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1 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vol. II, p. 2562.
2 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vol. II, p. 2562.
3 Her example is Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Importantly, the “witness is the bearer of an experience that, albeit unique, does not exist on its own, but only in the testimonial situation in which it takes places” (p. 82).
4 Wieviorka (2006: 57) reports that at the Eichmann trial, “[f]or the first time …, a historian, Salo Baron, then a professor at Columbia University, was called to the witness stand to provide a historical framework for the trial”. In literature, the expert witness appears for example in James (1977).
5 We would like to decouple Margalit’s discussion from “unmitigated evil regime[s]” and expand it to all political regimes.
6 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007y6k8/episodes/guide.
7 Hirsch (1997: 119) notes that the photograph normally reveals less than it promises to reveal.
8 “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch 1997: 22).
9 US Secretary of State’s address to the United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003, at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/05/iraq.usa.
10 Heidegger’s idea is presented in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1960, originally from 1935).
11 Wieviorka (2006: 101) reports that “one of the recurring themes in both oral and written survivor testimony is of a promise made to a friend or relative who is about to die, a promise to tell the world what happened to them and thus to save them from oblivion – to make death a little less futile. Survival itself is often explained and justified by this will to honor the legacy of those who perished”.
12 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Principles, Vol. II, p. 2563 (all quotations).
[56][57]2. Image Control in the Age of Terror
Louie Palu
The act of witnessing war, violence, documenting them and for what purpose any resulting photographs are used for can determine the outcome of political understanding and decisions on every level affecting a war.1 For example most if not all high-level politicians and civilian diplomats representing countries with western soldiers fighting in Kandahar, Afghanistan where I worked between 2006 and 2010 relied on series of witnesses for their understanding of the conflict. These civilians and policy makers were not allowed beyond a certain sized secure military base cut off from the communities they might be located in. This resulted furthermore in most civilian employees of any government not being permitted anywhere near the true frontlines where their policies may count most because of the high risk of them being targeted by opposing forces. Terrorists and militants in many areas attempt attacking any representative of a foreign government for the high propaganda value some insurgent groups placed on killing western civilians especially representing governments such as the United States and Canada. In addition, they were not allowed on patrols or out on combat operations with soldiers. They relied on journalist’s and soldier’s interpretations and reports on what the war looked and sounded like. The situation on the ground in the war was interpreted for them using still photographs, writing and including some video. However, even the witness is limited by what they can convey by these methods of documentation and representation as details such as the smell of war which includes dead bodies and what all the senses experience including the weather can never be documented as real as the an in person experience.
[58]Fig. 2.1: Screen capture still photograph from video made by the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan as it appears in Louie Palu’s documentary “Kandahar Journals” (76 minutes 2015). 2015 Photo © Louie Palu
Current conflicts like those that involve ISIS (aka ISIL) have become near impossible to photograph by journalists and include environments much too hostile to work in as an independent witness, as ISIS has made it their message within their videos to perform grotesque killings of members of the western media and create their own content. It is now the sophisticated manner in which militant groups such as ISIS create visual content and control what is visually documented that has changed the manner in which we see and don’t see what is going on in the world’s new battlefields.
When I see a photograph, the first thing I do is figure out who took it. But the name of the person who pressed the shutter button is just the first stem: for what purpose was the photograph taken? In printed newspapers and magazines, the photographer’s byline is often more discrete than that of the author of a news article the photograph accompanies. The photographer is identified by fine print in the margin of the page. Next, I turn to the caption: the who, what, when, where, why and how of the image as described there is critical to understanding the photograph as a photograph.
In the years dominated by the printed page, the photograph, its caption if any and the credit were printed on the same sheet of paper. They were inseparable. In the digital age, images are embedded online in social media apps without credit or caption Authorship and context are stripped away, and the viewer is left to make assumptions. Most of the students whom I have spoken[59] to who have come of age in the internet era say they do not look for the author of the photograph or for its caption.
Fig. 2.2: Screen capture still photograph from video made by ISIS of the murder of American Journalist James Foley in 2014.