David Levi Strauss Et Al The Anxiety of

THE ANXIETY OF IMAGES
Author(s): David Levi Strauss, Yasmine El Rashidi, Allan Sekula, Abigail Solomon-Godeau,
Mark Sealy, Thomas Keenan, Atom Egoyan, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Willis, David Cole,
Ariella Azoulay, Lynsey Addario, Fred Ritchin, Anne Nivat, Pieranna Cavalchini, Enrico
Bossan, Marguerite Shore, Trevor Paglen, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Paul Kaiser,
Julian Stallabrass, Anne Wilkes Tucker, Tim Hetherington, Rasha Salti, Geoff Dyer, Susie
Linfield...
Source: Aperture, No. 204 (Fall 2011), pp. 50-73
Published by: Aperture Foundation, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24473667
Accessed: 27-09-2018 17:09 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Aperture Foundation, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Aperture
This content downloaded from 128.59.222.107 on Thu, 27 Sep 2018 17:09:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
•PROJECT
PROJECT
THE ANXIETY OF IMAGES

This past March, looking toward the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the United States, Aperture's editors emailed a large group of photographers, artists, writers,
curators, critics, and other cultural thinkers and asked them to consider the image's evolution,
role, and presence since that day. How have the past ten years—shaped by conflicts,
from the 9/11 attacks themselves to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to ongoing uprisings
overwhelming North Africa and the Middle East (and as we write, on May 1, the day of the
public announcement of Osama bin Laden's killing)—been visually articulated? At the same
time, with the advent of new technologies and social media, how have unprecedented modes
of image production, distribution, and consumption transformed photography? Our hope is to
represent a range of voices contemplating these circumstances that are in such flux.
The responses to our March invitation were culled and then finalized in late April. During
that short time frame, one of our contributors, photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington,
was killed with his colleague Chris Hondros while working in Libya. Another contributor,
photographer Lynsey Addario, was captured with three other journalists in Libya by
pro-Qaddafi forces; they were held for six days before being released. These tragic and
deeply alarming incidents underscore the continuing dangers journalists confront as
they unflinchingly bear witness, in both words and pictures. In this moment of globally
networked, 24/7 media, the relentless insistence and insinuation of images in our lives
exponentially increases their perceived power—visceral, immediate, and accessible—
as well as calling into question who holds that power, as in many cases the author of the
image is integrally bound to its subject. The anxiety is palpable.
As a springboard for this project, we posed the following series of questions to our potential
contributors, and welcomed them to reflect with words and images, and to pose questions of
their own if they wished. In the following pages are their responses.
• Have reporting and bearing witness changed since 9/11—both in photo-reportage and
written journalism?
• What is the role of citizen journalism?
• In the last decade, to what new ends has photography been used by the U.S. government,
Al Qaeda, and other political and social institutions—however extreme?
• Is there a time when images should be censored?
• What is the relationship between photography and national security?
• How does one "cover" war?
• What role, if any, does photography play in revolution, whether political or other?
• Do photographs still have evidentiary value?
• How would you define the concepts of "difference" or "other" now? Have those concepts
changed since 9/11?
• What are the current culture wars—why do they exist? Whose wars are they?
50/ www.aperture.org
DAVID LEVI STRAUSS YASMINE EL RASHIDI
As I write this, in April 2011, peaceful protestors The people—young and old, men and women,
in Cairo's Tahrir Square are again being beaten veiled and not—held hands and formed human
and shot, this time by the Egyptian military. The shields, around Muslims and then Copts, as
political future of Egypt is very much in doubt, they prayed on Friday in Tahrir Square.
with the Muslim Brotherhood organizing for the The young men linked arms to make a
upcoming elections, attacks on Copts rising, moving barricade around the women marching
and calls for stability at any cost increasing. for their rights, chanting for equality. "Clear
But no matter what happens from this point the way," they urged. "This is the women's
on, nothing will alter the fact that something revolution. Let them through."
extraordinary took place this year in Egypt. A young woman in a pink veil with an
On January 25, demonstrators gathered Egyptian-flag pin searched my bag, patted my
at twenty locations throughout Cairo to call body down, checked my ID. "I am seventeen
for freedom, justice, and the end of President and volunteering," she said, "for the love of my
Hosni Mubarak's autocratic thirty-year reign. country."
What started as a few dozen people fanning Protestors told jokes, made up rhyming
out across the city in the early afternoon grew lyrics, recited poetry, and painted banners with
to hundreds, then thousands, then tens of caricatures and witty slogans. The international
thousands, who converged on Tahrir (Liberation) media ran story after story about "humor" in
Square, where they were met by police and the Egyptian revolution.
state security forces as well as by thugs working Egyptians, three million of them, chanted
for the regime. Three protestors were killed and for President Mubarak to depart. "Irhal," they
850 were arrested that night. Police finally broke shouted—go away. "Irhal. Irhal!" They also
up the crowds with rubber bullets and tear gas. chanted for peace, silmaya, urging the crowd
But the rebellion had only just begun. After to remain courteous and considerate, even if
eighteen days of fighting, with the crowds in provoked. "This is the revolution," they called
Tahrir Square swelling to over a million, Mubarak into microphones. "The Egyptian one—we
finally stepped down, on February 11. want it to be peaceful."
The organizers of the initial demonstrations
were mostly university graduates in their A soldier held up his phone to take a picture
twenties (60 percent of Egypt's population is of the young children waving flags from atop a
under the age of twenty-five). Thirty of them nearby army tank.
had met the week before to plan the marches; A young man stood up amid the gathering of
inspired by the Tunisians, they hoped to get tens a million during Friday prayer; he took out his
of thousands of Egyptians out into the streets phone and snapped a shot: men and women
of Cairo to demand political change. They used praying side by side.
Facebook and Twitter to spread the word and A father placed his child in a military
to mobilize forces on the ground. As the pro man's arms. The young son held a banner:
tests continued, Egyptian intelligence services "Free Egypt." The gleaming dad captured
began to closely monitor Facebook and Twitter the moment with his camera, as did many
accounts, so an anonymously distributed passersby.
"Egyptian Revolution protest manual"— Young men, young women, held up their
containing a suggested list of tools, clothes, Blackberries, their Nokias, their slim Casio
marching routes—was passed out using email, cameras. They clicked and clicked and clicked
home printers, and local photocopiers. again: the man onstage; Mohamed ElBaradei,
(continued on page 52) (continued on page 53)
OPPOSITE:
OPPOSITE: Screen
Screengrabs
grabsfrom
fromfootage
footageofof
"Egyptians
"Egyptians THIS
THIS PAGE:
PAGE: Scenes
Scenesof
ofTahrir
TahrirSquare,
Square,Cairo,
Cairo,
January
January
protesting
protesting Tahrir
TahrirSquare,"
Square,"Cairo,
Cairo,February
February4, 4,
2011.
2011. 25-February 25, 2011. All photographs by Yasmine
Al
AI Jazeera
Jazeera English,
English,via
viaCreative
CreativeCommons
CommonsLicense
License
(Creative
(Creative
Commons
Commons
3.0 3.0
Attribution)
Attribution) El Rashidi. Courtesy the author
no. 204 aperture / 51
(Strauss continued)
By the time the authorities understood the policies of the regime for many years, and
that this uprising was different from smaller organizers could always expect a few dozen or
demonstrations that had been happening in perhaps a hundred people to show up. This
Cairo for years, and had moved not only to time it was different. Suddenly, everyone was
crush the rebellion, but to control the images there. And slowly it dawned on the people
of it, the damage had been done. When those that there were enough of them, this time, to
young people came out into the streets on demand change and get it. There were enough
January 25, they were armed not with guns of them, this time, to say no.
but with cameras, and they took thousands And as soon as they realized this, they were
of pictures that were immediately uploaded no longer afraid. You can see this happening,
to social media and other sites, and spread this dawning, in the images from Tahrir Square,
around the world. The images showed You can see people looking at their young
Egyptians standing up and fighting for their children wrapped in the Egyptian flag with
freedom, part of the contagion of hope that newfound pride. You can see bloodied young
was spreading throughout the Middle East. men and boys wearing impromptu helmets
As we have learned from China, Iran, and made of empty water bottles and shields made
other repressive states, the Internet does have of can lids. And you can see women and girls in
an off-switch. At about 10 p.m. on January 27, the images, veiled and unveiled, demonstrating
Facebook was turned off in Egypt, and Twitter and fighting side by side with the men and
fell silent shortly thereafter. Just after midnight, boys. "If we can fight and die with you," they
the Internet was shut down, and mobile-phone eventually said, "we should be able to pray with
networks came down later that morning. Yet you," and that, too, happened,
the images continued to be made. Everyone was in this together, and you could
To outside observers in the United States see in people's eyes, over and over again, that
and elsewhere, the images from Tahrir Square, recognition, that they were not alone anymore,
whether in print or on screens, were absolutely
riveting. If the usual media sources flagged When America's college campuses erupted
or one's appetite expanded, one could go to in antiwar protests in the early 1970s, the
Al Jazeera English on the web to get more governor of California, Ronald Reagan, vowed
comprehensive coverage and more images. to put down the uprisings, no matter what
Every day something astonishing happened. it took. "Nothing has ever been solved or
From the beginning, the images coming changed," he said without a touch of irony—or
out of Cairo were different from the images prescience—"by people demonstrating in the
one remembers from other recent popular streets."
uprisings and demonstrations. Technological As we watched the Egyptians recognize each
change is obviously a big factor. The images other in January and February, and risk their
produced by cell- and smart-phones today lives to come together to demand freedom and
are of a higher quality than phone images justice, we Americans were reminded of where
produced a year ago—or even a few months we came from, what we've been, and what we
ago. Small, inexpensive cameras now record used to stand for. The Egyptians reminded us
high-quality video. And the propagation of who we once were. ■
these images has expanded exponentially, via
smart-phones and the from
r reporting InternetCairo
especially.
and Note:fThe *uthor's
reflections in9ratefu'f0 El RM whose,
our personal
The way these demonstrations formed and communications gave me a context for the imag
proceeded also influenced how the images
looked. Things happened quickly, and access
David Levi Strauss is chair of the graduate program in Art
(in the beginning) was good. Participants on all Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Ar
sides were surprised by what happened. There York■ His most recent book is From Head t0
and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is a
have been demonstrations in Egypt against contributing editor of Aperture magazine.
52 / www.aperture.org
(Rashidi continued)
circling the square; their friends in tents; funny with brooms and paints and garbage bags to American people are moved by these scenes
signs; the pop band; the popcorn vendor, clean the city, the visual references that have in Cairo and across Egypt because of who we
women selling wigs colored red, white, and come to be associated with the Middle East are as a people and the kind of world that we
black; people giving out free food. Hundreds were changed—perhaps forever. The images want our children to grow up in.
and thousands of flags held high, blowing in a of the angry Arab, the raging terrorist, the
cool February wind. violent Muslim, the American flag in flames, Later that same month, when workers in
Activists set up a tent amid many others were challenged, transformed, replaced. The Wisconsin took to the streets in prote
in the square. "The Media Tent," one of them photographs of the Egyptian revolution stood of those demonstrations reached
explained. "We want to create an archive of in peaceful confrontation to the visual and Americans were holding up banners
the revolution. Anyone with images, footage, mental archetypes of the "Arab" world. This strike, fight, walk "like an Egyptian."
anything else, can bring it here. This is our Egypt that was reaching the world through On 2/11, then, a new—unedited—ar
revolution." millions of images—many of them made by of images of the Middle East was created.
My friends uploaded images to Twitter and cell phones—was a different reality to the one A new set of visual refere
Facebook when Internet and phone services that had grown in people's minds in the years Muslims, Arabs, was co
were restored. Bloggers built new websites. I since 9/11. of a revolution—political, cultural, and social,
emailed images to friends abroad. On that afternoon of February 11, at 3:06 p.m. but also a revolution about voice, experience,
EST, President Barack Obama spoke: and how the democratization of the image
The photographs that emerged from the making process through technology helped
eighteen days of the Egyptian revolution Egyptians have inspired us, and they've done redefine the
captured what even Egyptians could not have so by putting the lie to the idea that justice its people. ■
imagined until January 25, the first of those is best gained through violence. In Egypt,
days. In the images that came out of the it was the moral force of nonviolence—not
Yasmine El Rashidi is a Cairo-based writer. A former Middle
Utopian city within a city, Tahrir (or Liberation) terrorism, not mindless killing . . . that bent the East correspondent for the Wall street Journal, she has
was not only diversity and a sense of the arc of history toward justice once moreChronicle
w^ten f°r fe Washington Post Ms., Newsday and the
of Higher Education. She contributes frequently
individual, but also immediacy, intimacy, an Today belongs to the people of Egypt, and the to the New York Review of Books.
infinite series of fleeting moments, encounters,
emotions, gestures, of humanity. In that
ALLAN
square, where the process of image-making SEKULA
ALLAN SEKULA
was democratized through technology,
and every Egyptian had not only a voice
but a platform—a democratically moderated
Yll Ik
one—the real essence of the Egyptian
people was given space. This revolution
influenced, propagated, experienced, shared,
memorialized, through the tools of image
making and technology—offered the world, for
the first time ever, an unedited photographic
portrait of the most populous country in the
Middle East.
When Hosni Mubarak stepped down on

February 11, and when fireworks lit the skies
and crowds took to the streets that night in
celebration, and when Egyptians young and
old returned to the streets the next morning
OPPOSITE: Scenes of Tahrir Square, Cairo, January

29-March 18,
29-March 18, 2011.
2011. All
All photographs
photographsby Yasmine Allan Allan
byYasmine Sekula,
Sekula, Europa,
Europa, 2005.©/courtesy
2005. ©/courtesy Allan
AllanSekula
Sekula
ElRashidi.
El Rashidi. courtesy
Courtesy Yasmine
Yasmine El Rashidiei Rashiai Allan Sekula is an artist, historian, and author of many books, including Photography Against the Grain (1984).
ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU
ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU pictures appeared in the press, hours after the number of images reproduced o
video footage had been screened, they were of the dailies? An incalculable number of
The inevitable commemorations of the ten-year mostly repetitions, quite literally deja vu. After cameras pointed toward the site
anniversary of September 11, 2001, will soon the shock came its immediate diffusion; even and yet only thirty photogr
be upon us. Other than an anticipated run on internationally, the images on the front pages on the front pages of U.S. newspape
American flags (manufactured overseas), it's of newspapers were drawn from those video September 11 to 13. A profusio
hard to predict how the anniversary will be sequences already selected by the American and the sensation of always s
observed, for, like many of the new millennium's media. same thing?
catastrophes, nothing about this one can be Clement Cheroux, photography historian
said to be "over." By now, it is evident that and curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Was this repetition of
the so-called war on terror—thus christened has contributed a thoughtful and incisive numbing? Should
by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney—is no discussion of the imagery that came to (con
closer to resolution than it was ten years ago. symbolize 9/11 with his 2009 book from Point
And it is doubtful that the war's architects du Jour, Diplopie: L'lmage photographique a
expected otherwise. For with whom and with /'ere des medias globalises (Double vision: The
what entity would they negotiate? photographic image in the era of globalized
Paralleling the United States' permanent media). Cheroux draws upon Guy Debord's MARK
MARK SEALY
SEALY TO HELP ME
military mobilization, the "war on terror" has concept of "spectacle," but especially from UNDERSTAND THIS
become part of the mental woodwork, but also Roland Barthes's more highly focused
(IN FIVE INCOMPLETE CHAPTERS)
a growth industry well suited to the needs of the approach to the codes, rhetoric, and formal
national security state. Insofar as this country devices of press photography. Diplopie hones Chapter 1: The Documentary = To
remains in Afghanistan (the longest war in U.S. in on the processes of /'conization and how they It was the most photographed and video
history—and undeclared at that) and Iraq (a shape the public meanings of photographic taped day in history. Two of the world's tallest
war justified by official mendacity, including imagery. In other words, Cheroux examines how buildings destroyed by hijacked planes.
the claim of Al Qaeda's involvement), it is clear ideology comes to permeate the photographic The next day newspapers published photos
that the events of 9/11 have had enduring and record, and how this helps secure the desired of the horror, but there were some images so
metastasizing effects in the United States, meaning of what is seen. (Thus, when the awful they provoked rage across the world.
none of them salutary. Towers' ruins were dubbed "Ground Zero"—a These were the pictures of people falling.
Whatever the various spins imposed on term that had long denoted the epicenter of One photograph of a falling man was
the decennial commemorations this coming the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—the U.S.'s most controversial of them all. It was br
September, it is certain they will be lavishly wartime destruction of two Japanese cities distasteful, exploitative, voyeuristic. It was nev
illustrated. In terms of the photographic record, was effectively superseded by a new narrative seen again. . . . Some argued that the pic
it is likely that the major U.S. print media will of American victimization.) of the falling man needed to be confronted... .
republish many if not all of those images that Practically speaking, the process by which It alone gave a true sense of the horror of that
were most widely reproduced a decade ago, on an image becomes iconic is initially dependent day. The quest to identify one man became a
September 11 and 12,2001. The image selections on the scale of its dissemination. One picture quest to give name and voice to that horror.
will privilege those photographs that have of the burning Towers is just a picture of A journey to help Americans learn and recover
already come to be characterized as "iconic." the burning Towers; reproduced thousands from its darkest day.
The photographic imagery of 9/11 was, of times, it becomes an icon, although the
however, distinguished from previous repre- question remains as to which images will Chapter 2: The Film = To Help
sentations of disaster by the immediacy of become iconic. What, Cheroux asks, is to be You have a right to kill me. You have a right
its documentation and circulation. Captured made of the contrast between the vast visual to do that. . . . But you have no right to judge
by video cameras in real time as the event archive available in the first two days after me. It's impossible for words to describe what
unfolded, the most spectacular moments (the the attacks and the relatively small number is necessary to those who do not know what
planes approaching, then smashing into the of "scenes" that were constantly rebroadcast horror means. Horror. Horror has a face . . .
buildings; the fiery aftermath, the mountainous thereafter? He writes: and you must make a friend of horror. Horror
billows of smoke and ash, the smoldering and moral terror are your friends. If they are
skeletons of the Twin Towers, etc.) preceded Large numbers of photographs were made not, then they
their appearance as still images. When still on September 11. How to explain the small are truly enem
major sources for the extraction of surplus
value, but above all because it requires their
instrumentalization to constitute what I will call
here an "imagosphere"... a continuous layer

of images that places itself as a filter between
the world and our eyes, which become blind to
the tense pulsation of reality. Such blindness
... is precisely what makes the subjectivities
ready for submission to the designs of the
market, thus rendering it possible to recruit
all their vital forces for the hypermachine of
capitalist production.
Photography is too frequently presented

in isolation and dislocated from the wider
political debates concerning complex po

litical acts of violence. Photography and its
application as a tool for seeing the world, for
recording "truthfully" what the world looks
like, especially across the field of violent
acts, has often been conveniently separated
from the ideological forces simultaneously
at work that shape perception of the subject
in focus. ■
Sources of citations:
Chapter 1: 9/11: The Falling Man (dir. Henry

Singer, 2006). Chapter 2: Colonel Walter E.
Kurtz (Marlon Brando), in Apocalypse Now
(dir.Francis
(dir. FrancisFordFord Coppola,
Coppola, 1976). Chapter
1976). Chapter
3: Judith Butler, Precarious Life The Power
of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso,
2006), p. 34. Chapter 5: Suely Rolnik, The
Body's Contagious Memory: Lygia Clark's
Return to the Museum, January 2007. Trans.
Chapter 3: The Theory = To Help Me become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for Rodrigo Nunes.
Rodrigo Nunes.Accessible
Accessibleat:
at: www.eipcp.
www.eipcp.
There are no obituaries for the war casualties national self-recognition, and the means by net/transversal/0507/rolnik/en.
net/transversal/0507/rolnik/en.
that the United States [and Coalition forces] which a life becomes noteworthy.
inflict and there cannot be If there were Mark Sealy is the director of the London-based photography
organization Autograph ABP, which focuses on cultural
to be an obituary, there would have had to Chapter 4: The Photograph = To Help Me identity and human rights. He is a contr
have been a life ... a life that qualifies for Understand Aperture magazine,
recognition. Although we might argue that
it would be impractical to write obituaries Chapter 5: The Conclusion = To Help Me
for all those people, or for all people, I think Understand This
we have to ask, again and again, how the The blockage of the critical potential of
Richard Drew,
Drew, A
A man
man jumps
jumps from
fromthe
theNorth
NorthTower
Towerof
of
obituary functions as an instrument by which creation . . . occurs outside its own terrain,
New York's
York's World
World Trade
Trade Center,
Center,Tuesday,
Tuesday,September
September
grievability is publicly distributed. It is the not only because the mercantile-media logic 11, 2001, after terrorists crashed two hijacked
means by which a life becomes, or fails to takes the forces of creation as one of its airliners intothethe
airliners into buildings.
buildings. ©Drew/AP
© Richard Richard Drew/AP Photo
photo
(Solomon-Godeau continued)
looped sequence of planes/impact/explosion/ of circumstance and polemical intention

THOMAS KEENAN
collapse as a collective (or corporate) man- unfolding temporally that determined how
agement of trauma? Were the continuous they came to be taken, made, used, and Excerpted from an interview with Ozge Ersoy
media representations themselves the circulated (e.g., Dorothea Lange's migrant
trauma?2 Is the repeated viewing of "trau- mother, Joe Rosenthal's flag-raising Marines, The "photo-opportunity" refers to the moment
matic" photographs or videos a way of etc.). This conscious intention on the part when something happens in the world in order
managing their psychological effects? Did of the photographer serves to stabilize and that a picture can be taken of it. The traditional
this visual saturation help Americans to indeed distill the desired meanings. In other epistemology of photography presumes that
come to terms with the event or did it serve cases, the production was adventitious, even first of all there's something in the world, and
to transform the event into a manageable, if made by a professional photojournalist (e.g. then, in an independent or neutral way, it's
appropriately ideologized, and eventually the explosion of the Hindenburg dirigible, represented somewhere else. The structure of
even marketable, narrative?3 the Mai Lai massacre, the execution of a the photo-opportunity, however, indicates that
Writing in the wake of World War I, Sigmund suspected Vietcong). Within thesometimes
at least category ofappear in the world for
things
Freud argued that the compulsion to repeat, the "iconic image," one canthe
also
sakedistinguish
of a picture, that they wouldn't happen
even if based on what one wishes to forget two general types; photographs that
without depict
the image, and that the possibility of
(i.e. trauma), signaled the subject's ceaseless the event or situation in macro terms, representation precedes and in some sense
attempt to assimilate and master a psychic alluding to the collective implications of what makes the event. The sequence doesn't get
wound. In later writing, he linked it to the death is represented (e.g., the ruins of Dresden), completely destroyed, but rather somehow
drive and the self-destructive attributes of the or alternatively in metonymic terms, insofar scrambled, so that things happen in front of
human species, in this particular instance, as the individual or individuals represented cameras that are waiting for them to happen.
however, there is reason to explore what was "stand for" a larger context. Typically, these The slogan of this might be a phrase from a
the collective "work" of the imagery of 9/11 in depict victims of natural disasters as well as 1995 New York Times story from Sarajevo, in
the U.S. press as it was collectively mediated war or other catastrophes, and are frequently which the reporter chronicled a sniper shooting
and disseminated. deployed by charitable agencies to make their captured on videotape. The reason it was
As Cheroux demonstrates, many institutional appeal to the viewer. These too on
captured may belong
videotape is, the reporter says,
apparatuses (political, "mediatic," governmental) to the category of the "traumatic"
that "there was aimage, but
cameraman there, waiting."
determined 9/11 's representations, its short- more often than not, they operate
This within
phenomenon the
of a "cameraman there,
hand moniker included. "The iconographic rhetoric of pathos. waiting" doesn't seem to be singular anymore;
work of the press agencies," he notes, "accom- In the specific case of 9/11, political, it is a feature of contemporary reality. Cameras
panied the national mourning [but] without nationalistic, and other determinations required create a space and time of appearance in
excessively exploiting the painfulness and their own forms of trauma management (if which things happen.
violence of other shock-photos that could have not manipulation). Cheroux demonstrates It may be that this is a structure of rep
been chosen (bodies blown from windows, how very quickly the imagery of horror and resentation or signification itself, and cameras
cadavers, panic)." Even before New York devastation was supplanted by the imagery of are simply the currently privileged medium for
City's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani weighed in, the heroism, individual or collective. Among those, that. But the period we're talking about begins
press declined to reproduce any of the more the much-reproduced photograph of the New with the turn of the 1990s—with the 1989
terrible sights, such as shattered bodies or York firefighters planting the American flag in overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania, the fall of
body parts of those who had jumped from the the Towers' wreckage (reprising Rosenthal's the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, and the Rodney
Towers or been blown up by the planes?4 photograph of Marines at Iwo Jima) alluded King tape, among other things. The Gulf Wa
Tactful as such choices were, they remain not only to the "good" war (which Rosenthal's was the first time reporters were systematically
examples of the processes of routine self- image celebrated), but also to the indomitability embedded with fighting forces. It was also
censorship that implicitly underwrite a "free" of the nation in the face of aggression, the famous, or infamous, for the initial experiment
press. Whether in the service of good taste or triumph of the United States as symbolized by in corralling journalists in briefing rooms an
of sensitivity to their readers' or advertisers' its flag, and the agency of individuals in the face hotels, and subjecting them to videotapes that
sensibilities, such elisions are based on con- of disaster. Similarly, in the days following 9/11, were made by weapon systems as a substitute
sensual if largely unspoken boundaries that photographs of the Japanese attack on Pearl for reporting. This was another kind of phot
mark the mechanisms of self-censorship. Harbor were variously redeployed, aligning opportunity—the mechanically or technically
In certain of the histories of now- the attack by Al Qaeda with the surprise generated news image from laser-guided
iconic photographs there was a chain (continued on page 58) bombs, tele-guided missiles, and the like.
f)6 / www.aperture.org
critiquing. This engagement implies, then, an
affirmation of some possibility in the object,
event, or practice that is being criticized.
Every critique therefore commits itself to
concretizing, realizing, or manifesting what
those other possibilities might be. Jacques
Derrida uses the term "institution" for this. The
deconstruction of an institution implies taking

a position and making a commitment to an
alternative institution. In short, if a thing is worth
critiquing, one must take the risk of building the
Ifi 1
H |i . . J
alternative that's implied by the critique.
Documentary and photojournalism are both
ten rhetorical practices. Literary critic Paul de

Man distinguished between two moments of
K
' rhetoric. The first concerns ways of knowing.
If I say to you: "She's as lovely as a flower," I'm
■
not simply praising her but I'm offering you
Reporting from within military commands and they are thoroughly mediatized as well). My some knowledge—you know what a flower is,
was virtually the only way that foreign interest is in the reality-constitutive effects of and now you know that she is like a flower. This
journalists could cover the first Gulf War, on media practices. is the traditional cognitive function of rhetoric,
both sides. A few went "unilateral" as they Traditional journalism is still powerful at The other dimension is persuasive, which is
called it; they operated outside of the control the level of practices, assumptions, and about producing effects. I speak not to teach
of military forces. These reporters were mostly expectations. But there are all sorts of you something but to get you to do something:
in Iraq—some were captured and some were practices that challenge, extend, undermine, vote, buy, go to war, love, whatever. There is
killed. The bulk of the world's media, however, and transform it. There are other ways of a meaningful distinction between these two,
was in Saudi Arabia with the Americans and doing it, and there always have been, but they but they are also linked. There are images that
their coalition. Reporters have always traveled have been buried beneath the hegemonic convey what you call "immediacy"; they capture
close to militaries, of course; but the Gulf War institution of photojournalism and the heroic a moment, make it known and knowable, and
constituted the birth of an official practice and figure of the photojournalist. I am interested send it somewhere else. But they are not
doctrine of embedded reporting. in trying to identify and display what I call a bound by that demand. On the one hand,
In his 1992 book Hotel Warriors: Covering the "double gesture": a self-critical hesitation, a the distinction between documentary and
Gulf War, John Fialka quotes a Marine officer: turning away and a refocusing, an investigation photojournalism gets productively collapsed
"We regarded [journalists] as an environmental of the event of photography itself. It explores or fuzzy. On the other hand, we're not entirely
feature of the battlefield, kind of like the rain," he the time and space in which reality anticipates in control of that distinction anymore, whic
says. "If it rains, you operate wet." The media are the camera, where the image constitutes the means that the phenomenon of unleashing
equivalent to a force of nature. You can protect event—and it does it with cameras. becomes possible. ■
yourself against some of the negative impacts There's a tradition of thinking about critique Thomas Keenan teaches literature and directs the Human
but you can't do anything about its existence. as something that comes from outside. Rights Project at Bard College, with Caries Guerra, he
curated the 2010 traveling exhibition Antiphotojournalism.
You simply factor it into your negotiations with According to this traditional epistemology, one Keenan is a contributing editor of Aperture magazine.
all the other givens, and try to make use of it. should be at a distance from the object in order „ . .. .. . . . . .
Installation view of photojournalist Kadir Van
Media are a constitutive feature of battlefield to criticize it. In all sorts of contexts, we series
Lohuizen's value Diamond
Lohuizen's series
Matters, Diamond Matters, 2004-
2004-5,
reality. I use "media" in the broad sense, to this critical distance. But there's something
an extensive an extensive
research research
project into project into the diamon
the diamond
industry,
include traditional newsgathering with reporters flawed about the idea, in ethical terms as wellexhibited
industry,as part of Antiphotojournalism,
exhibited as part of Antiphotojournalism
curated by
and cameras, as well as the cameras carried as epistemological. A critique—or maybe weCarles Guerra
curated byand Thomas
Carles Keenan, and Thomas Keenan
Guerra
presented
presented at
atthe
theInstituto
Institutodede
Cultura:
Cultura:
La La
Virreina
Virreina
by fighters and fighting machines, on all sides, ought to call it a "deconstruction"—of an object
Centre
Centre de
de lalaImatge,
Imatge,Barcelona,
Barcelona,July
July
6-October
6-October
10, 10,
and then also people who are independently or an institution needs to remain attached
2010.
to
2010. Courtesy
CourtesyVirreina
VirreinaCentre
Centredede
la la
Imatge,
Imatge,
Barcelona
Barcelona
or critically monitoring the activities of states it, invested in it, contaminated by it. One only
Keenan's interview with Ozge Ersoy was originally pub
or militaries (we could nickname them "NGOs," critiques something that one deems worthy of nShed online at ArtTerritories.net.
(Solomon-Godeau continued)
assault of 1942. What in literary criticism is images only until the networks decided not to representation of 9/11. It reminds us that what
called "intertextuality"—by which meanings allow such a harrowing view, out of respect for is registered by the eye of the camera has no
from different texts and discourses inform the the families of those so publicly dying. At CNN, sense in and of itself—or better, no signification
reading of any given work—Cheroux adapts to the footage was shown live, before people in and of itself—other than those meanings
photography as "intericonicity"—by which the working in the newsroom knew what was brought to bear on it. The Falling Man thus raises
images of 9/11 come to be read through, for happening; then, after what Walter Isaacson, questions about photographic meaning, for not
example, those of Pearl Harbor or Iwo Jima. who was then chairman of the network's news the least suggestive element of the picture is its
bureau, calls "agonized discussions" with the radical ambiguity in terms of what it means as
Within the image world of 9/11 there was, "standards guy," it was shown only if people in opposed to what it represents. Its resistance
however, one series of photographs—of which it were blurred and unidentifiable; then it was to ideological management, its obdurate lack
a single frame was reproduced on page seven not shown at all. of "message" (either positive or negative), its
of the September 12 New York Times—that implacable registration of time, mortality, and
was promptly withdrawn and soon vanished But surely another reason for the difficulty fatality, in some strange fashion suggests the
from media coverage. This was the sequence of Drew's images (and others depicting the practical limits of mediatization. It reminds us
taken by photographer Richard Drew, who on falling bodies) had to do with the nature of the that notwithstanding the malignant domestic,
the morning of the 11th was contacted by his attack. In the immediate wake of the event, geopolitical, and military uses to which 9/11
editor and dashed downtown to photograph hospitals mobilized for what was expected to has been conscripted, there exists in the
the event. When Drew aimed his camera up be a massive influx of hundreds or thousands photograph a resistant core to all ideological
the height of the still-standing World Trade of casualties, but by the end of the day it was usages that finds an eloquent emblem in
Center's North Tower, he recorded, almost obvious that there would be no more bodies, this falling everyman, frozen between life and
unknowingly, the fall of a man from an upper nor even identifiable remains. Those that didn't death, embedded in the invisible histories that
floor. In his "iconic" shot, the man's falling escape from the Towers had effectively been produced the event, but which are nowhere to
body is for a split second aligned in perfect obliterated, consumed either in the impact be found (or seen) in its media depiction. ■
parallel with the piers of the Tower. One leg and explosion of the planes and the fires they
Notes
is bent as though striding; he is fully clothed ignited or in the final collapse of the Towers.
, , r . , ,, , ^ „. 1. This and all other English translations in
1. This and all this
other text
English are in
translations by
this text are by
and shod, his face imperceptible. Nothing intheHence,
author. one highly disturbin
the picture communicates the state (or agony) Man
2. Needless istheits
to say, conjuration
discussion of
here does not consider
those personally touched by the attack, whether friends
of the subject or his imminent destruction. bodies—although he too has n
and
and families
families of the victims, of the
or those victims,
who were otherwise or those
It is a photograph suspended both in and from official representation. personally affected.
personally affected.
out of time; like any photograph, it freezes The complex afterlife of this picture raises 3. upon
3. Fast Fastthe
upon
eventthe event
was the was the
appearance appearance of kitsc
of kitsch
,,, .. ... t ., ... , "souvenirs," ranging from coffee
"souvenirs," cups
ranging bearing
from coffee cupsthe image
bearing the image
temporal flow, but here it captures a split questions that range
of the flag-raisingfrom
firefighters the
to jigsawethics of of ,he f
puzzles and other
ephemera. Then there were theto
second between life and death, impossible photographic representation sales the
of photographs
conflicts ephe
. , ,, . , . , representing various aspectsvarious
representing of the attack,
aspects of theand last,
attack, and alast,
hosta host
for the human eye to register, an uncanny between editorial freedom and the of rights
literary andof 0f representations,
artistic literary and from artistic representatio
novels (by such
homeostasis that is haunting and troubling in victims and/or survivors. For theauthors
family as Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Safran
of the authors as Don Deuiio, Bret Easton
Foer),
Foer),toto
films
films
and made-for-TV
and made-for-TV
docudramas.
docudramas.
a very particular way. falling man, first (mistakenly) identified by a
4.
4. What
What Barthes
Barthes
calledcalled
the photo-choc
the photo-choc
(now conventionally
(now conventionally
The story of this unforgettable picture, its journalist for the Canadian daily The
referred to asGlobe referred
"traumatic to as
representation") as a "traumatic
topos in repres
itself could be usefully considered here. Traumatic imagery,
initial production, and the circumstances Of and Mail, the photograph's reproduction was itself could be usefully considered
however,
however, is neither
is neither
a genre
a nor
genre
doesnor
it necessarily
does it define
necessarily define
its rapid withdrawal, is brilliantly recounted by an invasion of privacy, and worse, seemed
a particular content. to
But a particular
within content.
this category, and as with But within t
-p i , , 1 1. . 11 1— . . ... , 1 , 1 ,, . , . . , , ,. certain pictures made oncertain
September
pictures made 11,
on September
some11, are
somethose
are those
Tom Junod in an essay published by Esquire in publicly label their husband
in which, dismembered or destroyed, the and father
human body is as a
September 2003.5 Junod writes: "suicide," a mortal reduced
sin tofor Catholic
meat, rather than bone. This isbelievers.
why the human reduc
skeleton
, | . skeleton is is far
far less less purified
taboo; taboo; purified of flesh,
of flesh, it retains
it retains its its
Three other families claimed to recognize him, readability as human,
readability affirming
as human, affirming the physicalarchitecture
the physical architecture
of of
theitself.
In the most photographed and videotaped day but in 2006 he was identified as Jonathan the body body itself.
On theOn the subject of
subject of traumatic
traumatic imagery, see
imagery, see
Susan Sontag, Regarding
Regarding the
the Pain
Pain of
of Others
Others (New
(New York:
York:
in the history of the world, the images of people Briley, an employee of the Windows on the Farrar, Straus
Farrar, Straus andand Giroux,
Giroux, 2003). 2003).
jumping were the only images that became, by World restaurant, on the 102nd floor of the 5. See also
5. See alsothe
the2006 television
2006 television documentary
documentary 9/11: 9/11:
The The
Falling Man, directed by Flenry Singer and filmed by Richard
consensus, taboo-the only images from which North Tower. Falling Man, directed by Henry Singer and filmed by Richard
Numeroff.
Americans were proud to avert their eyes. All Whether or not Drew's iconic but
over the world, people saw the human stream censored picture reemerges in decennial
debouch from the top of the North Tower, commemorations, it could well serve as a Abigail Solomon-Godeau is professor of art histor
University of California Santa Barbara. She is a contributing
but here in the United States, we saw these coda (not a closure) for the photographic editor of Aperture magazine.
ATOM
ATOM EGOYAN
EGOYAN
In the decade since September 11,2001, anxious

narratives of violence have come to determine
essential aspects of our global interaction;

borders are closing down even as the technology
to connect us to each other is opening up.
Three years ago, I investigated this course
of change through my film Adoration. The
story looks at the malleability of identity when
it becomes engaged with the monumental
abstraction of virtual communication, and
how the convergence of new technologies—
in our contemporary climate of paranoia and
ALFREDO
fear—can bend characters out of shape. JAAR JAAR
The ALFREDO
film is a postmodern story, in which ancient On Tuesday, September 11,1973,1 was seventeen years old. It was the day I lost my political
symbols and codes have become completely innocence. I was living in Santiago de Chile when General Augusto Pinochet and his troops
rearranged to accommodate personal fan- staged a brutal military coup that lasted seventeen years. My generation was marked,
tasies and needs. Since 9/11, relationships forever, with "wars against terror," censorship, lies, fear, torture, and exile,
between citizen, state, and family have been Qn Tuesdayi September 11, 2001,1 was forty-five years old. It was the day Americans lost
profoundly altered, and this image from the film thejr po|jtjca| innocence. I was living in New York when the most brutal attack on U.S. soil
suggests a bewilderment that underlies our occurred. New Yorkers and Americans have been marked, forever, with "wars against terror,"
human desire for connection and meaning. ■ censorship, lies, fear, torture, and exile.
I took this photograph in New York in the early 1980s. ■
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan was born in Cairo of
Armenian descent. Based in Toronto, he has directed more Chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar is based in New York. His most recent publication is The
than fourteen feature films, including 1997's The Sweet Eyes of Gutete Emerita (DIRAC, 2010). He is a contributing editor of Aperture magazine.
Hereafter, which was awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes
ABOVE: Alfredo Jaar,
Jaar, Untitled,
Untitled, 1983.
1983. Courtesy
Courtesy the
the artist
artist
Film Festival and was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Egoyan's most recent film is Chloe (2009).
Film still from
Adoration, 2008,
Adoration, 2008,
directed by
Atom Egoyan.
© Ego Rim Arts
Arts
DEBORAH
[) L B 0 R A WILLIS
H WILLIS firemen and their families. The story was not
necessarily news, the photographs did not
On bearing witness: need to be exhibited or published. For me it was
Reporting has become much more personal a story of reflection—that's what differentiate
since 9/11. Photographs and articles appear my own work from citizen journalism,
to be more T-centered and experiential. I like
the phrase "bearing witness," as numerous On whether images should ever be censor
photographers—Marc Asnin among them— I often think about this. The word censor
have gone beyond traditional photoreportage a sense of finality, but I have a strong feelin
by including images that not only have shock that photographs should be scrutinized
value but have a personal impact on both edited sensitively, to focus on the humanity
viewer and the photographer. "I was there" is the subject; the conditions of the subject mu
evident, and "I want to do something about be considered.
it" is implied in the framing of the image. So The recent re-presentation of lynch
the implicit and explicit have changed in images of black men and women in the Sou
photoreportage today. during the last century has been difficult: the
images needed words to contextualize how
On citizen journalism: the history of the black body has been viewed
There is a sense of immediacy in citizen in this country.
journalism. There is a moment at which the Certain scenes of suffering in the world
"concerned citizen" believes that the telling of have been photographed with great detail,
a story and the imaging of it do not have equal enhancing the beauty of form and composition,
importance. which can detract from the horror of the event.
I recall September 11 vividly. What started What would be the impact of censor
out as a beautiful morning in New York turned imagery?
out to be a traumatic day filled with fear. At
about 8:45 a.m. I was headed to the Upper On "difference" and "other":
East Side for my first radiation treatment for Central to this question is how the display
breast cancer. I recall driving up Park Avenue, of the disempowered body is viewed in a
listening to the sounds of sirens from fire trucks global context. History and colonization have
whizzing by the car, and taking the time to look profoundly determined the visual construction
and wonder what was going on. I didn't have of the "other" and the "othered body" in
the radio on but I noticed the beautiful and stoic contemporary culture. The notion of difference
faces of the firemen standing on the backs of is seen through the lenses of class, religion,
the trucks. They were silent, as I was silent. I gender, and race; it is also constructed,
thought: This is just a routine day for them, and exploited, and informed by public perceptions
today my life is in peril. Little did I know how and media displays in the press, advertising,
wrong I was. film, and television. Reception and acceptance
The first time I heard the term citizen journalist, of "others" can be achieved t
it was a few weeks after September 11. As a relationships and developing
curator, photographer, and cancer patient, I in which to examine human
had been forced by that day to reevaluate my means to be human. ■
photographs within the context of collective
memory. I had been drawn to photograph the Deborah Willis is chair of the department
makeshift memorials people had created in and imaging at New York University
the Arts. Her most recent book is Posing Beauty: Africa
front of fire-house doors throughout the West American Images from the 1890s to the
Village. I wanted to document the memorials- 2009>■ She is a contributing editor of Ap
which included candles, flags, bottles,
LEFT: T-shirts, LEFT:
Marc Asnin, Scenes Marc
from Asnin,
New York City, Scenes from
September
photographs, and hand-written notes to the11, 2001. © Marc Asnin11, 2001. © Marc Asnin
September
6c / www.aperture.org
ARIELLA AZOULAY
THE ARCHITECTURE
OF EXECUTION
The firing squad, the electric chair, the gibbet,

the scaffold, the guillotine, the gallows, the
noose: all of these are well-known "traditional"
methods of public execution. Each is a tool

that organizes space in a way that makes the
execution (in)visible to a certain public. These
means, when utilized in public, imply a plan, an
order, some preparation, and a certain power
or authority imposing the plan or order. In the
these measures, the administration was forced past decade, new means—not necessarily
DAVID COLE
to retreat. The Supreme Court held that the immediately identifiable as means of execution
The Georgetown law students pictured here Guantanamo detainees had a right to question
per se—have been implemented that should
are protesting a speech by Alberto Gonzales, the legality of their detention and that thebe added to this list: electric barbed-wire,
Geneva
in which he sought to defend the Bush Conventions should protect them. Congress (continued on page 62)
administration's authorization of warrantless banned the use of cruel, inhuman, or degrading
wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Gonzales had treatment against anyone in U.S. custody. And
intended his speech as part of a concerted renditions to torture were slowed or halted in the
White House public relations campaign to face of international condemnation,
justify the illegal spying program (once that When President Obama was elected, he
program's existence was revealed by the New closed the secret prisons, forbade coercive
York Times). The news of the day, however, interrogation, and reaffirmed the importance
was dominated not by Gonzales's speech, but of responding to terrorism within the rule
by the students' protest. They had dared to of law. Who compelled the most powerful
stand up to the Attorney General of the United nation in the world to change course? We did.
States. What could be more American? Ordinary people—like the students pictured
The terrorist attacks of September 11 here—stood up and objected. They included
prompted the United States to authorize the lawyers who represented Guantanamo
indefinite detentions at Guantanamo, without detainees, the journalists who brought abuses
charge or access to court or legal protections; to public light, the human-rights groups who
to "disappear" suspects into secret prisons, challenged the moral and legal validity of
where they were subjected to torture; to each case, and the community activists who
"render" still other suspects to security services prompted communities across the country
in other countries where they were tortured on to publicly condemn the civil-liberties abuses
our behalf; and to round up thousands of Arabs committed in our name,
and Muslims, inside and outside the country, If the "war on terror" reinforced the tendency TOP: Miki Kratsman, Gaza, 2003; BOTTOM: Yasser
who had nothing to do with terrorism. The Bush of government to overreact in times of crisis, itSaymeh, Palestinians inspect a crater caused by an
administration no doubt felt that, as the world's also revealed the power of popular opposition Israeli air strike on smuggling tunnels in Rafah near
leading superpower, the United States could to stand against abuses of authority and for the border between Egypt and the southern Gaza
Strip on May 2, 2009. Israeli warpianes targeted
not be challenged. Yet with respect to each of what is right. ■
smuggling tunnels along Gaza's border with Egypt
David Cole teaches constitutional law, national security, and criminal justice at Georgetown University Law Center. His most
while Palestinian militants fired a volley of mortar
recent book is The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New Press, 2009).
shells at Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip, accord
Members
Members of
of the
the audience
audiencestand
standup
upand
andturn
turntheir
theirbacks
backs
onon
Attorney
Attorney
General
General
Alberto
Alberto
Gonzales,
Gonzales,
rearrear
center,
center, ing to Palestinian and Israeli sources. No casualties
as he speaks at Georgetown University Law School, January 24, 2006. Photograph by Charles Dharapak. were reported.
© Charles Dharapak/AP Photo Kratsman: © Miki Kratsman: Saymeh: © Yasser Saymeh/AFP/Getty Images
(Azoulay continued)
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles equipped with sovereign decision. No ruler explicitly ordered
LYNSEY ADDARIO
cameras, expulsion and closed fortress border the deaths described as follows: "Died during
systems, Sentry Tech System (called in Israel, a rescue operation, the boat waited 4 days As the war in Afghanistan enters its tenth year,
where it was invented, "Spot and Strike"), and before it was allowed to reach Italian coasts"; many in the military have seen and endured
food-flow management. or "Died on way to hospital in Nador [Morocco] injuries, and many have seen fellow soldiers
die.
Traditionally, the visual rendering of execution after being shot by border guards inSoldiers tend to feel very responsible for
Farhana";1
is focused on the instant of taking life—we see or "Two people suffocate insideone another's safety—it pains them terribly
smuggling
when
this from Goya to Manet, from Robert Capa tunnel under Gaza-Egypt border."2 another
These new soldier goes down.
to Eddie Adams, from the Warsaw Ghetto forms of killing usually evade theOn
category of with a battalion in Helmand
my last embed,
to Kabul's Ghazi Stadium. The moment is "execution," because the deaths they produce Province, there was an urgent call about a
conceived as an echo of what has been do not necessarily involve a direct order to take wounded soldier one evening. I went along in
institutionalized in photography discourse as life, or because the killing is not carried out the chopper, which landed in a field. A group of
the "decisive moment": the rare instant that by an identified executioner, or because the Marines emerged from the darkness carrying the
encapsulates a whole situation in a single executioners (though acting on behalf of the soldier wrapped in a blanket; they placed him
snapshot. sovereign state) deny being the executioners. on the floor of the Black Hawk, where the medic
This focus on the "decisive moment" Execution is a distinct form of taking life: took his pulse, put oxygen on him, did everything
of death excludes from vision the larger it is a performance of a kind of text, be it he could in the five-minute flight back to the base.
apparatuses involved in executions. "Innocent" a prescription, a wish, or a political order, The soldier had hit an IED (improvised explosive
photographs today contain traces of a more This performance is attained in a particular device) and had lost a huge amount of blood.
complex environment, with its own logic environment that is created for (or by) the At the base, not a second was wasted: a
and modus operandi, not totally subject to a execution. From the architecture of the team of doctors was waiting; they cut open his
execution we can reconstruct the location of chest, massaged his heart, gave him blood.
the spectators, their part in the execution, theirThe only sound was of the team working
approval or denial of it, the encounter between methodically to try to save this soldier.
executioners and the executed, the lesson that The room filled up with other soldiers. I knew
is meant to be learned from the execution. my presence in the room would make some
If the revolution in Egypt offered hope of them nervous: most soldiers are suspicious
of a possible "civil contract" not based on of journalists, especially photographers, so I
executions, this hope was quickly lost in tried to be as inconspicuous as I could. I had
Libya and Syria, and it is continuously lost in permission to work in the forward-operating
relation to democratic regimes such as Israel hospitals—but the proper permission doesn't
and the United States. Execution persists as help in every situation. When a soldier has been
part of national programs to "protect" nation gravely injured, emotions run high. At one point,
states from outside "Intruders" or "infiltrators" a soldier tapped me on the shoulder and asked
or those deemed by democratic ruling powers me to stop taking pictures. One of the doctors
as a threat to the democratic regime. Citizens pulled him back and explained that this should
support this new architecture passively, most be documented. I continued, working as
of the time without being totally aware of the respectfully as possible. Some frames do not
consequences. reveal the wounded soldier's identity, others do.
In terms of visual record, the focus on theTwenty-eight minutes after we brought him
"decisive moment" of death obscures the in, the anesthesiologist asked the team if
anyone could think of anything else to try to
architecture of execution. Images of the instant
of execution presuppose a sovereign whose
save the soldier. Twenty-nine minutes after we
brought him in, he was pronounced dead. He
orders are implemented within a demarcated
TOP: Miki Kratsman, Nablus #2, 2003; BOTTOM:
TOP: Miki Kratsman, Nablus #2, 2003; bottom: regime, while in fact the directwas
signature of the
twenty-two.
Jobard, A hundred Tunisian refugees crowded
ruling power on a death sentence has become They prepared his body for transfer, and
aboard a sixteen-meter fishing boat during the
..... . „ . , . . , . . unnecessary. The death sentences inscribed as they laid a flag over the body bag, the
fifteen-day
fifteen-day crossing
crossing from
from Zarzis Zarzis toinLampedusa in '
to Lampedusa
March
March, 2011. 2011. 'n these apparatuses and the potential chaplain said a short prayer. The other soldiers
Kratsman: © Miki Kratsman: Jobard: © Jobard/SIPA (via AP) (continued on page 64)
Kratsman: © Miki Kratsman: Jobard: © Jobard/SIPA (via AP) filed outside and made a line to pay their last
respects as he was carried into a temporary
morgue before his journey home, to be laid in
his final resting place.
One of the hardest parts about being a conflict

photographer is photographing the dead, or
the living who are about to die. We as a nation
have been at war for more than nine years.
While images of dead Iraqis and Afghans
appear with some regularity in our press, we
see only a handful of photographs of dead
American soldiers. Death is the highest price
we pay for war, yet we rarely show it. Is this a
matter of respect or denial? We need to ask
ourselves why these images are censored, and
what might be different if they were seen. ■
Photojournatist Lynsey Addario has worked extensively TOp.TOP:

Lynsey Addario,
Lynsey Members
Addario, of theofU.S.
Members themilitary pay their
U.S. military payrespects to the late
their respects Marine
to the late lance corporal
Marine lance corporal
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict zones. Her
photographs have appeared in the New York Times, at at Dwyer
Dwyer BaseininAfghanistan's
Base Afghanistan's Helmand
Helmand Province.
Province. BOTTOM:
BOTTOM:Lynsey
LynseyAddario,
Addario,U.S. soldiers
U.S. transporting
soldiers transporting
National Geographic, Time, and many other publications. the body
the of theoflance
body corporal.
the lance BothBoth
corporal. photographs December
photographs 1, 1,
December 2009. Lynsey
2009. LynseyAddario/VII
Addario/VIINetwork
Network for Time
Time magazine
magazine
(Azoulay continued)
populations that might be executed by them are

FRED
FRED RITCHIN
RITCHIN NO DEPTH OF FIELD
usually not seen as part of established politi
cal communities. Overloaded refugee boats We will—I will—remember the beautiful, blue, cavernous skies. The television unreal,
that try to attain entry into fortress countries, surreal. It cannot be. It cannot be. (Can a television set convince?) Over and over again,
persons whose names are widely known to the impossible—until nightmares took over from our dreams.
be on secret lists prepared and administered "An accident," my son said, walking. It had to be an accident.
by the security services of various states Another one?
(Israel among them) are examples of known One of those scary movies?
in-advance death sentences. And the need for How to survive? Then (very soon) how to respond? Distance.
citizens' approval for the death penalty is now We are all photographers suddenly, or surrounded by them. Airplanes are grounded,
superfluous. Indeed, the citizens' collaboration a no-fly zone. (A no-photography zone?) All the students in my documentary class at
within this system is almost invisible. New York University (many lived in the buildings' shadow) refused to photograph—it
Today the "decisive moment" is that of the would have been taking advantage, not being present. One person did make a few
spectator—he or she must invent inventories pictures, but only to look at years later. To remind herself that she was there.
of new modes of execution in order to protect Did anyone else refuse to photograph? I asked the question much later, at a Barnes
what I define as the human right that should & Noble book signing of Magnum photographers who had just published a book.
condition all other human rights today: that is, How could we not? What an idiotic question, one of their elders remonstrated. We are
the right not to be a perpetrator. ■ photographers, after all.
Notes This part of the World transformed into Image (much of the world would try to
1.
1. From
Fromthe
the
listlist
of 13,621
of 13,621
documented
documented
refugeerefugee
deaths deaths follow). Where was Moses now? Grieving, like so much of life, requires silence—at
through
throughFortress
Fortress Europe,
Europe,
accessible
accessible
at http://www.scribd.
at http://www.scribd.
the very least to hear oneself.
com/doc/31207694/List-of-13621-documented-refugee
com/doc/31207694/List-of-13621-documented-refugee
deaths-through-Fortress-Europe.
deaths-through-Fortress-Europe. I had asked a major museum if it would exhibit the pictures that people were making,
2.
2. "Two
"TwoPalestinians
Palestinians
Die in
DieGaza
in Smuggling
Gaza Smuggling
Tunnel,"Tunnel,"
from perhaps
from in their window? Let us get back to you. No, it would be too disruptive of their
ynetnews.com
ynetnews.com (September
(September
21, 2008).
21, 2008).
See http://www.
See http://www.
ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3599973,00.html
ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3599973,00.html
current exhibition—the work of a fashion photographer. (One has to admire the will to
Israeli
Israeliwriter
writerArietta
Ariella
Azoulay
Azoulay
teaches
teaches
visual culture
visual culture
and and carry on.)
contemporary
contemporary philosophy
philosophyat theatProgram
the Program
for Culture
for Culture We put work online from all over the world at pixelpress.org; poems, videos,
and
andInterpretation
Interpretationat Israel's
at Israel's
Bar-Han
Bar-Han
University.
University.
She is She is
the
theauthor
authorof of
TheThe
CivilCivil
Contract
Contract
of Photography
of Photography
(Zone multimedia, photographs. The Israeli photographer living in Boston who photographed
(Zone
Books,
Books,2008).
2008).
only dust; the Swedish photographer who sent an image of an empty bench; the
posters of the missing ascending like a flame that so wanted to be eternal. What is
wrong with metaphor? Nothing.
And the anger and horror when we put the most devastating images online of actual
events; we took them down. "Life is a narrow bridge," the rabbi said, quoting another
rabbi. All we can do is cross it.
Ten years later, after seventeen million people worldwide took to the streets in the
largest demonstration in world history so that the United States would not invade Iraq,
there are sixty billion photos on Facebook. It is, they say, an achievement. Facebook?
And the wars? Can our photographs do anything at all? (Or do we turn it all into
The
TheField
FieldIntelligence
Intelligence
Corps,
Corps,
a division
a division of the Israel Image so that it will bother us less?)
of the Israel
Defense Forces currently comprised of roughly 60 A blackened, oil-covered bird; a polar bear stranded on a small piece of ice; a woman
percent women, showcased "Spot and Strike," a
bleeding to death on a Tehran street (an image made with a cell phone!); videos of
new weapon system that allows soldiers to defend
beheadings; an Afghan girl with no nose; "Charlie bit my finger"; and that old hippie
the border using remote control equipment to
chant: "Yes We Can."
detect and handle threats. Soldiers are trained
to use the system in a special course and have What I would not give for an improperly exposed Kodak snapshot taken with the sun
monthly training sessions throughout their service coming from just over the photographer's shoulder. We could call it "citizen journalism."
to ensure they know the field and are qualified to But there would be the light of the sun. The seasons. And someone we loved.
operate the "Spot and Strike" Sentry Tech System.
Instead we have all these other pictures. Now what? ■
This system was presented in early March, 2010.
"Spot and Strike:" Image obtained from "Israeli Defense Forces—The Official
Blog of the IDF," posted on March 3, 2010, by IDF, accessed April 14, 2011,
[http://idfspokesperson.com/2010/03/03/idf-field-intelligence-corps-showcases
[http://idfspokesperson.eom/2010/03/03/idf-field-intelligence-corps-showcases Fred Ritchin's most recent book is After Photography (Norton, 2008). He is a contributing editor of
s pot-a nd-stri ke-system-3-mar-2010/ Aperture magazine.
64 / www.ciperture.org
ANNE NIVAT AND PIERANNA CAVALCHINI
French journalist Anne Nivat has written to me The only difference between me and the
on a regular basis about her travels and work in soldiers is that I am unarmed. Of course, for the
Russia, Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan since local population that we meet, I am with them.
2004, when she was an Artist-in-Residence at That strange feeling of being on the other
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum at my side of the mirror for the first time.
invitation. Her first email that included photo- Here [below] we are at a checkpoint of
graphs was from Chechnya. Nivat talks about the the ANA (Afghan National Army), which this
images she has in her head of the Chechen war— morning has organized a shura (an assembly
a war, she believes, that almost never existed to discuss important community issues). The local population is not easily fooled: they see
for the American public, because CNN was not Canadian major says a few words through his this project foremost as a way for the military
there to film it. "No CNN, no war," she often says. mPWRtB&Z ■ ■ ••-■i ..rny to ship supplies. The security bubble around
Earlier this year, Nivat emailed me about . i. - the construction site is impressive: Leopard 2
recent experiences as a journalist embedded " ^ -p A- —-s tanks are deployed. Every day mine cleaners
with a battalion of Canadian paratroopers in I I 11^— m* jir I need to neutralize the lEDs (home-made
Afghanistan. Nivat says she takes photographs I L mines), which have been positioned at night
because today we have reached such a .< o1-' AC —"Jwfe jjAziH above the construction yard. This slows things
level of the "virtual" in our understanding/ down. After a bomb explodes the construction
misunderstanding of these wars (Afghanistan, k ; work can begin again. The road construction
Iraq, etc.) that photography helps prove what E ~ , y jNjTy , A moves slowly, about 1 m
we say with words, proves that we were there. On patrol in town, we see two women in
What follows are some excerpts from beautiful pale burqas [below]. They see us and
Nivat's emails. —Pieranna Cavalchini translator (he has his right hand on his heart). apprehensively rush inside.
Sitting under him are two important men who
1/3/11 Dear Pieranna: are clearly playing a double game: the man in 3/3/11 Ten days after my time with the military,
We are the end of 2010. This is the hour that all the black jacket and cap is the chief of police, I change my clothes, put on my own burqa
the world puts sadness to bed and celebrates at his left the very corrupt governor of the again and go back to living among my Afghan
the New Year. It seems a good time for me district. These local politicians make sure that friends in Kandahar.
to share, as a photo story—a rather special all military deals go through them so they can I am back where I usually am: with the civilian
format—what I have been living through in my take their cut. It works: if there is no take to be population.
favorite lands of Afghanistan. had, they readily accuse the local "contractors" Your friend, Anne ■
Here [below] you see me in the company of of being Taliban or of supporting the Taliban,
Captain Anne, a Canadian at Kandahar Airfield even when it is not true. In this manner
(KAF), the biggest Allied airbase in the world, everyone gets a slice; blackmail is assured by
which has room for up to 35,000 members the law of silence,
of military personnel and civilians. I am on the
airstrip, dressed like the soldiers: bulletproof 2/3/11 Our translator is a Pashtun. He wears
vest, ballistic visors, gloves and under-gloves. a scarf so the people of the village we are
patrolling will not remember his face or
recognize him; otherwise he will have problems
with the Taliban. Often even the families of
translators do not know what they do. I think

Award-winning independent French journalist Anne Nivat is
as long as Afghans are Still hiding their faces, based in Paris. She writes regularly for the weekly magazine
this war is far from over. Le Pointexperiences

and hfs pud'ishhed ^ai books about her war
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya. Her most
The Canadians take me to a construction site recent book is a graphic memoir called Correspondante de
guerre (Soleil Productions, 2009).
[right, top]: a road is being built, ostensibly so
the villagers
the villagers will
will bebe able
able to to travel
travel faster
faster and take Pieranna ?a"'' tthe ™"at°r contemporary art
and take
° at Boston s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is a
their goods to markets in nearby cities—but the contributing editor of Aperture magazine.
no. 204 apertur
ENRICO BOSSAN
It has long been thought that a photograph is

unable to change the fortunes of a war or a way
of thinking. But today, considering the images
online devoted to the Syrian revolution—and
the many other photo-documented uprisings
that have transpired in past months—we are
forced to reconsider that assessment.
Recent studies show that one person in

five, by the fact of having a cell phone, is
able to shoot photographs and make videos.
This circumstance exerts a significant, if
unintentional, influence on the nature and
quality of information: nearly any individual can
now be a witness to and report on any event.
If we take this "democratic" extension of the
possibility of contributing information, and add

the web's power to disseminate images in real
time and to evade the control exercised by
-O T
-^>fi
traditional media, we end up with the possibility
that visual evidence of a local rebellion
might become the precondition for a larger *■ V '

_•. J •
insurrection. The image becomes the point of
departure for political movement. The formal
S3 r
"neutrality" of information spread by traditional
media is replaced by the technical imperfection
connected to the emotion of those who are
! •. t" 1 t.-«
personally experiencing events and bearing
witness to them with their own eyes.
The tragedy of September 11 may be con • eseeSK. an™ I !L
n
jpmS| Ik HM
sidered symbolic of the difficulty of believing
our own eyes that often accompanies trau
matic circumstances. Never until then had it ■"v" iffc ill1"
been possible to document so instantaneously
the dramatic, disastrous nature of an unprec
edented historic and symbolic event; never
until then had it been so clear that an image
that captured a real event, live, might in fact
represent only one of many possible readings
of reality. ■
Translated
Translated from
from
Italian
Italian
by Marguerite
by Marguerite
Shore. Shore.
Photographer Enrico Bossan is the editorial director of

Colors magazine and heads the photography program of
Fabrica, the Benetton group communications research
center. In 2010 he organized the exhibition Neramadre,
about the NGO Doctors with Africa (CUAMM).
Video
Videothumbnails
thumbnails
obtained
obtained
from the
from
Syrian
theRevolution's
Syrian Revolution's
Facebook page, accessed April 8, 2011,
http://www.facebook.com/Syrian.Revolution.
66 / www. aperture, org
TREVOR PAGLEN
The twenty-first century has already become

a photographic century, even more than the
nineteenth or the twentieth centuries. Despite
the emergence of new regimes of photography
and debates about the politics of imaging,
photographers, ironically, have had remarkably
little to say about how new forms of imaging
shape our political and cultural lives.
The most obvious changes have come from
advancements in digital cameras, coupled with
new ways to search and share "cloud-based"
images. Flickr, Facebook, and Google image
search have remarkably transformed how we
see the world in general and photographs in
particular. With a quick search on my laptop
or phone, I can browse billions of images
and instantly access photographs from my
ADAM BROOMBERG & OLIVER CHANARIN friends' Facebook pages, combat soldiers'
photographs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and
tourist snapshots from Machu Picchu and the
Bertolt Brecht's War Primer is an idiosyncratic and shoots for real. As the artist Hito Steyerl
Bahamas. Moreover, I can search the metadata
collection of newspaper clippings dating from has noted, the gun and the camera have
World War II, published in East Germany in been inextricably linked since photography's
of those photographs and see who took them,
1955. In this book, Brecht attempted to make inception. In the 1860s photographs were when and where, on what kind of cameras,
sense of images of war, which he viewed as exposed on an emulsion made from a and at what aperture and shutter speed. Less
a sort of hieroglyphics in need of deciphering. byproduct of manufacturing explosives, and obvious is the fact that those cloud-based
He wrote a four-line quatrain to accompany the mechanisms of some early cameras were photo-networks and search capabilities are
each image to be read as instructions on how based directly on the mechanics of the Colt just the public—or corporate—version of
to decode it. "Don't start from the good old revolver; later film cameras were inspired by a much broader photographic revolution.
things but the bad new ones," said Brecht. machine-gun technology. Imaging systems—i.e. photography—in the
If he were making his War Primer today, The September 11 attacks—what Boris service of state power are far more advanced
Brecht would not work with scissors Groys and the Retort Collective describe as the and wide-reaching than anything I can do on
and newspaper; rather, he would find an ultimate "image defeat" for America—brutally my laptop or cell phone.
abundance of moving images on the web; demonstrated the reciprocal relationship 9/11 provided the popular justification for
images of our current conflicts recorded by between war and images. The subsequent new forms of state photography and for the
numerous witnesses—unmanned drones, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq can be read increasing role of the image in social control,
insurgents, citizen journalists, and even as a genocidal search for images to counter this now surpassing anything George Orwell
soldiers. We encountered soldier-photo- "image wound." And, in this lethal exchange of imagined. In downtown New York, police cars
graphers—or "combat shooters"—a few years images, the Brechtian task of critiquing these are equipped with automated cameras tasked
ago when we were in Afghanistan's Helmand "hieroglyphics" is more urgent then ever. ■ to record every license plate they pass,
Province working on our project The Day identifying any car whose driver might have
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are artists living in
Nobody Died, which examines the practice London. They are currently working on The War Primer II, a suspended license or overdue registration.
Of embedded journalism. Armed With both and theirlatest book is People in Trouble Laughing Pushed This information is then held in searchable
to the Ground (Mack, 2011). They are guest curators of
an M16 and a Nikon D5, the combat shooter Krakow Photomonth 2011. archives detailing where each car was on a
is a particularly troubled witness tasked with given date. Next-generation airport security
ABOVE,
ABOVE, LEFT:
LEFT:Page
Pagefrom
from
Bertolt
Bertolt
Brecht's
Brecht's
WarWar
Primer,
Primer,
the impossible job of documenting the events 1955;
1955; RIGHT:
RIGHT:Adam
AdamBroomberg
Broomberg
& Oliver
& Oliver
Chanarin,
Chanarin,
cameras in Florida instantly "recognize"
in which he participates. But if the fighting Combat
Combatshooters, Helmand
shooters, Helmand Province,
Province, Afghanistan,
Afghanistan,
becomes serious, he puts down his camera 2008. Both images
2008. courtesy Adam Broomberg
Both images courtesy &&Oliver
Adam Broomberg Chanarin
Oliver Chanarin (continued on page 68)
PAUL KAISER
The photographer I most admire concerned

himself with measurement rather than with
appearance. Etienne-Jules Marey was a

nineteenth-century physiologist whose
motion studies of a man walking or a
pelican flying met his scrupulous scientific
requirements for precision, and yet are
images that are still startling today in both
beauty and implication. Marey stepped
outside of two of photography's defining
properties. First, he was intent on capturing
not the single instant but a series of instants.
Second, his concern was not with likeness
but with information. Fie plotted the traces of
movement as points and trajectories, pushing
photography toward the drawn diagram and
outside its fixed frame, in pursuit of what the
(Paglen continued)
underlying data would reveal.
the identity of anyone traversing their fields spatial, political, and cultural, with remote Today, photography is dissolving into data
of view. And that's just the local cops and controlled missiles. The drone's remote, real on a scale vastly more complex than anything
airports. time imaging system enables the creation of a Marey could have envisioned. The current
CIA and military drones—little more than non-contiguous "space"
situation of warfare, composed
has well-remarked drawbacks.
cameras and missiles mounted to remote- of pilots, intelligence analysts, weapons The single photographic image—post
control aircraft—flown by pilots in Nevada, officers, battlefield commanders, and soldiers Photoshop—no longer carries the authority
produce new relational geographies of war "on the ground," all of whom participate in ait once did; nor does it have much chance
while reorienting our cultural relationships and given mission despite the fact that they're of commanding single-minded attention, as
attitudes toward warfare. When an American scattered across the earth. The same is true a flood of photographs is now always at our
robot assassinates someone in Yemen, is of the facial-recognition camera, coming virtual fingertips. But there are advantages,
there anyone "over here" to hear the scream? soon to your local airport. Photography has too. Digital photographs give us not just the
Needless to say, the National Security Agency's become a relational medium—a meta-network picture taken, but its metadata: time and
once-illegal warrantless domestic surveillance of machines, politics, culture, and ways of date; focal length, exposure time, aperture;
program (retroactively "legalized" with Barack collective seeing. geographic coordinates. Given multiple shots
Obama's support) almost certainly correlates Photography is not going away. On the of the same scene, computers can now
data from email and cell-phone records with contrary, it's just getting going. Photography recover the location and angle of the camera
digital images and photographs, search terms, is becoming more and more inseparable that took each shot, and reconstruct, in 3D,
bank-account statements, and other electronic from the workings of state power, corporate a semblance of the original location. With
records and traces. interests, and our everyday lives. And this minimal human intervention, hundreds and
A final, perhaps not-too-obvious point: these is something I think photographers
thousands of images
should
can be projected back
"new" forms of photography are relational. critically reflect upon. ■ into a shared three-dimensional space. This
Flickr, for example, is a site for presenting can yield astonishing results: it is as if one
„u t u u * -4.1 i t i ti ., ., Artist Trevor Paglen's latest book, Invisible, was published
photography, but it s also a network. That s the by Aperture in 2010. can now peer around the constricting frames
point. Ditto for the Predator aircraft; the drone is .. of photographs, seeing more there than flat
^ ABOVE: Trevor Paglen, They Watch
ABOVE: theThey
Trevor Paglen, Moon, 2010.
Watch the Moon, 2010.
a camera, but it's also a relational geography— Courtesy
Courtesy Altman Siegel, San Francisco, andAltman Siegel,
Galerie Thomas Zander, photographs and
CologneSan Francisco, could Galerie
ever reveal.
Thomas Zander, Cologne
. 'S-. ■■■% V J" -
"|4'' «
•t
'
68 / ivww.aperture.org
We can look back now and investigate past
events as never before. Consider how we might
now picture the destruction of the Twin Towers
on 9/11. The disaster took place in the media
capital of the world and occurred not in an
instant but over a span of two hours. No event
has ever been more thoroughly recorded—
from an extraordinary diversity of vantage
points: helicopter-broadcast feeds, cell phone
snapshots, news photography, amateur video,
etc. Add to this the non-visual viewpoints—
from sources such as news reports, text
messages, voicemail, email, blogs, eyewitness
oral histories, radio dispatches, police logs,
and so on—and you have intricate intertwining
streams of visual and textual information. 9/11
at Ground Zero yields itself easily to timeline

reconstructions and associated narrative
histories—that is, to traditional forms of
JULIAN
journalistic and historical accounts, as STALLABRASS
well as JULIAN STALLABRASS making of their personnel. Does the sight
documentary films, all of which necessarily of state torture and murder—not only the
take a linear form. In 2010 WikiLeaks released Apache gun- moment of death (as in the killing captured
What we have yet to do is find a way to sight video footage featuring the killing of by Eddie Adams) but the process by which
make sense of the overwhelming simultaneity over a dozen civilians in Baghdad, as well death is decided upon—change the citizens
that prevails in such events—the bewildering as the conversation of the pilots and their in whose name such things are done? Do the
number of viewpoints brought to bear on controllers. We see here, not for the first time, people in that Baghdad street make a claim on
just about every second of the event as it a state committing murder, not merely the us? It is often said that documentary images
unfolds. Our challenge, today, is to invent careless manslaughter of "collateral damage," alone lack the context and the explicit politics
a new way of picturing things, which is as but the deliberate targeting of people. In 1903 to enact political change. Here, though, the
much about navigating and recomposing as H. G. Wells imagined individuals in tanklike record seems ample; this is one of thousands
about taking in. machines, passionless killers who place their of such videos. If something holds many
We might start by imagining the ability to cross-sights on the troops outside, certain of people back from prot
move through the vast three-dimensional their own safety, and bureaucratically efficient lies far outside the fram
space of a single second. We could shift from in their slaughter. There is some of that of a compelling alternative
a view of the burning Towers framed by an efficiency in the WikiLeaks video: cowardly and its conduct, of demo
apartment window to one with the fire looming murder from the air, in which imperial powers and of the claim of all
right overhead; then to a shot looking down have long specialized, though there is also they live, not to be arbit
from the air and then peer out from a window outright enjoyment of the killing.
in one of the Towers. Matched to this instant The military is now a profligate producer junan staiiabrass is a writer, cu
might be the yearning good-bye left by a victim of digital images, many of which are used professorofart historyat theC
a J »» ' J a » > / curated the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, Memory of Fire:
for his loved ones, recorded as a voicemail as propaganda, and it has become adept images of War and the war of images.
on his home answering machine, and an at managing the image production of news ABOVE: Still
ABOVE: Still from Collateral
from Collateral Murder.
Murder. Obtained Obtained
from from
eyewitness reporter's rushed and terrified organizations to serve its own ends. Here, as the
theWikiLeaks
WikiLeaks website,
website, accessed
accessed April 12,April
2011, 12, 2011,
description as she decides how close to the at Abu Ghraib, they lost control of the image- http://collateralmurder.com.
http://collateralmurder.com.
disaster she can safely stand. ■
LEFT:
LEFT: OpenEnded
OpenEndedGroup,
Group,Example
Exampleofof
spatial recon-
spatial reconDigital artist Paul Kaiser is a founding member of the
struction
struction of
of aa site
site from
from an
an unstructured
unstructured collection
collection of
of OpenEnded Group. He and his colleagues Marc Downie
photographs. The reconstruction
reconstruction produces
produces aa point-
point and Shelley Eshkar create works that span a wide
cloud of
cloud of 3D
3D coordinates
coordinatesand
andthe
the positions,
positions, orientations, range of forms and disciplines, including dance, music,
orientations,
lens parameters
and lens parameters of
ofeach
eachphotograph.
photograph.(See
(Seewww.
www. installation, and public art. They have collaborated with
openendedgroup.com/spatial)
openendedgroup.com/spatial) such artists as Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham,
©© OpenEnded
OpenEnded Group, 2010 Group, 2010 Bill T. Jones, and Trisha Brown.
no. 204 aperture / fx
ANNE WILKES
WILKES TUCKER
TUCKER RELEASING FEAR
In 1940 Sidney Grossman and his wife Marion The 9/11 attacks ushered in a
r
Hille traveled through Oklahoma and Arkansas, new wave of paranoia in the United FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
kjj • ' H'V
where Grossman photographed local musi- States—directed largely against •CJAIO.NATTDAT CKIAHQMA
\
cians, farmers, and craftsmen. An FBI file Muslims, though anything out of mni«rti i_
was opened on Grossman that summer, the "ordinary" may now be seen as . INTERNAL SECURITY - C.
by a person (probably a local postmistress) suspicious. Photographers continue •- ■' v ^ '.z

s/nopsisoffact* qrcbSMAN
who was "doubtful as to the patriotism of to be detained, and sometimes r/ A . who are probably cocuaercial ph^t-ftpvphAT* i ■ .
1 alleged to be active Communists. fihil* . \ , , f'
\> in Oklahoma City, they associated with
both Grossman and his wife." She had noted arrested, if their subjects are deemed ^ ^ known Cocununicts. 1 '* •
"several photographs of poor people in tents questionable. Often those who stop ^
DETAILS: . tlT ■ ' '".'^called at the Oklahoma City Off
and shacks, as well as negatives of oil-well them are violating the photographer's
wrv. to make a oomplaint regarding Mr. and Mrs. SID GROSSMAN, of New-'
York City, who, on August 22, 19AO, rented an apartment from
' 5 Bplggg r.V>t 1406 H. Vi. 16th Street, Oklahoma City. GROSSMAN
pumps and equipment."1 The informant also lawful right to be where he or she is T, ax I e g caiyma ue photographs for different magazines and hag a large
amount of photographic equipment and flash bulbs. G»y£i3i^feaidrr.
that she had been doubtful as Iff the |>^*ih|| P°0SSlriN .
noted that Grossman was an "Austrian Jew," working. During the 2008 FotoFest, r, and hi - wife and that she had f"~ ^.."1 SS*
A ' ; ^>a!nd had noted sevenuTTfibvographs of poor people ;
'■ la tents ancl^ shacks as well as negatives of oil well pumps and^(
and his wife German. This report set in motion one photographer was stopped by equipment. •'-« £.«»<!
^L. was of the opinion th

years of investigations about the photographer, a security guard for shooting on the and also mentioned that GROSSM
is of German nationality. They
and about the Photo League in New York sidewalk outside the guard's building. have be® using the automobiles o
she had seen them leave their ap
Oklahoma License 1-36026, and in
(of which Grossman was a cofounder). The The following year, a photographer's of• grey color, bearing 1940 Okla
leave home about 5:00 P. U. each
late hour. She mentioned that Subjects apparently visit a great ded
League would eventually be named as an film was confiscated by a train guard at 1521 Northwest 23rd StreetV OKlahcma City.
alleged Communist organization and closed in because he was shooting from a New I ,>■
lEAinjEESJ
■""/Vir ? j(T*a & 194*
1951 as a result. York-Washington, D.C., train window.
w 5— Bureau' - 0EC23
In 1955 Robert Frank was stopped by an Photographers on public roads i 2 - New York City
%T
3- Oklahoma City ■
Arkansas State policeman, who wrote that he aiming their cameras at oil refineries T^~
/
COPIES DESTROYED^ SM£L£»
was "shabbily dressed, needed a shave and have been detained and arrested,
a haircut, also a bath. Subject talked with a In zones of armed conflict, the
foreign accent. . . . Subject had numerous dangers are acute and unpredictable. Pho- phones), we are all potential risks. The best
papers in foreign languages. . . . This officer tojournalists have been killed—some of them shield for photographers is to carry letter
investigated this subject due to the man's targeted deliberately (such as Martin Adler, recommendation attesting to their professio
appearance, the fact that he was a foreigner shot in Somalia in 2006) and others suddenly status. Just as Walker Evans's letter help
and had in his possession cameras and felt in the line of fire (such as Tim Fletherington Robert Frank in 1955, photographer Peter
that the subject should be checked out as we and Chris Flondros in Libya). Photographers Granser acknowledged that a letter from a
are continually being advised to watch out for in such zones understand that they are taking museum that holds his work kept him from bein
any persons illegally in this country . . . and calculated risks. But photographers working arrested in 2007 when he was photographi
the possibility of Communist affiliations."2 in the United States are not in an active com- outdoor advertising in Texas for his book Signs,
In both these instances, the photographers bat zone—civil-rights laws should apply. The thus fighting authority with authority. ■
were investigated because they were foreign photographers who have been stopped were /vofes
(or were presumed to be-Grossman was (they thought) simply shooting moments of ,.^^1 Bureau
1. Federal ofofinvestigation
Bureau report
Investigation report filed December
filed December 18, 18,
U.S.-born). Equally suspicious was that what daily life. 1940, Oklahoma 1940,city office.
Oklahoma City office,
2. Report
they chose to photograph could not be under- The perception of of R. E. Brown, Lieutenant
photographers Arkansas State
as 2- Report of r. E. Bro
Police
PoliceDecember
December
19, 1955,
19, 1955,
to Allan
toR.Allan
Templeton,
R. Templeton,
captain, captain
stood by those who initiated the investiga- threatening is not new: crusading photog-
Criminal Investigation Division. criminal investigation Di
tion. Their detainers could only understand raphers have long been confronted for bearing „ T „ „ ,, „
^ ^ ° Anne Wilkes Tucker is the Gus and
Anne Lyndall
Wilkes Wortham
Tucker is the Curator
Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator
photographs that served as evidence, and unpopular evidence. Whatever
of Photography our
at the Museum legitimate
of Fine of Phot
Arts, Houston. She
i , .. , .. . ,, i 1 _ organized the exhibition War/Photography, opening at
organized the exhibition War/Photography, opening at
presumed that the photographers purposes current MFAH
national
in November security concerns
2012 and traveling thereafter. Tucker is in the
a contributing
were nefarious. That a photograph might be may be, events editorlike
of Aperture
9/11magazine.
give license to
art was as incomprehensible as the foreign and bigots in uniform. In the name of
languages on Robert Frank's documents. defense, they hassle photographers a
In both cases, the evil motive feared was whose
FBI actions they
report listing "evidence" thatdon't
photographer understan
Communism, a fear compounded by the appearance they
Sidney Grossman don't
and his wife like.
were alleged active And as m
"foreignness" of the photographers. us are now armed with cameras (if only
Communists. Photograph by Will Michels.
70 / wwiv.aperture.org
TIM HETHERINGTON RASHA SALTI
From: Tim Hetherington September 10
To: Melissa Harris To many, to most, in America and no doubt
across the world, September 10 became a
Sent: Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:08:14 -0400
metaphor for the quiet before the storm, the
Subject: Article serenity of unsuspecting. In my short-lived
marriage, which came undone a year later,
Hi Melissa
September 10 was a remarkably blissful day.
I'm still wrapped up on Libya and will be here till the 25th. My September 10 was a long car ride
I have a picture I want to use as a basis to say something—it's by Christoph Bangert and from
is Washington, D.C., to New York City on
of a man with his head basically cut off dumped on a rubbish dump. It's a photo I can't get out
a gorgeous, crisp autumn day. My husband
of my head and I'm interested why—and I think this goes to something about the capacity for
and I were driving home after a weekend with
photography to continue to haunt us despite new technology and critics' desire to say the image isfriends. For the entirety of the journey, we
his
impotent. It also plays into body horror, iconography of horror etc. sang along to classic soul and R&B songs. I
remember reckoning that his friends could
But I need more time and space to write something—unless you are just looking for five lines. Can
the deadline be extended a bit? become my new family, and I just might be
able to start a new life in this country. We had
All best, Tim
been married almost a year. I was his third
Editors' note: On April 20, 2011, photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington was killed in the city of Misurata, Libya, wife, he my first husband. He was twenty
when he and others came under fire at the city's front lines. His diverse work ranged from digital projections at the Institute
of Contemporary Art in London to fly-poster exhibitions in Lagos to hand-held-device downloads. His awards include thetwo years my senior, a brilliant academic
World Press Photo of the Year (2008), and the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival for the documentary film with radical politics. I had just completed
Restrepo, co-directed with Sebastian Junger. Hetherington was a contributing photographer to Vanity Fair and his most
recent book was Infidei (Chris Boot Ltd, 2010). ■ my graduate studies, and was daunted by
the prospect of making a meaningful life for
myself in America. I had never wanted to be
an immigrant but such was my predicament
if I wanted to be with him. Even though it was
entirely willed, uprooting myself from my native
Lebanon had thus far been profoundly painful.
The silent interior alienation felt tacitly, eerily,
like a socially accepted form of dementia.
Boxed in the car, we forgot we had married
too quickly and remembered why we had
married in the first place. I found the confidence
to ask my husband (again) if I could consider
getting pregnant by November. I remember he
said the prospect of parenting with me filled
him with regenerative joy. For the rest of the
drive, the listless American horizon, the sullen
rest stops, the soulless stacks of residential
units, self-righteous, navel-gazing and vacuous
middle America did not terrify me anymore.
September 11
Christoph
Christoph Bangert,
Bangert, AAdead
deadman,
man,his
hishands
handsbound
boundbehind hishis
behind back, found
back, by by
found Iraqi Army
Iraqi soldiers
Army of the
soldiers 4th 4th
of the
We lived in the East Village; our block was
Battalion,
Battalion, 1st
1st Brigade,
Brigade,6th
6thDivision
Divisionon
onpiles
pilesofoftrash
trash
at at
the
the
side
side
of of
thethe
road
road
justjust
outside
outside
Baghdad's
Baghdad's
Ghazaliya
Ghazaliya
part of the area cordoned off as the "unsafe"
neighborhood.
neighborhood. It
It wasn't
wasn'tclear
clearhow
howthis
thisman
manhad
haddied
died
as as
parts
parts
of of
hishis
body
body
hadhad
been
been
eaten
eaten
by by
wildwild
dogsdogs
that roam
roam Baghdad.
Baghdad.Nor
Norcould
couldititbebedetermined
determinedimmediately
immediately
whether
whether
thethe
manman
waswas
Sunni
Sunni
or Shia.
or Shia.
Dozens
Dozens zone that began at Ground Zero. After
of bodies like this
this are
are found
found every
every morning
morning all
all over
over Baghdad.
Baghdad. Most
IVIostofofthe
thedead are
dead victims
are ofof
victims sectarian September 11, I became obsessed with news
sectarian
violence.
violence. Baghdad,
Baghdad, December
December21,
21,2006.
2006.©©Christoph
ChristophBangert/Laif/Redux
Bangert/Laif/Redux (continued on page 72)
no. 204 aperture / ~i
(Salti continued)
and analysis—as a lot of people did. Every day, I

GEOFF DYER
collected Arabic-language newspapers from a
shop on 14th Street. It took me a month or so to Every era tends to become identified with a particular kind of technology, and cell-phone imager
realize how I cautiously packed them in my bag has become the default look of the post-9/11 world, even if phone-cameras weren't used th
to hide them, that I no longer spoke Arabic when widely back in September 2001. Or were they? I can't remember. Perhaps it was only with th
making calls from public phones. London bombings of 7/7 (2005) that cell phones really came into their own in this way, but th
Shortly afterThanksgiving, I met with a Lebanese have retrospectively insinuated themselves into an earlier date that feels less like the past than th
friend for a cup of coffee. We traded anecdotes beginning of the present. (9/10 is the past.)
about the INS—it turned out we had both submitted In 2008-9, at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, Geert van Kesteren exhibited pictures
applications for a green card in the days preceding from a series called Baghdad Calling: cell-phone images taken by amateur photographers in
September 11. From laughing at our petty miseries, Iraq. The gallery context emphasized the haphazard technical qualities of these images while
we turned for the first time to our experiences on simultaneously establishing their failings as an aesthetic standard in its own right. There's
that day and what ensued in New York—as Arabs, nothing new about this, or rather, it's the latest technological manifestation of a pattern whereby
as Muslims. I found myself describing feelings an apparent abandonment of style and standards then becomes a style and standard
and states of mind I had not articulated even to Robert Frank's work is the most important paradigm change in this respect, but a similar thing
myself. And I realized I was speaking in Arabic, happened
in with Nan Goldin: snapshots of her druggy gang that then came to be a new stylistic
a public place. It came naturally, the Arabic—and orthodoxy
it of the wasted.
felt like a relief. In spite of the protections affordedSo I think John Moore's picture of the Benazir Bhutto assassination is exemplary, especially
by privilege—class and other—I had interiorized since
so it won a 2007 World Press Photo award. (It's also a reminder that the consequences of 9/11
much fear. I was stunned. continue to be felt most powerfully miles away from the U.S. mainland.) Moore was in the jostling
crowd at a rally. As soon as he heard gunshots, just as the suicide bomber detonated himself,
September 12 Moore held up his camera and hit auto-wind, shooting blind. The image is a swirl of blurred figures
The eleventh Istanbul Biennial opened on Septem and exploded light.
ber 11, 2009. On September 12 the program hosted Robert Capa said that if your pictures aren't good enough that's because you aren't close
a panel discussion called "Who Needs a World enough—but the present paradigm necessitates a rewrite: if they aren't bad enough, you aren't
view?" In his prefatory remarks, writer and theorist close enough. Get this close to the epicenter of history and your pictures are bound to look like
Brian Holmes noted the significance of the date, as they're being blown apart. The irrefutable truth of the image—Moore was there—would seem to
"the day after" September 11 and its commemora override all aesthetic and technical concerns, but it actually conforms to the urgent Imperative of an
tions, and invited speakers to consider that in their aesthetic whose biast-waves have extended far beyond its point of technological origin. ■
discussions. Meltem Ahiska, a renowned Turkish
Geoff Dyer's book The Ongoing Moment (Pantheon, 2005) won an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography.
sociologist, reminded Holmes that September 12 His most recent book is a collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (Graywolf, 2011); a new book,
Zona, on Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, will be published by Pantheon in February 2012.
was significant in itself for Turkey: it was the date,
in 1980, of the military coup that inaugurated a very John
JohnMoore,
Moore,Survivors
Survivors
fleeflee
a bomb
a bomb
attack
attack
on former
on former
Prime Minister
Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto,
BenazirRawalpindi,
Bhutto, Rawalpindi,
Pakistan, Pakista
December
December27,
27,2007.
2007.
© John
© John
Moore/Getty
Moore/Getty
Ir Ir
violent chapter in recent Turkish history, crushing
the leftist movement and starting the war against
Kurdish communities for years to come.
Part of the danger in writing the "history" of
September 11, 2001, and charting a worldview
that begins there, is eliding the chronological
cartography of days in September that are equally
sinister. Perhaps the key to liberating the inhibited
mourning of those who lost family and loved ones
on that day in the United States starts from a
reckoning with the pain of others, years before and
years after, across the world. ■
Curator and writer Ftasha Salti lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon.
She has contributed to The Jerusalem Quarterly Report
(Palestine), The London Review of Books, and many other
publications. Salti and photographer Ziad Antar collaborated on
the exhibition and publication Beirut Bereft, The Architecture of
the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict (Sharjah, 2009).
~2 / www.aperture.org
SUSIE LINFIELD
SUSIE LI N Fl ELD
is physically unharmed. His arms are raised quite powerful. Yet nearly four years after its
to the skies; with his face tilted upward, he publication, I remain haunted by this particular
On December 27, 2007, photographer John howls in grief and rage. photograph, and I think the Times's decision
Moore was covering an emotional rally Though we Americans are obsessed, for to print it—rather than a more graphic image
organized by Benazir Bhutto in the Pakistani good and bad reasons, with 9/11, we often was spot-on. It shows us, as did the pictures
city of Rawalpindi. Bhutto gave a fervent tend to forget (or perhaps never bother to of Robert Capa, that much of the meaning
speech to an ecstatic crowd about Pakistan's think about) the agony of the many victims of war is to be found not among killers and
need to combat Al Qaeda and other terrorist of Islamist terrorism in the Muslim world: the corpses, but behind the lines, so to speak:
groups. Minutes later, she was assassinated by untold thousands of Pakistanis, Yemenis, among the grieving, abandoned survivors,
a suicide bomber and his accomplices. Somalis, Afghans, Iraqis, and others who Moore's photograph should make us
Moore took some blurry pictures of the have been murdered, or grievously wounded, consider—and heed, more deeply and
crowds fleeing in panic after the killing, or left parentless or childless, as their schools humbly than we usually do—these often
and some bloody pictures of the stunned and hospitals and funerals and mosques and forgotten victims of the terrorists' pitiless,
survivors. But the image that the New York marketplaces are targeted by the suicide exultant wrath. ■
Times printed was neither blurry nor bloody. bombers. These dead are not "collateral
It shows a Bhutto supporter standing in the damage": they are intended consequences, Susie Linfieid is author of The Cruel Radiance: Photogra
phy and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press,
rubble of the attack's aftermath—rubble that and their murders are proudly celebrated by 2010), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
included not only abandoned cars, a bicycle, those who plan, finance, and commit them. criticism- She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criti
cism program in the graduate journalism department at
shoes, and charred refuse, but also the So many lives destroyed, so many societies New York university.
mangled bodies of the dead, which now could deformed, so much desolation that can neverJohn Moore,
Moore, A
A survivor
survivor stands
standsamid
amidthe
thecarnage
carnageofof
be mistaken for clumps of garbage. (At least be healed. dead and wounded dead
following a following
and wounded bomb ablast attack
bomb blast attackon
on
twenty people were killed in the attack.) The Since the attacks of 9/11, we have seen formerformer
PrimePrime
Minister Benazir
Minister BenazirBhutto, Rawalpindi,
Bhutto, Rawalpindi,
Pakistan,
upright man in the center of Moore's picture many images of carnage—some of them Pakistan, December 27,
December 27, 2007.
2007.© John Moore/Getty Images
©johnMoore/aettyimages

David Levi Strauss Et Al The Anxiety of

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

David Levi Strauss Et Al The Anxiety of

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE ANXIETY OF IMAGES

THE ANXIETY OF IMAGES

• What is the role of citizen journalism?

• Is there a time when images should be censored?

• What is the relationship between photography and national security?

• How does one "cover" war?

• Do photographs still have evidentiary value?

(continued on page 52) (continued on page 53)

no. 204 aperture / 51

When Hosni Mubarak stepped down on

OPPOSITE: Scenes of Tahrir Square, Cairo, January

here an "imagosphere"... a continuous layer

Photography is too frequently presented

political debates concerning complex po

Chapter 1: 9/11: The Falling Man (dir. Henry

no. 204 aperture / 55

looped sequence of planes/impact/explosion/ of circumstance and polemical intention

deconstruction of an institution implies taking

critiquing, one must take the risk of building the

ten rhetorical practices. Literary critic Paul de

no. 204 aperture / 57

In the decade since September 11,2001, anxious

essential aspects of our global interaction;

Film still from

The firing squad, the electric chair, the gibbet,

methods of public execution. Each is a tool

no. 204 aperture / 61

One of the hardest parts about being a conflict

Photojournatist Lynsey Addario has worked extensively TOp.TOP:

no. 204 aperture / 64

populations that might be executed by them are

translators do not know what they do. I think

this war is far from over. Le Pointexperiences

no. 204 apertur

It has long been thought that a photograph is

Recent studies show that one person in

possibility of contributing information, and add

might become the precondition for a larger *■ V '

Photographer Enrico Bossan is the editorial director of

66 / www. aperture, org

The twenty-first century has already become

no. 204 aperture / 67

The photographer I most admire concerned

appearance. Etienne-Jules Marey was a

. 'S-. ■■■% V J" -

at Ground Zero yields itself easily to timeline

histories—that is, to traditional forms of

disaster she can safely stand. ■

no. 204 aperture / fx

by a person (probably a local postmistress) suspicious. Photographers continue •- ■' v ^ '.z

^L. was of the opinion th

no. 204 aperture / ~i

and analysis—as a lot of people did. Every day, I

no. 204 aperture / 73

You might also like