conference reviews |
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Human Suffering on Display Ethical issues in documenting pain, disfigurement and death in war and other conflicts. Seminar organised by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton, Brighton Photo Biennial and the Imperial War Museum 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. 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 it would be easy enough to find a thread or focal point to write about. With such disparate material, all of it interesting but much straying from the ethics of documenting pain, it was a difficult task trying 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. 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. Julian Stallanbrass discussed the Abu Ghraib photographs, based upon his curatorial work at the Brighton Photo Biennial “Memory of Fire”. These photographs were subsequently raised several times throughout the day, not surprisingly since they have become iconic images representing a recent, unpopular and confused conflict with no other clear imagery or mythology. And, it is these photographs that seem to encapsulate much of the issues of the conference. 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 Standard Operating Procedures, Errol Morris’ documentary about Abu Ghraib in which perception is as important as - and inseparable from - the content itself. Throughout the film there is a constantly changing understanding of what happened at Abu Ghraib. Each interviewee has 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 seen to be simple, they are not. The film reveals photography’s multiple, shifting layers of meaning, and its ambivalent relationship to reality. Perhaps Hilary Roberts’ interpretations came from seeing a repetition of certain themes or occurrences throughout the history of war photography. I thought about this again in relation to Standard Operating Procedures when, in the film, army investigator Brent Pack explains how one photograph shows a crime, while another shows stress and discomfort (i.e. fear and pain) and is thus just a representation of standard operating procedure. Pack also explains 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. Of course, another ethical issue is that whilst the Abu Ghraib photographs showed the humiliation of people by soldiers, in other sections of the prison people were being physically tortured and sometimes killed. Yet it is the photographs that caused outrage. They are seen as evidence of guilt. All the soldiers depicted in them were seen as guilty, whether they committed any crimes or not, and those who were not shown were not found guilty. This is as 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. But the question is always what are we seeing? The conference ended with a discussion about the power of photography to change things – something that is hard to prove given that everything has to be seen in context and as an accumulative effect. But, it is important to ask whether it is justifiable to show images of pain and suffering if they do have an effect in ending or lessening suffering. Certainly, 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. 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. 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 some sort of perverse voyeurism, or moral indignation, we want to see these images. Whilst there were some at the conference who questioned their reproduction in the media, their reproduction at the conference was shown nonetheless. No one objected or seemed particularly distressed or perturbed, no one looked away, no one seemed to have trouble holding down beer or food afterward. 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.? The next conference, to be held in Brighton in November, will be kicked off by two photographers. 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 those pictures taken at Abu Ghraib?
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