals,” Washington Post. Page 153. “the latest evidence of a culture gone stark raving mad”: Rebecca Hagelin, “Down the Sewer to Abu Ghraib,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2004, B11. Page 153. “cultural rot . . . We have been sliding down”: Hagelin, “Down the Sewer.” Page 153. “laughable”: Frank Rich, “It Was the Porn that Made Them Do It,” New York Times, May 30, 2004, sec. 2, 1. Page 153. “Some of our self-appointed moral leaders”: Rich, “It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It.” Page 154. “Most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence”: Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004, 27. Page 154. “America has become a country”: Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” 28–29. Page 154. “This idea of fun”: Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” 28. Page 154. “Anyone acquainted with the U.S. way of life”: Slavoj Žižek, “Between Two Deaths,” London Review of Books, June 3, 2004. Page 155. “as degenerate and subversive”: Rouzbeh Pirouz, “Empire’s Mockery,” opendemocracy.net, October 11, 2004, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ democracy-abu_ghraib/article_2151.jsp. 281

Notes to Pages 156–160

Page 156. more than ten million viewers: Olga Craig, “The New Tricoteuses,” Telegraph, October 17, 2004. Page 156. “Never before had such primal dungeon scenes”: Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 262. Page 156. “Strictly speaking, one never understands”: Sontag, On Photography, 23. Page 157. “a profound public service”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 264. Page 157. “easy to think that they were the whole story”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 264. Page 157. “the poster girl for this war”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 277. Page 157. “writhing in pain”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 139. Page 157. “a solid-doored, windowless, lightless”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 136. Page 158. “I knew he wouldn’t be electrocuted”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 177. Page 158. “became one of the MPs’ favorite prisoners”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 181. Page 158. “just a picture”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 139. Page 158. “It was the public’s fascination”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 182. Page 158. “submit”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 283. Page 159. “To see a whole nation passing the buck”: Martha Gellhorn, “Das Deutsches Volk,” in Gellhorn, The Face of War, 163. Page 159. “I guess we weren’t really thinking”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 178. Page 159. “happy snaps”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 178. Page 159. “It was just—Hey, it’s a dead guy”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 178. Page 159. “It wasn’t a thong”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 97–98. Page 159. “On pictures it looked so much more horrible”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 155. Page 159. “Does inadequacy not characterize all”: Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, 69. Page 160. “The issue of the truth or falsity”: Errol Morris, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” New York Times, July 10, 2007. Page 160. “Without the photographs there would have been no scandal”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 264. Page 160. “ocular proof”: Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, 261; as Gourevitch notes, the phrase originally comes from Othello. Page 160. “These photographs are proof”: Josef Koudelka, “Invasion 68: Prague, Interview with Melissa Harris,” Aperture, no. 192 (Fall 2008): 25. 282

Notes to Pages 162–167

Page 162. “the Muzak of the Arab world”: Thomas L. Friedman, “Talking Turkey with Syria,” New York Times, July 26, 2006, A17. Page 162. bleeding, screaming, maimed: See, for instance, Michael Rubin, “Iran Against the Arabs,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2006; Eric Calderwood, “The Violence Network,” boston.com, January 18, 2009; Michael Wolff, “Al Jazeera’s Edge,” New York, April 21, 2003; Azadeh Moaveni, “How Images of Death Became Must-See TV,” Time, April 29, 2002. Page 162. “It’s pretty hard to adequately describe”: Wolff, “Al Jazeera’s Edge.” Pages 162–163. “The silently rolling footage”: Moaveni, “How Images of Death Became Must-See TV.” Page 163. “Militants in black turbans”: Steve Coll, “Letter from Pakistan: Time Bomb,” New Yorker, January 28, 2008, 49. Page 163. footage of Islamic terrorists beheading a young Japanese hostage: Agence France-Presse, “Outrage as Iraq Hostage Beheading Shown at Japanese Rock Concert,” December 28, 2004. Page 163. “a vast supermarket of death and dismemberment”: James Harkin, “Shock and Gore,” Financial Times, January 13, 2006. Page 163. as well as on YouTube: Coco McPherson, “War on the Web,” Rolling Stone, November 2, 2006, 37–38. Page 163. Some terrorist groups: Karby Leggett, “Kidnappings Spur Israeli Offensive inside Lebanon,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2006, A1. Page 164. “The use of photography and film has always been central”: Harkin, “Shock and Gore.” Page 164. “The Daniel Pearl murder video is more grotesque”: Bruce Shapiro, “By All Means Look Away,” Salon, June 13, 2002. Page 165. “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation”: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 238. Page 165. “total and encompassing”: Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” in Kael, Going Steady, 201. Page 165. “He is speaking in German”: Danny Lyon, “‘Such Damnable Ghastliness’: A Visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Aperture, no. 164 (Summer 2001): 37; italics in original. Page 166. “the facticity of evil”: “The Face of Evil,” New Republic, June 24, 2002, Vol. 226, Issue 24: 8. Page 166. “What remains in the mind”: New Republic, “The Face of Evil,” 8. Page 166. “If there is anything that should galvanize”: Boston Phoenix, “Editorial: Freedom to Choose,” June 6–13, 2002. Pages 166–167. “No one is supposed to say so”: Becky Ohlsen, “Ethical Voyeurism,” December 2007, unpublished paper. Page 167. “It may be uncomfortable to admit”: Charly Wilder, “The Masochistic Voyeur,” December 2007, unpublished paper. 283

Notes to Pages 167–177

Page 167. “the stuff of delusion and self-rationalization”: Wilder, “The Masochistic Voyeur.” Page 167. “a fascination fueled not by the desire for truth”: Wilder, “The Masochistic Voyeur.” Page 168. “If the conflict in Vietnam was notable”: Michael Kamber and Tim Arango, “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images,” New York Times, July 26, 2008. Page 169. “Our apology”: Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, http://www.rawa.org/gallery.html. Page 169. The Israeli press . . . abjures printing: See, for instance, Bruce Hoffman, “Aftermath,” Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004, 41–43. Page 169. “dancing on blood”: Bradley Burston, “Mideast Horrors: What We’re Shown, and Why,” Haaretz, May 13, 2004. Pages 169–170. “Gazans, starved for vengeance”: Burston, “Mideast Horrors.” Page 170. the Palestinian paper Al-Ayyam: See, for instance, the issue of January 7, 2009. Page 170. “the horror fuelled by Arab television networks”: Abdelwahab Meddeb, “The Pornography of Horror,” signandsight.com, January 14, 2009; originally published in Frankfurter Rundschau, January 9, 2009, and Le Monde, January 12, 2009. Page 170. “big crush”: Wolff, “Al Jazeera’s Edge.” Page 171. “because to watch would be to lose”: Ron Rosenbaum, “Errol Morris Has a Very Blue Line: Curse Darkness,” New York Observer, May 24, 2004, 1.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Page 175. with which George Orwell would fight: A photograph from the time shows Orwell, in a uniform of sorts and towering over his comrades, standing in line with POUM’s Lenin Brigade. Page 176. “He is a passionate democrat”: Richard Whelan, This Is War! Robert Capa at Work (New York: International Center of Photography, 2007), 162. Page 176. “our special envoy”: Whelan, This is War! 43. Page 176. “audacious”: Robert Capa, Heart of Spain: Robert Capa’s Photographs of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Aperture, 1999), 35. Page 176. “You wonder, when you see them”: Vincent Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1939), 332. Page 177. it became the classic war image: In recent years, there has been a seemingly unending debate on the circumstances—and even the authenticity—of this image, though the dispute has not dimmed the photograph’s still-resonant power. For various views, see Philip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 209–12; Richard Whelan, 284

Notes to Pages 177–187

“Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier: A Detective Story,” Aperture, no. 166 (Spring 2002): 48–55; and Larry Rohter, “New Doubts Raised over Famous War Photo,” New York Times, August 18, 2009, C1. Page 177. “intact in spirit”: Martha Gellhorn, “The Undefeated,” in Capa, Heart of Spain, 165. Page 178. “It’s not enough to have talent”: Alex Kershaw, Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 5. Page 178. “Scrap iron! Scrap iron!”: Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 18. Page 179. “was the nearest thing to journalism”: Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography, 30. Page 179. “very well designed”: Kershaw, Blood and Champagne, 226; see also Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 83. Page 180. “get me photographs of Hitler coming out of a synagogue!”: Bodo von Dewitz and Brooks Johnson, eds., Shooting Stalin: The “Wonderful” Years of Photographer James Abbe (Göttingen: Steidl, 2004), 8. Page 181. “committed to cross[ing] all frontiers”: Whelan, This Is War! 28. Page 181. “oftener than our shoes”: Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” in Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, 320. Page 182. “fabulously successful”: Whelan, This Is War! 40. Page 182. “Capa, who has spent so much of his energy on inventions”: John Hersey, “The Man Who Invented Himself,” 47: The Magazine of the Year (September 1947): 77. Page 183. “Never were there so many so happy”: Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 179. Page 183. “demoiselles des rayons”: Robert Capa and David Seymour “Chim,” Front Populaire, text by Georgette Elgey (Paris: Chêne/Magnum, 1976), 64–65. Page 184. “amazing”: Hersey, “The Man Who Invented Himself,” 70. Page 184. “For a war correspondent to miss an invasion”: Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 19. Page 185. “From the Rhine to the Oder I took no pictures”: Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 226. Page 185. “the slaves, the worn-out . . . broken, conquered”: Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 150. Page 185. “In classical tragedy, man is defeated”: Irving Howe, “Writing and the Holocaust,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 190. Page 186. “I entered the school”: Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 103. Page 187. “For Gerda Taro”: Robert Capa, Death in the Making (New York: Covici-Friede, 1938), unpaged. Page 187. “totalitarian war”: Capa, Death in the Making, unpaged. 285

Notes to Pages 188–198

Page 188. “the ingenious death from the skies”: Capa, Death in the Making, unpaged. Page 188. “In Spain a new army has been forged”: Capa, Death in the Making, unpaged; italics in original. Page 188. “There are answering vibrations from without”: Capa, Death in the Making, unpaged. Page 188. “Nothing, not the victory/will erase the terrible bloody hole”: Pablo Neruda, Tercera Residencia (1935–1945) (Bogotá: Editorial La Oveja Negra, 1982), 46–47. Page 188. “vulgar pacifism”: Ellen Willis, “Why I’m Not for Peace.” Radical Society 29, no. 1 (April 2002): 15. Page 189. “We believed that there could be no peace”: Gellhorn, The Face of War, 13–14. Page 190. “He simply made friends with all the soldiers”: Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography, 264. Page 190. “I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer”: Robert Capa, Images of War (New York: Grossman, 1964), 153. Page 190. “With seemingly everyone from writers to politicians”: Brothers, War and Photography, 2; italics in original. Page 191. “The pictures are there, and you just take them”: Capa, Heart of Spain, 32. Page 192. “In a war you must hate somebody”: Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography, 275. Page 192. to prove his anti-Communist credentials: For speculation on Capa’s motives, see Whelan, Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 12, and Irwin Shaw, “Talking about Photography,” Vogue, April 1982, 145. Page 193. “Capa’s most personal war”: Kershaw, Blood and Champagne, 202. Page 193. “That would be the final insult—being killed by the Jews!”: Shaw, “Talking about Photography,” 145. Page 196. “What determines the possibility”: Sontag, On Photography, 19. Page 196. “spirits revived”: Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 122. Page 196. “all the Germans [soldiers] were either dead or prisoners”: Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, 122. Page 197. “photographs of groups of defenders” of the Alcazar: George Orwell, “Review,” in An Age Like This: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 1:288. Page 198. “repersonalize war”: Whelan, Heart of Spain, 34; italics in original. Page 198. “puts a spell . . . and under this spell”: Jürgen Habermas, Philip Brewster, and Carl Howard Buchner, “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin,” New German Critique, no. 17 (Spring 1979): 35.

286

Notes to Pages 199–209

Page 199. “the lack of connections drawn between the [Francoist] Insurgents”: Brothers, War and Photography, 59. Page 199. “Swear upon these fraternal letters that you will sooner die”: Whelan, Heart of Spain, 57, 176. Page 200. “situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort”: Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Picador, 2002), 91. Page 200. “a revelation of ‘the other man’”: Octavio Paz, in Whelan, Heart of Spain, 13. Page 201. “exactly what educated evil looks like”: This comment, by a house reviewer, appeared on amazon.com.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Page 205. “Maybe the gods themselves are depraved”: Douglas Cruickshank, “James Nachtwey’s ‘Inferno,’” Salon, April 10, 2000. Page 207. a virtually anonymous ascetic: A 2001 documentary film about Nachtwey called War Photographer, directed by Christian Frei, supports this impression. Page 207. “grim reaper”: Richard B. Woodward, “To Hell and Back,” Village Voice, June 6, 2000. Page 207. “sniper”: Henry Allen, “Seasons in Hell,” New Yorker, June 12, 2000, 106. Page 207. “hideous”: Peder Jansson, “Photography’s Dissidents: Documentarism vs. Visual Art? The Aesthetic Transformation of the Documentary Photograph,” Katalog (Spring 2001): 43. Page 207. “like seeing pieces of your life”: Pauline Kael, For Keeps (New York: Plume, 1996), 456. Page 207. “not only reported history”: Steve Appleford, “The Eyes of Perpetual War,” LA Weekly, November 22, 2002, 37. Page 208. “I became a photographer in order to be a war photographer”: Elizabeth Farnsworth, “Interview with James Nacthwey,” NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, PBS, May 16, 2000, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/jan-june00/ nachtwey_5-16.html; Nachtwey states this also in Ann Gerhart, “War’s Unblinking Eyewitness,” Washington Post, April 11, 2000, and Alexander Linklater, “The Last Witness,” Herald (Glasgow), January 29, 2000, 32. Page 208. “The chances of surviving would be very slim”: Cal Fussman, “What I’ve Learned,” Esquire, October 2005, 206. Page 208. “gulag”: Cruickshank, “James Nachtwey’s ‘Inferno,’” Salon. Page 208. “The ghoulish cruelties”: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 44. Page 209. “the black slab”: David Friend, “The Black Slab (An Appreciation of

287

Notes to Pages 209–217

James Nachtwey’s Inferno),” Digital Journalist, no. 0007, http://www.digital journalist.org/issue0007/friend.htm. Page 209. “terrible”: Appleford, “The Eyes of Perpetual War.” Page 209. “history is still being made”: Richard Lacayo, “Prints of Darkness,” Time, April 3, 2000. Page 209. “chaos,” “impossibility,” “gruesome hopelessness”: Allen, “Seasons in Hell,” 106. Page 209. “there’s a sense of cosmic burnout”: Allen, “Seasons in Hell,” 106. Page 209. “ruthless attitude . . . punishes us”: Woodward, “To Hell and Back.” Page 209. “holding a gun to our heads”: Woodward, “To Hell and Back.” Page 209. “Should we be grateful?”: Woodward, “To Hell and Back.” Page 209. “ruin”: Gerhart, “War’s Unblinking Witness.” Page 210. “atrocious artfulness”: Sarah Boxer, “Photography Review: The Chillingly Fine Line between Ecstasy and Grief,” New York Times, June 9, 2000, 27. Page 210. “scrappy, often blurry pictures”: Woodward, “To Hell and Back.” Page 210. “heartless opportunists”: Jansson, “Photography’s Dissidents,” 43. Pages 210–211. “I find it hard to understand”: Jansson, “Photography’s Dissidents,” 44. Page 213. “seems a turning point”: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 44–45. Page 213. “Lamentation, which once seemed only possible”: J. M. Bernstein, “Dismembered and Re-membered Bodies,” unpublished paper. Page 213. “His modernist formalism”: Bernstein, “Dismembered and Remembered Bodies.” Page 213. “lines, frames, cut-offs”: Convert, “James Nachtwey: Bibliotheque Nationale,” Art Press, no. 286 (January 2003). Page 213. “authoritarian”: Convert, “James Nachtwey.” This criticism echoes that of Roland Barthes, who, as we have seen, charged that images of violence deprive us of moral freedom; for more on this, see chapter 1. Page 213. “the possibility of a critical reading”: Convert, “James Nachtwey.” Page 214. “Through me is the way”: James Nachtwey, Inferno (New York: Phaidon, 1999), unpaged. Page 215. “the theatrics of utter simplicity”: Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? 251. Page 215. “moral line in the sand”: David Rieff, “The Quality of Mercy,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 19, 2000, 1. Page 215. “the deadliest conflict”: Amy Goodman, “The Invisible War,” Truthdig, January 23, 2008. Page 215. “Nachtwey doesn’t have causes”: Woodward, “To Hell and Back.” Pages 216–217. “less on optimism”: Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 18. Page 217. “translate their feelings”: Nachtwey, Inferno, 469.

288

Notes to Pages 218–226

Page 218. “Not often”: Peter Aspden, “Perspectives: Focusing on the Lost People,” Financial Times, January 29, 2003. Page 218. “My job is not to go someplace”: Cruickshank, “James Nachtwey’s ‘Inferno.’” Philip Jones Griffiths, a member of Magnum for over four decades, has expressed a similar thought: “A photographer who becomes emotional is as useless as a surgeon who faints at the sight of blood.” (William Messer, “Presence of Mind: The Photographs of Philip Jones Griffiths,” Aperture, no. 190 [Spring 2008]: 64.) Page 218. “the classic moral distaste”: Kozloff, “Terror and Photography,” 37. Page 219. “morally anguished . . . No”: Linklater, “The Last Witness.” Page 219. “Congolese soldiers ill-treating prisoners”: Don McCullin, Hearts of Darkness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 63. Page 219. “You cannot walk on the water of hunger”: Don McCullin, Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 218. Page 219. “On the train to London, . . . I hated myself”: Capa, Images of War, 62. Page 221. “powerhouse pictures”: Greg Marinovich and João Silva, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 38. Page 221. “The Zulus and I took off ”: Marinovich and Silva, The Bang-Bang Club, 15. Pages 221–222. “I was one of the circle of killers”: Marinovich and Silva, The BangBang Club, 16. Page 222. “gash in his head . . . light sucked”: Marinovich and Silva, The BangBang Club, 74. Page 222. “a group of women”: Marinovich and Silva, The Bang-Bang Club, 44–45. Page 222. “We stopped at a shack”: Marinovich and Silva, The Bang-Bang Club, 128–29. Page 223. “We had not personally suffered”: Marinovich and Silva, The Bang-Bang Club, 224. Page 223. “you are never freer”: Gerhart, “War’s Unblinking Witness.” Page 223. “vaporized”: James Nachtwey, “Day One,” in VII, War (New York: de.Mo, 2003), 17. Page 224. a declaration of war against America: A 2008 installation project at the International Center of Photography, created by the German artist HansPeter Feldmann and titled “9/12 Front Page 2001,” makes clear that this was, in fact, the general understanding of the Al Qaeda attacks throughout much of the world. Page 224. “At the time, I thought I was photographing”: Nachtwey, “Day One,” 19. Page 224. “Manichean” and “anti-humanistic”: Bruno Chalifour, “From Inferno to War: A Few Considerations on James Nachtwey, VII, and War Photography,” Afterimage 32, no. 6 (May 2004). Page 225. “blown apart”: Nachtwey, War, 318–19. Page 226. “fervency to religious insanity”: John Stanmeyer, “Thought,” in VII, War, 129. 289

Notes to Pages 227–236

Page 227. a small gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village: Some of the photographs had previously run as an extended photo essay in National Geographic; see “Military Medicine,” http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/12/iraq -medicine/nachtwey-photography. Page 228. “gored by shrapnel”: Neil Shea and James Nachtwey, “Iraq War Medicine,” National Geographic, December 2006, image 9. Page 230. “It’s come as a shock”: Gareth Evans, “Confronting the Challenge of Terrorism: International Relations After 9/11,” in Rethink: Cause and Consequences of September 11, ed. Giorgio Baravalle (Millbrook, NY: de.Mo, 2003), 85. Page 230. “terror . . . collapsed distance”: Michael Ignatieff, “The American Empire: The Burden,” in Baravalle, Rethink, 389.

CHAPTER NINE

Page 233. “None”: Harry Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History: Conversation with Gilles Peress, Magnum Photographer,” April 10, 1997, http:// globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Peress/peress-con0.html. Page 233. “It was a time of cross fertilization”: Carole Kismaric, “Gilles Peress,” Bomb 59 (Spring 1997). Page 234. “The spirit of unmasking”: Morris Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4. Page 234. “dim referents in a ghostly allegory”: Dickstein, Double Agent, 4. Page 234. “Language started to disconnect”: Kismaric, “Gilles Peress.” Page 234. “more and more like an intellectual disease”: Kismaric, “Gilles Peress.” Page 234. “Peress’ photographs are exercises of mind”: Rieff, “The Quality of Mercy,” 2. Page 234. “a methodology of self doubt”: “Students Chat with Gilles Peress,” March 18, 1998, http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Peress/peress-chat1.html. Page 235. “the curse of history”: To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive (New York: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1999), 65. Page 235. “I remember my father”: To the Rescue, 64. Page 235. “It was as if the Jews went to Switzerland”: Tuller, “Through a Lens Darkly.” Page 235. “album of fears”: To the Rescue, 68. Page 235. “A Few Things My Father Never Told Me”: Of this piece, critic Eleanor Heartney wrote in Art in America, “Only Gilles Peress used the archive as a historian might, to fashion a representation of events in a way that illuminates the underlying forces which shaped them.” Eleanor Heartney, “Between Horror and Hope,” Art in America 87, no. 11 (November 1999): 75. Page 235. Brecht’s . . . War Primer: For more on this, see chapter 1, note 108. Page 236. “We, the Europeans, are floating in the vomit”: To the Rescue, 65. 290

Notes to Pages 236–245

Page 236. “I kept hearing this whole political language”: Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History.” Page 236. “a tool and a vehicle to understand”: Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History.” Page 236. “the postmodernist incapacity for dealing with the world”: Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History.” Page 237. “particularly obstinate bit of bourgeois folklore”: Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Sekula, Photography Against the Grain, 5. Page 237. “incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth”: James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 234. Page 237. “truth, reference and objective causes”: Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotexte(e), 1983), 6. Page 238. “where half of the text is in the reader”: Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History.” Page 238. “moment where my language finishes”: Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History.” Page 238. “has a way of speaking the loudest”: Kismaric, “Gilles Peress.” Page 238. “with a vengeance”: To the Rescue, 67. Pages 238–239. “These photographs, made during a five-week period”: Gilles Peress, Telex Iran: In the Name of Revolution, essay by Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi (Zurich: Scalo, 1997), unpaged. Page 239. “implicit abandonment of any moral position”: Grundberg, Crisis of the Real, 194. Page 240. while a large portrait of a cleric: He is Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, a prodemocracy cleric who was prominent in the early days of the revolution. Shariatmadari was later arrested, tortured, and killed by Ayatollah Khomeini. Page 241. “The mullahs are propagandists”: Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi in Peress, Telex Iran, 101. Page 242. “the wheel of death”: Kapuścińksi, Shah of Shahs, 12. Page 242. “the refugees heading nowhere . . . the mutilated world”: Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” New Yorker, September 24, 2001. Page 243. “It’s Munich all over again”: Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia, (Zurich: Scalo, 1994), unpaged. Page 245. “alarming and sublime realism”: Richard Pierre Claude, “Book Review: The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar,” Human Rights Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1999): 540. Page 245. “I work much more . . . like a police photographer”: Gilles Peress, “I Don’t Care That Much Anymore about ‘Good Photography,’” U.S. News and World Report, October 6, 1997. 291

Notes to Pages 246–256

Page 246. “As I look at him he looks at me”: Peress, The Silence (New York: Scalo, 1995), unpaged. Page 246. “Troubled and troubling”: Mark Durden, “Eye-to-Eye,” Art History 23, no. 1 (March 2000): 129. Page 247. “The look of the camera presumes itself”: Mirzoeff, “Invisible Again,” 88. Page 248. massive sexual violence: For more on this, see Jonathan Torgovnik’s photography book Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape (New York: Aperture, 2009). Page 249. “What made the camps almost unbearable”: Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 267. Page 250. “I had this feeling that I was going to vomit all the time”: Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History.” Page 250. “excessive and relentless”: Durden, “Eye-to-Eye,” 129. Page 250. “pre-political formless chaos”: Mirzoeff, “Invisible Again,” 88. Page 250. “Ours was an inarticulacy borne of sorrow”: Fergal Keane, “Spiritual Damage,” Guardian, October 27, 1995. Page 250. “My whole youth was permeated with Rousseauist ideas”: Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History.” Page 250. “kind of notion of 50/50”: Kreisler, “Images, Reality, and the Curse of History.” Page 251. “We are in a tension between the speed of history”: To the Rescue, 66. Page 251. “tattoo of heart in pelvic area”: Eugene Richards and Janine Altongy, Stepping through the Ashes (New York: Aperture, 2002), unpaged. Page 252. “The intimation of mortality”: Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan, and Charles Traub, Here Is New York (Zurich: Scalo, 2002), 10. Pages 252–253. “Photography was the perfect medium”: George and others, Here Is New York, 8–9. Page 254. “at once iconic and impermissable”: Tom Junod, “The Falling Man,” Esquire, September 2003. Page 254. “The desire to face the most disturbing aspects”: Junod, “The Falling Man.” Page 255. “allowed to speak for themselves”: George and others, Here Is New York, 9. Page 255. “that wisdom lies . . . in the collective vision”: George and others, Here Is New York, 9. Page 255. “I tried to drop every element of style”: Author’s conversation with Gilles Peress, November 20, 2008. Page 256. “It is far easier to be in Iraq with the Special Forces”: Author’s conversation with Gilles Peress, November 20, 2008. Page 256. “I think I’m in Cleveland”: Gilles Peress, “A Sleep of Reason,” http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/sleep-of-reason. 292

Notes to Pages 256–258

Page 256. “a perverse kind of fascism”: Grundberg, “Point and Shoot,” 109. For more on this, see chapter 2. Page 257. “post-postmodern”: Author’s conversation with Gilles Peress, November 20, 2008. Page 257. “We are entering into an age”: Author’s conversation with Gilles Peress, November 20, 2008. Page 257. “There is no longer a voice of authority”: Author’s conservation with Gilles Peress, November 20, 2008. Page 257. “the notion of the creator of images as a Nietzschean demi-god”: Author’s conversation with Gilles Peress, November 20, 2008. Page 258. “still a space to reorganize our thoughts”: Author’s conversation with Gilles Peress, November 20, 2008.

293

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to photographs. Abbas, 10, 38 Abbe, James, 180 Abu Ghraib photographs, xvii, 151–52, 171; and American exceptionalism, 152; American press on, 153–54; blamed on American culture of corruption, 152, 153–54; cultural debate about, 152; “Hooded Man,” 157–58; and status of photographs as documents of the real, 160. See also Gourevitch, Philip: Standard Operating Procedure Adams, Eddie Adorno, Theodor, 36, 44–45, 59; and aesthetic of false simplicity, 215; and Lanzmann, 93–94 Afghanistan wars, xvii; Nachtwey photographs, 212–13, 219, 220; persistence of, 135, 212; sanitization of images by Bush administration, 167–68 African National Congress (ANC), 220 Agee, James, xiv, xv, 4, 30, 155, 237, 247 Al-Aqsa TV, 162 Al-Arabiya, 162 Al-Ayyam, 170 Al-Jamadi, Manadel, 157, 159 Al-Jazeera, 162–63, 170 Allen, Henry, 209 Allen, Jay, 187

Al-Manar, 162 Al-Qaeda, media production house, 61 Al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 155 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 235 American pop culture, 153–54, 155 Améry, Jean, xv, 39, 66 Amnesty International, 43, 47 Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, 49 anti-Semitism, 73, 178, 180, 181, 184 Arab press, images of war between Israel and Hamas, 170–71 Arab television, violent footage, 155, 162 Arago, Dominique François, 15 Arbeiter-Fotografen movement, 24 Arbus, Diane, 193 Arendt, Hannah, xv; on Auschwitz, 90; on “black holes,” 99, 280; on compassion, 128–29; Eichmann in Jerusalem, 247; on failure of human-rights doctrines, 36–37; on the Holocaust, 97; on human alienation from history and nature, 35; on solidarity, 129, 147 Arnold, Eve, 179 Atget, Eugène, 17 Auschwitz, 36, 37, 201; only known instance of rebellion at, 89; photographs produced at, 68, 88–91, 95–96;

Index Auschwitz (cont.) Sonderkommandos (“Special Squads”), 88–90; Survival in Auschwitz (Levi), 99, 128, 214. See also Holocaust; Holocaust photographs Auschwitz Album, The, 95 auto-exterminations, 133–34 Azoulay, Ariella, 14, 60 Baathist party, self-documentation of torture, 51 Babel, Isaac, 53 Baer, Ulrich, 75 Baghdad, Iraq: “Al Hussein with his friends at recess,” 2004, 28–29; women mourning their relative, 2003, 26–27 Bah, Mohammed, 135 Balanchine, George, 4 Balibar, Étienne, 233 Bang-Bang Club, The (Marinovich and Silva), 220–23 Bangladesh, woman burned with acid, Dhaka, 2001, 32 Barthes, Roland, 16; Camera Lucida, 5–6, 65, 66; indictment of photography, 7, 21, 22 Baudelaire, Charles, 13, 14, 18, 31, 61; “What Is the Good of Criticism,” 3 Baudrillard, Jean, 237 Beah, Ishmael, A Long Way Home, 140–41, 144 Becherer, Max, 168 beheading videos, 155, 162, 163, 164, 166, 171. See also Islamic death videos Benjamin, Walter, xvi, 33, 67, 113, 181, 218; dialectical imagination, 237; on difference between paintings and film, 165; on fascist art, 198; fears about photography and independent judgment, 7; influence on photography criticism, 16; “Little History of Photography,” 17, 21; and subjective power of photograph, 17–18; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 17, 24. See also Weimar Republic Ben-Menahem, Arieh, 79

310

Berg, Nicolas, beheading of, 155, 156 Berger, John, 30, 34, 130, 166; “The Hals Mystery,” 264; hopes for revolutionary change, 147; influenced by Brecht, 21; reactions to images of political violence, 127–28; view of photography, 6–7 Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 180 Bernstein, J. M., 213, 214 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 207 Bhutto, Benazir, 150 Biafran children, 50 Biebow, Hans, 74–75 Birns, Jack, photographs of prerevolutionary China: Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution, 117–23; Communist strikes, 118; cotton thieves, 118; daily life, 118–19; economic inequalities in, 118; photographs of “comfort women,” 121–22; photographs of Communists about to be executed, 120–21; as precursor to Cultural Revolution, 119 Black Book of Polish Jewry, The (Apenszlak, ed.), xiii–xiv, xviii, 72, 84 Bosnian Muslims, 52 Bosnian war, 134. See also Farewell to Bosnia (Peress) Boxer, Sarah, 210 Brauman, Rony, 50, 279 Brecht, Bertolt, xvi, 16, 168, 181; defining voice in photography criticism, 20–21; distrust of photographs, 20; on feeling and emotion, 22–23, 24; War Primer, 235, 267; and Weimar era, 23. See also Weimar Republic Brothers, Caroline, 190, 198–99 Bruckner, Pascal, 128 Buchenwald, 92. See also Semprun, Jorge, Literature or Life Burgin, Victor, 11 Burrows, Larry, 207 Burundi, 134 Bush, G. W., administration: post 9/11 legal policies, 153; sanitization of images of Afghanistan and Iraq wars, 167–68

Index Cahiers du Cinema, 88 Calhoun, Craig, 103 Capa, Robert, xvii, 19, 24, 38, 67, 137, 269; Altalena incident, 193; antifascist images, 202; Aragon front, Spain, 1936, 174; background, 178–79; and Cartier-Bresson, 181; and Chim, 38, 181, 182, 183, 184; D-Day photographs, 185; Death in the Making, 187–88, 198, 215, 242; depiction of wars as contest between fascism and democracy, 192; “The Falling Soldier,” 176–77, 284–85; Gedera, Israel, photograph of immigrants in village for the blind, 193–94, 195; and Gerda Taro, 176, 181, 182, 187, 188, 191; immersion in battle, 176–77; lived knowledge of political possibility, 184–85; militant humanism, 202; opposition to photographing atrocities, 177, 185; in Paris, 181–84; persuading outsiders to support Loyalist Spain, 198; photographs from Israel, 192–96; photographs from Italian campaign, 185– 87; photographs from Spain, 190–92, 196–200; photographs of members of armed forces, 190; photographs of refugees, 193; Popular Front photographs, 183–84; portraits of Spanish Loyalists, 177, 187–88, 199, 200; questioning of morality of photojournalism, 219–20; as quintessential war photographer, 176; refusal to photograph death camps, 185; Slightly Out of Focus, 185; and Spanish Loyalists, 197–98; and symbolic import of mundane moments, 190–91; and tenderness of human relationships, 198; in Vietnam, 192 Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 15 Carter, Kevin, 220, 221 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 181, 182, 238 Centelles, Agustí, 196 Chandler, David, 58–59 Chelmno, 68, 91 Chen Lei, 100, 106 Chiang Kai-shek, 117

children, torture and killing of, 57, 112, 139, 279. See also photographs of suffering children child soldiers, xvi, 138–45, 280; aim of exploiters of, 139–40; amorality, 140–41; paradox of, 143–44; used as sex slaves, 139; viewers’ responses to photographs of, 141–45. See also Beah, Ishmael, A Long Way Home; Voeten, Teun China: emergence as world power, 103, 115; 1989 democracy movement, 103, 104; ostracism of in 1960s, 115; staggering problems of, 115, 116; turn toward hypercapitalism, 103 China’s Cultural Revolution: as attempt at democracy, 103, 107–8; infantilism and anti-intellectualism, 107, 277; influence on modern China’s development, 103; “Little Red Book,” 107; Mao-mania, 106–7; memoirs of, 108; photographs of, xvi, 101–23 (see also Li Zhensheng, photographs of Cultural Revolution); poverty during, 278; public shaming rituals, 102; punishment and humiliation, 104, 108; purification rituals, 109–10; “rebel factions,” 104; Red Terror, 104; Shanghai as center of ultraleftism during, 117; “struggle sessions,” 104, 108; symbolism, 107 Chinese civil war, photographs of, 116–23. See also Birns, Jack, photographs of prerevolutionary China Clendinnen, Inga, Reading the Holocaust, 95–96 Coll, Steve, 163 Colombia, 134 compassion, 128–29 compassion fatigue, 45 “Concentration Camp Dachau,” 68 Congo: Anglo-American abolitionist campaign, 48; “atrocity photographs,” 48–49; “crimes against humanity,” term first used in, 48; Leopold’s crimes in, 48–50; Twain, Mark, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 49–50

311

Index Congo, Democratic Republic of, 215; lack of institutions in, 143; mass rape in, 215; Nachtwey’s photographs of, 215–16; photographs of child soldiers, 142, 143. See also Nachtwey, James Convert, Pascal, 213, 214 cotton thieves, pre-Revolutionary China, 118 “crimes against humanity,” first used in Congo reform movement, 48 Crimp, Douglas, 8 criticism: Agee on, 4, 30; Baudelaire on, 3; connection between intellect and feeling, 13; Fuller on, 3; Jarrell on, 4; Kael on, 12–13; Kazin on, 4, 5, 13; modernist project of, 13. See also photography criticism; postmoderns Croce, Arlene, xiv, 4 cultural conservatives, condemnation of American pop culture, 153–55 Daguerre, Louis, 13, 15 Danner, Mark, 152 Darfur, 47 Daylight, 28 Dayton Accords, 243 Dean, Carolyn J., 41 Death in the Making (Capa), 187–88, 198, 215, 242 De Bode, Chris, 142, 143 Delay, Jerome, women mourning their relative, Baghdad, Iraq, 2003, 26–27 Demotix, 61 Denby, Edwin, xiv Dephot, 180, 181 Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, 178 Deutscher, Isaac, 277 development pornography, 40 Dhiya, Ahmed, “Al Hussein with his friends at recess,” Baghdad, Iraq, 2004, 28–29 Dickstein, Morris, 234 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 88, 90, 91, 159, 271–72 Dien Bien Phu, 192 digital photography, 61

312

Dobrodeev, Georgy Vladimirovich, 54 Doctors Without Borders, 43, 47, 50, 129, 135, 215, 279 documentary photography: documentation of world unfit for habitation, 37–39; dominated by liberals and leftists, 24; expectation for highlighting similarities among people, 67. See also photography criticism; photojournalism; postmoderns Doe, Samuel, 51–52 Drew, Richard, 253–54 Duhamel, Georges, 165 Dybenko-Sedyakina, Valentina, 53 Dyer, Geoff, 11 Eastlake, Elizabeth, 15 Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 67, 181, 201 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13 England, Lynndie, 155, 157, 158, 227. See also Abu Ghraib photographs Ermanox, 67 Evans, Gareth, 230 Evans, Walker, 247 Falconer, Delia, The Service of Clouds, 59–60 “Family of Man” exhibit, 1955, 130 Farewell to Bosnia (Peress), 242–45; desolation of those abandoned by world, 243; as documentation of current events, 243; highlighting of hands, 243; morgue photographs, 244 fascist aesthetics, 70; in Arab media, 170; Benjamin on, 198; in photographs of Spanish civil war, 197–200; Sontag on, 200 Feldman, Hans-Peter, “9/12 Front Page 2001,” 289 Flanner, Janet, 179 Flaubert, Gustave, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 14–15 Forgotten War (Nachtwey), 215 Foucault, Michel, 233 Frank, Robert, 215 Frankfurter Zeitung, 19

Index Frankfurt School writers, 16–25, 154, 168 Freedman, Stuart, 145, 146 French Revolution, secularized view of moral purity, 109 Friedman, Thomas, 162 Frost, Jeffrey, 159 Fuller, Margaret, 3, 31 Galeano, Eduardo, 39, 42 Gangale, Riccardo, 143 Garanger, Marc, 38 Gellhorn, Martha, 137; on China in 1941, 115–16; and fascism, 189; friendship with Capa, 192; journalistic disillusion, 47; on “passing the buck,” 159; program for China, 278; on Spanish civil war, 177 Genewein, Walter, 74–75 Georg, Willy, 73–74 George, Alice Rose, 251 German New Order in Poland, The, 72 Ghetto Fighters’ House, 79 Gidal, Tim, 181 Gladshtein, Yudif, 54 Godard, Jean-Luc, 88, 92, 233 Goebbels, Joseph, 201 Goldblatt, David, 10 Gollancz, Victor, 72 Goma, Zaire, Hutu refugees in, 50–51 Google Video, spectacles of atrocity, 163 Gourevitch, Philip: “Exile and Return,” 245; Standard Operating Procedure, 156–60 (see also Abu Ghraib photographs); We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 246 Goya, Francisco de, The Disasters of War, 208, 213 Graner, Charles, 157 Graves, The, 244–45 Griffiths, Philip Jones, 38, 269, 288 Grossman, Mendel, 78–81; photograph of Lodz Ghetto, 80 Grosz, George, 20, 22 Grundberg, Andy, 9, 60–61, 256 Guttman, Simon, 180–81

Haaretz, 169–70 Hagelin, Rebecca, 153 Harman, Sabrina, 158, 159 Hassan, Mohammed Jaber, 26 Hatzfeld, Jean, Machete Season, 246 Haviv, Ron, 272–73 Heartfield, John, 20, 24 Heartney, Eleanor, 290 Herbert, Zbigniew, 97 “Here Is New York” exhibit, 252–53, 254–55. See also 9/11 Hersey, John, 182, 184 Hersh, Seymour, 152 Hetherington, Tim A., 145 Heydecker, Joe J., 68, 85–87 Heydecker, Marianne, 86 Hicks, Tyler, 38, 168 Hilberg, Raul, 72 Hine, Lewis, 130 Hitler, Adolf, 53, 181; Mein Kampf, 71 Hobsbawm, Eric, 134 Hochschild, Adam, 48–49 Holocaust, 34; Arendt on, 97; as attempt to destroy victims before death, 76; designed to leave no witnesses, 97; diaries and archives of victims, 99; and human rights movement, 34–35, 36; Primo Levi on originality of, 76 Holocaust deniers, 88 Holocaust photographs, xvi, 45, 73; as form of resistance, 73; impossibility of “correct” reaction to, 75–76; Lanzmann on, 70–71, 91–92, 93–94; objections provoked by, 69–71; smuggled out of Germany, 71–72; taken by Auschwitz prisoners, 88–92; viewing of, 96–99. See also Nazi photographs Horthy, Miklós, 178 Howe, Irving, 185 humanitarian aid movements, 40, 47, 48, 50, 129, 218 humanitarian invervention, 129, 218, 249 human rights, 34–35; Arendt on, 36–37; consciousness of, and sentiment, 47; debate over meaning of, 268; Ignatieff

313

Index Human rights (cont.) on, 35; and photography, xvi, 37–40, 47, 48–50, 59–62; as political accomplishment rather than natural attribute, 37; Rorty on, 35–36, 47 human rights movement, as reaction to failure, 35 Human Rights Watch, 47, 140 Hungarian diaspora, 178, 181 Hungarian Jews, 95 Hunt, Lynn, 34 Hussein, Saddam, 51 “Hussein with his friends at recess, Al” (Dhiya), 28–29 Hutus, 51 Ignatieff, Michael, 35, 47, 216–17, 230 Illustrierter Beobachter, 68 Inferno (Nachtwey), 204, 209, 211, 217, 224, 228 Inkatha Freedom Party, 220 International Crisis Group, 146, 230 international intervention, Spain, 188, 189 internationalism, 47–48, 137–38 Internet: as democratic tool, 256–57; as potentially fascist, 60–61, 256; use by human-rights groups, 61; use by terrorist groups, 164, 169 interwar left, 189 In the Warsaw Ghetto, Summer 1941, 73–74 Iosifovich Vislyak, Yan, 53 Iran: photographs of prodemocracy demonstrations, 61–62; women’s demand for political voice, 26. See also Peress, Gilles; Telex Iran: In the Name of Revolution (Peress) Iraq, xvii; photographs from, 25–27, 255–56 Islamic death videos, 163–67; beheading videos, 155, 162, 163, 164, 166, 171, 174; deliberately performed for the camera, 163; evocation of intense anxiety, 166; “facticity of evil,” 166; as forms of war, 164; lure of forbidden violence, 166–67; need for “heightened presence of mind,” 165; viewing as collusion, 166

314

Islamic fundamentalists: condemnation of America, 155; women beaten or killed by, 169 Islamic websites, executions and suicide bombings, xvii, 152, 155, 162, 163, 164 Israel: Capa’s trips to, 192–96; as cause of the left, 193; photography books on, 193 Israeli press: taboo against celebrations of violence, 169–70; taboo against images of Palestinian suicide bombings, 169 Israel-Palestine wars, xvii, 134 Jaar, Alfredo, 46 Jameson, Fredric, 9, 40 Jansson, Peder, 210–11 Jantzen, Ulrik, 32, 38; woman burned with acid, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2001, 32 Jarrell, Randall, 4 Jean, François, 135 Jewish Museum, Frankfurt, 75 Jewish resistance, WWII, 84, 85 Johnson, Prince, of Liberia, 51–52 Jöst, Heinrich, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 64, 65–67, 68, 75, 79, 81–85, 87 Judenrat, 78 Junger, Sebastian, “The Terror of Sierra Leone,” 125, 127 Kael, Pauline, xiv, 3–4, 10, 30, 155, 165, 167; on Last Tango in Paris, 207; “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” 12–13 Kaldor, Mary, 46 Kamara, Fatmata, 139 Kapuściński, Ryszard, 52, 242; Shah of Shahs, 239 Kazin, Alfred, 4, 5, 13 Keane, Fergal, 250 Keane, John, 136 Keenan, Thomas, 26 Kertész, André, 187 Khmer Rouge, and Tuol Sleng, xv, 54–59 Killing Fields, The ( Riley and Niven), 54–59 King, David, Ordinary Citizens, 52, 53, 56 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 181 Klein, William, 215

Index Kleinman, Arthur, 40 Kleinman, Joan, 40 Koch, Gertrud, 70, 87 Korff, Kurt, 180 Koudelka, Josef, 38; photographs of 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, 160–61 Kozloff, Max, 11, 25, 218 Kracauer, Siegfried, xvi, 16, 67, 170, 180; on diminution of photographs, 18–20, 39; disdain for mass audience, 20; “Film 1928,” 20; on mass culture, 25; on Weimar era, 23 Krauss, Rosalind, 8 Krol, Roman, 159 Lacayo, Richard, 209 Lanzmann, Claude, 70–71, 81, 88, 91–92, 93, 94, 158, 167 Last Tango in Paris, 207 left: ideal of solidarity, 129, 137–38; modern, aversion to military action, 188; reactions to Abu Ghraib, 152 leftist internationalism, 137–38 Leica, 67 Leopold, King, 48 Levi, Primo, xv, 74, 185; on gray zone, 140; on originality of Nazi doctrines, 76; on the Sonderkommandos, 89; Survival in Auschwitz, 99, 128, 214; on time, 144 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, War, Evil, and the End of History, 134, 136–37, 138 Lewis, Jim, 44 Leys, Simon, 278 liberal internationalism, 216–17 Liberia, 134 Li Fanwu, 106 Life, 117 Lily Jacob/Lili Meier Album, 95–96 Lissner, Jorgen, 40–41 “Little Red Book,” 102, 111, 114 Li Zhensheng, photographs of Cultural Revolution, 101–23; “struggle sessions,” 100, 105–8, 113–15; underdevelopment of country, 116 Lodz Ghetto, 66, 74, 76–78, 80–81

Lorant, Stefan, 180 Lord’s Resistance Army, 142 Lubyanka prison, portraits of political prisoners, 52–54, 98; Ekaterina Alexeevna Zakharova, 55 Luce, Henry, 117 Lyon, Danny, 38, 165 magic-lantern shows, 48 Magnum photo cooperative, 182, 206, 208, 253 Magubane, Peter, 38 Makiya, Kanan, 28, 39 Malraux, André, 102, 137, 185, 216; association of humiliation with capitalism, 111; The Conquerors, 110, 115; Man’s Fate, 110–13, 117, 118, 121; prescience regarding wars of the 1920s, 111 Mandela, Nelson, 220 Mandelstam, Osip, 53 Mann, Sally, 130 Mansarah, Memuna, 124, 125–27, 147 Mao Zedong: on four “olds,” 104; and New Left, 103; unleashing of Cultural Revolution, 104 Marcus, Greil, xiv, 155 Marinovich, Greg, 220, 221–22 Marx, Karl, 34 Marxist ethics, xvi mass culture, 25 Matin, Le, 196 Mayer, Jane, 152 McCarthy, Mary, 10–11 McCullin, Don, 6, 10, 38, 207, 219; photographs of Biafran children, 50 McKibbin, Vasily Vasilievich, 53 Meddeb, Abdelwahab, 170 Meiselas, Susan, 10 “Mémoire des Camps,” 87–92 Mitchell, W. J. T., 11, 31 Mizban, Hadi, 168 Moaveni, Azadeh, 162–63 Moholy-Nagy, László, 181 Molzahn, Johannes, “Stop Reading! Look!” 19

315

Index Moore, Barrington, Jr., 109 Moore, John, 150, 168 Morris, Errol, 156, 158; “Zoom,” 159–60 Moyn, Samuel, 33 Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 264 Münchner Illustrierte Presse, 180 Munkácsi, Martin, 181 Munkakör (Work Circle), 178 Murray Town Amputee Camp, Sierra Leone, photographs from, 135–36; Memuna Mansarah and father, 124 Muslim civilians, depictions of wounded and dead from wars, 162–63, 168, 169, 170 musselmen, 185 Nachtwey, James, xvii, 60, 82, 185, 221; action of war on all sides of conflict, 225; aesthetic, 211; Ayod, Southern Sudan, famine victim, 204, 210; background, 207–8; Civil Wars, 220; “Collateral Damage,” 228; contrasted with Capa, 206–7, 215, 216–17; critiques of, 42, 82, 207, 209, 210–11, 213–14, 215, 217; and current disputes over photojournalism, 207; derided as exploiter, 42, 210–11; desire to photograph Crusades, 208; didacticism, 214; extended photo essay, 228; fascinated and inspired by war, 208; focus on civilian victims of war, 208–9; formalism and sense of completeness, 211–12, 214; Inferno, 204, 209, 211, 217, 224, 228; injury in Iraq, 227; lack of sentimentality, 219; “The Passion of Allah,” 229–31; photograph of Afghan woman mourning brother in Kabul cemetery, 212–13; photograph of Somali famine victim being prepared for burial, 212; photograph of triple execution in Afghanistan, 1990, 219, 220; photographs in Forgotten War, 215; photographs of Congo, 215–16; photographs of Kabul in 1996, 135; photographs of 9/11 attacks, 223–24;

316

post-9/11 work, 230–31; and question of intervention in violence, 218–19; Rethink: Cause and Consequences of September 11, 228–31; “The Sacrifice,” 227–28; segregation of text and photographs, 217–18, 230; subjects disconnected from history and politics, 205–6; transformation of subjects’ experiences, 214–15; view of wars in Muslim world, 224, 230; visual sophistication of photographs, 210–11; WAR, 224–26 Namuth, Hans, 196 Nazi death camps, xv, 66. See also Auschwitz; Capa, Robert; Grossman, Mendel; Lanzmann, Claude; Levi, Primo; Ross, Henryk, Lódz Ghetto Album; Semprun, Jorge, Literature or Life; Shoah “Nazi gaze,” 71 Nazi photographs: exposure of Nazi brutality, 72; Genewein, Walter, 74–75; Georg, Willy, 73–74; Jöst, Heinrich, In the Ghetto of Warsaw, 64, 65–67, 68, 75, 79, 81–85; Lily Jacob/Lili Meier Album, 95–96; radically disorienting, 76; as selfportraits of Nazi degradation, 71; Sniatyn death-pit photograph, 68–69, 79; unauthorized photographs, 68; viewed as tool of nation building, 67–68 Nazis: destruction of victims prior to deaths, 76; ideology, 70; selfdocumentation, 68–69 Neruda, Pablo, 188 new journalism (Weimar Republic), 180 Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967–70, 50 9/11: changed perceptions of class, 254–55; and collapse of distance, 229–30; “Here Is New York” exhibit, 252–53, 254–55; Nachtwey photographs, 223–24; Peress photographs, 251–55; photographs of those who jumped from burning buildings, 253–54; and racial unity of New York, 254; unusual visual event, 253 “1937 Guernica 2007,” 235–36 Nixon, Richard, 103 Northern Alliance troops, Afghanistan, 168

Index Ogrish, 163 Ohlsen, Becky, 166–67 Ojukwu, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu, 50 Oosterbroek, Ken, 220, 221 Orwell, George, 72, 175, 188, 196, 200, 284 Ouyang Xiang, 106 Oxfam, 129 Packer, George, 227 Pagetti, Franco, 139 Pagnoux, Elisabeth, 91 Pakistan, xvii; aftermath of suicide bombing, Rawalpindi, 2007, 150 Partisan Review, 10 Paz, Octavio, 200 Pearl Daniel, execution of, 164, 166, 167, 171 Peress, Gilles, xvii, 10, 38, 43, 61, 136; background and early life, 235; on defeat, 236; documentation of return of Kosovar refugees in “Exile and Return,” 245; “A Few Things My Father Never Told Me,” 235, 290; “Here Is New York,” 251–53; and Holocaust, 235; influence of political ferment of 1960s on, 233; on language, 234; 9/11 photographs, 251–55; “1937 Guernica 2007,” 235–36; at Paris Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 233–34; photograph of execution victim, Kosovo, 1999, 257; photographs as open documents, 238; photographs from Iraq, 255–56; photographs of aftermath of Wall Street crash of 2008, 256; photography as way of making meaning from reality, 234, 236; on postmodernism, 237; relationship to history, 235–36; “A Sleep of Reason,” 256; use of postmodern skepticism to enlarge photographic possibilities, 237–38; view of Internet as antiauthoritarian tool, 256–57; views of appeasement, 236; worldview, 236–37. See also Farewell to Bosnia (Peress); Silence, The (Peress); Telex Iran: In the Name of Revolution (Peress) photo essay, 180, 218

Photofreund, 67 photographs: ability to conjure deep emotions, 50; association with death, 65; dialectic between immediate appearance and viewer knowledge, 201; as encounter with the individual, 97; evocation of unexpected responses, 25; ideal of as interventions, 59–60 photographs celebrating cruelty, 51–59; Baathist self-documentation of torture, 51; lynching photographs, 51; Nazi photographs, 51; Prince Johnson of Liberia, 51; Sierra Leone Revolutionary United Front photographs, 51 photographs of people about to be murdered, 66–67, 272–73; China’s civil war, 120–21; Lubyanka prison, 52–54, 55; Pol Pot prisoners, 52, 54–59 photographs of suffering, xv; charges of desensitization against, 45–46; charges of pornography against, 40–42; as documents of protest, 33; and ethics of seeing, 60; as impure art, 44–45; presentation of specific individual suffering, 39–40; revelation of what ought not to exist, 41; strengths and weaknesses of, 52; “wrong” reactions to, 75 photographs of suffering children, 130–33; in Daily Worker, 1936, 132; Memuna Mansarah, 124, 125–27, 132–33; pure victimhood, 127; Tuol Sleng prison photographs, 57, 58; use of for manipulation and propaganda, 131–32 photographs of war: ambiguities as starting point of discovery, 28–30; dismissed as “war porn,” 40; intensified depiction of atrocity, 177–78; wars of disintegration, 135; wars of nihilism, 206; wars within wars, 269 photography: and ambivalence about technology, 16; anti-analytic nature of, 22; deceptive similarities, 21–22; as democratic medium, 13, 15–16; and globalization of conscience, 46, 47–48; and modernity, 13; and painting, 14–15;

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Index photography (cont.) postmodern, 8, 9; quasi-equal participation of women and men in nineteenth century, 15; as social medium, 13; of Weimar era, 23. See also photojournalism photography criticism, 4–13; antireality position, 237; argument that photographs have no inherent meaning, 196; Barthes, Roland, 5–6, 7, 16, 21; Benjamin, Walter, 16, 17–18, 20–21; Berger, John, 6–7, 16, 21; championing of sloppy aesthetic, 44; contemporary, 30–31; and debate over 2001 Paris exhibit, 87–92; influenced by Brecht, 16, 20–21, 24; Kracauer, Siegfried, 16, 18–20; photographs as sacrilegious, 87; postmoderns’ hostility to photography, 7–12; “rejectionists,” 69–71, 87, 93, 94, 97; Sekula, Allan, 7, 10, 11, 21; Sontag, Susan, xiv–xv, 5, 7, 8, 16, 21, 39, 40, 45, 156; “transcendentalists,” 94–95. See also postmoderns photojournalism: belief that perpetrators hide crimes, 52; criticism of too-beautiful or too-ugly pictures, 44; dialectic between immediacy and history, 202; and human rights, 37–39; inability to explain politics, 28–29; meaning deepened through specificity, 218; tension between humane impulse and imperative of journalism, 219–20, 221–22 PhotoVoice, 61 Physicians for Human Rights, 244 Picasso, Pablo, 235 Pictorial History of the Holocaust, The (Arad), 75 Pirouz, Rouzbeh, 155 Pirozzi, Giacomo, 144 PixelPress, 61 Polish Resistance, 71, 89 Pol Pot regime, prisoners of, 52, 54–59, 66. See also Khmer Rouge, and Tuol Sleng Popular Front, 38, 183–84, 216

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pornography: “development,” 40; Internet, 153; and photographs of suffering, 40–42 postmoderns: denial of freedom, 11; fear of sentimentality of women intellectuals, 10; hostility to documentary photography, 9–10; hostility to modernist photography, 7–12; on lack of objectivity of photography, 8; on relation of photography to capitalism, 8–9; skepticism about truth, xvii, 7, 237; view of photography influenced by Frankfurt School, 16 poststructuralism, 8, 16, 234, 237 POUM, 174, 175 preexecution photographs, 66–67, 272–73 Prince, Richard, 9 punishment vs. humiliation, 108 purity: in Cultural Revolution, 109–10; as religious concept, 109; secularized ideal of, 109 Red-Color News Soldier (Li Zhensheng), 101 Red Guards, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108 Reisner, Georg, 196 “rejectionists,” 69–71, 87, 93, 94, 97 Ren Zhongyi, 106 Rethink: Cause and Consequences of September 11, 228–31 Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), 169 revolutionary humanists, 102 Revolutionary United Front (RUF), Sierra Leone, 125, 135, 141, 144 Rich, Frank, 153 Richards, Eugene, 10 Rieff, David, 42, 131, 215, 279 Riis, Jacob, 38, 48 Ritchin, Fred, 272 Rodger, George, 182 Romania, “gulag” of orphanages, 208–9 Rorty, Richard, 35–36, 47 Rosenbaum, Ron, 171 Rosler, Martha, 9, 10, 11, 129 Ross, Henryk, Lódz Ghetto Album, 76–78, 79

Index Ross, Stefania, 76 Rothko, Mark, Light Red Over Black, 217 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 46 Rwandan genocide, 47, 51, 245–49; refusal of world to prevent, 249; world aid for killers, 249. See also Silence, The (Peress) Rwandan Patriotic Front, 248 Sa’edi, Gholam-Hossein, 241 Sakamaki, Q., 139 Salgado, Sebastião, 38, 39, 44, 129; derided as exploiter, 42; respect for subjects, 42; socialist-realism, 43; visualization of labor theory of value, 43 Salomon, Erich, 181 Sankoh, Foday, 145, 147 Sante, Luc, 43 Santora, Marc, 279 Saramago, José, 42 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 91 Sattlberger, Chris, 145 SAVAK, 232, 242 Scarry, Elaine, 39 Scharsu, Candace, 124, 135–36, 138 Schoenberg, Arnold, A Survivor from Warsaw, 44–45 Schwarberg, Günther, 81 Scorpions, 52 Sekula, Allan, 7, 10, 11, 21, 30, 40, 129, 237 Seldes, Gilbert, 155 Semprun, Jorge, Literature or Life, 92–93, 94, 97, 98, 99 Sessay, Issa, 135–36 Seymour, David (Chim), 38, 181–82, 183, 184, 187, 189, 196, 198 Shalev, Avner, 96 Shalyto, Afraim Mikhailovich, 54 Shanghai: center of ultraleftism during Cultural Revolution, 117; in Malraux, 110. See also Birns, Jack, photographs of prerevolutionary China Shapiro, Bruce, 164; “By All Means Look Away,” 166 Shariff, Abdul, 222–23

Shaw, George Bernard, 15 Shaw, Irwin, Report on Israel, 193, 194 Sheean, Vincent, 176, 189 Sherman, Cindy, Untitled, 217 Shimkevich, Emilya Markovna, 53 Shi Shouyun, 114 Shklar, Judith, Ordinary Vices, 126, 128 Shoah, 71, 81, 91–92, 94, 158 Shulan, Michael, 251, 252, 255 Sierakowiak, Dawid, 74 Sierra Leone, xvi; atrocities against civilians, xiv, 134; British intervention, 147; civil war, 125, 132, 134–36, 139, 140–41, 144, 145–47; last on United Nations’ human development index, 145–46; Makeni, 2004, 146; photographs of suffering children, 124, 125–27, 132–33; Revolutionary United Front photographs, 51; United Nations-backed war-crimes court for, 144. See also Beah, Ishmael, A Long Way Home; child soldiers; Mansarah, Memuna; Scharsu, Candace Silence, The (Peress), 245–49; depiction of experience of chaos, 249–50; framed with photos of a killer, 246–47; Hutu refugee camp in Goma, Zaire, 249; juxtaposition of extent of genocide with individual suffering, 247–48; religious framework, 250 Silva, João, 220, 221, 222 Sischy, Ingrid, 43, 44 Slate, 44 Sliwinski, Sharon, 48 Sniatyn death-pit photograph, 68–69, 79 Sobibor, 68, 91 solidarity, 129, 136, 147, 148 Solnit, Rebecca, 11 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 9 Somalia, 134 Songjiang, China, 1948, Communist prisoners, 121 Sontag, Susan, xiv, 8, 16, 130, 265; on Abu Ghraib, 153–54; establishes tone of distrust in photography criticism,

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Index Sontag, Susan (cont.) xiv–xv; on fascist aesthetics, 200; on Goya, 213; indictment of photography, 7, 21, 39; indictment of Salgado, 43; On Photography, 5, 45; on pornography of photographs of suffering, 40; on possibility of being affected by photographs, 196; Regarding the Pain of Others, 98, 208; and Standard Operating Procedure, 156. See also photography criticism Soviet purge trials, 104 Spanish civil war, 189, 196–200; comparison between fascist and Loyalist photographs, 197–200; connection to Israel in Capa’s iconography, 193; pro-Franco photographs, 198–99; role of photographs in, 132, 187–88, 190–92; as template for Capa, 192. See also Capa, Robert Sparticists, 180 Spiegelman, Art, 254 Squiers, Carol, 10 Stalinist prisons, 52, 53, 66. See also Lubyanka prison, portraits of political prisoners Stern, 75 Stone, I. F., This Is Israel, 193 Stone, Robert, 216 Stover, Eric, 244 Strand, Paul, 10 Strauss, David Levi, 11 Stroop, Jürgen, 73 Stroop Report, 73 Struk, Janina, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence, 70, 74, 75, 87, 95, 96 suicide bombings, 152, 155, 162, 164; aftermath of, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, 2007, 150, 168, 279; photographed as they occur, 163–64 suicide-by-fire, women of Afghanistan, 38 Survival in Auschwitz (Levi), 99, 128 Szarkowski, John, 9

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Tagg, John, 9 Taliban: killing of children, 279; video production unit, 61, 163, 169 Taro, Gerda, 38, 176, 181, 182, 191, 243 Taylor, Charles, 145 Tehran, Iran, 2009, prodemocracy demonstrators, 61–62 Telex Iran: incomplete nature of photographs, 238–39; In the Name of Revolution (Peress), 225, 232, 238–42; photographs of burials and cemeteries, 241–42; photographs of women, 241 Temps Modernes, Les, 88, 91 “Tereska” (Chim), 145 “terrorism of the gaze,” 138 Thurston, Anne F., 108 Tiananmen Square, 104, 114 Torfinn, Sven, 142 torture, 39, 48, 54, 57, 112, 152–53, 154, 157, 171, 232 “transcendentalists,” 94–95 Traub, Charles, 251 Treblinka, 91 Trotsky, Leon, 178 Tuol Sleng prison photographs, 54–59; photographs of children, 57, 58. See also Khmer Rouge, and Tuol Sleng Twain, Mark, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 49–50 “Twitter Revolution,” 61 Tynan, Kenneth, xiv, 4 Uganda, 134, 144 United Nations, 34 universal brotherhood, ideal of, 35–36, 197 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 34, 35 Vanity Fair magazine, 125 Vashem, Yad, 75, 84, 85 Vietnam War, 127 VII, 208, 215, 224, 229 visual technologies, and relationship between information and war, 61

Index Vitz, Paul, 153 Voeten, Teun, 125, 126, 127, 142 Wall, Jeff, “Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986),” 98–99 Wang Yongzeng, 114 war: as expression of emotion rather than ideology, 136; increasingly apolitical nature of, xvii, 133–38, 178; Jean on, 135; Keane on, 136; marked by violence against women and children, 133–34; Peress on, 236; “uncivil wars,” 136; wars of disintegration, 133–34 War in Spain, 198 War Primer (Brecht), 235, 267 Warsaw Ghetto: German tourists visiting, 68; Heydecker photographs, 85–87; Jöst photographs, 64, 65–67; official food ration, 82; uprising, 85; as “Waiting Room of Death,” 66 Warsaw League of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, 75 Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N., 103 We Have Not Forgotten, 1939–1945, 75 Weimar-era writers: antipathy to photography, 30; influence on photography criticism, xvi Weimar Republic: climate for journalism and press photography in, 179–81, 218; collapse of, 179; first illustrated

magazines and newspapers, 67; hostility between Social Democrats and Communists, 23, 179; influential theorists on photographic image, 67. See also Benjamin, Walter; Brecht, Bertolt; Kracauer, Siegfried Weisskopf, Michael, 227 We Shall Not Forgive! 72 White, E. B., 252 Wilder, Charly, 166 Willis, Ellen, 188 Wilson, Edmund, 3, 84 Winogrand, Garry, 215 With a Camera in the Ghetto (Grossman), 79 Witness Iraq: A War Journal, February–April 2003, 25–27 Wolff, Michael, 162, 170 Wolff, Theodor, 181 Woodward, Richard B., 209, 215 Wu Bingyan, 114 Yellow Spot, The: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany (anon.), 72 YouTube, 61, 163 Zagajewski, Adam, 242 Zajkharova, Ekaterina Alexeevna, 54, 55 Zelizer, Barbie, 45 Zheltikov, Alexei Grigorievich, 54 Zinoviev, Grigory, 53 Žižek, Slavoj, 154, 155 Zylberberg, Michael, 68

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