Image Testimonies

Witnessing in Times of Social Media

Kerstin Schankweiler, Verena Straub, Tobias Wendl, Kerstin Schankweiler, Verena Straub, Tobias Wendl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367582197
• eBook ISBN: 9780429786235
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent political conflicts signal an increased proliferation of image testimonies shared widely via social media. Although witnessing with and through images is not a phenomenon of the internet era, contemporary digital image practices and politics have significantly intensified the affective economies of image testimonies. This volume traces the contours of these conditions and develops a conception of image testimony along four areas of focus.

The first and second section of this volume reflects the discussion of image testimonies as an interplay of evidential qualities and their potential to express affective relationalities and emotional involvement. The third section focuses on the question of how social media technologies shape and subsequently are shaped by image testimonies. To further complicate the ethical position of the witness, the final section looks at image testimony at the intersection of creation and destruction, taking into account the perspectives of different actors and their opposed moral positions.

With an emphasis on the affectivity of these images, Image Testimonies provides new and so far overlooked insights in the field. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Sociology and Social Policy, Media and Communications, Visual Arts and Culture and Middle East Studies.

Chapter 1

Image testimonies

Witnessing in times of social media

Kerstin Schankweiler, Verena Straub, and Tobias Wendl

The currency of image testimonies

Recent political conflicts have signaled an increased proliferation of image testimonies that are shared widely via social media. Although witnessing with and through images is not a phenomenon of the internet era (Zelizer 2007), image practices and politics in social media have significantly intensified the affective economies of image testimonies that are circulated in “real time” on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media platforms. New technologies have enabled individuals to record, upload, and share images directly via mobile devices, which make nearly everyone a potential witness at any given time. Since the so-called Arab Spring, it has become evident that audiovisual accounts of witnessing are circulated under new conditions that fundamentally reshape not only the practices of witnessing and testifying with images but also the testimonies as such. The Egyptian Uprising 2011 has been called the “Facebook Revolution”—not without contestation (Lim 2012)—and the Syrian conflict, for example, was described as the “the first YouTube war” (cited in Al-Ghazzi 2014, p. 441). This already indicates the assumed privileged role of social media in political conflict today. At the same time, social media and digital communication networks are integral parts of our current visual culture, characterized by the ubiquity of digital photography and imaging (Hand 2012). This new dominance of the visual and visuality has significantly transformed practices of witnessing and therefore calls for a new theoretical approach to testimony as image testimony. The current volume traces the contours of these conditions and attempts to develop a concept of image testimony that contributes to the ongoing debate on witnessing and testifying as contemporary image practices in the context of social media.

Towards a concept of image testimony

Our notion of image testimonies draws from a variety of theoretical strands and positions that crystallize around the two terms under question: image and testimony. Combining the two into a compound term first of all underscores the fact that testimony includes language-based as well as image-based exemplars and that their modulations oscillate between the registers of the verbal and the visual. Language-based testimonies on the one hand refer to scripted speech acts that were originally associated with either religious or legal contexts (such as giving a fervent expression of faith or making a solemn declaration in court). Image-based testimonies on the other hand show a less concise genealogy, though they have precursors in discursive practices that evolved in journalism (Zelizer 2007), as well as early visual anthropology using photographic images as an analytical tool and as evidence.¹ Testimonies, of course, have been recorded and transmitted in different and diverse media, embracing the media landscape as it developed. They have been communicated as spoken or written accounts, as literary texts,² illustrations, photographs or moving images. Regardless of modality, the social practice of testifying, in a basic understanding, includes the following parameters; a subject who acts as testifier, an event (or certain facts of this event) that form the content of the testimony, the testimony itself, as well as an audience to which the testimony is addressed, and, last but not least, a media infrastructure in which the testimony is articulated and circulated. As the chapters in our volume demonstrate, however, these parameters are not fixed entities but are constantly transformed and contested.

Through the proliferation of digital image technologies, growing transnational media connectivity and the increasing amount of images fluxing and refluxing around the globe, human experience has become much more visual (and visualized) than ever before. As a response, scholars in the 1990s made visual culture a new field of inquiry. Shifting their focus from the verbal to the visual, from text to image, they engaged in exploring how people seek information, meaning and pleasure in the interface with visual technologies and environments (Mirzoeff 1999, p. 3). Although images have thereby often been addressed as if they were texts, made up of discrete entities (signs, symbols), unfolding in a narrative plane, there are good reasons for trying to overcome such a textual bias. W.J.T. Mitchell (1986, p. 9) has stressed the agency of images that can make them grow into “actors on the historical stage,” but he has also pointed to the difficulties of drawing neat demarcation lines between images and texts as they more often than not intermingle and interact. According to Mitchell (1994, p. 5),

the “differences” between images and language are not merely formal matters; they are, in practice, linked to things like the difference between the (speaking) self and the (seen) other; between telling and showing, between “hearsay” and “eye-witness” testimony; between words (heard, quoted, inscribed) and objects, actions (seen, depicted, described); between sensory channels, traditions of representation, and modes of experience.

Current testimonial practices can mostly be described as a combination and interplay of image and text. This interplay shows considerable variations, from photographs that include written statements, audio-visual witnessing accounts and video footage to complexly layered multimedia contexts in the internet. Therefore, to speak of an image testimony does not proclaim the absence of language and text.

Witnessing and testimony have been theorized within a broad framework of epistemological, philosophical, ethical, and media-theoretical perspectives as well as in journalism and communication studies. Political scientist Michal Givoni (2011, p. 150) has observed: “Since the last third of the twentieth century, testimony has enjoyed unprecedented popularity as a philosophical theme, as an artistic gesture, and a political strategy.” An important and influential body of literature on testimony has been developed in relation to the issue of trauma and the Holocaust (e.g. Felman & Laub 1992; Agamben 1999; Wieviorka 2006). While this strand of research focuses on the figure of the survivor-witness, other scholars aimed at expanding and differentiating a variety of witnessing figures, including the martyr, the juridical, historical or moral witness, and eyewitnessing versus fleshwitnessing (Fassin 2008; Assmann 2008; Harari 2009). The conceptual field of witnessing is characterized by a complex multiplicity of terms that are often not clearly distinguished and used synonymously, such as the witness, witnessing, bearing witness, to testify and testimony (Givoni 2011; Peters 2001; Tait 2011). John Durham Peters points to the double meaning of the verb to witness, “the passive one of seeing and the active one of saying” (Peters 2001, p. 709). Notions such as eyewitnessing or bearing witness seem to account for this ambiguity by differentiating between more passive and more active dimensions of witnessing. Understood as a social relational practice, witnessing always depends on its mediation through testimony (Frosh & Pinchevski 2009, p. 1). In our digital visual culture today, images have definitely become the dominant means of mediating witnessing. Our volume’s focus on image testimonies acknowledges and highlights this central role of mediation, enabling witnessing accounts to move through space and time somewhat independently from the human witness.

In this context, it is worth noting that from early on, visuality and vision, image, and imaging technologies have shaped theories of testimony. In discourses of witnessing, seeing has been attributed a privileged role, compared with other senses of perception (Zelizer 2007, p. 410). Both in journalism and communication studies as well as in historical sciences, eyewitnessing gained importance as a key concept in relation to the account of events (Zelizer 2007; Burke 2001). In the most basic sense, eyewitnessing as “a social archetype” (Givoni 2011, p. 149) requires being physically present at an event, which unfolds before one’s own eyes. According to John Durham Peters (2001, p. 720), “to be there, present at the event in space and time is the paradigm case [of witnessing].” This “being there” provides the legitimacy and reliability of the eyewitness. While the act of eyewitnessing is not detachable from the human body and its co-presence at the event, testimonies are mediations of this act, a result or product of eyewitnessing. Image testimonies, such as drawings, paintings or photographs were then valued analogously to archeological objects and artifacts as historical sources, as “objets témoin” (Gabus 1975) or “mute witnesses” (Burke 2001, p. 14), whose evidential qualities were at the same time doubted, just as the eyewitnesses’ claim to authority. This doubt accompanied most of the historical discourse around eyewitnessing and was dependent on developments of imaging techniques used as “eye-witnessing tools” (Zelizer 2007, p. 418). As Renaud Dulong observes in his book, Le témoin oculaire, it was the camera that played an especially significant role in shaping our modern understanding of the eyewitness. With the emergence of photography, the eyewitness as a central figure in testimony theory was confronted with the ideal and model of the camera to register reality in a seemingly objective way (Dulong 1998). In contrast, Dulong as well as other researchers elaborated a different understanding of the eyewitness as an ethical figure with the ability to judge. This gave way to conceptualizations of the witness beyond the paradigm of the eyewitness (Givoni 2011). In view of current image practices, the dilemma of the eyewitness presents itself in a new light. With the mobile phone camera always at hand, witnessing practices today often combine both the ethical position of the human and the recording techniques of the camera. The resulting images document the events as much as they mark subjective positions and ethical engagements.

The topic of visual media again became center stage in theories that analyze mass mediated forms of witnessing. Building on John Ellis’ idea of second-hand witnessing, which assumes that distant viewers “are drawn into the position of being witnesses” themselves (Ellis 2000, p. 10), Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski have coined the term “media witnessing” (Frosh & Pinchevski 2009). They elaborated on the ubiquity of “media witnessing performed in, by and through the media” (Frosh & Pinchevski 2009, p. 1). Shifting the focus away from the eyewitness to “witnessing as receptivity,” Paul Frosh reminds us that “ ‘bearing witness,’ … is an act performed not by a witness but by a witnessing text” (Frosh 2006, p. 274). This shift makes it necessary to bring this witnessing text itself into focus. In light of the current primacy of the visual, it becomes obvious that the “witnessing text” today is predominantly image-based.

Although visuality and image practices represent a recurring theme in research on witnessing and testimony, the analysis of the images themselves has not been at the center of attention. Only a few publications, especially within art history and visual culture studies, have foregrounded the potential of images in bearing witness and addressed images as the subject of investigation (e.g., Guerin & Hallas 2007; Behrmann & Priedl 2014; Richardson 2016). Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (2007, p. 4) insist on “the agency of the material image,” which “is grounded in the performative (rather than constative) function of the act of bearing witness. Within the context of bearing witness, material images do not merely depict the historical world, they participate in its transformation.” This body of literature does not yet account for witnessing in times of social media. Our volume therefore aims at expanding this discussion and at re-conceptualizing image testimony in the digital age.

Image testimony in the social media era

Research on witnessing and testimony has often revolved around turning points in history that have impacted practices of witnessing. Times of eminent crises have always given rise to a proliferation of testimonies. The Holocaust and 9/11 are two of the most prominent examples often referred to in testimony theory. A similar paradigm shift in witnessing practices can be attributed to a wave of new social movements that started only a decade after the terror attacks in New York and Washington with the uprisings in North Africa and the Arab World. These movements gained their paradigmatic status and momentum by the unprecedented use of mobile devices as tools of witnessing and social media networks, producing a hitherto unknown global visibility. This new visual culture of witnessing also spilled over to other parts of the globe—just think of the Occupy movement, the Gezi Park protests, Euromaidan, or ongoing activism such as #BlackLivesMatter. Many assumptions about witnessing and testimony need to be reconsidered in light of these recent developments, both in the political as well as in the media sphere of our networked world.

Works focusing on the digital turn and the creation of connectivity and connectedness via social media networks are particularly fruitful in this context. Several scholars (van Dyke 2008; Gunthert 2015; Gerling, Holschbach & Löffler 2018) emphasized the fact that digital photography has experienced a major change from its former memorial and commemorative functions to a more communication-oriented use. André Gunthert (2014) has introduced the concept of “conversational images,” thus highlighting the new practices of photo sharing as a means to trigger conversations. Taking the events during the Egyptian revolution as their example, Florian Ebner and Constanze Wicke (2013) have suggested that the increasing connectedness of photographers, activists and citizen journalists with social media platforms has bestowed photography with a new testimonial layer and quality. This goes particularly for the unfolding of civic protest movements, when the digital devices connected to social media platforms, provide the witnesses, participating in the events on the ground, with a means for testifying. Kari Andén-Papadopoulos (2013), for example, has coined the term “citizen camera witnessing” in relation to embodied practices of witnessing in recent uprisings. Mette Mortensen (2015) has referred to this new condition as “connected witnessing,” in which the former temporal and spatial division of witnessing and testifying increasingly dissolves. Mortensen (2015, p. 1403) explains:

By placing emphasis on the participatory aspect, connective witnessing not only captures ongoing changes to acts of witnessing and political participation but also accentuates the increasing overlap between the two. Depending on focus, one may speak of witnessing as a personalized form of political participation or personalized political participation in the form of witnessing.

Considering the timeliness of the topic—with new technologies, practices and genres of image testimonies emerging as we write—our volume aims at laying the foundation for a relevant new field of research.

Pluralities of witnessing and evolving genres

The causes and motivations for producing image testimonies today are manifold and wide-ranging. Political activists and dissidents might use their mobile phone cameras as a means of resistance against oppressive regimes. Equally, regime loyalists, militant actors and terror groups employ digital media for their purposes (Al-Ghazzi 2014). Opposing actors often circulate their image testimonies with very different intentions on the same social media platforms. While some image testimonies are used as weapons with distinct aims, others seem to be recorded accidentally and without any clear intention by people who happen to be at the site of the witnessed event. Theorizing image testimonies in a globalized world needs to start by acknowledging the plurality of witnessing practices. While testimony theory has mostly emphasized the moral and ethical integrity of the witness, only recently have scholars challenged this conception in which “to witness means to be on the right side...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Image testimonies: witnessing in times of social media
• PART I Epistemologies of testimonies
• In conversation
• PART II Affective witnessing
• PART III Social media practices
• PART IV Witnessing destruction