In an on-line forum debate about war photography a few years ago, I replied to a comment reducing it to coffee table book material, saying that war photography was, by its nature, ambivalent and complex, as are the moral issues that surround it.
Nothing earth shattering, but Bob Brecher, Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics at the University of Brighton read it, thought it was spot-on, and invited me to a seminar in April at the Imperial War Museum entitled Human Suffering on Display, Ethical issues in documenting pain, disfigurement and death in war and other conflicts, a follow on from the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial – Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War, curated by Julian Stallabrass. Brecher’s idea was to bring together a variety of people from a variety of disciplines to see if a) “something concrete and to the point can be said about the ethics of showing images of pain/suffering/war and b) if there might be interest in building a longer-term project”.
Less concrete it couldn't have been, nor expected to be. Some thirty people with different concerns and backgrounds discussed a huge variety of photographs, and with no agreed framework of the issues of photography - or any other issue for that matter - on which to base the discussions. But it was a start.
Much of what was discussed, although it may have used examples of war photography, was proper to photography as a whole - the ambivalent nature of truth and fiction, the public and the private, propaganda and objectivity, pain and pleasure, objectivity and subjectivity, and how their meanings are influenced by the context of history and memory.
Sarah Maltby had asked me to write something about the conference for the War and Media Network website, and I said I would do so from a personal point of view, thinking that it would would be easy enough to find a thread or focal point to rant and rave about. With such disparate material, just about all of it interesting but much straying from the ethics of documenting pain, I ended up having a hard time encapsulating what the conference was about. Part of the problem was combining issues of images of war with those of photography and with the ethics of displaying images of pain and suffering.
The photographs taken at Abu Ghraib were raised several times, understandably since besides being part of Julian Stallabrass’ curatorial work at the Brighton Photo Biennial which he talked about in his seminar presentation, they have become the iconic images representing a recent, unpopular and confused conflict with no other clear imagery or mythology, at least not for the West.
They represent human behaviour in all its vile debauchery and depravity, yet we’ve all seen images of much worse human suffering than those of naked men being threatened, roughed up and humiliated. Given that in other parts of the prison, torture was being committed, that just outside people were being killed by bombs and bullets, and that Abu Ghraib had been Sadam’s hanging chamber, the most disturbing aspect for me is that the soldiers in the photographs are smiling. It’s not the pain so much as the sadism. It’s Lord of the Flies and Pasolini’s Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom representing the Iraq war as a whole.
I then viewed Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedures. Like his The Thin Blue Line, perception is as important as, and inseparable from, the content itself, and throughout the film there is a constantly changing understanding of what happened at Abu Ghraib. Far from the generic lobotomised trash that they are perceived as, each interviewee had his or her personal history, reasoning and moral understanding, none of which the photos reveal, and although the abuses and taking of photographs may be have been a joke to some, it’s not that simple.
The film reveals photography’s multiple, shifting layers of meaning, and its ambivalent relationship to reality. Hilary Roberts of the Imperial War Museum presented the conference with an excellent historical overview of war photography, but with interpretations that I felt were too singular and fixed. She gave a historical context for the images, but each image has its own history, impossible to fully know even under the best of circumstances.
Lucy Noakes’ talk both complemented and served as a counterpoint to Roberts’, focusing on the historical shifts of meaning for certain photographs, with different meanings in different political contexts. Although not usually so dramatic and clear cut, those shifts are constant and subjective in all photography, and no fixed meaning or morality can be assigned to this paradoxically most objective of media, making the ethics of displaying images of pain and suffering problematic from the start.
I thought that perhaps Hilary Roberts’ interpretations came from seeing a repetition of certain themes or occurrences throughout the history of war photography, and I thought about it again when, in the film, army investigator Brent explains how one photograph shows a crime, while another is just stress and discomfort (i.e. fear and pain) and thus OK, just standard operating procedures. He also explains his military history, and says that people who have not seen what he has couldn’t understand (again, the issues of ethics). Someone being told that if he gets off of the box he’s made to stand on he’ll get electrocuted might not understand either.
Another ethical problem is that the photographs were mostly of people being humiliated and roughened up by soldiers, while in other sections of the prison people were being physically tortured and sometimes killed by, as they are called, OGA’s (other government agencies). Yet the photographs are what caused the stir, and the photographs are seen as evidence of guilt, and all those in them were seen as guilty whether they committed any crimes or not. Those who were not shown were not found guilty, and this is true in terms of military justice as it is in popular culture and imagination - images have the power to override all else. Seeing is believing, the question is always what are we seeing.
There was a discussion at the conference about the power of photography to change things - a hard thing to prove given that everything has to be seen in context and as an accumulative effect - but an important question weighing in on the ethics of displaying images of pain and suffering if they have an effect in ending or lessening suffering. The Abu Ghraib images played a role in changing America’s perception of the Iraq war and of itself, making ethical considerations of their production and display a complex problem.
Ironically, the images were taken by amateur photographers who did not set out to expose the wrong-doings of the world and to change them - although Sabrina Harman did write in a letter at the time that she wanted to record what she saw as wrong - or to take great photographs. As opposed to many great photographs of war, they lack any aesthetic concerns of such banalities as composition. When an image of suffering is also a great photograph, its aesthetic pleasure plays a complex role in its viewing and reading. Those of Abu Ghraib have none of that - they are an unmitigated cesspool of human debasement.
The military learned its lessons from the Vietnam war, and tried to keep the press photographers under control and away from the death and destruction, and censor and control those images that did come out. So instead of depicting passion and pathos, there is crudeness and cruelty; instead of tired and wounded or brave soldiers, there are grinning ones void of any aesthetic, ideological or moral values. They may not be the only photographs taken or published, but they have come to represent the war in Iraq the way others represented the Vietnamese war.
So where are the ethics of displaying images of suffering? The soldiers took these pictures and then passed them on to anyone who wanted a copy, and are condemned perhaps more for taking or being in the photographs than for the acts themselves, but then Julian Stallabrass makes an exhibition of it, and the rest of us at the conference look at them and discuss them for our own edification. The answer, then, must be that it is OK to display these images.
Whether for a bit of fun, some sort of perverse voyeurism, or moral indignation, we want to see these images. Their reproduction in the media may have been questioned by some at the seminar, but the images were shown nonetheless, and no one objected or seemed particularly distressed or perturbed, no one looked away, no one seemed to have trouble holding down their beer or food afterward. A good time was had by all.
Sabrina Hartman may have taken photos to record abuses she knew were wrong (a fuller explanation in Standard Operating Procedures), but as images they are indistinguishable from those taken with no moral bearing. So how do they differ, ethically speaking, from those taken by Robert Capa, et. al.?
Due to a last minute cancellation, no photographer was able to make a presentation and talk about his experience. The next conference, to be held in Brighton in November, will be kicked off by two photographers, and what I want to know is what makes them take photographs of human pain and suffering, and how is what they do different, ethically speaking, from taking pictures at Abu Ghraib.
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Human Suffering on Display
Ethical issues in documenting pain, disfigurement and death in war and other conflicts. An invitation seminar organised by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton, Brighton Photo Biennial and the Imperial War Museum
