Conversations on Conflict Photography

Lauren Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Fotografía

In today's image-saturated culture, the visual documentation of suffering around the world is more prevalent than ever. Yet instead of always deepening the knowledge or compassion of viewers, conflict photography can result in fatigue or even inspire apathy. Given this tension between the genre's ostensible goals and its effects, what is the purpose behind taking and showing images of war and crisis?

Conversations on Conflict Photography invites readers to think through these issues via conversations with award-winning photographers, as well as leading photo editors and key representatives of the major human rights and humanitarian organizations. Framed by critical-historical essays, these dialogues explore the complexities and ethical dilemmas of this line of work. The practitioners relate the struggles of their craft, from brushes with death on the frontlines to the battles for space, resources, and attention in our media-driven culture. Despite these obstacles, they remain true to a purpose, one that is palpable as they celebrate remarkable success stories: from changing the life of a single individual to raising broad awareness about human rights issues.

Opening with an insightful foreword by the renowned Sebastian Junger and richly illustrated with challenging, painful, and sometimes beautiful images, Conversations offers a uniquely rounded examination of the value of conflict photography in today's world.

INTERVIEWS

SECTION 1
BEHIND THE LENS

1
THE WORLD OF CONFLICT PHOTOGRAPHERS

The beginnings

Photographs of conflict are nearly as old as the medium itself.¹ Daguerreotypes exist from the Mexican-American War (1846–48), when photography was still in its infancy. The Crimean War (1853–56), waged between Imperial Russia and an alliance of Ottoman, British, and French forces, is considered the first extensively documented conflict, with over 300 photographs made by British photographer Roger Fenton. And Mathew Brady, an American photographer, has earned a place in the canon for his studio’s documentation of American Civil War battlefields (1861–65).

Photographers have thus been documenting conflict for over 150 years, and their tools and techniques have evolved enormously. So, too, have the conversations and debates around creating and looking at such imagery, whether of war specifically or crisis more broadly. This essay briefly highlights some of the more recent developments in this field while explaining workings within the industry, in order to lay a contextualizing foundation for the interviews to come in this section.

What is a photograph? And why take these pictures?

It may be easier to begin with what a photograph is not. A photograph isn’t “the truth.” That isn’t to say that photographs lie, but to point out that photojournalistic documentation cannot show, and by extension tell, us everything of a given event. A photo typically represents a fraction of a second of time, recorded visually, from a vantage point chosen by the photographer. If “the truth” is often understood as an unassailable and comprehensive consistency with fact, then a photo, for all of its visual precision and documentary value, must be acknowledged as the creation of a subjective photographer. That said, a photo can be a truthfully captured moment (that is, created following journalistic ethical guidelines—more on this to come), despite being unable to communicate the entirety of “the truth” of a situation. (And many, in the postmodern tradition, will throw up their hands at this characterization of truth anyway, asserting that there is no one unassailable truth, but rather, a plenitude of competing perspectives.) These limits of the medium can be summed up this way: a photograph cannot show us what is outside the frame, nor can it explain the causes behind what we’re seeing in the frame.

It is in that sense, of the image’s inability to explicate itself, that photographs—especially photos of conflict—often come in for sharp critique. Susan Sontag, for instance, has said that photographs can never give “ethical or political knowledge.” What the photo allows, she continues, “will be a knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom.”² It’s a critical take on the limits of photography and one that various interviewees in Conversations on Conflict Photography resist, even if They’re not specifically referencing Sontag as they speak. The goal of conflict photography, according to several of its practitioners in the forthcoming pages, isn’t solely to offer knowledge in the form of the photo, but to spark curiosity in order that the viewing public will be piqued to learn more about a given situation. Others in this section stress the importance of ensuring context for their images, and feel a responsibility to foster real knowledge, not its semblance. As photographer Susan Meiselas says in her interview:

[The photographer is] responsible to the frame, and to creating a larger framework in which the image you’ve “framed” can be understood. This means it’s not just, “I took a picture and I’m offloading it, and whatever happens, happens.” It has always been, in my practice, a goal to try to contextualize my images, whether working with traditional media, in bookmaking, or with museums or other public spaces.

Meiselas also offers, “Remember, photos are inherently de-contextualized. Everything you do with it after you take the picture constitutes the work to contextualize; and it always needs further re-contextualizing.” Thus there is an important acknowledgment of what the photo is not, what it cannot show, what it does not say on its own. But various interviewees flip Sontag’s language, moving from an implied rhetoric of “cannot” into a discussion of best practices, hopes, and goals. In other words, they take the limitations of the image as a starting point.

In the coming pages, many of the photographers share experiences of limitation—whether of their work’s intended goals, or in aspects of the industry itself. Why then enter into this line of work? Why take pictures of violence or suffering? The answers to these questions vary depending on the photographer: to communicate information in a raw, arresting manner; to provide evidence of crimes; to portray the human toll of a crisis; to give voice to people who have been caught up by terrible forces of history; or to generate anger or empathy in a viewing public to move them to act. Many will also explain, or show through their work, that crisis does not always need to take the visual form of explicit suffering. Photographers may turn the lens away from the gory (see Marcus Bleasdale’s documentation of miners and traders in the Democratic Republic of Congo, chapter 3); or may choose to individualize one subject who represents others (see Newsha Tavakolian’s portrait of a female fighter in northern Syria, chapter 13); and stories of extreme hardship or injustice can be portrayed aesthetically, even artfully (see Andrea Bruce’s photo of an infant who died from exposure to the cold, chapter 2). Yet of course some of the documentation does foreground the graphic, the brutal, the extreme agony. Whether images of conflict are overtly violent or not, they raise a number of important ethical questions.

A few key debates

Scholar Jane Lydon writes, “Although powerful, there is nothing logically necessary about witnessing another’s sorrow, rather than their happiness or contentment, in order to feel with them or understand them as human.”³ In other words, is it necessary to see suffering to experience sympathy with another via the photographic form? In tackling this question, at times indirectly, several photographers present strong arguments in favor of creating and distributing imagery of “another’s sorrow.” For instance, some contend that the horrors of war should be made explicit, that the public should not be rendered ignorant in the name of “protecting” it from upsetting imagery. That argument might extend in the following way: the public needs to see these images in order to understand better what it means to support politicians who vote for—or who oppose—military engagements and armed interventions.

Another critique of conflict imagery holds that even when the photographer is well intentioned, the outcome may miss the mark. Many photographers talk of wanting to raise awareness in order to help situations, whether of crisis, injustice, or other forms of suffering. But as Fred Ritchin, Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography School, has observed, “Too often the well-meaning motivation of those involved in the enterprise of making and publishing photographs about issues of importance is considered sufficient—whether or not the imagery has the desired effect is frequently not the focus.”⁴

Readers may be surprised to learn from these interviews that photographers can be enduringly aware of their own “missed marks”—the photo that didn’t galvanize geopolitical intervention (see Ron Haviv, chapter 6); the pre-digital image that wound up online to the horror of its subject, a rape survivor (see Nina Berman, chapter 10); the crushing feeling of documenting refugees and thinking that the work isn’t helping at all (see Eman Helal, chapter 8). Despite common assumptions about conflict photographers (e.g., that they are always jumping from one “hot spot” to the next, or have inadequate knowledge of the theoretical discussions), a number of these interviews demonstrate an attentiveness to many debates and concerns that circulate around the creation and distribution of such photos.

There are also cases that the photographers themselves call success stories: the coverage that pushed Intel, a major technology corporation, to ban usage of conflict minerals in its products; and the imagery that has been used at The Hague to indict war criminals (see chapters 3 and 6). Those are two of the “big banner” victories, and even then, such wins are never perfect, as photographer Marcus Bleasdale notes with regard to the Intel ban and problems that occurred in the wake of its implementation. Other interviewees talk of successes on much smaller, and perhaps more realistic and practical, scales. For instance, Andrea Bruce offers an anecdote about a woman who keeps one of Bruce’s photos from Afghanistan above her desk at work as a reminder of the distant suffering of others.

In short, it’s a complicated terrain—with seeming victories and abject failures. There are photos that fail because they don’t meet the creator’s expectations, as well as those that fail because they create problems, for instance, by reinforcing stereotypes—a concern taken up in some of the photographer interviews and which reappears in the section on human rights and humanitarian agencies (Section 3). The question thus perhaps becomes: who is responsible for the “missed marks” and how might they be avoided in the future?

As this question implies, the ethical debates around conflict photography fall into two broad categories: the ethics of creating the imagery and the ethics of looking at it. Regarding the former, the critiques can range widely in tone, with the more extreme likening photographers to vultures; some say this is a predatory behavior wherein the subjects of images are appropriated, turned into objects for the gain of the photographer, who benefits professionally from a powerful image. Other critics accuse photographers of voyeurism, or of “parachuting in,” snapping pictures, and getting out without real understanding or regard for the subjects. For this reason, it is particularly interesting to learn when and how research plays a role for photographers covering faraway conflicts. Some interviewees describe a process of background research or intensive reading in order to prepare for an assignment. But at least one photographer talks of being ill prepared for covering a locale very early in his career; he realized then that more study was necessary. It’s also interesting to note when and how certain photographers become deeply engaged with a place. Some spend just a brief period of time covering a given event, but others settle in foreign regions for extended periods, even years on end. Still others take up longer-term projects—long-form documentary as opposed to breaking news reportage—and at least one interviewee featured here has returned to sites of prior conflict, to continue to understand and tell a story over a period of decades.

In considering the other broad category of debate, the discussions around the ethics of looking, some question the aestheticization of suffering. Why make a striking or even beautiful image of another’s pain? The interviewees discuss their perspectives on the balance between style and content. And while much of the documentation explored here was created as current events journalism, at times that imagery moves to other contexts, from books to galleries to, in one case, a cathedral (see Laurent Van der Stockt, chapter 12). Subjects describe their thinking on the display spaces that break from the traditional newspaper or news magazine. ...