Photography is not simply seeing; it is actively evaluating the world. Photographs are not only taken, witnessed and forgotten, they shape the view of ourselves in relation to the other. What is retained by the witness is the photograph (de)contextualized by particular historical and cultural narratives. The historical and cultural narratives that inform our perceptions of the Middle East, for example, are made up of moments of war, suffering, savagery and romanticization that provide us with static and isolated visual truths. When we are told, “there are terrorists abroad”, the photograph provides visual evidence in the form of a massacre, a burned out building and human suffering. When we are told that the threat of violence is present in the West, the photograph shows us the Twin Towers falling, blood spilled on the floor of the Bataclan and what Susan Sontag calls “a narrowly selective transparency” (Sontag 1977). Most Westerners learn of national and international conflicts through pictorial representations in news media. The photographic narratives produced can blur or transform racial, ethnic and religious lines and have the power to mobilize against the racial other while propagating normative discourses. In the midst of increased tension between the West and Middle East, these pictorial representations continue to produce knowledge about the Oriental other.
Photography, Violence and Power
Susan Sontag, author of On Photography
Susan Sontag’s seminal work On Photography is a collection of essays that argues for the inherent power of the photographic gaze. Photography is neither a passive art nor static practice. It is imbued with changing cultural shifts and perceptions of photographer, photographed and viewer. To photograph, writes Sontag, “means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, feels like power.” (Sontag 1978). Photographs are epistemically turned into mental objects that codify truth and shape our perceptions of the world. Sontag’s work will inform this paper by contextualizing the power of photography to both mobilize and to reify. In our case study of domestic terrorism, for example, Sontag will show how events when defined in a certain matter mute the power of photographs taken abroad while strengthening those taken at home. Sontag argues that politics and photography are inseparable, the former using the latter as a means of producing knowledge and exerting power. This latter point will be made clear in the use of pictorial representations to support American hegemonic power.
Photography and American Colonialist History
Photographs played a key role in categorizing and presenting the other to Western audiences. Field cameras by the age of the Protestant mission in the late 1800s were as ubiquitous as the Bible. Cameras served as a discursive means of expressing core Christian values with the aim of shaping the cultural and human landscape abroad and at home. In other words, photography became the tool to affirm the right nature of Christianity and their understanding of the uncivilized other. By 1900 more than 9,000 Protestant missionaries were out in the field and the camera became a ubiquitous tool of catalogue, visual display and Christian representation of self and other. Visual culture defined American Christianity and its relationship to the rest of the world in ways that print media could not achieve. This was accomplished through visual evidence of Christian schools, hospitals and other benevolent functions. By the late 19th century, photographic evidence of missionary benevolence and stereotypical Islamic culture could be found displayed in churches, missionary tracts, and hung up inside the homes of American elites. Missionaries and governments alike were eager to display to those back home the effect of their donations and tax monies; photography provided the means to do so.
As America began to eye global expansion, Spanish intervention in Cuba offered enticing incentives for America to conquer new territories. A rhetoric of humanitarianism, aided by pictorial representation, was used by many Christian groups to justify war on Spain in Cuba; the same rhetoric which later justified the conquest of the Philippines. Pictorial representations of Cubans and their Spanish aggressors were central in pushing America towards moral intervention. Historian Andrew Preston writes that, “Christian America had a responsibility to God to make the world a better place,” (Preston 2012). Drawings in newspapers became the catalyst that allowed for this responsibility to play out. Drawings of American women being molested by Spaniards or starving Cuban children, engaged an American population that saw benevolence and protection of its own as a moral duty. The majority of Americans believed that “America had a duty to uplift the human race, and God had chosen the Philippines as its first test.” (Quanchi 2010). Max Quanchi writes that images in this period “constituted self-generating ethos reinforcement that served constantly to promote the central ideas and concerns of the age.” (Quanchi 2010). Drawings, like photography, became a moralistic endeavor that was used to awaken Christian consciousness.
As the medium became more accessible, photography, unlike print journalism or painting, became the primary, epistemic interlocutor of Truth. Through the mode of capture and the science of emulsion, photography was perceived as a cure and solution to the weaknesses and corruptions of earlier technologies of representation. Into the middle of the 20th century, it became clear that photography held the power to shape the American collective sense of self and purpose. Both official narratives and the power of photojournalism shaped the public’s response to international American interventions. The Korean War and the Vietnam War were opportunities for photojournalism to cement itself as the authoritative medium through which American perceptions could be filtered. Susan Sontag notes that, “without a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will most likely be experienced as, simple, unreal or as a demoralizing emotional blow.” (Sontag 1977). Photographs shocked to the point of mobilization during the Vietnam War, where they sparked outrage, or dulled the senses to a state of apathy in Korea, where the war and photographs were sold as a “just struggle” against communism. Viewing as an active process during these conflicts was aided by cultural precepts, government propaganda and politics. In viewing a photograph of the other, “we become aware that it is not simply a captured view of the other, but rather a dynamic site at which many gazes or viewpoints intersect.” (Lutz et al 1993).
The Contemporary Landscape of Photography, Violence and Power
Photograph by Ron Haviv
Contemporary photography of conflict zones serves several purposes. Importantly, the images broadcast in newspapers, magazine, traveling exhibits and 24-hour news cycles acts as “stand ins for complex narratives.” (Griffin 2004). The image of irrational violence is easily swallowed and, as Sontag notes, then quickly absorbed into the viewer’s understanding of how the world operates and judged. Images of the Middle East in American post September 11th discourse can be divided into the categories of American exceptionalism and Muslim barbarism. Each category reinforces the other so that Muslim barbarism calls for American imperialism, which then reinforces the distinctions between both worlds. Michael Griffin notes that analyses of photo coverage during American interventions in the Middle East post-9/11, conformed to narratives of a powerful American military industrial complex and compassionate humanitarianism. Michael Griffin notes that, “this discourse suggests an American myth of providential supremacy.” More than technological supremacy, images of military humanitarianism were juxtaposed with others depicting brutality inflicted by Arabs on other Arabs. Images that highlighted American humanitarianism were also more likely to be published by Western media, especially in times of political turmoil, such as during the Vietnam War and the “War on Terror”. (Griffin 2004).
Roland Barthes in his work Camera Lucida writes that the photograph can become “subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” (Barthes 1981). Art historian David Morgan argues that images and icons inevitably bring the viewer into what he calls a web of relations. These webs are the images, preconceived beliefs and cultural artifacts that inform the way we view, and in turn construct what is being viewed. What is retained by the viewer is the photograph (de)contextualized by dominant historical and cultural narratives. Though privileged as empirical evidence, the photographic image is an empty vessel ready to receive meaning imposed by the photographer and viewer. As Talal Asad writes responding to a perceived a priori status of symbols, “it was not the mind that moved spontaneously to truth, but power that created the conditions for experiencing that truth.” (Asad 1993). Birgit Meyer points out that what is in play in photography is “the capacity of a picture to invoke for its beholders a sense of likeness to what it represents.” (Meyer 2015). Photography is a medium that “renders present a mental image or figure in the imagination.” (Meyer 2015) Images participate in but also become reflections of cultural myths; they participate in the meaning-making project and political landscape which has and continues to other those photographed. Art production, the degraded other with a gun pointed to his head, gun-wielding children and cultural markers such as the hijab reinforce the dichotomy of us vs. them, West vs. East. Such images, represented as authentic reality, can both prompt moral action or desensitize the viewer to the point of apathy. In either case, the result has been a continuation of the colonialist mission and the disempowerment of communities at home and abroad.
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