Soldier photography: visualising the war in Iraq

2003

Susan Sontag, like the Italian writer Umberto Eco, is among the few present day cultural critics whose influence resonates, in part through their novels, beyond the intellectual press and university libraries. In 1977 Sontag published On Photography, an extended essay looking at the role of photography in the West, which went on to become her most celebrated book. Its publication came at the close of the Vietnam war, which brought documentary photography, via the media, to the breakfast tables and television screens of America and Europe. The book’s importance lay in the way it developed its readers’ relationship with the photographic image by introducing an accessible language in which to discuss the increasing torrent of images around us. Sontag took discussion of photography out of the specialist realm into that of the everyday. Now, in Regarding the Pain of Others, the author returns to the nature of the photographic image in the West; to re-evaluate and reconsider some of her o...

Some of the most celebrated and well-known photographs in existence are of war. When we think of ‘war photography’, we tend to recall a small number of iconic images which have endured in the public imagination. By contrast, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the most mediatised conflicts in history, and yet from the vast corpus of imagery produced, arguably none have come to define these wars in the public imagination. Why? Following an established belief in the negative impact of media coverage during the Vietnam War, accounts of the media in war position the objectives of the military and the media as incompatible. They typically adopt a simplistic understanding of the sources of photographic effect which draws a straight line between the event—of which the photograph is considered an unproblematic trace—and its political impact. Such an approach cannot fully account for the vagaries of the news photograph as a political vessel. The media policy put in place for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequently introduced in Afghanistan marked the beginning of a more experimental approach to media- military relations characterised by synergy rather than opposition, and one in which the photograph—as a vessel of political communication—operated primarily as a connotative symbol rather than as a denotative index of particular events. By combining elements of Cultural Studies literature with empirical data, this dissertation seeks to ask what War Studies can learn from understanding the role and functioning of the image in war and finds that the field of vision remained firmly sublimated to established political discourse which resonates more closely with American national mythology than it does with particular news events.

The twenty-first century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan experienced and experience the most media coverage of any conflict in American history. Take for instance the famous picture of a statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down by marines as a crowd of Iraqis looks on. This image made the rounds of television media and government as proof that the Iraqis saw U.S. troops as liberators. Later revelations exposed that the toppling did not come at behest of the Iraqis and that much of the crowd in the photo came from the press staying at the nearby Palestine Hotel. 1 Television news, taken in by the story, replayed it incessantly while removing the context by making comparisons to iconic events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. The photo did not lie, but its usage became propaganda to push forth a narrative that an administration desperately needed the public to believe. This image, and the aftermath, clearly displays the dangers inherent in the irresponsible use of photography without context. While the image did not necessarily get staged, the lack of context and availability of journalists along with twenty-four hour news changed the meaning of the event for the audience. Iconic images often run into issues with interpretation due to their power in presentation. On the other hand vernacular images by soldiers, never published, and not seen outside their circle of family and friends allows for a more intricate view of their war and their response to it and building the foundation for a broader understanding of the experiences of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Apertúra folyóirat, 2021

The paper analyzes the visual and personalised implications of late modern warfare and its representation in documentary film. In the first half of my paper, I’m analyzing the cinematic representation of late modern war and its relationship to film and vision primarily from a media-historical perspective: what does the access to information mean in this context and what kind of media and mediatisation specificities has the war after the 2000s. In the second half of my study I’m focusing on the video-selfie-scenes of Nine Months of War (László Csuja, 2018) from a phenomenological and reception-theoretical perspective: what are the implications of the use of video-selfies in this documentary and what kind of new functions could this film add to these in warfare. I classify the functions of video-selfies into a three-tier typology of channel (making a video message to another person), identity affirmation and space of testimony. While at the beginning of the war the apparently superficial video-selfie-use characterizes the protagonist as a content producer and user, it then serves to identify with the military self-image and finally creates a specific, private space for the expression of traumatic experiences.

The war in Iraq has brought to the fore some very old questions about the visual representation of conflict, war and pain. I shall be examining the particular twist given to those issues by the developments in Iraq and in particular the so-called Abu Ghraib photographs, now world (in)famous. The issues of Third World people represented by the denizens of Western power, the USA and UK, and especially of Muslim males being subjected to the force and rule of non-Muslims in what was understood as a neo-Christian moral and globalising crusade, are some of the more complex issues of our time. The article will examine images of unidentified Iraqis taken by their jailers and torturers. How do such images compare with ones taken during the war in Vietnam when the US liberal media arguably played a significant role in bringing the war to an end? The question of the role of the media in this latest conflict, and especially of the visual imagery of pain, will be assessed through the Abu Ghraib visual record of scandalous and inhuman treatment of the detainees by US forces and the effect this had on the American public. Some deep sociocultural fault lines, historically linked to the representation of war and conflict, will be also examined, such as the question of veracity instanced by the off-staging of scenes and the re-creation of emotions by visual direction of the documentary image. Such issues are the staple of postmodern textual analysis but occupy a position of special importance here.

Assuming that photography is at a crucial stage in its development, namely a low-point in believability and a high-point in its social presence, this article will explore strategies used by media that show how photographs are still able to function as witness to historical events. Examples from recent conflicts, those in Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran, show that digitization of the photographic image provides new possibilities to a medium in crisis. En supposant que la photographie est arrivée à une étape cruciale de son développement, c'est-à-dire à un niveau de faible plausibilité mais de forte présence sociale, cet article explorera des stratégies utilisées par des médias qui montrent comment les photographies continuent de fonctionner comme témoins des événements historiques. Les exemples de conflits récents, ceux en Syrie, à Gaza, en Ukraine et en Iran, montrent que la numérisation de l'image photographique ouvre cet art en crise à de nouvelles possibilités.

Media, War & Conflict, 2016

In this article, the author focuses on the struggles over self-representation that soldiers have engaged in at two key historical moments of modern Western warfare: the First World War, the first major industrialised conflict of the 20th century (1914–1918); and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the so-called ‘War on Terror’, which marked the emergence of information warfare in the 21st century (2001–2014). The Western soldier’s self-representation, the author concludes, has shifted from a practice of observing the battlefield as a strange place and himself as an ‘other’ within it, to a practice of considering the ‘other’, here the Iraqi or Afghani local, as the self, someone who shares a Western sense of humanity. These antithetical self-representations, the author argues, point in turn to complex transformations in the technologies, moralities and cultures of warfare, throwing into relief uneasy tensions in the West’s 21st-century interventionist conflicts. In their attempt to move a...

This chapter is based on a study of the US Department of Defense’s Flickr photostream, from 2009 through February of 2014, examining a total of 9,963 photographs (with some key examples reproduced in the chapter), and two dozen US military directives, manuals, and guides on public diplomacy, strategic communication, social media use, and photography. Having said that, the analysis is not a quantitative one; instead, the project builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about regulated images, consecrated works, and the objectification and codification of (militarized) values, as well as the works of a number of visual anthropologists. Rather than an activity that expresses the randomness of individual imaginations, US military photographs register a pattern that reflects the prevailing political norms of a given social order. The patterns to be found among these thousands of images is in fact quite regular, and makes a series of clear points. This public engagement is carried out by the Pentagon with a belief that a major part of “the battle” is a “battle of the narrative,” one that takes place in the public’s “cognitive space,” in what is has been termed “Fourth Generation warfare”. These photographs are intended to represent the US military as a humanitarian, charitable organization, working among many communities around the world that are populated by children who are only too happy to be vaccinated and to skip rope with US soldiers. Female US soldiers have smiling close encounters with little girls, or cradle babies. When not displaying pure, motive-less good intentions, the photographs also produce a celebration of the awesome power and sophistication of US military technology: jets flying in formation, shiny drones illuminated at night like alien UFOs, lines of massive ships at sea, etc. Yet, there are virtually no images of actual combat. The photographs collectively portray a world rendered frictionless by the speed and ubiquity of American power and technology. In addition, by being studiously depoliticized, the photographs produce a political effect, for political purposes—they do not tell the horror stories of war, of blood shed and lives lost, of destruction and grief, but rather portray something like a birthday party, with a cycle of endless family reunions. However, as the Pentagon understands that every action is potentially a message, and there is an unresolved tension between “perception effects” and military planning, strategic communication in the form of disseminating photo-graphs through social media faces ultimate pitfalls.

The common understanding of war is strongly influenced by cogent but codified visual narratives. “Images of war” is a complex photographic genre impregnated with emotion, which unsurprisingly carries enormous power in determining reality. Departing from the emotion-focused debates on the representation of war/wartime, photo-journalism and questions of photos’ authenticity, the present chapter looks at how images shape both what we know and how we learn about contemporary war, its landscapes, actors, actions, and causes. It aims to contribute to the debate on the fragility of war representation in a time when we are saturated with images of violence.