Image operations: Visual media and political conflict

Image operations

Image operations

Visual media and political conflict

EDITED BY JENS EDER AND

CHARLOTTE KLONK

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2017

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Contents

List of plates

List of figures

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk

Part IUsing images: metaphors, processes, affects

1Images of the world, images of conflict

Ben O’Loughlin

2Worldmaking frame by frame

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel

3Working images: Harun Farocki and the operational image

Volker Pantenburg

4Affective image operations

Jens Eder

5Method, madness and montage: assemblages of images and the production of knowledge

W. J. T. Mitchell

Part IIImages in warfare, insurgency and counterinsurgency

6Image operations: refracting control from virtual reality to the digital battlefield

Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell

7Sensorship: the seen unseen of drone warfare

Tom Holert

8Images that last? Iraq videos from YouTube to WikiLeaks

Christian Christensen

9Images of terror

Charlotte Klonk

10The making and gendering of a martyr: images of female suicide bombers in the Middle East

Verena Straub

11Photographic archives and archival entities

Ariella Azoulay

Part IIIImage activism and political movements

12Exposing the invisible: visual investigation and conflict

Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

13Human rights in an age of distant witnesses: remixed lives, reincarnated images and live-streamed co-presence

Sam Gregory

14The hunger striker: a case for embodied visuality

Bishnupriya Ghosh

15The visual commons: counter-power in photography from slavery to Occupy Wall Street

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Afterword

James Elkins

Index

Plates

1 Desktop screenshot © W. J. T. Mitchell

2 Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas , plate 45, 1924, photograph © The Warburg Institute, University of London

3 Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Matthew McGinity, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, T_Visionarium II , iCinema Scientia Facility at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Festival, 2008

4 Unit coordination in Virtual Battlespace 2, Bohemia Interactive Simulations, 2007 © Bohemia Interactive Simulations

5 The ARC4 augmented-reality display for the soldier of the future © Applied Research Associates, Inc.

6 Plan X visualises networking information on large touchscreen monitors to allow intuitive conduct of cyberwarfare, DARPA, 2014

7 Geospatial Intelligence conference (GEOINT) in Tampa, Florida, April 2014 © United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation

8 Predator C Avenger UAV Great War Machine , General Atomics promotional video, c. 2009 (Bravo.Alpha, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0dHKWjXn-E )

9 Predator Sensor , USAF video, 2014

10 #NotABugSplat , A giant art installation targets predator drone operators, April 2014, photograph taken from a small drone

11 Montage of CCTV footage of the men behind the 21 July 2005 failed bomb attack in London ( www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jul/22/july7.uksecurity9 )

12 Charles Maurin, Ravachol , 1893, coloured print, 220 × 137 mm, private collection, photograph © Charlotte Klonk

13 Arrest of Muktar Said Ibrahim and Ramzi Mohammed on 29 July 2005 in London ( www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2007/07/09/bomb_plot_trial_feature.shtml )

14 Video testimony by Sana Yusif Muhaydli, broadcast on 9 April 1985 on Lebanese television ( www.ssnp.com/new/multimedia.htm )

15 Photograph of Dareen Abu Aisheh, handed out by her family in Nablus on 28 February 2002

16 Photograph of Ayat al-Akhras, presumably taken on 29 March 2002 ( http://americanfront.info/2013/03/31/present-pflp-martyr-ayat-al-akhras )

17 Photograph of Reem Riyashi with her three-year-old daughter ( www.paldf.net/forum/showthread.php?t=549634 )

18 Portrait of Eliot Higgins, at his house, in his town and at work, Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

19 Reference image of Iranian 107mm rocket (left) and occurrence of Iranian rocket in Syrian war video (right), Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

20 Rajwa and co-activist of the Mashaa group at work, Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

21 Connecting Nabih Berri, Speaker of the Parliament of Lebanon, to his coastal house, Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski (map image © 2014 Google, DigitalGlobe)

22 Hagit Keysar’s work–archives in Jerusalem (left) and a still from video of House Demolition in East Jerusalem by Haitham Khatib (right), Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

23 Kids and kites, Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

24 Portrait of James Bridle (left), image of rendered drone as seen on online hobbyist forum (centre) and Bridle’s drone model in car park (right), Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

25 Render drone: canonical but deceptive drone image, Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

26 Real-sized drone model in the car park, Exposing the Invisible film series, 2014 © Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski

27 The Most AMAZING Video on the Internet #Egypt #jan25 (Hadi Fauor, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThvBJMzmSZI )

28 Kenya, 11 witches burnt alive, from kaotal.com (Serignesene, 2009, www.youtube.com )

29 Live-streamed arrest in Brazil (PosTV, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDO6tr6kgAk )

30 Irom Sharmila in Tales from the Margins (dir. Kavita Joshi, India, 2006)

31 Postcard from ‘Postcards for Irom’ campaign © Abhishek Majumder

32 Protesters hold banner of Irom Sharmila’s image in Srinagar © Dar Yasin (AP Photos)

33 Timothy O’Sullivan, Untitled (Slaves, J. J. Smith’s Plantation, near Beaufort, South Carolina) , photograph, 1861, image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

34 Jill Freedman, Untitled (woman burning draft card) , photograph, 1968 © Jill Freedman

35 Jill Freedman, Untitled (Rev. Kirkpatrick) , photograph, 1968 © Jill Freedman

Figures

1 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine , video, 2000 © Harun Farocki

2 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine , video, 2000 © Harun Farocki

3 Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire , 16mm film, 1969 © Harun Farocki

4 Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire , 16mm film, 1969 © Harun Farocki

5 Mohammed Atta, New York Post , 13 September 2001

6 Untaken photograph, Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, May 1945

7 Inaccessible photograph, Israeli prison, Hani Muzheir’s testimony, recorded by B’Tselem report on torture, 1994

8 Unshowable photograph, Tul Karem region, women and children who are part of a transfer of 1,100 people leaving the Jewish zone toward the Arab zone, under the auspices of the International Red Cross on 18 June 1948, V-P-PS-N-0-4-2679

Contributors

Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Comparative Literature, Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, USA. Her publications include From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008) and, co-authored with Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford University Press, 2012). She is the director of several documentary films, among them Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012), I Also Dwell among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004) and The Food Chain (2004), and has curated numerous exhibitions including Untaken Photographs (Ljubljana and Tel Aviv, 2010), Potential History (Leuven, 2012) and Act of State 1967–2007 (Centre Pompidou, 2016).

Luke Caldwell is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University, USA and a Beinecke scholar. His work examines the naturalisation of cyber and information warfare under digital capitalism and contemporary manifestations of the military–entertainment complex. He is a co-author with Timothy Lenoir of The Military–Entertainment Complex, forthcoming from Harvard University Press (2017).

Christian Christensen is Professor of Journalism in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University in Sweden. In addition to his edited volumes, he is the author of over forty journal articles and book chapters, as well as a large number of popular pieces on media and politics published in outlets such as Le Monde Diplomatique, Al Jazeera and CounterPunch. His current work revolves around technology, politics and news, and he is participating in three large-scale projects on (1) the use of new technologies by journalists in Sweden; (2) social media and national elections in Sweden, Norway, the United States and Australia; and (3) media, conflict and democratisation in South Africa, Egypt and Serbia.

Jens Eder teaches at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Previously, he was Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, and Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Hamburg. He has written on audiovisual narrative, film and politics, cross-media strategies, emotions in audiovisual media, media characters and representations of human nature in the media. His publications in English include the book Characters in Fictional Worlds (de Gruyter, 2010, with Ralf Schneider and Fotis Jannidis) and papers on characters, emotion, digital media and transmediality. A monograph on the theory of media characters is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press (2017).

James Elkins is E. C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. His most recent book is What Photography Is (Routledge, 2012). He writes on art and non-art images; recent books include Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong University Press, 2010) and Art Critiques: A Guide (New Academia Publishing, 2012). As of October 2015 he has stopped writing monographs in order to concentrate on an experimental writing project that is not related to art.

Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. She is the author of two books on contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalisation. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers University Press, 2004) addressed the dialectical relations between emerging global markets and literatures reflexively marked as ‘postcolonial’, and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke University Press, 2011) turned to visual popular culture as it constitutes the global. She is currently conducting research for a third monograph, The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization, which tracks the relations between globalisation and cinematic/post-cinematic images.

Sam Gregory is a video producer, trainer and human rights advocate. He is Program Director at WITNESS (www.witness.org), which trains and supports people to use video in human rights advocacy. He has worked with human rights activists – particularly in Latin America and Asia, including the Philippines, Burma and Indonesia – integrating video into campaigns on human rights issues. He was lead editor of WITNESS’s book Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press, 2005). He developed WITNESS’s Video Advocacy Institute, an intensive two-week training programme, and has taught on human rights advocacy using video at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Macalester College, USA. She received her PhD in Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016) is based on fieldwork conducted in the United States, France and Turkey and focuses on the production, distribution and circulation of international news images and the changing cultures of photojournalism after the digital turn. Specifically it addresses the labour and infrastructures behind news images. Her next project investigates photography as a tool of governmentality in the late Ottoman Empire. She has published in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Anthropology Now and Jadaliyya and has contributed chapters to volumes on global news and journalism, photography and memory, and visual cultures of nongovernmental activism.

Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski have been working worldwide to bring design and technology together with activism and campaigning for the past twenty years. They began working together in 2000 and founded the Tactical Technology Collective in 2003, an organisation working to build the skills of activists worldwide. In 2011 they co-founded Tactical Studios, a creative design agency for advocacy and co-authored the book Visualising Information for Advocacy (tacticaltech.org, 2013). Stephanie Hankey has an MA from the Royal College of Art and is an Ashoka Fellow. Marek Tuszynski is the producer and director of Exposing the Invisible , and previously co- founded the Second Hand Bank and the International Contemporary Art Network.

Tom Holert is a Berlin-based art historian, critic, curator and artist. A former editor of Texte zur Kunst and Spex, Holert is honorary professor of art theory and cultural studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where, from 2008 to 2011, he held the chair of Epistemology and Methodology of Art Production and co-coordinated the Center for Art/Knowledge (CAK) and the PhD in Practice. Holert is a founding member, since 2012, of the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne.

Charlotte Klonk is Professor of Art History and New Media at the Institute of Art and Visual History at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. Previously, she was a research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford and lecturer in the History of Art Department at the University of Warwick. She has been a fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. Her publications include, among others, Science and the Perception of Nature (Yale University Press, 1998), Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800–2000 (Yale University Press, 2009) and, with Michael Hatt, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods (Manchester University Press, 2005). She currently researches the history, role and dynamic of images in acts of terror, forthcoming as Terror: Wenn Bilder zu Waffen werden (S. Fischer Verlag, 2017).

Timothy Lenoir is Distinguished Professor of Science and Technology Studies and of Cinema and Digital Media at University of California, Davis, USA. He has published several books and articles on the history of biomedical science from the nineteenth century to the present and on the roles of federal programmes and university–industry collaborations in stimulating innovation in several areas of science, technology and medicine. Lenoir has published several recent studies on computational media and human technogenesis, including an extended essay, ‘Contemplating Singularity’, an edited e-book, Neurofutures, and several essays in the area of game studies. With Luke Caldwell, Lenoir is co-author of The Military–Entertainment Complex, forthcoming from Harvard University Press (2017).

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, USA. He is one of the founders of the academic discipline of visual culture in such books as An Introduction to Visual Culture (Routledge, 1999/2009) and, as editor, The Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 1998/2002/2012). He is also deputy director of the International Association for Visual Culture and organised its first conference in 2012. His most recent book, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke University Press, 2011), won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. His book How to See the World (Penguin Books, 2015/2016) is being translated into Chinese, Spanish and other languages. In 2012, he undertook a durational writing project called Occupy 2012. Every day, he posted online about the Occupy movement and its implications. He is currently producing an open source anthology of the project as an e-book.

W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, USA. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America.

Ben O’Loughlin is Professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is co-director of the New Political Communication Unit, which was launched in 2007 by Professor Andrew Chadwick. Before joining Royal Holloway in September 2006 he was a researcher on the ESRC New Security Challenges Programme. He completed a DPhil in Politics at New College, Oxford in October 2005 under the supervision of the political theorist Elizabeth Frazer and journalist Godfrey Hodgson.

Volker Pantenburg is Assistant Professor for Visual Media with Emphasis on Research in Moving Images at the Faculty of Media of the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany. Between 2010 and 2013 he was junior director of the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) Weimar, where he directed a PhD programme on the History and Theory of Cinematographic Objects. His book publications include Film als Theorie: Bildforschung bei Harun Farocki und Jean-Luc Godard (transcript, 2006), Minutentexte: The Night of the Hunter (Brinkmann & Bose, 2006; co-editor), Ränder des Kinos: Godard – Wiseman – Benning – Costa (August, 2010), Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Austrian Film Museum, 2012; co-editor), Wörterbuch kinematografischer Objekte (August, 2014; co-editor), Cinematographic Objects: Things and Operations (August, 2015; editor) and Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory (Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

Verena Straub is an art historian, working at the collaborative research centre Affective Societies at Free University Berlin. Previously, she was research associate at the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung at Humboldt University Berlin (2013-2016). She studied in Toronto and Berlin where she received her master’s degree in Art and Visual History and is currently completing her PhD thesis on video testimonies of suicide bombers and their adaptation in contemporary art. Verena Straub also works as a freelance journalist, contributing to national daily papers and art magazines.

Acknowledgements

Many of the contributors to this volume gathered in Berlin in April 2014 to discuss image operations across different academic fields. Others have since joined and through their generous gifts of time and hard work advanced our thinking on the subject beyond measure. We would like to thank all our authors for their remarkable dedication, their inspiring insights and their patience. A book of this kind is impossible without support by many helpful minds and hands. The conference that started our exchange received generous funding from the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung of Humboldt University Berlin and was graciously hosted by the Institute for Cultural Inquiry thanks to Christoph Holzhey and Claudia Peppel. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to David Becker, Nina Bergeest, Dortje Fink, Stefanie Gerke, Felix Kirschbacher, Maria Kleinschmidt, Christina Landbrecht, Jana Schröpfer and Franziska Solte for helping to organise the conference and for their astute comments while editing the manuscript. Trevor Paglen inspired us all with his work as an artist and researcher, which he presented at the conference in a dialogue with Isabelle Graw. The conference also included a section on image operations in the field of medicine. Although the contributions did not in the end become part of the book (because of its focus on political conflict), we are deeply grateful to the chairs and speakers of this section: Matthias Bruhn, Lisa Cartwright, Michael Hagner, David Kaul, Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles and Sven Stollfuß. The two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript provided constructive criticism and helped us in clarifying our arguments and the overall structure of the book. Our students in Berlin and Mannheim also contributed valuable questions and ideas. Lastly, many thanks go to Manchester University Press for guidance and unwavering support throughout the publishing process.

Introduction

Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk

Consider three well-known images. Each set in motion a particular kind of image operation that cannot be fully understood either by reconstructing the intentions of the producers or by considering single moments of its reception. Instead, a whole series of largely uncontrollable events came together to create a complex cluster of meanings that goes well beyond the images’ efficacy at any specific point in time.

Image A: on 11 March 1993, the photographer Kevin Carter accompanied a United Nations humanitarian aid mission to South Sudan. He had thirty minutes to take photographs. While the adults of the village were busy collecting the delivery from the UN plane, Carter saw a small girl crouching on the ground – too weak to move, too starved to notice him or the vulture directly behind her. He shot a photo and chased the vulture away. Two weeks later the photograph appeared in newspapers around the world. More than any other picture it seemed to capture in one iconic image the consequences of famine and despair in Africa. In 1994, Carter won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet soon a storm of protest gathered with unprecedented force in the mass media and on the Internet. What happened to the child, viewers asked. Why did the photographer not help her? Was his interest in shooting an iconic image stronger than his humanitarian impulse? The editors of the New York Times, where the picture first appeared on 26 March 1993, were forced to reply that the ultimate fate of the girl was not known, but that it was a rule for journalists in Sudan not to touch victims of the famine in order to avoid the risk of transmitting diseases. Three months after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for the photo, Carter committed suicide. In 2006, Dan Krauss shot the documentary film The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2007, and the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar conceived a video installation in 2006, The Sound of Silence, which also centred on the life and death of Carter in order to ask questions about the ethics of humanitarian photojournalism. The image had an impact on lives well beyond the tragedy that it depicts.

Image B: on 5 April 2010, WikiLeaks released a video that would make the whistle-blower Internet platform famous. Titled Collateral Murder, it showed video footage from the targeting system of a US Apache helicopter during the Iraq War in 2007. In the incident, the Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, the driver Saeed Chmagh and others were assumed to be insurgents and killed in a public square in eastern Baghdad. What shocked viewers around the world was that the assault continued after a minivan with unarmed adults and children arrived on the scene and two of them attempted to aid the wounded. The cynical comments of the helicopter crew as they made their decision to shoot caused a wave of moral outrage. Yet the publication of the footage also opened a can of controversy. Some criticised WikiLeaks for selectively highlighting certain aspects of the military battle in Iraq, whereas others applauded it for showing the abysmal truth of a nation that went to war on the precept of holding the higher moral ground (Adams 2010). Since its publication the video has been shared widely and is perhaps the single most influential set of images that has brought counterinsurgent image propaganda into discredit. On the one hand, its footage was instrumental in the death of innocent people and the imprisonment of Private Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, who was charged with disclosing the video. On the other, the video contributed to turning the tide of the war in Iraq, and to this day WikiLeaks’ fame is connected with its disclosure.

Image C: on Wednesday, 20 August 2014, a video appeared on YouTube that showed the execution of the American journalist James Foley by a member of the militant jihadist group, the so-called Islamic State (IS). It appeared that Foley was executed somewhere in the desert in Syria. In the video he is seen in a long orange shirt reminiscent of the jumpsuits worn by detainees at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The use of this garb has been an iconographic sign of militant anger against the United States for at least a decade. In contrast to earlier videos of this kind, however, Foley’s execution is staged in the open air. A wide stretch of the bleached Syrian desert, met at the horizon by the expanse of the blue sky, serves as the background of this scene. Behind Foley stands his masked executioner dressed in black, holding a knife in his hand. The stark colours and striking mise-en-scène are reminiscent of the 1995 Hollywood thriller Seven starring Kevin Spacey. It demonstrates IS’s remarkable media affinity, evident in most of its propaganda material.

After the White House confirmed its authenticity, the footage quickly spread through other social platforms on the Internet. In newsrooms around the world, however, it raised ethical questions. How to report the brutal murder without becoming a propaganda tool of the IS? How to preserve the dignity of the victim while acknowledging the undeserved cause of his death? Most newsrooms decided against broadcasting the video altogether, showing instead a single static image. Most even pixelated the face of the journalist.

Although the footage was immediately banned from social media, and in the United Kingdom just watching constitutes a crime, it has been found and viewed well over a million times in Britain alone. Beheadings have always attracted viewers. Yet in this case the actual beheading cannot be seen. A significant cut in the video comes between the raising of the knife and the separation of the head. It is as if the murderers knew that a botched beheading would have the capacity to be counterproductive. None the less, as controlled and image-conscious as the video appears to be, the reactions of the Western world were varied. On the one hand it stirred an unprecedented ethical debate that led to a fairly rigorous ban on its footage and a restrained, self-conscious showing of its imagery not practised previously when beheading videos were issued. On the other hand it drew the US government into a war in which it had so far been reluctant to engage. Whereas previously the US military declared it was acting solely as invited aids to the Iraqi Army, after the tragedy it began to conduct self-authorised air strikes in Syria in 2014. Allegedly, the video was intended to be a ‘Message to America’ (thus the title) to stop military interventions. Instead, it provoked a more concerted military action against IS than was ever planned. It is hard to say whether this response was a hidden aim of the producers of the video or whether their propaganda strategy backfired. Yet a man died in order for the video to come into existence. As is often the case in such no-win situations, the speed of deeds escalates and the spiral of deadly events spins out of control. More beheading videos were issued in the weeks that followed and more nations, such as Canada, were drawn into the war at home and abroad.

What do all three images have in common? Firstly, they all operate in areas of political conflict. The first stems from the field of humanitarian aid, the second from warfare and the third from the particular battle zone that insurgency and counterinsurgency produces. Secondly, they were all created with a specific purpose in mind, yet in each case their reception led to unforeseen and unintended effects. Thirdly, although all three images operated within the seemingly disembodied digital sphere of the Internet, their production and circulation led directly or indirectly to the physical death of real people. Finally, in all cases the images are the agens et movens in the unfolding of events.

This confluence illustrates the central premise of this book: images not only have expressive or illustrative, representational or referential functions, but also augment and create significant events. In all cases they are crucial factors within the dynamics of political conflicts. In what follows, we will define the contours of the field of image operations, consider empirical, theoretical and ethical questions that arise from their function in war, insurgency and activism and reflect on the relation between images, media and agency. Finally, we will survey existing literature on this subject and point towards some blind spots, before summarising the content of this book.

Image operations: contours of the field

Images are crucial to events in very different ways, only some of which have been explored so far. Well known, for example, is their power to create events by providing evidence. As several authors have argued, images not only depict news stories but are crucial to their legibility, illegibility and perceived reality (Barnhurst 1994; Azoulay 2008; Mirzoeff 2011). For many events to come to light, we require images. But, as Susan Sontag argued, if photographs are the only way to establish what has happened (as in the case of torture and other atrocities), then the evidence actually constitutes the phenomenon (Sontag 2003). Moreover, images, such as those produced in the prison of Abu Ghraib, are not only posterior but also anterior to events, and often the camera is an active, present participant in the scenario (Butler 2010; Nichols 2010). However, as the contributions to this book show, the causal effect of images is not exhausted by these two modes of operation. There are many different ways in which images are intentionally produced to have a specific impact. As their impact unfolds they become instrumental in a whole series of further events, both in the virtual and the physical world, that often go beyond the original intentions of their producers and sometimes even against them. It is in this sense that we understand the title of the book, Image Operations.

While images are operative in many areas of life – such as industrial production, navigation, surgery, advertising and pornography – political image operations seem to be of particular significance, as they regularly involve larger groups of people in fundamental ways. Political conflicts concern collective interests, values or goods, and they are fought out in ways that exceed usual forms of interaction and often threaten lives (Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research (HIIK) 2014). Today’s conflicts are mediatised: media amplify the volume, speed, reach and level of conflictual involvement, influence the representation, performance and development of events and are instrumental in the structure of power relations. They reduce, intensify or transform existing clashes and even generate new types of conflict (Eskjær, Hjarvard and Mortensen 2015, 8–11). In short, they do not just reflect or represent conflicts but play performative and constitutive roles within them (Cottle 2006, 9). Images are central to this process and it is in situations of conflict that their operational role becomes particularly evident.

This book focuses on the use and function of imagery in three areas: contemporary warfare, insurgency/counterinsurgency and non-violent political activism. Between them, we hope, the ground of contemporary image operations is sufficiently covered, so that a spectrum of uses, reuses and abuses will emerge that is salient enough to be transferred to other fields. All three areas are, of course, highly charged areas of contemporary life. Images of suffering may arouse compassion among the global public, but they may also contribute to ‘compassion fatigue’, depending on their form and the kind of reporting in which they are embedded (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010). Still and moving pictures increasingly function as ‘weapons of war’ (Sommer 2003; O’Loughlin 2011) in battles of ‘image warfare’ (Roger 2013), and violent images of political terrorism have moved centre stage in insurgency strategies (Bolt 2012, 259). In all three areas, image operations aim at relatively strong, direct effects. The persons represented or addressed are to be affected in vital ways; their bodies or behaviours are to be changed. This is true for people hit by drone strikes,