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If there is one thing we're missing in today's photography culture, it’s the critical reading of photography in a non-visual space. As photography becomes more accessible and proliferated, we also have to be mindful of our changing relationship with images. A critical approach makes the photographs more than mere scribbles on a large visual canvas.
When I recently met Coco Chen at Magnum Photos in London, we started discussing her dissertation based on photographs shot by Canadian photojournalist Rita Leistner in Balad, Iraq in 2003. At the time, Coco was in the process of completing her piece. Now I am pleased to present to you the essay in its entirety, titled “Precarity in the Age of Digital Reproduction: The Political and Civil Repercussions of Rita Leistner’s “Prisoners of Balad.”
The paper, as you'll read now, discusses how we are all consumers influenced by the media. However, before the public is exposed to the products of the media, the political climate already works to shape and determine the media’s mechanisms and content. Coco and Rita have agreed to let me publish the paper— an important document for every consumer of photography to read— here on Constellation Cafe.
To continue reading…
We want the photographer to go to country X and illustrate our preconceptions. – Philip Jones Griffiths (1)
To make a photograph is to acknowledge that an event has the prospect of an
afterlife. In journalism, photography serves as a tool to aid the organization of events
past: “The photograph is a kind of promise that the event will continue, indeed it is
that very continuation, producing an equivocation at the level of the temporality of the
event.” (2) To assess the photographs from the Iraq War, it is imperative to bear in
mind that the U.S. intervention in Iraq told “a story of exploded illusions” and still
leaves behind a legacy of grievous ramifications. (3) The major American occupation
of Iraq may have ended, but countless unresolved political and civil conflicts persist.
By documenting the happenings of events in process, photojournalism at its best bears
the intrinsic quality of an eyewitness. According to the Benjaminian view of the
photographic unconscious, photography ‘flashes up’ and renders truth in a dissociated
moment. (4) However, as newspapers and newsmagazines are perceived as less
credible, the documentary photograph is losing its previous criticality. (5) Few
memorable icons emerged from the Iraq War, a long conflict during a time when
images have been most proliferated and accessible. (6) As the Canadian
photojournalist Rita Leistner’s series of photographs of prisoners in Balad
demonstrate, the imbalance of the media reportage of the Iraq War concerned two
problematic aspects—the mechanism of embedding and the circulation of images.
The circumstances in which Leistner photographed the prisoners and the delayed
distribution of the images unveil the visual politics of the ‘War on Terror.’ Not until
the images from Abu Ghraib prison leaked in April 2004 did Leistner’s photographs
from July 2003 find willing buyers in international press. Leistner’s images
demonstrate that the incident at Abu Ghraib acted as a breach in the public
understanding of the Iraq War.
In mid-March 2003, just days before the US invasion of Iraq, many
independent freelancers, including Leistner, waited at the Turkish border to enter Iraq.
The border never opened, and the Turkish border patrols were ordered to shoot-to-kill
if they saw any illegal trespassers. (7) Stranded without the coalition forces or the
means to try accessing Iraq from Jordan or Kuwait, Leistner decided to hike to Iraq.
With the help of smugglers, she reached the Iraqi side of the border after a harrowing
three-day hike that took her through the treacherous mountains of Syria and Iran, just
in time to watch the fall of Tikrit on television, on April 14, 2003. (8) By late April,
Leistner landed a story of her own. The Daily Mail had sent her to cover Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to Camp Victory, the vast military base near the
Baghdad airport. (9) However, without a press invitation, she was barred at the front
gate, where by chance she met ‘Crazy Horse’, the soldiers of Charlie Troop, 3rd
Squadron, 7th US Cavalry, 3rd Infantry Division. They invited Leistner to stay at the
base, where she would not have to pay any expenses and would be able to leave the
country with them. Her definitive encounter with Crazy Horse led to an unusual
embed with the unit and later their replacements, soldiers of Alpha Compant, 1-8
Infantry Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, of the 4th ID, that would last for four
months. About a month and a half after her encounter with Crazy Horse, Leistner
accompanied the soldiers to Balad in the Sunni Triangle. (10)
In the city of Balad, the story of Leistner’s images of Iraqi prisoners began.
Tracing the history of Leistner’s photographs to their origin reveals fundamental
aspects of guerrilla warfare as well as flaws in the conditioning of some US soldiers
that ultimately led to the photographed event. By mid-July 2003, Crazy Horse was
sharing the base with their replacements.
The 3ID soldiers made a big deal of the difference between their expectations of Iraq and those of the incoming 4ID soldiers who had arrived after the
invasion, and had not seen combat. The 4ID solders did not feel the same sense of betrayal by their government, because they hadn’t been lied to yet—at least that is how it was explained to me by some of the soldiers in Crazy Horse. Nor had they had time to gain respect for the Iraqis. (11)
The soldiers had not been in Iraq for very long, and their unfamiliarity with the local
situation all the more distorted the unreliable methods already endemic to guerrilla
warfare— mass arrests, interrogation, and torture. (12) On the evening of July 15th,
Leistner accompanied the 4ID on a night-patrol. During these patrols, the 4ID was
regularly targeted with rocket-propelled grenades (RPG). On this particular night, the
Bradley Fighting Vehicle ahead of Leistner’s vehicle in the convoy was attacked, and
when her vehicle came to a halt, a second RPG struck another vehicle. The soldiers
proceeded to raid the nearby houses to find the source of the attack and arrested the
Iraqi men in all the houses. Leistner recalls documenting the event:
This was very much straight journalism, spot news—I was simply there and I was photographing what was in front of me, things as they were. I added light, but that was it. There was a lot going on, and I had to make selections as I went. (13)
The soldiers brought the arrested men back to the base where there was an old Ba’ath
Party jail. Thereafter, under the watch of American soldiers, the relatively benign
handling of the prisoners changed its course. For the first time, Leistner watched
interrogations. She remembered thinking that if she were in the position of the
prisoners, she would be grateful for the presence of a photojournalist to guarantee her
mere survival. (14) As later proved by the trial of a 4ID commander for revenge
killings, Leistner was right to assume that her camera offered immunity to the
prisoners and still upholds her belief:
If I could go back, I would have fought much harder to figure out what was happening to the prisoners. But the truth is, none of us had ever been in that kind of situation before, and prisoners would just be gone the next morning. We had no reason to imagine the worst because the story hadn’t been told yet. (15)
At the time, all she knew was that the prisoners were interrogated, and then some
were let go while others were sent to undisclosed locations.
During Leistner’s first embed with 3ID, she noticed that the base lacked basic
means of communication and updated information on the war. There was no
electricity, running water, toilets, food, Internet, or phones. Leistner observed that the
soldiers had no idea of the happenings of the war and kept thinking they were
supposed to return home soon only to be told otherwise. (16) In a photograph
depicting a tied and bagged Iraqi suspect on the ground, the suspect awaits the
decision of the American soldiers, who presumably arrested him and whose feet are
only indication of their presence in the image. (Fig. 1) In the moments following the
raid of the houses in Balad and the arrests of many Iraqi men like the pictured subject,
the soldiers are discussing their next move in the operation. The photograph reveals
the deliberation of the American soldiers, but it also suggests the lack of a thorough
plan, as if their agenda only comprised of rounding up the Iraqis and not what to do
with them afterwards. Like the Iraqi suspect, the soldiers are also awaiting an order
from a higher power. A remarkable stillness penetrates the composition: the Iraqi
suspect is as still as a corpse, nor does the image show any sign of action from
American soldiers. What it does show is a static moment during wartime when a
photojournalist like Leistner could have taken time to frame the photograph and take
multiple shots. It was not a fast point-and-shoot photograph to capture some remnant
of transient action, and for this reason, the photograph reveals a vulnerable aspect of
the American mission— at times American soldiers lacked access to news sources,
and their uninformed decisions showed that they had become ignorant of the wider
conflict.
Photojournalism exists for an ethical and urgent purpose, but the politics of the
policing of visual circulation indicate otherwise. The critic Fred Ritchin pleads against
the general moral negligence of viewers:
Given that extensive image archives tend to emerge only after the fact, a crushing new sense or moral failure on the part of the viewer could be mitigated by a sense that, had the international community only known of the atrocities sooner and in such visceral detail, a more active response might have been provoked. (17)
Any opportunity to trigger immediate and proactive responses from viewers is
stripped from photographs like Leistner’s, which only emerged in public domain
when the media finally acknowledged their depicted subject. As such, Butler claims,
“the frames that, in effect, decide which lives will be recognizable as lives and which
will not, must circulate in order to establish their hegemony.” (18) Conversely,
interrupted or discontinued circulation thwarts journalists’ urgent missions. Believing
that her photographs showed significant news, Leistner tried to distribute them
immediately afterwards:
I remember that night I took those pictures I stayed up in the middle of the desert. I filed them to my agency and they shot them around and no one was interested at all. They couldn’t sell them. One of the things they heard back was that the assumption was that it didn’t represent what was going on because they hadn’t seen those kinds of pictures. (19)
The agency’s refusal to purchase Leistner’s photographs confirms Butler’s
proclamation of “recognisability precedes recognition.” (20) The spectator has to first
establish a subject through general terms, conventions, and ‘norms’ before fully
discerning it. According to Butler, subjects only become recognizable lives if they fit
with the citizen’s predetermined conceptions of personhood. Viewers are more
willing to accept visual representations that correspond with their ‘norms,’ even if
those representations betrayed reality. Hannah Arendt appropriately wrote, “Lies are
often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has
the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to
hear.” (21) Photographs can function in a similar manner as political lies, and the
media as liars: if they show what the audience has envisaged, the audience is more
likely to accept them. Since the content of Leistner’s photographs did not correspond
with normative representations of the war, the media declined to transmit the
photographs’ messages. The initial dealings with Leistner’s photographs unveil the
strategy of the American media powerhouse to rejects representations it refuses to
believe. Consequently, the selection of photographs that ended up in newspapers,
newsmagazines, and online reported carefully filtered propaganda, undermining the
democracy of representation.
Not only did the majority of Americans ally themselves with their president
before the war, they further increased their support for him when he made the
decision to launch an unprecedented pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein. In the
period between March 14-15 and March 22-23, 2003—including March 19, the day
the war began—statistics show that President Bush’s approval ratings rose by a large
margin from 58% to 71%. (22) However, when it came to visual representations of
what the American soldiers were doing to Iraqis, the media deemed the images too
harrowing for the public’s taste. No mainstream media outlet wanted the public to see
what were revelatory photographs depicting how US troops treated Iraqi insurgents.
For the American audience, seeing images of atrocity committed by their nation’s
soldiers only escalated the discrepancy between the representations of their president
as victorious (i.e. Bush in Mission Accomplished photo opportunity) and
compassionate (i.e. Bush on a surprise visit serving Thanksgiving turkey to American
soldiers stationed in Bagdad) and the reality of the horror of war. (23) This
irreconcilable difference is, for obvious reasons, undesirable for the Pentagon’s
communication strategies.
During the first Persian Gulf War, the American Government had banned
photographers from the conflict, thereby creating “a blind spot that would heavily
contribute to the illusion that the second invasion of Iraq would be a cake walk.”(24)
The treatment of visual representations did not improve in the second Gulf War; it
was only the Pentagon’s weapon of war that had changed. Usurping visual censorship
was image and news management in the form of embedding. On October 20, 2002,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld launched embedding to counter and match the
successful news management of the Taliban and al-Qaeda and “to have accurate,
professional journalists on the ground to see the truth of what was going on.” (25)
Though considered to be a military achievement, embedding came with its own set of
rules and complications. The only way for reporters to get close to combat was to
embed with troops. (26) As reporters and soldiers naturally formed mutual reliance,
embedding strengthened the propagandistic strategies of the US government.
Embedding also limited the access of journalists, which according to Leistner, is
responsible for the disparity between news coverage and the reality of the war:
If you create an environment where the majority of journalists are reliant on being embedded, those journalists, simply by geographical, physical situation, will only be able to report from the perspective of being inside the military. (27)
Access in itself is selective, and it formed the very foundation of the Pentagon’s
method of controlling war reportage.
As insurgencies broke out, journalists had no choice but to enrol in the
embedding program to get to stretches of Iraq too dangerous for independent travel.
For the Pentagon and media corporations, the rise of American casualties rose called
for a tightening of the rules for photojournalism. As the war went bad, the military
forbade photographing dead American soldiers and prohibited photographing
wounded soldiers unless permission was acquired before they were injured.
Photographing prisoners and dead American soldiers was out of the question. (28)
But whatever the motivations behind the military’s restrictions—to spare the families of the fallen some pain, for instance—their effect was to cast a sanitized gloss over the war in Iraq, and to help deprive the American people of a fuller knowledge of the realities of the war that their fellow citizens were fighting. In a country whose bedrock principles hold that war can be waged only by consent of the people, such restrictions were troubling indeed. (29)
Because of these changes, Leistner could not have taken the photographs of the
prisoners had she encountered the situation in Balad a few years later.
As the US government justified, the toughened regulations were warranted in
the name of protecting the rights of the dead, wounded, and imprisoned. (30) By 2007,
the result was obvious on the news pages: gone were the images of dead or wounded
Americans, their caskets, memorials, funerals, Iraqi prisoners, and car bomb scenes.
(31) Among many who shared the same sentiment, photojournalist Ben Brody stated
that he felt more comfortable photographing Iraqis than American soldiers. He
photographed a number of wounded and dead Iraqi police officers and soldiers, but
the one time when he raised his camera to photograph an American soldier missing
his legs following an improvised explosive device attack, an American staff sergeant
threatened him with violence. It was the closest he felt like he had ever been to getting
killed. (32) As the conflicts became more atrocious, the media coverage, in an
opposite trajectory, provided more sanitized disinformation.
In fact, during the period when Leistner had taken and attempted to file her
photographs, the US government was denying that an insurgency was occurring in
Iraq and still kept on suppressing news of civilian uprisings for at least another year.
(33) In a polarized dialogue with the Pentagon’s public refusal to account for the
reality of the war, Leistner’s photographs reveal the extent to which the American
invasion impacted the lives of civilians. One photograph of the Balad series shows a
middle-aged Iraqi man, hands tied behind his back, leaning against the wall. (Fig 2.)
He is bleeding from a blow he received during his arrest. Another photograph shows
two soldiers from the 4th ID dragging an elderly man from either side from his home.
(Fig. 3) The elderly man needed the assistance of a cane, which an American soldier
in the right foreground has seized from him. Clearly unfit for launching RPGs, the
elderly man was one of the many innocent civilians arrested. As a US Army Inspector
later discovered in his investigation, the 4ID was “grabbing whole villages, because
combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not.” (34)
This corresponds with the soldiers discussing their plan after arresting and bagging
the Iraqi suspect on the ground. (Fig. 1.) In an incident largely unimaginable to the
citizens of countries funding the war, three innocent inhabitants of Balad paid for their
neighbours’ plotting with their own blood and flesh. Soon after Leistner and other
journalists left the base of the 4ID, three Iraqi prisoners died in separate incidents over
a two-day period in orchestrated revenge killings. (35) The military court later found
the commander of the 4ID Captain Matthew Cunningham and some of his
subordinates guarding the prison guilty of sanctioning revenge killings on the Iraqi
civilians on the night of January 2nd/3rd, 2004. (36) Had she stayed with the 4ID or
fought for the images’ immediate publication, Leistner felt that her camera could have
prevented the atrocious treatment of the prisoners that led to their deaths. (37)
It just makes sense that if their photos had been in the news there’s no way [soldiers of 4ID] would have felt the kind of immunity they obviously felt they had to do whatever they wanted. (38)
Above all, the course of Leistner’s images shows that the operative circulatibility of
visual representations maintains the power to save lives.
Only after the images from Abu Ghraib leaked did Leistner’s images receive
any attention and assert their secure dwelling place in the public domain of human
affairs. When the Abu Ghraib story broke at the end of April 2004, approximately
nine and a half months after Leistner first attempted to file the photographs, both Time
and Newsweek bid for the rights from Leistner’s agency. (39) The significance of the
news giants’ sudden interest, which even led to a competition between them to buy
the images, was that editors at both magazines had remembered the images from the
news feed of Leistner’s agency from the previous summer. When Leistner first filed
the images, the market of photojournalism was hostile to them because of its
dependence on the political beliefs of media corporations. However, at the outbreak of
the Abu Ghirab story, the political climate exposed the Bush Administration’s de-
realization of the atrocity of modern warfare and warmed up to Leistner’s images.
At the time of their immediate release, the Abu Ghraib images created an
uncompromising opposition to the popular conceptions of the Iraq War. (40) Profound
for their exaggerated theatricality, the torture scenes strip the human figure down to
its bare form and stage the lives of the prisoners as if to suggest they are hardly
grievable. The photographs conveyed to international communities the sense that the
US was no better than any other imperialist conqueror in the past and intensified their
fears about the motives of the invasion. (41) The photograph had an immediate impact
among American citizens as well: Bush’s performance rating plummeted to what was
then its lowest point of 46%, and a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll indicated that nearly
three-quarters of Americans said the mistreatment of the detainees was not justifiable
under any circumstances. (42) The Abu Ghraib story as ideological evidence opened
up a gap in the media—a window of opportunity—for other ideologically similar
evidence, like Leistner’s images, that might also subvert the public’s previous
understanding of the Iraq War. It speaks to great volumes that the media’s invigorated
demand for Leistner’s images only occurred in retrospect, utterly undermining the
reasons Leistner endured precarious measures to access Iraq, encounter the incident in
Balad, and take the photographs in the first place. The media compromised, and
violated, the creed of photojournalism.
Today, exactly a decade after the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the
impact of images has become more and more diluted. War fatigue, and the lack of
funding, reduced the number of photographers from hundreds in March 2013 to no
more than a half dozen by the war’s end in 2011. (43) Steeped in the culture of the
developed world, visual consumption often departs from the ethical grids that should
underpin humanity. For example, to view a slideshow of news photographs on major
news websites, the media player drags its viewer through highly saturated
commercials before showing the more serious substance. How much more
disenchanting can the difference between the separate spheres be? Butler set the
premise of her essay on ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’ as one “offering a
first-world ethic and politic that would demand an outraged and informed response on
the part of those whose government perpetrates or permits such torture.” (44) The
protection of ‘the first world’ shelters us from understanding the burden of being
represented. We are able to capitalize on others’ tragedies, but do we ever think of the
subject as the rightful owner of a photograph? (45) For many, museum and
institutional contexts have become the only sanctuaries that allow for the right amount
of space for thinking and time for gestation in the fast-moving digitalized world. (46)
As a solution, Butler suggests:
If we can be haunted, then we can acknowledge that there has been a loss and hence that there has been a life: this is an initial moment of cognition, an apprehension, but also a potential judgment, and it requires that we conceive
of grievability as the precondition of life, one that is discovered retrospectively through the temporality instituted by the photograph itself. (47)
However, there is profound hypocrisy in looking and understanding only
retrospectively. Photographic archives may be “a resource to recall and relegitimize a
culture identity,” but historic distanciation tends to make images less depressing and
leaves us at a loss when faced with contemporary challenges. (48) I suggest that we
confront and respond to the problems raised by photojournalism as they come, as the
media should have done when Leistner first filed her photographs in the desert of
Balad in July 2003. After all, photojournalists continue to jeopardize their lives for the
reason of evoking the infinite language of compassion.
Coco Chen, May 2014
Figure. 1. An Iraqi suspect in an early morning roadside attack on an American convoy is “bagged and tied” by American soldiers. He lies waiting on the lawn of a neighbor’s house while the soldiers discuss their next move. Rita Leistner. July 16, 2003. Balad, Iraq. (Image: http://www.ritaleistner.com.)
Figure 2. An Iraqi suspect in an early morning roadside attack on an American convoy has his arms tied and is bleeding from a blow to the head received during his arrest. Rita Leistner. July 16, 2003. Balad, Iraq. (Image: http://www.ritaleistner.com.)
Figure 3. An Iraqi suspect in an early morning roadside attack on an American convoy is dragged our of his house by American soldiers. He is an elderly man who walks with a cane, which an American soldier is holding. Rita Leistner. July 16, 2003. Balad, Iraq. (Image: http://www.ritaleistner.com.)
Footnotes
1. Fred Ritchin, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen, 137.2. Judith Butler, Frames of War, (London: Verso, 2009), 84.3. George Packer, “Home Fires,” The New Yorker, April 7, 2014. 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions,” Illuminations, (London: Pimlico, 1999), 230.5. Ritchin, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen, 11-12.6. Ritchin, “Syrian Torture Archive: When Photographs of Atrocities Don’t Shock,” Time: Lightbox, January 28, 2014, accessed February 2, 2014, http://lightbox.time.com/2014/01/28/when-photographs-of-atrocities-dont-shock/#1.7. Rita Leistner, “Embedded with Murderers: Balad, Iraq, July 15th, 2003,” ed. by Julian Stallabrass, Memory of War: Images of War and The War of Images, (Brighton: Photoworks, 2013), 84. 8. Michael Kamber, Photojournalists on War, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013),156.9. Leistner, “Embedded with Murderers: Balad, Iraq, July 15th, 2003,” 86.10. Kamber, 156.11. Leistner, “Embedded with Murderers: Balad, Iraq, July 15th, 2003,” 87.12. Rita Leistner, e-mail message to author, May 9, 2014. 13. Leistner, “Embedded with Murderers: Balad, Iraq, July 15th, 2003,” 89.14. Kamber, 156.15. Leistner, e-mail message to author, May 9, 2014.16. Kamber, 156.17. Ritchin, “Syrian Torture Archive: When Photographs of Atrocities Don’t Shock.”18. Butler, Frames of War, 12.19. Kamber, 161.20. Butler, 5.21. Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” Crises of the Republic, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 6.22. “Presidential Approval Ratings—George W. Bush,” Gallup, April 12, 2014, accessed April 13, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx.23. Ritchin, After Photography, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 89.24. Ibid, 85.25. Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, Embedded: The Media War in Iraq, (Guilford, Connecticut, The Lyons Press, 2003), IX.26. Ibid, XI.27. Leistner, e-mail message to author, May 9, 2014.28. Kamber, Photojournalists on War, X.29. Ibid.30. Ibid.31. Ibid, XIIV.32. Ibid, 29.33. Ibid, 161.34. Ibid, 159.35. Leister, “Embedded with Murderers: Balad, Iraq, July 15th, 2003,” 98.36. Ibid, 98.
37. Kamber, 161. 38. Leistner, e-mail message to author, May 9, 2014.39. Leistner, “Embedded with Murderers: Balad, Iraq, July 15th, 2003,” 97.40. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 153.41. “Iraq: Abu Ghraib’s Legacy,” CNN, December 19, 2011, accessed February 12, 2014. http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2011/12/19/nat-abu-ghraib-legacy.cnn.html.42. Ritchin, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen, 144. 43. Kamber, X.44. Butler, 93.45. Ariella Azoulay, “The Civil Contract of Photography,” The Civil Contract of Photography, (New York: Zone Books, 2008).46. Butler, 99.47. Ibid, 98 48. Ritchin, Bending the Frame, 128.
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