Das Streit-Bild
A proposal for an exhibition
February, 2013. The Italian photographer Franco Pagetti has just finished shooting the images for Veiled Aleppo, a series of photographs that will chart the transformation of the old city around Salah al-Din, where—ten long years ago—I used to sit drinking tea with the frustrated sons of Assad’s Syria. The veils in question are not hijabs or chadors, but the sheets that hang between buildings. A decade prior, these sheets were simply the week’s washing; an urban scene echoed in cities across the Mediterranean. In 2013, the sheets are used to block snipers’ lines of sight. Pagetti’s Aleppo is composed of deserted streets, shuttered shops, and suggestions of movement, hidden behind fabric.
Pagetti’s photographs were some of the last images taken by a professional photographer in northern Syria. Since September 2014, the territory is effectively a no-go zone. A slew of abductions and assassinations has meant that few journalists—even with extensive security details—go into the areas north of Aleppo. Much of the Syrian conflict occurs out of the sight of the international media.
This does not mean the conflict is invisible. Millions of YouTube videos and images have emerged from the conflict, often taken by participants. These media-products are circulated and distributed in a variety of ways: as propaganda, as evidence, and as part of international legal tribunals. The front-page-photography of the New York Times is now only one form of image-production amid a heterogeneous assemblage of forms.
The sheet quantitative growth of such images is little reflected upon. Equally, there has been little work on how the circulation of these images recodes conflict in the contemporary world.
This exhibition will pose two questions. It will ask what we can learn about contemporary conflict—which exceeds the temporal and narrative frames of the category of war—from these emergent forms of image production, and it will ask what we can learn about the contemporary moment from the conflict over such images. It will thus ask about conflict (Streit), and not war, and about the image (Bild), rather than the photograph.
In doing so, it will seek to avoid two unfortunate tendencies that befall many exhibitions of conflict-images.
The problem with one of the most recent exhibitions of such images—the ongoing War/Photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum—is that the images were not placed in the context of networks of reproduction and circulation, but are instead treated as objets d’art. The photographs (which are taken from the entire history of war photography) are grouped around empty themes—‘Leisure Time’, ‘Faith’, ‘Children’—that are neither historical nor conceptual. Each photograph is solemnly given its place on the walls, isolated from context.
The effect is to flatten the photographs: images of dying children in Vietnam from 1973 are placed next to yet more images of dying children, this time from Iraq in 2005. The only connection holding the pictures together is a thin humanism, which makes war and suffering the same in all time, and in all places.
The inverse problem occurred during the 2008 Brighton Biennial, Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, curated by Julian Stallabrass. The exhibition engaged in a curiously moral version of area studies. Images were rigorously arranged by conflict (with the American war in Iraq playing the part of the Mesopotamian section in the British Museum), but the emphasis was not on curating a series of images that would allow the viewer to get a sense of the image-ecology in which individual images accrue significance, but was rather on naming the perpetrators of violence. The exhibition’s organizing principles were moral and journalistic. However, denuded of even the questionable efficacy of the newspaper or the magazine, and placed in the comfortable confines of the Brighton pavilion, the effect of the exhibition was to create a smug self-satisfaction: curation as therapy.
The question Streit-Bild will pose is neither whether there are powerful images of war, not whether there are victims and perpetrators. Streit-Bild will interrogate the relationship between images and conflict in the contemporary period, at a moment when war photography (and war photographers) has lost its position as the dominant means of image-production.
The exhibition will be formulated around a series of problematics. For instance, the question of suffering in images of conflict will be taken up in a series that runs from the 19th century conflict in Crimea to the Crimean conflict of 2014.
This series will present—through videos, images, and historical context—a changing configuration of the relationship between viewer, image, and the image’s circulation. The changing stakes of such images—from the almost daily photographs of suffering in the Crimea that played a role in the fall of the British government in 1855 to the attacks on wire photographers in Crimea in 2014—will be laid out for the exhibition’s viewer. However, answers shall be avoided: the exhibition will encourage the viewer to inquire into the changing nature of conflict-images.
One of the principal axes along which the viewer will be encouraged to inquire is the changing relationship between proximity and partisanship. Moving past the British curation of images of the 19th century Crimean war for public consumption, the exhibition will devote some space to an analysis of two of Robert Capa’s most famous lines: “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”, and “In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.” These two quotes will frame a series of investigations into the relationship of partisanship to proximity. To be close enough requires knowing which side one must be close to. In Capa’s images, the duality of proximity and partisanship leads to his photographs dwelling on the theme of fraternity. By investigating—ethnographically, as it were—a series of Capa’s images, they way they circulate, and the effects they have, the exhibition will build up a series of figures that will allow us to understand the changing place of war photography in the second half of the 20th century.
We will look, for instance, at the way the inability of photographers to ‘choose a side’ in the conflicts in Congo and Sudan in the 1990s gives rise to images that focus on the figure of the ‘victim’ and the spectacle of suffering. The breakdown in the relationship between proximity and partisanship will also allow us to understand why contemporary images of fraternity—such as between Al Qaeda fighters on the Syrian border—are unable to be coded as such in the international media; rather than partisan proximity, such images are read as propaganda, or worse.
This sense of uncertainty over the proper relationship between photography and conflict culminates in Am-My Lê’s work at the US Marine base at 29 Palms, in California’s Mojave Desert. How might one approach the conflict in Iraq? A conflict waged through extensive planning, in air campaigns, and covered by embedded journalists? Lê turns away from proximity, and instead composes elaborate landscape photographs of troops in training, before they are deployed, self-consciously using the style and form of American civil war photography.
This breakdown of the traditional tropes of narrativization that dominated war photography for the second half of the 20th century will be used as hinge to understand the broader networks of image circulation and distribution that have contoured our understanding of conflict for the last twenty-five years. The museum is only one site of condensation for the passage of such conflict-images, and the exhibition will consider both its own place in these networks of circulation, and the broader flows in which it plays a part.
A room, for instance, will be devoted to images of Iran’s ‘Green Revolution’ — one of the first ‘media-events’ whose images were largely produced and circulated outside of the typical networks of international-media-production, following the Iranian government’s ban on international journalists. It will trace the way images of protestors in Iran were taken up and recoded by a heterogeneous group of actors, including Republic politicians in America, and Persian diaspora communities in Los Angeles. Through videos, images, and web-based displays, the exhibition’s viewer will be able to inquire into the circulation of contemporary images and the narrative frames in which they become embedded. The displays would raise an older, Kantian question: If the significance of an event is not to be found in its contingent occurrence, but in the reactions to which it gives rise, what can we understand about contemporary conflict from the way reactions and narratives are circulated through image-ecologies?
As much as conflict-images play a part in the creation of sites of condensation and intensity in contemporary conflicts, there is also a battle over images today: they are sites of conflict, and parts of conflict. A further room in the exhibition would focus on the video ‘The Innocence of Muslims.’ This video was made in California, but circulated—via YouTube—to communities across the world. It played an ambiguous role in protests in Muslim communities from Indonesia to Sudan, and was implicated in—though without basis—the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. This room would both sketch the local context for these protests, via video interviews and archival materials, whilst also posing the question: given the formal similarity of these protests, and the common networks of circulation for the video, what can one understand about the contemporary world from the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ which is not simply reducible to local context?
Further sections of the exhibition would take up this problematic in the context of the circulation of videos of jihad in the contemporary crisis in Syria, the instrumentalisation of images of suffering by NGOs, the rise of forensic imagery and the increasing legal importance of conflict-imagery, and the importance of satellite imagery—both militarily and politically—since Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
In sum, the exhibition would be attentive to context. However, the context of the contemporary image-ecology is not simply a series of local circumstances—though these are important—but the way these images circulate and are coded, and the heterogeneous assemblage of affects that they generate. Through a retelling of the changing (and now insufficient) position of the archetypal war photographer, we shall be in a better position to look at contemporary conflict-imagery and ask, along with Kant: what do we see in images of contemporary conflict? If events and episodes can be discerned, what prognostic signs to they show us, and what can we learn from them about where we are headed? What might conflict-images tell us about the contemporary world that we inhabit?
