Of War in the Photography of Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye

Thinking the ‘Event’ of War in the Photography of Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye

Emma Crott

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW Art & Design 2018

Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname/Family Name : Crott Given Name/s : Emma Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : PhD Faculty : Art & Design School : Art & Design Thinking the ‘Event’ of War in the Photography of Sophie Ristelhueber, Thesis Title : Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye

Abstract:

This study examines how three contemporary art photographers, Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye, critically engage with the history, conventions and functions of representations of war. All three image-makers have established reputations in the international art world. Commentators have also placed their work under the recently coined rubric of ‘aftermath’ or ‘late’ photography that responds to military conflicts. Arriving days, months or years after battle has ceased to photograph traces of war and the destructive effects left behind, this ‘late’ mode of war photography is often contrasted with the temporal and spatial proximity to action endorsed by the ‘decisive moment’ of photojournalism.

My analysis of works by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye focuses on examples of their practice made in response to military conflicts in the Middle East since the 1990s. These works are briefly contextualised within the historical evolution of war photography, and related to shifts in the conduct and media representations of war in recent decades. Additionally, the study investigates commentaries on aftermath war photography by theorists John Roberts and David Campany, among others. A significant aim of this project is to interrogate assumptions about what constitutes the ‘event’ (of war) that informs the current literature on aftermath war photography. My approach to this topic draws on Jacques Derrida’s theorisation of the divided structure of the ‘event’ as both resistant to representation and necessarily subject to representational translation. It is proposed that works of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye reflect this divided structure by simultaneously ‘speaking’ and ‘keeping silent’ about the event of war.

Various historical and contemporary aesthetic theories are adapted to explore how each artist confects a degree of conceptual indeterminacy in their works. These theories include Jacques Rancière’s concepts of the ‘pensive image’ and ‘anachronism’, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s eighteenth century thinking of the ‘pregnant moment’ in history painting. It is contended that unlike much contemporary media imagery of war that circumscribes and directs interpretation, the photography addressed in this project delays, fragments or suspends cognitive resolution, thereby offering food for thought about the contentious topic of war.

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

16 April 2018 …………………………………………………………… ……………………………………..……………… ……….……………………...…….… Signature Witness Signature Date The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional circumstances and require the approval of the Dean of Graduate Research.

FOR OFFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements for Award: Statement of Originality

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

Signed ……………………………………………......

Date ……………………………………………...... 16 April 2018

i Copyright Statement

I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.

Signed ……………………………………………......

Date ……………………………………………...... 16 April 2018

ii Authenticity Statement

I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.

Signed ……………………………………………......

Date ……………………………………………...... 16 April 2018

iii Abstract

Various historical and contemporary aesthetic theories are adapted to explore how each artist confects a degree of conceptual indeterminacy in their works. These theories include Jacques Rancière’s concepts of the ‘pensive image’ and ‘anachronism’, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s eighteenth century thinking of the ‘pregnant moment’ in history painting. Each of these theories echo Derrida’s account of the double or divided structure of the event. It is contended that unlike much contemporary media imagery of war that circumscribes and directs interpretation, the photography addressed in this project delays,

iv fragments or suspends cognitive resolution, thereby offering food for thought about the contentious topic of war. This is not to say, however, that these practices make a fetish of conceptual indeterminacy or open-ended meaning. This study will also present fresh insights into the different critical reflections on events of contemporary warfare posed by the photography of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye.

v Acknowledgments

Firstly, I owe a huge thank you to my supervisor, Dr Toni Ross. This thesis would not have been possible without your support, guidance and unflinching perseverance throughout the ups and downs of the PhD process. Your academic rigour, meticulous editing and mentorship were invaluable. I am truly grateful for the time devoted and knowledge imparted to this thesis which I know went above and beyond the requirements of a supervisor.

During my candidature, I was fortunate enough to receive university funding to attend and present my research at two conferences: The Arts in Society Ninth International Conference at Sapieza University of Rome in 2014 and The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) conference at the Australian National University in 2016. I am grateful for these experiences that helped solidify my research, and in particular, for the opportunity to travel to Europe to view the works discussed in this study in the flesh.

To my fellow colleagues and friends in the post-graduate study space—Vanessa Bartlett, Meredith Birrell, Bec Dean and Pia van Gelder—thank you for your support and putting up with my constant sighing and temperature control issues! I will miss furiously typing away with you.

A special thank you to my friends Meg Cockle, Louise Mayhew, Mike Barnard, Dom Hindmarsh and Virginia Mawer for championing me along the way, providing stimulating conversations over coffee and lunch breaks, supplying me with study treats and Yum Cha outings, and more recently, understanding my necessary absence in the final sprint to the finish line.

Finally, thank you to my loving family. Your continued faith in my ability to complete this mammoth task has buoyed me along the way. In particular, to my mum and step mum for their emotional guidance and support, without which I would probably be an anxious nervous wreck!

vi Table of Contents

Statement of Originality ...... i Copyright Statement ...... ii Authenticity Statement ...... iii Abstract ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... vi Table of Contents ...... vii List of Illustrations ...... viii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One A Selective Historical Sketch of War Photography...... 10

Chapter Two Representing the 'Event' of War ...... 45

Chapter Three Sophie Ristelhueber: pensiveness and the wounds of war ...... 81

Chapter Four Simon Norfolk: anachronism and unfixing the event of war ...... 104

Chapter Five Luc Delahaye: the expectant moment of tableaux photography and reframing the 'other' in war ...... 125

Conclusion Thinking the ‘Event’ of War ...... 150

Illustrations ...... 154 Bibliography ...... 179

vii List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1: Frank Hurley, Episode after Battle of Zonnebeke, 1918. Gelatin silver print, 35.8x48.5cm...... 154

Figure 1.2: Robert Capa, Landing of the American troops on Omaha Beach, 1944. Gelatin silver print, 24.1x35.5cm, International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos……………………………………………………………………………154

Figure 1.3: Huynh Cong ‘Nick’ Ut, Accidental Napalm Attack, 1972. Gelatin silver print, Associated Press...... 155

Figure 1.4: Malcom Browne, The Burning Monk, 1963. Gelatin silver print, Associated Press/Wide World Photos...... 155

Figure 1.5: Joe Rosenthal, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, 1945. Gelatin silver print, Associated Press...... 155

Figure 1.6: Dmitri Baltermants, Attack—Eastern Front WWII, 1941. Gelatin silver print, 22.6x29.8cm...... 156

Figure 1.7: Roger Fenton, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855. Salted paper print, 27.6x34.9cm...... 156

Figure 1.8: Roger Fenton, Distant View of Sevastopol, with the Lines of Gordon’s Battery, 1855. Salted paper print, 21.9x34.6cm...... 156

Figure 1.9: John Warwick Brooke, An officer of the 10th Battalion leads the way out of a sap and is being followed by the party, 1917. Gelatin silver print...... 157

Figure 1.10: Edward Steichen, Aerial view of ruins of Vaux, France, 1918. Gelatin silver print...... 157

Figure 1.11: Robert Capa, The Falling Soldier, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 24.7x34cm...... 157

Figure 1.12: Larry Burrows, James C. Farley with a jammed machine gun shouts to crew as wounded pilot James E. Magel lies dying beside him, 1965. From One Ride with Yankee Papa 13 series. Gelatin silver print, 34x23cm...... 158

Figure 1.13: David Turnley, US Sergeant Ken Kozakiewicz (23), gives vent to his grief as he learns that the body bag at his feet contains the remains of his friend Andy Alaniz, 1991. Inkjet print, Black Star...... 158

Figure 1.14: Still from video footage of precision-guided munition, Iraq, 1991. US Military...... 159

viii Figure 1.15: Patrick de Noirmon, Anti-aircraft tracer fire lights up Baghdad, 1991. Reuters...... 159

Figure 1.16: Saibal Das, Taliban fighters with a vehicle on highways in Afghanistan, 1996. Getty Images...... 159

Figure 1.17: Ramzi Haidar, Smoke covers the presidential palace compound in Baghdad, 21 March, 2003. Getty Images/AFP...... 160

Figure 1.18: Still from video footage of POW US Private First Class Jessica Lynch being loaded into a military helicopter on her way out of Iraq, 2 April, 2003. Getty Images...... 160

Figure 2.1: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Jumping Over a Puddle [Behind the Gare St. Lazare], 1932. Gelatin silver print, 35.2x24.1cm, Magnum Photos...... 161

Figure 3.1: Alexander Gardner, Portrait of Lewis Payne before Execution, 1865. Albumen silver print from collodion wet plate negative...... 162

Figure 3.2: Walker Evans, Kitchen Wall in Bud Field's Home, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 20.3x24.8cm...... 162

Figure 3.3: Installation view of Eleven Blowups (2006) in the disused apartment of the governor of the Banque de France, Arles, France, 2006...... 163

Figure 3.4: Installation view of Fait (1992) at Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1999...... 163

Figure 3.5: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #60, 1992. Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm...... 164

Figure 3.6: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #69, 1992. Black and white photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm...... 164

Figure 3.7: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #67, 1992. Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm...... 164

Figure 3.8: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #20, 1992. Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm...... 165

Figure 3.9: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #61, 1992. Black and white photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm...... 165

Figure 3.10: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #19, 1992. Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm...... 165

Figure 3.11: Sophie Ristelhueber, Every One #14, 1994. Black and white photograph, silver print laminated on wood fibre plaque, 270x180cm...... 166

Figure 3.12: Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups #7, 2006. Colour silver print, 110x133cm...... 166

ix Figure 3.13: Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups #2, 2006. Colour silver print, 110x133cm...... 167

Figure 3.14: Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups #11, 2006. Colour silver print, 110x133cm...... 167

Figure 4.1: Simon Norfolk, King Amanullah’s Victory Arch built to celebrate the 1919 Independence from the British. Paghman, Kabul Province, 2001-2. From Afghanistan: Chronotopia series. Digital chromogenic print, 100x126cm...... 168

Figure 4.2: Claude Lorrain, Capriccio with ruins of the Roman Forum, 1634. Oil on canvas, 79.7x118.8cm...... 168

Figure 4.3: Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus, 1644. Oil on canvas, 102x135cm...... 169

Figure 4.4: Simon Norfolk, The interior of the utterly destroyed Presidential palace at Darulaman, damaged firstly by the Soviets and later in fighting between Rabbani and the Hazaras in 1992, 2001-2. From Afghanistan: Chronotopia series. Digital chromogenic print, 61x76.2cm...... 169

Figure 4.5: Simon Norfolk, Bullet-scarred outdoor cinema at the Palace of Culture in the Karte Char district of Kabul, 2001-2. From Afghanistan: Chronotopia series. Digital chromogenic print, 100x126cm...... 170

Figure 4.6: Simon Norfolk, The swimming pool of the destroyed Presidential palace at Darulaman, 2001-2. From Afghanistan: Chronotopia series. Digital chromogenic print, 100x126cm...... 170

Figure 4.7: Simon Norfolk, Former teahouse in a park next to the Afghan Exhibition of Economic and Social Achievements in the Shah Shahid district of Kabul, 2001-2. From Afghanistan: Chronotopia series. Digital chromogenic print, 100x126cm. 171

Figure 4.8: Installation view of Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk (2010) at Moeller Fine Art, New York, 2011...... 171

Figure 4.9: Simon Norfolk, A security guard’s booth at the newly restored Ikhtyaruddin citadel, Herat, 2010. From Burke + Norfolk series. Fujicolour crystal archive print, 100x126cm...... 172

Figure 4.10: Simon Norfolk, The peripheries of the city of Kabul, especially near the north and east are endless building sites. Since most of the documentation concerning land title was lost during the war, much of this speculative and illegal construction is concerned more with establishing undisputable ‘facts on the ground’. Apartments and shops are, almost exclusively, unoccupied, 2010. From Burke + Norfolk series. Fujicolour crystal archive print, 100x126cm...... 172

x Figure 4.11: Simon Norfolk, Some of the astonishing new architecture mushrooming up in cities all over Afghanistan. Part Disney, part wedding cake; inspired by Bollywood but reverential to Greek classicism; it represents as architectless kind of architecture, 2010. From Burke + Norfolk series. Fujicolour crystal archive print, 100x126cm...... 173

Figure 4.12: Simon Norfolk, Unfinished, speculative property development near Kabul Airport, 2010. From Burke + Norfolk series. Fujicolour crystal archive print, 100x126cm...... 173

Figure 4.13: Simon Norfolk, Refugees from fighting between NATO and the Taliban in Nangarhar province, close to the Pakistan border, now sheltering on wasteground in Kabul, 2010. From Burke + Norfolk series. Fujicolour crystal archive print, 100x126cm...... 174

Figure 5.1: Luc Delahaye, US Bombing on Taliban Positions, 2001. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 112x238cm...... 175

Figure 5.2: Luc Delahaye, Jenin Refugee Camp, 2002. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 111x239cm...... 175

Figure 5.3: Luc Delahaye, Baghdad IV, 2003. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 111x240cm...... 175

Figure 5.4: Luc Delahaye, Taliban, 2001. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 111x237cm...... 176

Figure 5.5: Nicholas Poussin, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1631-32. Oil on canvas, 148x175cm...... 176

Figure 5.6: Léon Cogniet, Scene from the Massacre of the Innocents, 1824. Oil on canvas, 265x235cm...... 176

Figure 5.7: Luc Delahaye, Kabul Road, 2001. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 111x238cm...... 177

Figure 5.8: Théodore Géricault, The Raft of Medusa, 1818-19. Oil on canvas, 491x716cm...... 177

Figure 5.9: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà, 1498-99. Marble, 174x195cm, St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City...... 178

Figure 5.10: Samuel Aranda, A woman holds a wounded relative in her arms, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen on 15 October, 2011. Associated Press...... 178

Figure 5.11: Luc Delahaye, Ordinary Public Consistory, 2003. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 114x240cm...... 178

. xi Introduction

This research project examines the contemporary photographic art practices of Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye. These three internationally renowned artists critically engage with the subject of war in order to disrupt the assumptions underlying the character of contemporary warfare and its representational translation in the media. Curators and photography commentators have placed their practices under the rubric of ‘aftermath’ or ‘late’ photography depicting the traces of combat and the destructive effects of warfare. Aftermath photographers visit theatres of war days, months or even years after the cessation of combat. They capture what remains at sites transformed by war: crumbling infrastructure, spent ordnance that litters the landscape, pockmarked buildings riddled by bullets, abandoned military equipment, and bomb craters that tear open the ground like graves. This ‘late’ mode of war photography is often contrasted with a temporal and spatial proximity to the action of combat endorsed by the ‘decisive moment’ model of war photojournalism.

My analysis of works by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye focuses on examples of their practice responsive to military conflicts in the Middle East since the 1990s. Each artist has produced numerous works in response to wars in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. In particular, their respective focus on Iraq and Afghanistan signals a critical engagement with the seemingly perpetual warfare instituted by the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ and the grandstanding of US military power in the region. Their practices have been taken to exemplify the relatively recent phenomenon of ‘aftermath’ or ‘late’ photography of war, the rise of which has been aligned with “the unfathomable, awe-inspiring and horrific nature of today’s globalised, technologised warfare”.1 Moreover, works by each image-maker are regularly exhibited together in international exhibitions, the most noteworthy recent example being the major 2014-5 Tate Modern exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography. My interest in their practices stemmed from a recognition that despite apparent similarities in subject matter, each artist works in dialogue with a diverse range of historical, aesthetic and conceptual precedents

1 Sarah James, "Making an Ugly World Beautiful? Morality and Aesthetics in the Aftermath," in Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, ed. Julian Stallabrass (Brighton: Photoworks, 2013), 118. 1 rarely addressed in the literature. Moreover, much commentary concerning the three artists focuses on ethical implications of depicting sites of war photographically, or alternatively positions their work within a more general discussion on aftermath photography. To date, less attention has been paid to analysing formal and art historical features of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye’s artworks or interpreting issues posed by their photographs. Using a methodological amalgamation of art historical, formal and theoretical analysis, this study undertakes such a task, while simultaneously supplementing scholarship on the aftermath mode of war photography.

It should be noted that the term ‘aftermath’ has been used in contemporary art theory to discuss a wide range of practices that photographically document the effects of historically significant events. Examples include the ecologically devastating impact of industry on the natural landscape depicted by Edward Burtynsky and the life-long psychological and physical injuries sustained by veterans of war represented in documentary projects by Lori Grinker. The term ‘aftermath aesthetic’ has also been employed by Roger Luckhurst to relate practices as divergent as those of Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Zarina Bhimji, Paul Seawright and Sally Mann to the temporal belatedness of trauma and the politics of memory.2 Although topics of mourning and remembrance are addressed in my analysis of the practices of Ristelhueber and Delahaye, the fields of trauma and memory studies fall outside the scope of this thesis. Moreover, artistic practices deemed to be working within the ‘aftermath’ arena are too multiple and varied to make any theoretically coherent argument. Rather, this project focuses specifically on photographic works depicting the aftermath of events of military conflict, as identified in writings by theorists David Campany and John Roberts. This more limited category of aftermath photography has been interpreted in contrast to commonplace media representations of war, and it is within this particular framework that my study unfolds.

The literature on aftermath war photography approaches what Sarah James describes as this “strange new genre” that surfaced in the 1990s with varying degrees of scorn and condemnation.3 This mode of imaging has been reproached by commentators for maintaining a physical and temporal distance from the geopolitical specificities of

2 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 158. 3 James, 115. 2 warfare. Moreover, because these artists often take an overt formalist and aesthetic approach to the medium of photography, they are further rebuked for sublating political issues under a merely “aesthetically rarefied response”.4 Described as distant, mute, emotionally detached, visually banal (or conversely, spectacular), politically withdrawn, ethically reprehensible, melancholic, morally dubious, fetishistic and also sublime, the category of aftermath photography is certainly not without its critics. As such, commentators analysing the critical potential of artworks associated with the ‘genre’ actively try to disengage these works from the rhetoric of the aftermath. For example, David Mellor and Henrik Gustafsson distance Sophie Ristelhueber’s practice from aftermath photography. Mellor stresses the metaphoric complexity of Ristelhueber’s work to distinguish it from what he calls the “monumental naturalism” of Simon Norfolk’s aftermath photography.5 On the other hand, Gustafsson suggests that Ristelhueber is unconcerned with a self-reflexive critique of the specificity of the photographic medium, as posited by Campany in his oft-cited essay that coined the term ‘late’ photography.6

This thesis acknowledges the authority of the already established aftermath framework but diverges from accounts that position it as a homogenous style of photography. For example, many commentators follow Campany in highlighting the ‘straight’ composition of late photography, foregrounding the ‘objectivity’ of the camera and the visual resemblance of the image to ‘reality’. However, Ristelhueber’s use of oblique camera angles actually radically upsets the mimetic intelligibility of the photographic image, while Norfolk’s evocative use of lighting is far from ‘neutral’ or ‘straight’. Furthermore, the oft-noted ‘stillness’ of the late photograph has been tied to the absence of people, yet both Norfolk and Delahaye’s images feature human presence while still conforming to the ‘after-the-conflict’ structure of this mode of imaging. This study proposes a more theoretically nuanced understanding of aftermath war photography that recognises the aesthetic and conceptual diversity of these image-makers.

4 David Campany, "Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Problems of 'Late Photography'," in Where Is the Photograph, ed. David Green (Brighton & Kent: Photoforum & Photoworks, 2003), 132. 5 David Mellor, "Rents in the Fabrics of Reality: Contexts for Sophie Ristelhueber," in Sophie Ristelhueber: Operations (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 225. 6 Henrik Gustafsson, "The Cut and the Continuum: Sophie Ristelhueber’s Anatomical Atlas," History of Photography 40, no. 1 (2016): 70. 3 Chapter Two analyses commentaries on aftermath war photography by Campany and Roberts, among others, to investigate the underlying assumptions of the temporal framework of ‘lateness’. In particular, the term ‘late’ gives the impression that these photographers have missed the opportune moment—their tardy arrival at events of war suggests they’ll have to ‘settle’ with merely capturing remnants and remains of the now ‘past’ event. But as I explain, these assumptions are derived from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s influential conception of the ‘decisive moment’ captured by photography as a temporal schema underpinned by notions of immediacy and instantaneity. I propose that the dichotomy set up in the literature between the timeliness of the ‘decisive moment’ and the delay of ‘late’ photography privileges an understanding of the event as bound entirely to human action. Moreover, the ‘decisive moment’ model assumes a conventional thinking of the event as fixed and stable ‘in time’; once the action has ceased, the event is considered ‘over’ and therefore unavailable for further representation.

However, I argue that this understanding of events captured by photography fails to do justice to the critical import of works by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye. Stressing the ‘lateness’ of their photography positions their practices as melancholic protestations of loss—both for the ‘event’ and for the once privileged power of photography to capture the ‘event’ as it happens, which Campany and Roberts both suggest has been ceded to video technology. By postulating the now diminished capacity of photography to represent news events, these commentators conclude that pictorial representations of traces of past conflict offer little more than an elegiac reflection on the diminished cultural status of the photographic medium. One key aim of this project is to question common assumptions about what constitutes the event of war and its translation via photography. In so doing, I reframe the discussion to demonstrate how the examples of ‘aftermath’ photography addressed in this study engage critically and reflectively with the topic of war, part of which entails presenting alternative ways of seeing and thinking about war to the kind of war photojournalism that circulates in media contexts.

My approach to the event of war questions ‘normative historical thinking’ that reduces the specificity of events to chronologically satisfying narratives. Chapter Two also examines Jacques Derrida’s theorisation of the double structure of the ‘event’ as both resistant to representation and necessarily subject to representational translation. Derrida’s thinking departs from the assumption that historical events, such as war, are

4 exhausted or captured by discursive translation, theorising instead that the event entails an irreducible singularity that resists epistemological attempts to contain it. This singularity, combined with the ‘disjointed’ temporal structure of the event, reveals the event is always open to the possibility of reconfiguration, rethinking and reinterpretation, thereby destabilising a fixed and absolute historical account of the ‘past’. Importantly, however, Derrida does not signal the utter failure of representation when faced with significant events. For him, every event ‘marks’ and it is these marks that are available to representational translation.

I argue that artworks by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye can be interpreted in terms of Derrida’s paradoxical configuration of the event. I elaborate various strategies these artists implement to suspend or confound the transmission of determinate interpretive conclusions expected from most media representations of war. By inscribing a level of conceptual indeterminacy within their images, these artists allow various interpretative possibilities to remain in play. Each of the three chapters on the artists draws on a theoretical construct to explore how cognitive resolution is differentially delayed or fragmented in their practices. The third chapter on Sophie Ristelhueber utilises Jacques Rancière’s theory of the ‘pensive image’ to discuss the tension sustained in her work by combining conflicting modes of expression. In Chapter Four on Simon Norfolk, a Rancièrian reading of historical anachronism is employed to examine how the artist stages or captures mixed temporalities and layered histories of war in his series of photographs taken in Afghanistan. Finally, in Chapter Five, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s conception of the ‘pregnant moment’ in history painting is applied to Luc Delahaye’s monumental tableau photographs of war.

While focussed on ways in which each of the art practices examined create images of conceptual indeterminacy and aesthetic ambiguity to counter the informational inclinations of press photography, this study does not suggest that the artists make a fetish of conceptual indeterminacy. Certainly, the emphasis on conceptual indeterminacy employed by these ‘aftermath’ photographers is assigned a critical dimension because of a resultant slowing down of the reception of their images that differs from cycles of high velocity production and consumption characteristic of contemporary media reporting on war. However, as the summaries of the case study chapters below suggest, I also seek to

5 develop interpretations of what particular images and series of images by the artists in question have to say about the wars they address and war more generally.

Chapter One provides a historical background on war photography from the 19th Century onwards, relevant to approaches referenced and/or rejected by the three photographers that are the focus of this study. It presents a brief sketch of the historical evolution of war photography, tracing how visual strategies and conventions of war photography are tied to the shifting conduct of warfare, technological advancements, as well as varying levels of state-sanctioned censorship. The chapter also presents a brief overview of media representations of war in the Middle East since 1990, from the perspective of Western geopolitical interests. It is this context that Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye respond to in some respects. Many commentators have noted how the perpetual ‘War on Terrorism’ defies many of the assumptions of conventional warfare, disrupting clear distinctions between the military and civilians, the battlefield and the ‘home front’. This is a globally dispersed war that traverses spatial divides; drones are deployed in Afghanistan from the relative safety of the US Nevada desert, while the elusive ‘enemy’ crops up in ‘terror cells’ all over the world. Yet photojournalism continues to recycle conventional tropes to frame contemporary war in a comprehensible, contained and familiar visual language. As Liam Kennedy suggests, photojournalism today is burdened by underlying assumptions and expectations established during its early twentieth- century origins.7 This includes the privileging of the photographer’s proximity to the event as ‘eye witness’ to provide an authoritative and objective visual documentation of historically significant events such as war. Furthermore, a liberal humanitarianism underscored much documentary and photojournalistic images of the twentieth century, which assumed that depicting the suffering of others would provoke compassion in audiences and galvanise socio-political action to end injustice. Yet, as Kennedy claims, the idealistic aims of early photojournalism have largely inflated the “capacity of the genre to both document and enact social change” and overdetermined its ethical and political objectives.8 In response, critically engaged photographers today must seek new “ways to revitalize perceptions of war and violence, humanity and otherness, and visually

7 Liam Kennedy, "Photojournalism and Warfare in a Postphotographic Age," Photography and Culture 8, no. 2 (2015): 4. 8 Kennedy, 4. 6 map the shifting forms of US warfare”.9 The purpose of outlining a history of war photography is not to set up a dichotomy between photojournalism and the artists discussed in this thesis, but rather to demonstrate how their practices are informed by, and responding to, the conventions of mainstream photojournalism.

This study proposes that the ‘aftermath’ mode adopted by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye presents alternative ways of envisaging war to prevailing media representations. For example, it will be argued Ristelhueber undermines the US military rhetoric of ‘humane warfare’ and techno-superiority established during the Gulf War by inverting surgical metaphors of the war to focus on the material violence enacted by war. Delahaye recycles Christian visual motifs of sacrifice to elicit identification with the enemy ‘other’, collapsing the binary divisions often instituted by the media between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to justify military conflict. Norfolk’s photographic series from Afghanistan eschew the ‘now-ness’ of much photojournalism by producing images in which multiple temporalities converge to reflect on the enduring presence of war in the country. While sensationalised forms of news media may construct binary divisions to help legitimise warfare, Caren Kaplan insists that war is “utterly confounding of divisions; perceptions of time and space are altered, certainties are destabilised”.10 The photography of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye amplify the complexity of contemporary war by foregrounding rather than dissolving conceptual tension.

Chapter Two, Representing the ‘Event’ of War, outlines current commentaries on aftermath war photography. Specifically focussed on commentaries by David Campany and John Roberts, this chapter unpacks assumptions about what constitutes the ‘event’ of war in photographic representation. In order to counter claims of the political inefficaciousness and ethically dubious nature of aftermath photography, this chapter outlines an alternative theoretical framework for thinking the event of war in photography. The divided structure of Jacques Derrida’s theory of the event is called on to consider how this imagery inscribes conceptual indeterminacy as a way of simultaneously ‘speaking’ and ‘keeping silent’ about events of war. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates that photographing the topographical traces and physical marks of

9 Kennedy, 5. 10 Caren Kaplan, "Desert Wars: Virilio and the Limits of ‘Genuine Knowledge’," in Virilio and Visual Culture, ed. John Armitage and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013): 69. 7 warfare can provide an interpretive account of the event of war, because according to Derridean logic, the event is not irrevocably ‘lost’ to history but rather open to the potential for renewed interpretation.

The remaining three chapters discuss key works from each artist’s practice that are in keeping with the aftermath genre. While analysing the various ways their images resist, delay or fragment cognitive resolution, these chapters also present fresh interpretative insights into their works as critical responses to contemporary military conflict. Chapter Three, Sophie Ristelhueber: pensiveness and the wounds of war, analyses the artist’s critically acclaimed series Fait (1992) through the lens of Jacques Rancière’s theory of the ‘pensive image’. The convergence of conflictual modes of expression, such as realism and abstraction, are identified in her practice as sustaining a tension that opens the works up to multiple potential meanings. Furthermore, this chapter elaborates on Ristelhueber’s metaphoric interest in wounds and scars to suggest the ethical necessity of thinking the shared precariousness of human life and the invocation of interminable mourning in the face of contemporary warfare.

In Chapter Four, Simon Norfolk: anachronism and unfixing the event of war, Norfolk’s beautiful photographs from Afghanistan are discussed according to Jacques Rancière’s reframing of anachronism. I argue that Norfolk’s series Afghanistan: Chronotopia (2001- 2) draws on a picturesque tradition of painting, while the Burke + Norfolk (2010) series engages with the historical archive, in order to reflect on layered, multifaceted and non- diachronic aspects of war. Establishing parallels between seemingly distinct events of war, Norfolk conveys a cautionary tale regarding imperialistic and geopolitical incursions into the country over a long period of time.

Finally, Chapter Five Luc Delahaye: the expectant moment of tableaux photography and reframing the ‘other’ in war, considers Delahaye’s panoramic tableaux photographs. While many commentators have likened his work to history painting, aesthetic and formal features associated with this relationship have not been addressed in detail. This chapter undertakes such a task. Also discussed is Delahaye’s most controversial work, Taliban (2001), depicting with unflinching detail a dead Taliban soldier, which will be interpreted as memorialising those forgotten in official modes of remembrance: the enemy ‘other’.

8 This study offers a historically and theoretically informed approach to analysing the artistic practices of Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye. It also investigates and extends the current literature on the aftermath of war in contemporary art photography, of which these artists are included. In so doing, this project seeks to highlight the assumptions underpinning the representational registration of historically significant events, such as war, and foregrounds the critical saliency of artistic practices that disrupt these conventions. By sustaining a tension between indeterminacy and intelligibility, their photographs prolong and expand thinking the ‘event’ of war.

9 Chapter One

A Selective Historical Sketch of War Photography

As Paul Virilio asserts in War and Cinema, war is inextricably bound to representation: “War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle […] There is no war, then, without representation”.1 He goes on to explain, “the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception”.2 In other words, war consists not only in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories but also in appropriating the ‘immateriality’ of perceptual fields. Here Virilio points to the intangible quality of perception that can nevertheless be directed by visual framing. Photography (and by extension, cinema) has proven crucial in directing how war is seen and understood by the general public. Not only has photography been used as a medium for portraying the ‘reality’ of war in the news media, but it has also been deployed by military institutions for technological, instructional and intelligence purposes. In fact, in English, the very terms applied to photography have eerily militaristic connotations—to ‘shoot’, take a ‘shot’ or ‘snapshot’, to ‘capture’ an image (as one might capture a prisoner or location) and ‘load’ cameras with ‘cartridges’ or ‘magazines’ of film (although the latter have been made largely redundant by digital technology). Furthermore, photographic terms adopted from the martial sphere, such as ‘trigger’ and ‘firing mechanism’, are still applicable today, particularly when integrated with wireless capabilities.

Considering the interconnectedness of war and photography, this chapter provides an historical sketch of war photography as a vehicle to track key changes in the modes of representation related to technological developments, the prevailing ideological imperatives, and political and military motivations. Charting representations of major wars since the advent of photography provides a background for better understanding the war imagery produced by the three contemporary art photographers addressed in this study. In particular, the 1990 Gulf War marks a significant shift in modes of perception

1 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 5-6 (emphasis in original). 2 Virilio, 7 (emphasis in original). 10 management by the military, allied with the global authority of the United States over geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. This period also marks the commencement of the artworks by Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye analysed in this study. Additionally, this chapter touches on debates surrounding the political and ethical implications of photographically representing death, destruction and atrocities of warfare. This is because, despite vary rarely depicting the suffering of humans, each of the artists in this study have nevertheless been accused of an ethically reprehensible ‘aestheticisation’ of war.

The history of war photography outlined here is primarily concerned with images disseminated through the news media, framed as visually ‘informative’ supplements to textual reports on current and ongoing events. These images contribute to the public perception of war and form a significant archive from which historical narratives are constructed and re-presented, for example in cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. As such, this study considers photographs of war circulating in the public domain, excluding those produced as personal memorabilia by war participants or for strategic military purposes. Professional war photographers are typically categorised as ‘official’ or ‘commercial’. Official war photographers are employed directly by the military or their respective government to document conflicts for the authorised national historical record. While many official war photographers, such as Australian Frank Hurley (1885-1962), have been celebrated for their aesthetic and technical abilities, their work is often subject to strict censorship derived from state-sanctioned agendas. On the other hand, commercial photographers are typically photojournalists employed by international news agencies such as Agence France-Presse (AFP), Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, or photo-specific agencies such as Magnum Photos and Getty Images. In the early years of photography, print media outlets directly commissioned photographers, yet the economic evolution of media institutions in recent decades has resulted in a reliance on ‘stock’ imagery supplied by photo agencies, which has arguably contributed to more homogenised representations of war.

However, the lines between official and commercial war photography have become significantly blurred with the advent of ‘embedded journalism’, used to describe civilian journalists and photojournalists attached to a military unit. While ensuring a certain level of safety, ‘embedding’ effectively inhibits the nature and scope of reportage. Although

11 there are many examples of restrictions placed on the media during war time, most successfully employed by the British during the Falklands War (1982) and the United States during the Gulf War (1990-91), embedding became official practice during the Western allied invasion of Iraq in 2003 and in Afghanistan (2001-present).3 In his analysis of war images from Afghanistan, Paul Verschueren cites numerous reports that link the practice of embedding since the Gulf War to an increased bias of media coverage in favour of the US military and their allies.4 Even more concerning are reports of military personnel actively obstructing the imaging of certain events by confiscating equipment and threatening reporters with weapons.5

As photographs of war encompass a range of practices, it is worth noting some subtle distinctions between the constructed categories of ‘photojournalism’ and ‘documentary photography’. Although both are concerned with capturing real world situations and events, John Taylor defines photojournalism as “all photography used in journalism” aligned with breaking news and rapid turnover.6 Typically in such cases, an image functions as evidential ‘proof’ of an event described by written or spoken words. Documentary photography is associated with more sustained photographic projects, often conceived as series or picture stories, becoming prominent with the rise of picture magazines in the 1920s. The steady decline of illustrated magazine publishing since the late 1960s, coupled with the emergence of photographic scholarship, accounts for the migration of documentary photography into art museum and gallery contexts.7 Characterised by a humanitarian or social focus and an emphasis on the ‘objectivity’ of the image, this conventional understanding of documentary is typified by photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration in Depression era America. This state-funded project was responsible for building the reputations of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee and Marion Post Wolcott, among others. It is clear from

3 David Campbell, "How Has Photojournalism Framed the War in Afghanistan?," in Burke and Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan (Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 2011), 153. 4 Paul Verschueren, Picturing Afghanistan: The Photography of Foreign Conflict (New York: Hampton Press, Inc., 2012), 79-80. 5 See David Campbell, "Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War," Review of International Studies 29 (2003): 59. 6 John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 5. 7 Stephen Bull cites Bill Brandt’s Museum of Modern Art, New York, retrospective travelling exhibition first exhibited at The Hayward Gallery, London, in 1970, and Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1969. Stephen Bull, "Documentary Photography in the Art Gallery," Engage, no. 14 (2004): 3. 12 this brief comparison that photojournalism and documentary photography are likely to overlap, particularly since both genres are subject to the burden of proof and traditionally value the ‘realism’ and ‘transparency’ of the camera image. Differentiating between photojournalism and documentary photography based on the context of their publication may risk over simplifying the intentions of individual photographers or the specificity of images, it nevertheless highlights how contextual frameworks contribute to the construction of normative modes of reception. For example, the reception of images circulating in the media is tied to the ‘fast’ consumption of news and facts, while documentary modes assume a prolonged viewing experience.8 In fact, Michael Griffin notes that photojournalism is a concept that has been retrospectively imposed on the history of photography—the term only entered into common parlance in the 1920s, and the practice itself was only fully established during World War II.9 Similarly, Abigail Solomon-Godeau contends in her influential essay ‘Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography’ that many early photographs have been retrospectively labelled ‘documentary’, suggesting the term is “historical, not ontological”.10

Despite the widespread debunking of photography’s inherent ‘truth value’ in academic scholarship, at least since the 1980s, photojournalism and documentary photography continue to trade on the supposed transparency of the medium, stressing the causal connection between the image and its referent, while employing an ‘objective’ and ‘straight’ approach to ensure visual resemblance to ‘reality’. Crucial to the authenticity of the photograph is the construction of the photographer as eyewitness, whose “existential proximity to the world” stands in for our own physical and temporal distance from things photographed.11 The evidentiary status of war photography arguably prevails in much popular discourse. Public revelation of the Abu Ghraib scandal is just one example of the mainstream media’s dependence on photographic evidence to corroborate verbal and textual information. Accounts of the systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners by the

8 For an analysis of contextual differences in reception of photography see Howard S. Becker, "Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It's (Almost) All a Matter of Context," Visual Sociology 10, no. 1-2 (1995). 9 Michael Griffin, "The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism," in Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 122-25. 10 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practicies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 169. 11 John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 95. 13 US military were given little international coverage until cell phone photographs taken by the perpetrators surfaced in the media some three years after a written report released by Amnesty International in 2003.

When considering the history of war photography, we are likely to recall a select group of photographs that have become emblematic of certain conflicts, such as Frank Hurley’s composite image Episode after Battle of Zonnebeke (1918) [fig. 1.1] from World War I, Robert Capa’s US troops assault Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings (1944) [fig. 1.2] taken towards the end of World War II or Nick Ut’s Accidental Napalm Attack (1972) [fig. 1.3] from Vietnam. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites define photographic icons as:

[I]mages appearing in print, electronic, or digital media that are widely recognized and remembered, are understood to be representations of historically significant events, activate strong emotional identification or response, and are reproduced across a range of media, genres, or topics.12

Yet what makes one photograph operate as an icon, while countless images fall into the abyss of the collective archive? If the photographic icon is thought to embody the event, crystallise its very essence in visual form, then Henri Cartier-Bresson’s conception of the ‘decisive moment’ demonstrates how the event and its representation have been conventionally constructed in photojournalism. Formulated in 1952 towards the tail end of the ‘golden age’ of photojournalism, Cartier-Bresson describes the ‘decisive moment’ as “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression”.13 The ‘decisive moment’ links to the assumed veracity of the camera by privileging both instantaneity and proximity. Yet as John Roberts explains, this moment is not necessarily the temporal ‘peak’ of the event but rather “the moment when the internal elements of an observed scene appear, subjectively, to cohere pictorially”.14 He argues that the photographer’s ability to freeze movement in such a way that the formal arrangement of the scene is appropriately illustrative of the event taking place is not only a highly subjective concept but equally bound by contingency. Roberts therefore claims

12 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27. 13 Henri Cartier-Bresson, "The Decisive Moment," [1952] in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel, 2007), 47. 14 Roberts, 95-6. 14 that the ‘decisive moment’ has become fetishised as attesting to the photographer’s unique perceptiveness and skill at choosing exactly the right moment to take the shot.15 This elusive moment or instant where form and content merge has become a cornerstone of photojournalistic practice, made all the more resolute with the introduction of handheld video technology. The theoretical underpinnings of the ‘decisive moment’ are explicated further in the following chapter.

This is not to say that all photographs presumed to capture the ‘decisive moment’ are iconic; many social, cultural and political factors coalesce to assign such arbitrary status to photographic images. Undoubtedly, however, all iconic photographs display the formal coherence theorised by Cartier-Bresson. Furthermore, it is the temporal logic of the ‘decisive moment’ that is called on to account for the enhanced memorability of photographs, in contrast to other modes of representation. For example, Susan Sontag asserts, “Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor”.16 The idea that photography suspends time is described by Vivian Sobchack as a ‘temporal hole’, a “presence without past, present, future”.17 She alludes to the idea that iconic images have a ‘timeless’ quality, stating, “Indeed, the most ‘dynamic’ photojournalism derives its uncanny power from this temporal hole, this transcendence of both existence and finitude within existence and finitude”.18

The purported ‘mnemonic superiority’ of photography derived from the static and atemporal structure of the medium is a view that according to David Campany continues to pervade popular consciousness.19 Like Sontag, Patrick Hagopian links the ascendancy of the photograph to stillness: “Because it exists in space but not in time, it can endure for the viewer. We can fix on a particular configuration of forms and we can hold it in our gaze. We can possess it as we stare at it”.20 Not only does such a claim fail to account

15 Roberts, 96. 16 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005), 13. 17 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 59-60. 18 Sobchack, 60. 19 David Campany, "Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Problems of 'Late Photography'," in Where Is the Photograph, ed. David Green (Brighton & Kent: Photoforum & Photoworks, 2003), 126. 20 Patrick Hagopian, "Vietnam War Photography as a Locus of Memory," in Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, ed. Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 213. 15 for the complex temporality of photography, to be discussed in Chapter Two, but as Campany argues, it neglects to consider the changing nature of memory itself.21 Rather, he suggests “if the frozen photograph seems memorable in the contemporary media- sphere it is probably because it says very little”, by having to rely on contextual markers such as captions for its meaning to be transmitted.22 This idea is echoed by David Campbell, who asserts that news photographs are rarely chosen for their descriptive capacity but rather for their ability to “provide symbolic markers to familiar interpretations and conventional narratives”.23 Rather than attending to the historical particularities and complexities of war, photographs circulating in the media are quickly and easily understood because of the repetition of symbolic tropes. An interesting example of the mnemonic paradox of photographic images is evident in the case of the Vietnam War. The wide deployment of video technology in the media coverage of the led the conflict to be retrospectively cast as the first ‘television war’. Yet it is just a handful of photographs that resound strongly in collective memory: the aforementioned Accidental Napalm Attack [fig. 1.3] depicting children fleeing a bomb attack or the 1963 photograph The Burning Monk [fig. 1.4] by Malcolm Browne showing the self- immolation of a Buddhist monk (Thich Quang Duc) in Saigon protesting the treatment of Buddhists by the American backed South Vietnamese regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Liam Kennedy attributes to images such as these a capacity to capture ‘decisive moments’ that bring visual and conceptual clarity to “the scenery of confusion”. Such images become iconic because they are subsequently transformed into symbols of “universal human concerns”.24

As suggested above, the enduring quality of iconic photographs lies more with their symbolic form than an inherent ‘power’ to arrest time and crystallise the event in one frame. According to media historian Michael Griffin, war photography represents “the most highly valued photojournalism genre” due to the associated risks, and therefore provides the most salient examples of iconicity.25 Such images undergo a process of abstraction that Griffin describes as one of “dehistoricisation and symbolisation”,

21 Campany, 126. 22 Campany, 126 (emphasis in original). 23 Campbell, "How Has Photojournalism Framed the War in Afghanistan?," 154. 24 Liam Kennedy, Afterimages: Photography and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 18. 25 Griffin, 140. 16 rendering them emblematic of “national, cultural, and professional myths”.26 These photographs are posed less as depictions of the particularities of an event, and instead act as “symbols of national valour, human courage, inconceivable inhumanity, or senseless loss”.27 Furthermore, historical specificity decreases with the continual republishing of these photographs in various contexts across time. Griffin concludes by suggesting that “published photographs of war have a ritual quality, like the monuments and commemorative displays constructed as markers of collective memory”, contributing to the construction of national mythology.28 Yet as Roberts highlights, the structural processes underlying this “generic (and U.S.-led) mortification of history”, are largely invisible and ideologically driven.29 Here, Roberts uses ‘mortification’ in the sense of supressing or destroying historical singularity, reducing the complexity of history to ‘key’ events. Not only is photography’s role in the production of meaning and narrative naturalised, but so too are the relations of power governing its presentation and circulation in the news media. As Hariman and Lucaites explain, “Photojournalism might be the perfect ideological practice: while it seems to present objects as they are in the world, it places those objects within a system of social relationships and constitutes the viewer as a subject within that system”.30

When considering the history of war photography, equally important as the handful of ‘iconic’ photographs are the mass of generic images published in the news media that shape public perceptions of war. In Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crisis, David Perlmutter differentiates between the ‘discrete icon’ or the famous photograph, and the ‘generic icon’ in which elements are continuously repeated, resulting in ‘visual cliché’.31 These tropes are consistently called on to express abstract concepts, such as ‘courage’ or ‘patriotism’, and seek to elicit formulaic emotional responses from viewers. Examples in war photography include the spectacle of destruction, usually shown from a distanced perspective; the aftermath of battle; raising a national flag; mourning women; people in the moment before death;

26 Griffin, 140. 27 Griffin, 131. 28 Griffin, 152. 29 Roberts, 101. 30 Hariman and Lucaites, 2. 31 David D. Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crisis, ed. Robert E. Denton, Praeger Series in Political Communication (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1998), 11. 17 children, either alone or accompanied by soldiers; and military personnel with weaponry (for example holding guns or standing next to a tank). Like the de-historicised photographic icon, generic motifs of war are likely to lack particularity, relying instead on an accompanying caption or textual report for contextual meaning. These conventional symbols are so historically ingrained they are rarely questioned by either the photographer producing them, or audiences consuming them.32 For example, the flag, a symbol embodying nationalist ideologies and identity, may be used to connote ‘victory’ over the enemy. A famous example is Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945) [fig. 1.5]. The national flag also signifies ‘patriotic duty’ and ‘heroic sacrifice’ when draped over coffins of the military dead. Other tropes are less explicit but equally emotive. Marta Zarzycka argues that images of the mourning woman, particularly the non-Western woman or ‘other’ function as symbols of the “degeneracy and hopelessness of the oppressed, obscuring social and political subjectivities”.33 Zarzycka further contends that the recycling of images of bereaved or suffering women ensures that geo-political issues of war are reduced to personal drama and echo the familiar motif of ‘mourning mother’ as a mainstay of Christian iconography.34 Another pictorial cliché of war photography shows a solider or soldiers as paternal protectors standing surrounded by children, or children playing within the wreckage of war. If children symbolise innocence and represent the future of humanity, such photographs imply that the immediate horrors of war are necessary to the hope of securing peace and stability for the future. Thus, depicting the ‘other’ as mourning women or innocent children legitimises military intervention in distant countries. Such photographs are particularly relevant to current wars such as Afghanistan, where the enemy is increasingly elusive and military success is difficult to identify.

It could be argued that, despite the sustained number of wars since Vietnam, there has been less occasion for the embedding of iconic photographs in the public imagination. This is, in part, due to the growing reliance on the moving image, which offers a near- infinite number of still frame options, and the fast paced and constantly changing nature

32 This is not to suggest that shrewd photographers or audiences are not aware of the symbolic construction of meaning in such photographs, but rather that the historical pattern of repetition has helped solidify their symbolic value. 33 Marta Zarzycka, "Madonnas of Warfare, Angels of Poverty: Cutting through Press Photographs," Photographies 5, no. 1 (2012): 71. 34 Marta Zarzycka, "The World Press Photo Contest and Visual Tropes," Photographies 6, no. 1 (2013): 178. 18 of the media, particularly the Internet where news stories change daily, if not hourly. Therefore, photojournalists are more likely to draw on pre-established visual codes, working in what David Campany describes as a ‘nostalgic mode’.35 Just as early photographs of war relied on established visual conventions such as a ‘picturesque’ aesthetic, professional photographers today emulate the stylistic codes of ‘golden era’ photojournalism discussed later in this chapter. This adoption of well-worn visual tropes produces images that reveal very little about the specifics of particular wars. Campany is critical of the “emergence of [this] new brand of photojournalism that is often keener to quote and imitate its own illustrious history than it is to understand the present”.36 Barbie Zelizer suggests journalists draw on the past to reinstate normalcy, generating similar photographic images of wars that are in no way similar so that history “intrudes into the present of news photographs by acting as a carrier for symbolism and connotative force”.37 For example, reporter Ed Vulliamy recognises that using an image of emaciated men behind bars or wire fences to accompany his report on the 1997 Bosnian War recalls traditions of knowledge and expectation related to the Holocaust.38

Like the hackneyed tropes repeated in subject matter, a number of photographic conventions have become constitutive of photojournalism. For example, employing tight framing or motion blur caused when the subject moves faster than the speed of the camera’s shutter, are techniques used to indicate the photographer’s proximity to the event, therefore authenticating their status as ‘eye witness’. If action is predicated on motion, then signs of motion in a ‘frozen’ image imply being inside the action of warfare. This occurs in Dmitri Baltermants’ photograph Attack—Eastern Front WWII (1941) [fig. 1.6]. Arrested movement signalled by the photographic blur is heightened by the low perspective of the camera in this image, another convention used to direct meaning. As Ann Marie Barry suggests, “The language of camera angles is also highly manipulative emotionally and is perhaps one of the simplest and easiest to understand examples of visual language grounded in perceptual experience”.39 For example, Barry notes the

35 David Campany, "The Red House: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq," Aperture, no. 185 (2006): 28. 36 Campany, "The Red House," 30. 37 Barbie Zelizer, "When War Is Reduced to a Photograph," in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, ed. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (Oxon: Routledge, 2004), 125. 38 Taylor, 63. 39 Ann Marie Barry, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 135. 19 expression ‘seeing eye to eye’ that equates images shot at eye level with “equality of status or importance”.40 As such, shifting the camera angle results in shifting the power dynamic between the subject of the photograph and the viewer. A low camera angle assigns power to the photographed subject, and in photojournalism is often used to highlight the heroism and authority of soldiers, either in the midst of action or stationary (as in Baltermants’ photograph). Contrastingly, a high camera angle fixes the imaged subject in a position of subjugation. This rather literal manipulation of perspective is typical of highly emotive and dramatic images used for propaganda purposes.

The Crimean War and Early ‘Aftermath’ Photography

Despite a small number of photographic images taken during the Mexican-American War (1846-48), the Crimean War (1853-56) is generally accepted as the first war to be officially photographed. The conflict saw an alliance formed between the Ottoman Empire and Britain, France and Sardinia in order to thwart Russia’s expansion into the Danube region (present day Romania) and destroy their naval strength in the strategic Black Sea. In early 1855, British photographer Roger Fenton travelled to the Crimean Peninsula. Although he was not the only photographer on site, Fenton’s archive of over 350 negatives stands as the first extensive and systematic photographic documentation of war. The large number of photographic images produced, coupled with the advent of the illustrated press during the early 1840s, saw representations of war become more available to the British public than ever before. However, the limitations of printing techniques meant photographic images had to be translated through engraving, infusing them with the established visual codes and conventions of artistic representation. While Bernd Hüppauf notes ‘enthusiasm’ for early photographs of war and their profusion of details, Thierry Gervais is critical of the retrospective significance placed on early photographs of war, suggesting that there was a general resistance to the new medium of photography. He demonstrates that engravers seeking to correct certain ‘faults’ within the image deliberately undermined photography’s supposed evidential authority.41 It wasn’t until the introduction of the halftone printing process in 1880 that commercial war

40 Barry, 135. 41 Thierry Gervais, "Witness to War: The Uses of Photography in the Illustrated Press, 1855-1904," Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (2010): 374. 20 photography developed as a legitimate supplement to written news reporting.42 Nevertheless, art historian Ulrich Keller designates the Crimean War “the first media war in history”.43 He points to both the increased visual coverage of the war, as well as evidence that suggests certain aspects (such as battles) were strategically managed in a way that would appeal to mass consumption.44

The newly popular collodion wet plate process, employed by Fenton, necessitated long exposure times and rapid development of the glass plate. This slow and cumbersome equipment meant that the depiction of direct warfare and action was impossible, limiting early photographers to “battleground landscapes, posed pictures of fighters, simulated combat, and portraits of soldiers prior to battle”.45 The majority of Fenton’s Crimea photographs can be categorised as portraiture, supplemented by landscape scenes before and after battle. Emulating the traditional conventions of portrait painting, Fenton photographed many high-ranking officers of the British and allied armies. Interestingly, however, he also photographed many colonels and captains who had little notoriety in the army, suggesting a “curious compromise between the selectivity of the old feudal aristocracy and the pluralism of the industrial age”.46 Yet despite this broadening range of subjects, which Hüppauf relates to the democratising power of photography, Fenton systematically refused to depict the wounded, sick or dead.47 This may have been due, in part, to the un-saleability of such images, coupled with a self-imposed censorship based on ‘gentlemanly taste’. Keller suggests Fenton’s ties to the aristocracy swayed his portrayal of the war, preferring to depict soldiers as ‘healthy’ and ‘in high spirits’, rather than acknowledging the estimated 300,000-375,000 people who died over the course of the Crimean War.48 As Hüppauf notes, the photographic images taken (and not taken) in the Crimea already reveal the complexities of war photography, raising questions “as to what can and what should be represented in photographic images of war”.49

42 Hilary Roberts, "War Photographers: A Special Breed?," in War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, ed. Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, 2012), 13. 43 Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (New York: Routledge, 2001), 251 (emphasis in original). 44 Keller, 251. 45 Peter Howe, Shooting under Fire: The World of the War Photographer (New York: Artisan, 2002), 14. 46 Keller, 142. 47 Bernd Hüppauf, "The Emergence of Modern War Imagery in Early Photography," History and Memory 5, no. 1 (1993): 136. 48 Keller, 120-23. 49 Hüppauf, 131 (emphasis in original). 21 The issue of death is central to Fenton’s most iconic Crimean photograph, which significantly does not image people but rather an empty battlefield. The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) [fig. 1.7] shows a ravine and a road leading down to the trenches of Sevastopol strewn with cannonballs. Another exposure was taken from the same vantage point depicting a clean road, causing much contention between scholars over whether Fenton had the cannonballs arranged or simply found them so. Nevertheless, it is the image with the spent shells that was exhibited in London in September 1855 to reviews commending the melancholic nature of the image as informing the public of the dangers faced by soldiers.50 While paintings representing the Crimean War, such as The Charge of the Light Brigade (1877) by Thomas Jones Barker, show countless soldiers in the midst of battle, swords and guns raised against clouds of smoke, such frenzied action was impossible to capture photographically due to exposure times of up to 20 seconds. Instead, in The Valley of the Shadow of Death, we are confronted with the inverse of action; an empty stage where battle is only hinted at by the remains of artillery, and death is conjured by the evocative title from Psalm 23 of the Old Testament. It is an image described by Steve Edwards as ‘haunting’ and “fetishistically substitutes munitions for smashed bodies as a way of conveying the effects of war”.51 Unlike the expansive panoramic photographs that are typical of Fenton’s Crimean archive, such as Distant View of Sevastopol, with the Lines of Gordon’s Battery (1855) [fig. 1.8] where the actual battle is beyond the camera’s reach, compositionally The Valley of the Shadow of Death, taken from a foot soldier’s perspective, creates a sense of drama. It is this image which is most often called on in the current literature on contemporary ‘aftermath’ photography as a historical precedent of the ‘genre’, despite the rarity of such images actually being produced by Fenton.

Documentation of the aftermath of battle was more thoroughly explored by James Robertson and his assistant Felice Beato, who arrived in the Crimea to photograph the final stages of the war. Beato is particularly well known for his photographs of the British Army’s suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1858 that unashamedly depicted dead bodies—albeit of the dead enemy. However, as Jorge Lewinski contends in his history of war photography, images by Fenton, Robertson and Beato are framed for Anglo-French

50 See quotes from the Guardian and Morning Chronicle in Keller, 133. 51 Steve Edwards, "Apocalyptic Sublime: On the Brighton Photo-Biennial," Historical Materialism 17, no. 2 (2009): 97. 22 audiences curious to see the exotic landscapes of the ‘other’.52 Even Beato’s photographs in India, while undoubtedly horrific, can be described as “distant and detached”. 53 Hüppauf argues that these early photographs of war follow the conventions of the ‘picturesque’, a pictorial code established in the late eighteenth century that emphasised “aging, decay, destruction and disorder”.54 Drawing on Edmund Burke’s influential 1757 book A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, William Gilpin sought to reconcile the two aesthetic codes through the picturesque which he conceived “to preserve the restraint of the Beautiful with the variety, roughness and fragmentation of the Sublime”.55 In painting, printmaking and drawing, the picturesque is evoked by the depiction of architectural ruins, particularly when merged with the natural landscape. As James Ackerman has indicated, these artists were more concerned with the ‘melancholic beauty’ generated by these scenes than documenting the medieval past for historic purposes.56 In these early photographs of war, the detached perspective and distanced relation to objects (including dead bodies) emulate the picturesque, leading Lewinski to describe these nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century photographers as ‘distant witnesses’, and their images as “portraiture of the participants and vistas or landscapes of war arenas, rather than records of deeds and action”.57 Here we can note that even in the early years of war photography, proximity to the event of war is tied to ‘action’.

The Modern Techno-Wars: World War I and II

World War I is marked by most cultural commentators and historians as a pivot around which the entire globe turned: from older industrial practices to newer ones, from visual cultures of spectacle to surveillance, picturesque to utilitarian, local to global, discipline to control and management.58

52 Jorge Lewinski, The Camera at War: A History of War Photography from 1848 to the Present Day (London: W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd, 1978), 42-3. 53 Lewinski, 43. 54 Hüppauf, 139. 55 James S. Ackerman, "The Photographic Picturesque," Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 78. 56 Ackerman, 89. 57 Lewinski, 60. 58 Caren Kaplan, "Desert Wars: Virilio and the Limits of ‘Genuine Knowledge’," in Virilio and Visual Culture, ed. John Armitage and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013): 74. 23 Rampant technological innovations during the nineteenth century, particularly the increased use of steam-power for transport and manufacturing, proved the ideal platform for the revision of warfare strategies and technologies during World War I (1914-18). Considered “the first truly technical war in Europe” by Paul Virilio, photography played a key role in celebrating new technologies.59 Soldiers were often imaged posing with artillery and military vehicles, positioned as either in control of, or protected by, machines.60 For Lilie Chouliaraki these photographs are characteristic of early twentieth- century attitudes celebrating the modernist relationship between man and machine, accenting “heroic virtue and technological utopia”.61 These staged photographs dominated in the press as civilian photographers were banned from the front lines. Only two military photographers were granted permission to cover the Western Front at the outset of the war, purely for the historical record.62 Such strict censorship imposed by the Allies, coupled with increasingly blurred boundaries between civilian life and the military, meant news outlets relied heavily on photographs of the ‘home front’ to accompany reports about the war. Unlike earlier wars, women were well represented in photographs, as nurses or in factories making munitions, to present “the impression that everybody was behind the war effort”.63 However, as Paul Wombell notes, women returned to the domestic sphere after the war ended, and images of the home front proved scarce in retrospective accounts.64 Instead, it was the soldier’s plight that was highlighted with an emphasis on ‘heroic sacrifice’.

World War I was typified by trench warfare, employed predominately on the Western Front, which ran from the Belgian coast through France to the Swiss border. By 1917, Britain, Canada and Australia recognised the importance of photography to the war effort, appointing more official military photographers to document the front lines. However, to avoid ‘public distress’ media censorship was still rife and photographers were strongly discouraged from representing the dead. The concept of going ‘over the top’, where

59 Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War: Twenty-Five Years Later, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 24. 60 Lilie Chouliaraki, "The Humanity of War: Iconic Photojournalism of the Battlefield, 1914-2012," Visual Communication 12, no. 3 (2013): 321. 61 Chouliaraki, 322. 62 Lewinski, 63. 63 Paul Wombell, "Face to Face with Themselves: Photography and the First World War," in Photography/Politics: Two, ed. Patricia Holland, Jo Spence, and Simon Watney (London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1986), 79. 64 Wombell, 80. 24 soldiers left the relative safety of the trenches for the deadly ‘no man’s land’, lent itself well to photographic representations of heroic sacrifice. John Warwick Brooke’s image An officer of the 10th Battalion leads the way out of a sap and is being followed by the party (1917) [fig. 1.9] is taken from behind a line of soldiers moving through the trenches, their individual identities obscured by the camera angle so that the image becomes representative of a general experience of trench warfare. It would have been extremely dangerous to present a panoramic view of ‘no man’s land’ in the midst of battle. Brooke instead positions the viewer within the trenches, looking up as the soldiers do towards the foreboding clouds of smoke on the horizon line to imagine the unknown horror beyond. He produced a series of such images in response to simulated ‘over the top’ photographs by Ivor Castle, Canada’s official military photographer, who photographed soldiers in training rather than in battle.65

Castle’s deception is symptomatic of photography’s inability to adequately capture the sheer scale and geographic spread of action in modern warfare. Many of the images produced during World War I are of low quality, unattributed to a specific photographer, and as Lewinski suggests, produced using large-format cameras “which partly accounts for the relatively low number of action pictures from that time”.66 Australian photographer Frank Hurley declared his frustration stating, “I have tried and tried to include events on a single negative, but the results were hopeless. Everything was on such a vast scale”.67 As a result he produced composite images where multiple indicators of war, such as aeroplanes, bomb blasts, smoke and soldiers, all appear in one frame to create a frenetic yet visually harmonious image of war. In reference to Hurley’s observations, Hüppauf points to the gap between the experience of warfare and the limitations of the camera to adequately portray such an experience, despite the capacity of the photograph to resemble the physical appearance of reality. He argues this failure is indicative of a larger concept of modern reality as “disjointed, abstract, complex, and the product of technical, including photographic, constructions”.68

65 Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels, War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, 2012), 142. 66 Lewinski, 78. 67 Frank Hurley quoted in Bernd Hüppauf, "Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation," New German Critique, no. 59 (1993): 53. 68 Hüppauf, "Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation," 53. 25 When considering World War I and II photographs of geographical landscapes, Chouliaraki discerns a paradox between the celebration of technology in these industrial wars, and the devastating destruction caused by new technologies.69 World War I photography focused on the aftermath of battle where “fusions of mud, crater marks, bomb debris and human bodies” acted as indices of the action that photographers struggled to capture. The scale of destruction was significantly expanded by World War II as the borders of battlefields became increasingly indistinct due to the deliberate targeting of civilian populations, such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Chouliaraki argues that these images of destroyed landscapes can be understood through a sublime aesthetic, as upon viewing our initial horror is replaced by a rational acknowledgment of our safe distance from the catastrophic event.70

The “fireballs and black smoke [that] came to symbolize the war—especially the war in the Pacific” during World War II can be attributed to the increased use of aerial warfare.71 Just as the invention of the steam locomotive altered perceptions of the landscape through motion, so too did the aeroplane. Combined with photography, aeroplanes offered a new perception and experience of the landscape. Primarily used for military reconnaissance, aerial photographs were not published in the press until the end of World War I for fear of security breaches. These photographs flattened the harsh terrain of the battlefield, reduced the intricate trench systems to geometric patterns, and scenes of mass destruction can be seen as “grandiose spectacles of places of pure horror”.72 For example, in Edward Steichen’s Aerial view of ruins of Vaux, France (1918) [fig. 1.10] not only is physical distance emphasised by the aerial perspective, but the viewer also remains emotionally distanced from the event without any human subjects to identify with. Caroline Brothers notes that the normalisation of aerial photography’s detached and impersonal perspective during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) works to diminish the human impact of war.73 Yet in relation to aerial photography in World War II, Cosgrove and Fox argue that due

69 Chouliaraki, 325. 70 Chouliaraki, 324-5. 71 Susan D Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 235. 72 Hüppauf, "Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation," 56. 73 Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (New York: Routledge, 1997), 103. 26 to the geographically dispersed theatre of war it was difficult for civilians to conceive its scope without aerial images.74

As stated above, censorship during World War I ensured that images of dead Allies were not published, although photographs of dead German soldiers were regularly seen in magazines and newspapers.75 Instead, studio portraits of the military were published (in both World War I and II) to communicate the tragedy of death and memorialise soldierly sacrifice, but without the brutal specificities. It was not until 1943 that the press slowly started publishing photographs of wounded and dead American and Allied soldiers,76 after President Roosevelt’s call to show more “blood and gore”.77 Importantly, this coincided with the increased successes of the Allied armies, where the dead were presented as fallen heroes, unlike the ‘senseless loss’ that was connoted by images from the Vietnam War. American photographer Carl Mydans states, “there’s always a difference in photographing war when we’re winning and when we’re not winning”, thus indicating how the photographer’s perception of the conflict and political imperatives influence the pictorial framing of events.78 The new bomb technology employed in World War II not only meant mass casualties but also that bodies were violently torn apart. Yet only ‘intact’ dead bodies were considered appropriate to be photographed. While Chouliaraki acknowledges the shift in representation of soldiers from World War I to the admission of death and “recognition of the intense emotionality involved in battle” in World War II, photographs from both these conflicts were nevertheless “dominated by a romantic conception of combative agency that celebrated soldierly suffering as heroic”.79

Despite more photographers commissioned to document the war, Griffin reminds us that World War II was also a highly-censored war, citing the difference between the great number of images produced and the small number actually published. It is evident that “the press worked willingly to construct inspiring narratives of patriotic duty and national unity”.80 A prominent example is Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945)

74 Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, "The Airman's Vision: World War Ii and After," in Photography & Flight (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 57. 75 Wombell, 80. 76 Moeller, 224. 77 Franklin D. Roosevelt quoted in Chouliaraki, 322. 78 Carl Mydans quoted in Moeller, 227. 79 Chouliaraki, 324. 80 Michael Griffin, "Media Images of War," Media, War & Conflict 3, no. 1 (2010): 12. 27 [fig. 1.5], which frames the national flag as a symbol of victory. Moeller suggests that patriotism associated with the American flag meant it was often employed in photographs during World War II as a reminder of home and the “American way of life”, thereby constructing nationalistic narratives to give purpose and honour to the fighting.81

Arresting Action: Robert Capa and the ‘Golden Age’ of Photojournalism

The ‘golden age’ of photojournalism is a period of photographic history that emerged in the 1930s, concurrent with evolving photographic technology and the rise of photo- magazines. Peaking around 1947 at the time illustrious photographers Robert Capa, David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and William Vandivert founded the Magnum photo agency, the demise of the ‘golden age’ in the 1970s is linked to the slow decline of magazine publishing. Dwindling sales, rising overhead costs associated with printing and the growing ubiquity of television lead to the demise of prominent photo-magazines such as Life. While many sub-genres of photojournalism emerged during this period, war photographs can be characterised by a distinctive urge to capture action. The invention of the Leica camera in 1925 allowed far greater mobility during fieldwork due to its compactness and fast interchangeable lenses. By World War II wide- angle lenses offered greater depth of field, while telephoto lenses allowed photographers to zoom in close to their subject, unlike World War I images of combat that were taken from a distance with a short lens.82 Coupled with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s conception of the ‘decisive moment’, this evolving technology gave photographers the means to capture (what they considered) the ‘quintessence’ of an event in a single frame.

Robert Capa photographed five different wars, including extensive coverage of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy and France, and is widely considered the ‘father’ of photojournalism as we know it today. His famous maxim “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” is oft quoted to demonstrate a willingness for photographers to sacrifice their safety in capturing the ‘decisive moment’. This capacity continues to be recognised in awards such as the Robert Capa Gold Medal, established in 1955, which is bestowed on photographers who demonstrate “exceptional courage and

81 Moeller, 225. 82 Moeller, 239. 28 enterprise”.83 Howard Chapnick, President of Black Star photo agency for 26 years until his retirement in 1990, considered Capa the archetypal ‘bang-bang’ photographer, a term used in photojournalistic vernacular to conjure the idea of action, but also more literally the rapid fire and sound of gun shots.84 Capa undoubtedly placed himself in some extremely dangerous situations throughout his career. Nevertheless, the retrospective mythologising of him as a ‘hero’ serves to heighten the heroic projection of his subjects. Arguably, Capa’s most famous photograph is Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano (1936) [also known as The Falling Soldier] [fig. 1.11] depicting a Republican soldier at the precise moment he is impacted by a bullet during the Spanish Civil War, due to the continued debates over the authenticity of the scene. His ‘magnificent eleven’ series of photographs documenting the Allied invasion of Normandy, France, on 6th June 1944 are most celebrated for their portrayal of action. According to Capa, only 11 of 106 photos survived a technician’s error while developing the photographs at Life magazine’s office in London. The heated emulsion meant the resulting black and white images have a blurred and grainy appearance that Susan Moeller argues adds an aesthetic that echoes “exactly the view that the world had of the gritty battle for France”.85 In one image [fig. 1.2], a soldier moves through the water towards the camera (and the beach beyond), waves lapping around him, against a background of unidentifiable landing craft and ships. It is the inability to distinguish the specificities of battle in these images that make them ‘romantic’, while the blurriness suggests movement and by extension, the chaos of war. As Kelly Oliver argues, war photographs focusing on specific individuals represent the unique human experience while simultaneously becoming representative of broader typologies (e.g. ‘American hero’). For Oliver, this depoliticises the context in a way akin to the process of dehistoricisation and symbolisation discussed earlier.86 Likewise, Ann Kaplan observes, “One is encouraged to identify with specific people, to enter into their experiences rather than to think about what we are looking at, or to engage on any larger intellectual or analytical level”.87 It is perhaps for this reason that contemporary ‘aftermath’ war photographers generally avoid the depiction of humans, in order to avoid the an empathic response with the experiences

83 Griffin, "The Great War Photographs," 141. 84 Griffin, "The Great War Photographs," 141. 85 Moeller, 199. 86 Kelly Oliver, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 79. 87 Ann Kaplan quoted in Oliver, 79. 29 of individuals in favour of a more critical reflection on the events of war and their conventional representation.

The Vietnam War

The photographic portrayal of war appeared to shift focus during the Vietnam War (c.1955-75), due to the relative freedom of coverage afforded the media, photographic and military technological innovations, and the evolving nature of combat.88 Paul Verschueren notes that while photojournalists had to be accredited to travel with American and South Vietnamese soldiers during the war, they were not subject to direct censorship as in World War II. This meant that they could move around the war arena more freely.89 Lewinski suggests the media were treated well, granted access and provided accommodation, and sometimes airfares, in the hope they would portray the US military in a ‘favourable light’. The strategic importance of the war for America, in addition to the mass of images produced leads him to state, “Vietnam helped to raise war photography to a new status”, which was reflected by the fame and critical acclaim of many photographers who covered the war.90

Considered an ‘intersection’ between the industrial World Wars and the current ‘information’ wars by Rune Henriksen, photojournalists in Vietnam increased their focus, especially towards the end of the war, on the dead or injured, possibly in response to the large number of casualties and the duration of the conflict over twenty years.91 Moeller refers to Larry Burrows’ photo essay One Ride with Yankee Papa 13 (1965) documenting the mission of helicopter crew Yankee Papa 13 to rescue the injured gunner and co-pilot of Yankee Papa 3, as indicative of the changing representation of death. In previous wars, photographs of dead soldiers had been taken after the fighting had ceased, but here Burrows offers viewers “the day-long, step-by-step events leading to a man’s death”.92

88 Debate over the official start date of the war exists, however the involvement of US and anti- communist countries (including Australia) increased in the early 1960s. The Tet Offensive of 1968 is considered the peak of the war, and realisation of US defeat saw the withdrawal of troops beginning in 1973—hence, discussions of photography from Vietnam generally focus on the period from 1962 to 1975. 89 Verschueren, 78. 90 Lewinski, 201. 91 Rune Henriksen, "The Character of War and the Nature of Combat " in The Character of War in the 21st Century, ed. Caroline Holmqvist-Jonsäter and Christopher Coker (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2009), 9. 92 Moeller, 394. 30 Particularly emphasised in these images is not only the technological element of ‘chopper combat’, but also the emotional distress of Chief Jim Farley who rescued, yet failed to save, the co-pilot [fig. 1.12]. Moeller argues that the audience of Burrows’ images “becomes witness to death through the eyes and emotions of a man who has seen it”. 93 This approach is revisited in later wars. For example, the explicit depiction of grief and the helicopter context is emulated in David Turnley’s World Press wining photograph US Sergeant Ken Kozakiewicz (23), gives vent to his grief as he learns that the body bag at his feet contains the remains of his friend Andy Alaniz (1991) [fig. 1.13]. However, as Michael Griffin points out, this image of human emotion is atypical of the ‘sanitised’ photographs published during the first Gulf War.94

Guerrilla warfare practiced by the Viet Cong ensured there was no explicitly demarcated ‘frontline’ but rather saw the war fought within the harsh jungle landscape and among civilian villages. This may account for why the most recognisable photographs from Vietnam, retrospectively touted as ‘emblematic’ of the conflict, stress the human impact of war, particularly on civilian life, which was muted in earlier wars. Nick Ut’s iconic photograph from 1972 of children running down the road after a misdirected aerial attack by the South Vietnamese Air Force hit a civilian village, sometimes titled Accidental Napalm Attack or The Terror of War [fig. 1.3], is a salient example. The image shows children from the village of Trang Bang running towards the camera, away from the ominous dark cloud coagulating in the background. The centralised figure is nine-year- old Kim Phuc, naked with outstretched arms, her face distorted by pain. A group of soldiers from the South Vietnamese army walk behind. A sense of urgency is implied by movement in the frame, made apparent by the children’s bent legs and the slight blurriness in the left-hand corner of the image. Ut won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for this image, which has often been attributed with sparking anti-war protests in America and the subsequent withdrawal of allied troops from the country, thus ending the lengthy war. Many critical thinkers have discredited this claim, attributing it to an over inflation of the media’s pivotal role in the war.95

93 Moeller, 395. 94 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 27. 95 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 13. 31 Nonetheless, the US military cited a lack of patriotism in the media as a key factor in defeat, while those critical of war claim that such images of horror and atrocity can ignite political action.96 Furthermore, Griffin points to a number of investigative analyses that indicate that the media was in fact predominantly supportive of the allied war effort in Vietnam until quite late in the conflict.97 Bresheeth considers the shock value of Ut’s photograph as based on the rarity of such graphic images being shown on American television.98 The graphic images that have become synonymous with the Vietnam War, such as Ut’s or Ronald Haeberle’s photographs of the Mỹ Lai Massacre of 1968, were an exception to the general coverage, either irregularly dispersed in the media or not published until well after the events they capture.99

Despite the availability of colour film at the time, most photographs continued to be printed in black and white. Eddie Adams, known for his photograph capturing the precise moment a Viet Cong prisoner (later identified as Nguyễn Văn Lém) was executed by General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan on a Saigon street in 1968, stated “I think all war should be done in black and white. It’s more primitive; colour tends to make things look nice. Makes the jungle in Vietnam look lush—which it was, but it wasn’t ‘nice’”.100 This emphasis on conveying a visceral experience of the brutality of war, rather than objective facts, is akin to Hurley’s composites from World War I or Capa’s use of motion blur.

Picturing Death and Atrocity: The Ethics of Photographic Representation

It is worth interceding here in this abridged historical survey of war photography to briefly consider some of the key arguments and ethical positions elicited by photographic representations of death and atrocity. War is undoubtedly rife with horrific violence and atrocity, when defeat of the enemy by ‘any means necessary’ is the primary goal. Yet the discussion so far in this chapter reveals the varying degrees of censorship imposed on photographers during times of war, either by themselves as a consideration of ‘taste’, by military restrictions or editorial control. The sanitation of representations of war has only

96 Campbell, "How Has Photojournalism Framed the War in Afghanistan?," 155. 97 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 13—In particular see Hallin (1986), Wyatt (1995) and Knightly (2004). 98 Haim Bresheeth, "Projecting Trauma: War Photography and the Public Sphere," Third Text 20, no. 1 (2006): 63. 99 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 13. 100 Eddie Adams quoted in Moeller, 391. 32 intensified since the ‘clean’ Gulf War military strategy, as the following section demonstrates. Paradoxically, this coincides with the Internet Age’s thirst for violent first- person shooter video games and graphic, bloody portrayals of war in Hollywood cinema. It seems the problematic stems from the indexical status of the photographic medium when used in reportage—the camera records real people subjected to real horror and violence. The theoretical argument against photographing the dead or suffering is that such images only encourage voyeurism and risk further exploiting those depicted, a process Martha Rosler deems ‘revictimising’ the victim.101 Similarly, Allan Sekula’s derision of documentary photography, arguing it has “contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world”, is characteristic of Marxist-inspired readings of the medium that emerged in the 1970s.102

The condemnation of photography for ‘aestheticising’ human suffering and atrocity goes hand in hand with the suggestion that the medium depoliticises its subjects. These arguments, founded on a Kantian notion of the ‘disinterested pleasure’ of aesthetic judgement, suggest any aesthetic appreciation of photographs taken of horrific real-life situations (such as war or famine) risk ‘anaesthetising’ viewers, rendering them numb to the complex socio-political circumstances from which the image arose. The fear of being ‘seduced’ by aesthetics sees critics and commentators inevitably turn to Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay On Photography to support claims of ‘compassion fatigue’ and the deadening effects of photography. In the essay Sontag argues, “the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it. […] As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions”. 103 Sontag is concerned with the question of whether photography can incite moral outrage and motivate viewers to act against injustice, but concludes that the ubiquity of clichéd and sensationalised images nullifies any such response. In her later book Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag modifies some of her earlier claims by paradoxically suggesting

101 Martha Rosler, "In, around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)," in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004), 178. 102 Allan Sekula, "Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)," The Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (1978): 863-4. 103 Susan Sontag, On Photography, (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005). ProQuest eBook Central Collection, 109-110. 33 that images of war and atrocity are both desensitising in their over proliferation yet necessary to motivate ethical reflection.104

The artists discussed in this study—Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye—are acutely aware of these positions. Despite humans rarely appearing in their photographs, all three have been variously accused of aestheticising the devastating reality of warfare. Underlying these criticisms is the assumption that formal coherence and an appeal to the senses are inappropriate in the context of war, despite the fact media images unquestioningly follow aesthetic strategies. The following chapters will touch on how these artists deliberately draw on historical aesthetic strategies to both challenge the ‘aestheticisation’ argument, and offer an alternative to media representations of war by attending to the complexity of the realities of warfare.

The ‘Clean’ Gulf War

As early as 1930, Ernst Jünger predicted that the transformation of battle technology would alter the makeup and representation of future conflicts.105 This became particularly apparent during the Gulf War (1990-91) waged by the United States and thirty-four allies against Iraq, in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of neighbouring Kuwait. In this conflict, technological advancements in weaponry played a key role in directing both the visual and rhetorical representation of the war in the news media. Portrayed as ‘high-tech’, ‘clean’, ‘virtual’, ‘high-speed’ and ‘surgical’ in the precision of aerial attacks, numerous commentators have designated the relatively short war as a pivotal turning point in how contemporary warfare is waged, managed and communicated. W.J.T. Mitchell particularly notes the Gulf War’s importance for American history, “marking the transition between the end of the Cold War and the unveiling of George Bush’s ‘new world order’”, a reference to Bush Senior’s 1990 congressional speech outlining the future of US foreign policy in the Middle East.106

In response to the purported ‘mistakes’ of the Vietnam War, where the media had relatively unrestricted access to combat zones, the Pentagon sought to control the

104 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). 105 Ernst Jünger, "War and Photography," New German Critique 59, Spring-Summer (1993): 25. 106 W.J.T. Mitchell, "Culture Wars," Online Journal, London Review of Books 14, no. 8 (1992), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v14/n08/wjt-mitchell/culture-wars. 34 representation of the Gulf War through the implementation of a pool system. Inspired by British media policies during the Falklands War (1982) where only twenty journalists and two photographers were accredited to cover the conflict, the US permitted 1500 journalists to be based in Baghdad.107 Journalists, photographers and camera crews were accompanied by military escorts and news items were monitored by military officials before being published, resulting in what Griffin describes as “a convergence of reporting that was stunningly homogeneous”.108 In restricting media access to direct combat, the Pentagon responded to the dearth of imagery by distributing their own still images and video footage to the media, which consisted primarily of high-tech weaponry. Griffin notes the most widely reproduced and iconic image of the war is a still taken from video footage shown at a Pentagon press briefing of a precision-guided munition (or ‘smart bomb’) targeting screen [fig. 1.14].109 This distant and abstract perspective, which puts viewers “right in the seat of a stealth F-117 fighter bomber”,110 not only contributed to the ‘video-game’ analogy of contemporary warfare but was key in positioning the US military as “efficient and humane, targeting only military facilities”.111 Furthermore, the predominant use of night-time aerial strikes against the Iraqis and their subsequent retaliation added to the ‘virtuality’ of the war, with photographs such as Patrick de Noirmon’s Anti-aircraft tracer fire lights up Baghdad (1991) [fig. 1.15] appearing more like a spectacle of fireworks than a scene of deadly destruction. In fact, according to Griffin, the emphasis on high-tech weaponry dominated media coverage so much that such images acted as “effective advertisements to the rest of the world for American arms manufacturers. The victory was more commercial than moral”.112 In 1961 President Eisenhower warned of a growing collusion between the military and weaponry manufacture, which he termed the ‘military-industrial complex’. James Der Derian has updated this idea to account for the media’s role in perpetuating warfare. While acknowledging that the ‘military-industrial-media-entertainment network’ (MIME-NET) is not necessarily unique to contemporary warfare, Der Derian asserts, “What is

107 Verschueren, 79. 108 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 26. 109 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 27. 110 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 27. 111 Douglas Kellner, "The Persian Gulf Tv War Revisited " in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, ed. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (Oxon: Routledge, 2004), 146. 112 Griffin, "The Great War Photographs," 151. 35 qualitatively new is the power of the MIME-NET to seamlessly merge the production, representation, and execution of war”.113

By stressing advanced munition technology deployed by the military, the media contributed to a public perception of the Gulf War as ‘clean’. Der Derian contends that by focusing on the means rather than the effects of warfare the media failed to admit that “war is anything but less destructive, deadly, or bloody for those on the receiving end of the big technological stick”.114 As W.J.T. Mitchell also notes, “A major objective in the presentation of the Gulf War to the American public was the erasure of the human body from the picture. General Schwarzkopf announced at the very outset that there would be no body counts or body bags in this war” in order to construct it as “both the antithesis and the antidote to Vietnam”.115 Michael Griffin and Jongsoo Lee’s analysis of 1104 photographs published in 3 major US newsmagazines during the course of the war further supports claims that the media colluded with the military to present the public with a ‘clean war’. Their findings indicate that only 5% of images depicted military or civilian causalities or funerals.116

While this study focuses on photography, it is worth briefly mentioning the role of television during the Gulf War, which marks a crucial stepping stone in the development of our current global news networks. At the time, CNN was the only 24-hour international news channel, and an estimated one billion people from 108 countries tuned into their coverage of the war.117 Media theorist McKenzie Wark describes CNN’s news strategy as one of “pure speed” aligned with the promotion of the instantaneity of information flow.118 The supposed direct and immediate access to events resulted in ‘live’ reporting having authority over fact-checked information. While the dramatic reporting in the centre of events as they happened generated public interest, the lack of time to check facts meant misinformation was often broadcast. For example, in a case that turned out to be

113 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Colorado: Westview Press, 2001), xx. 114 Der Derian, xvi. 115 Mitchell. 116 Michael Griffin and Jongsoo Lee, "Picturing the Gulf War: Constructing an Image of War in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 72, no. 4 (1995): 820. 117 Mitchell. 118 McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 38. 36 false, a CNN correspondent wearing a gas mask reported that Iraqi scud missiles carrying nerve gas had hit Tel Aviv, much to the alarm of Israeli citizens watching in ‘real-time’.119 Virilio is particularly critical of the circulation of disinformation instigated by the speed and instantaneity of communication technology employed during the Gulf War.120 Explaining his general concern with the impact of acceleration on perception, Olga Alekseyeva writes, “For Virilio, acceleration is one of the important forms of power; to be able to act at speed is thus a form of domination”.121 Not only does this account for the domination of CNN coverage over the international perception of the first Gulf War, but the crucial impact of the ‘perception of speed’ in accounting for US military success.

‘War on Terrorism’: Afghanistan and Iraq

The photographic artworks considered in this study by Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye were largely produced in the Middle East following US president George W. Bush’s declaration of war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. While Ristelhueber travelled to Kuwait for her series Fait (1992) made in response to the Gulf War discussed above, the majority of works by these artists were shot in Afghanistan, Iraq and neighbouring countries caught up in the US-led agenda. In part, Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye’s artworks respond to the saturation of stereotypical and clichéd images of these countries circulating in the media, and the construction of an enemy ‘other’. Moreover, despite the fact that most of these works were created in the early 2000s, they continue to hold critical relevance today in light of the interminable nature of the ‘War on Terrorism’. While the ‘enemy’ may have shifted from the Taliban, to al-Qaeda, and now to ISIS, the divergences in the structural formation, religious ideologies and cultural allegiances of these organisations (or lack thereof) are rarely acknowledged in Western media reports. As such, much of the visual rhetoric instituted by the events of 2001 is still applicable today.

The military and media successes of the Gulf War formed the blueprint for subsequent US-led conflict in the Middle East, namely Afghanistan (2001-present) and Iraq (2003-

119 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 28. 120 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener (London: Continuum, 2002), 135. 121 Olga Alekseyeva, "Logistics of Perception," in The Virilio Dictionary, ed. John Armitage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 114. 37 2011). As such, much of the visual material generated during these wars reflects the sanitised, high-tech narrative established during the Gulf War.122 Yet the length of these wars, the complexity of geopolitical relations in the region and the construction of a ‘global fight against terrorism’ mark a number of key divergences. The attacks by terrorist organisation al-Qaeda on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11th September 2001 are particularly significant, not only for the catastrophic destruction, significant loss of life and the declaration of a ‘War on Terror’ by US president George W. Bush in retaliation. The attacks also instigated a renewed and heightened commitment to the power of images to act as weapons, able to direct public sentiment. In Cloning Terror, W.J.T. Mitchell argues, “Our time has witnessed, not simply more images, but a war of images in which the real-world stakes could not be higher”.123 He parallels the onset of the ‘war of images’ with the 9/11 attacks, which as media studies scholar Philip Hammond recognises “were calculated not simply to wreak terrible destruction but to create a global media spectacle by targeting symbols of American prestige and power”.124 The insidious nature of the ‘war of images’, appropriated by all ‘sides’ of the war is highlighted by Mitchell:

[I]t has been fought by means of images deployed to shock and traumatize the enemy, images meant to appal and demoralize, images designed to replicate themselves endlessly and to infect the collective imaginary of global populations.125

Key to this strategy is the construction of the ‘enemy’ in media reporting. This was particularly evident following 9/11 where photographs of al-Qaeda leader and ‘mastermind’ of the attacks Osama Bin Laden were repeatedly reproduced, providing an identifiable enemy and with it a clear mission to locate him and ‘bring him to justice’. When the Taliban, who at the time controlled over 90% of Afghanistan, refused to extradite Bin Laden and others involved in 9/11, the US invaded the country, backed by the United Kingdom, Australia and later NATO. As Griffin notes, due to the relatively quick deployment of troops to Afghanistan, far fewer images were in circulation

122 See Michael Griffin, "Picturing America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ in Afghanistan and Iraq: Photographic Motifs as News Frames," Journalism 5, no. 4 (2004). 123 W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2 (emphasis in original). 124 Philip Hammond, "The Media War on Terrorism," Journal for Crime, Conflict and Media 1, no. 1 (2003): 23. 125 Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 2-3. 38 compared to the Gulf War invasion. Instead the media-scape was saturated with images of 9/11 and its aftermath.126 Republishing imagery of the catastrophic destruction of the attacks on the Twin Towers legitimised forceful retaliation. While images of rescue efforts, the clean-up and makeshift memorials in Manhattan and elsewhere demonstrated the resilience and valour of the American people in the face of adversity.

Once the war in Afghanistan was underway, the Islamic fundamentalist ideology of the Taliban regime was forcefully highlighted in the international news media (despite many years of oppression and human rights violations that went largely unreported). Photographs emerged of Taliban soldiers wearing turbans or with face coverings, wielding AK-47 guns or with arms raised chanting (giving the impression of a ‘mob mentality’) [fig. 1.16], and women dressed in burqas (a custom enforced by the Taliban). Such imagery, coupled with the rhetoric of the US administration, served to underline the radical ‘otherness’ of the enemy and further justify military intervention based on ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom from oppression’ for the Afghan people. This liberation was represented by images of “women joyously removing their burkas, of smiling children and hopeful villagers”.127

In order to construct the ‘other’ as the antithesis of the ‘self’ (or ‘them’ versus ‘us’) a number of hyperbolic binaries are called on, namely evil/good, barbaric/civilised, cowardice/heroism, unjust/just. As Nico Carpentier recognises, such constructions not only set up an antagonistic relationship between identities, it also positions the ‘enemy’ as a threat to ‘our own’ identity.128 These constructions of ‘other’ and ‘self’ are not necessarily specific to the Taliban as enemy of the US, rather in the global ‘war on terror’ such binaries endorse a stark dichotomy of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ versus ‘Western democracy’. In some respects, the need to construct an identifiable and tangible ‘enemy’ is the result of the reality that fundamentalist terrorist organisations are highly elusive, fractured and ideologically and culturally disparate. Generalising ‘Islamic terrorists’ accounts for the continual blurring of geopolitical specificities in media reporting, where

126 Michael Griffin, "Picturing America’s ‘War on Terrorism’," 392. 127 Barbie Zelizer, "Death in Wartime: Photographs and the "Other War" in Afghanistan," The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 10, no. 3 (2005): 34. 128 Nico Carpentier, "Fighting Discourses: Discourse Theory, War and Represenations of the 2003 Iraqi War," in Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military, ed. Sarah Maltby and Richard Keeble (Suffolk: Arima Publishing, 2007), 105. 39 Al-Qaeda is used interchangeably with the Taliban, or images of the Afghan Northern Alliance are confused with the Taliban (despite fighting against them). In fact, when it became clear that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was not harbouring ‘weapons of mass destruction’, the 2003 war in Iraq was subsumed under the general ‘fight against terrorism’ by the Bush-Cheney administration as another attempt to justify invasion.

A fundamental element in directing visual representations of ‘us’ and the ‘enemy other’ is the control of photojournalists by enforced military restrictions, which this chapter has demonstrated has taken many covert or overt forms throughout modern history. While the media pool system employed in the Gulf War was an effective strategy for the US government in controlling perceptions of the war without appearing to impose overt censorship, many journalists bemoaned the restrictions, particularly the lack of access to ‘frontline’ action. In response, the US formed an embedding system during the initial stages of the Iraq war, which was subsequently employed in Afghanistan and is used to a lesser extent today. In such cases, journalists are consigned to military units and accompany them on various missions, with the proviso that sensitive, strategic and classified information is not released to the public. While embedding has contributed to the rise of dramatic and ‘action packed’ photographs of soldiers in combat, largely missing from the Gulf War, many commentators highlight the singular perspective of this form of reporting. Judith Butler notes that the viewpoint of embedded journalists is restricted by the parameters established by the military, and many have commented that the military is often portrayed in a sympathetic light due to the journalist’s dependence on them for survival.129 As Kelly Oliver suggests, embedding undermines any sense of critical distance because these journalists are “both reporting on events and participating in them”.130 Taking the criticism further, Alain Badiou infers that embedded reporters merely serve as a prop for the dissemination of military generated information. He states, “Controlling images is a military function, one that lies somewhere in between intelligence, intoxication, and propaganda […] ‘embeddedness’ tells us nothing worthwhile”.131

129 Judith Butler, "Photography, War, Outrage," PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005): 822. 130 Oliver, 82. 131 Alain Badiou, "Fragments of a Public Diary on the American War against Iraq," Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 8, no. 3 (2004): 230. 40 The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the US and coalition allies including the UK and Australia, employed a ‘shock and awe’ military strategy that resulted in visually spectacular images. Mitchell views this as a deliberate tactic utilised by the US military in the ‘war on images’.132 Based on “achieving rapid dominance over an adversary by the initial imposition of overwhelming force and firepower”, the ‘shock and awe’ tactic involves targeting key infrastructure in order to diminish resistance and psychologically destroy the enemy’s will to engage.133 Photographs of the air attacks on Baghdad played a critical role in demonstrating the rapidity and power of the US military and their allies, and the fact that the attacks took place at night significantly contributed to the visual drama. For example, Ramzi Haidar’s iconic photograph for AFP Smoke covers the presidential palace compound in Baghdad 21 March, 2003 [fig. 1.17] (a version of which was printed on the cover of TIME magazine’s special issue on the Iraq War), depicts plumes of smoke rising from the Presidential palace bathed in golden light, which sharply contrasts with the black sky and darkly shadowed foreground. Similarly, in Smoke rises from explosions during the first few minutes of a massive air attack on March 21, 2003 in Baghdad, Iraq by Wathiq Khuzaie for Getty Images, drama is heightened by the contrast between the red-tinged smoke clouds and the darkened silhouette of buildings and palm trees in the foreground. Night-time aerial strikes and ground combat were also captured photographically using night-vision goggles. The green hue cast by the goggles enhances the technological narrative of the war. Moreover, the trope positions the audience as viewing the scene through the soldier’s perspective to imply proximity to the unfolding action.

Throughout the history of war photography there have been countless claims that many iconic images are staged. Doubts about veracity continue to surround Robert Capa’s iconic photograph The Falling Soldier [fig. 1.11] and Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima [fig. 1.5]. What seems increasingly amplified in the contemporary management of perception by the military (and by extension their respective governments) is the construction of events specifically for the media, rather than by them. Hammond cites the example of footage of US special forces entering Kandahar in October 2001, which was

132 Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 3. 133 "Shock and Awe," Oxford Reference Online, ed. Elizabeth Knowles, 2 ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Oxford University Press, 2005), http://www.oxfordreference.com/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100502693. 41 actually an operation of “dubious military value” since the area had already been secured.134 A better-known example is the dramatic video footage shot by the military of the ‘heroic’ 2003 rescue of American soldier Private Jessica Lynch from Iraqi captivity, which was offered to international news outlets by the Coalition Media Centre in Qatar. Qatar was then and is now an important US ally in the Middle East. A grainy still image from the footage of Lynch, lying on a stretcher with a US flag partly draped over her body, was widely published [fig. 1.18].135 The official story accompanying the footage was that Lynch had been shot, stabbed and tortured by her Iraqi captors. It was later revealed that the ‘rescue’ had been staged, with no real threat posed to the US special forces sent in, nor to Lynch herself, as the Iraqi military had fled Nasiriyah the previous day. Furthermore, Lynch was being treated in a civilian hospital for wounds sustained in a traffic accident.136 While the international media contributed to unravelling the fabrication of the Lynch rescue, the initial story was obviously publicised to provoke patriotic sentiments of heroism, bravery and victory. Furthermore, as Maryam Khalid points out, the fact that Lynch is a white woman acting as a symbol of ‘western femininity’ serves to further embed fears of the barbaric ‘Arab/Muslim other’ threat against liberal Western values, including gender equality.137

Concepts of freedom and liberation are particularly problematic in the controversy surrounding the felling of the public statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on 9th April, 2003. What has become an iconic photograph symbolising the defeat of Hussein and his Ba'ath Party (as he was in hiding the image was used in lieu of actual imprisonment), the supposedly ‘spontaneous’ act of destroying the statue was managed by the US military, who restricted the number of Iraqi civilians participating by cordoning off Firdos Square. Other photos emerged of a marine draping a US flag over the head of the statue, however, these images invited criticism because they symbolised American occupation of Iraq rather that the country’s liberation. After this ‘historic moment’ of the tyrant’s symbolic fall, Griffin notes that the objectives of the war became more ambiguous, and public interest dwindled, so that reporters slowly began to leave Iraq.138 These developments

134 Hammond, 27. 135 Campbell, "Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War," 63. 136 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 32 137 Maryam Khalid, "Gender, Orientalism and Representations of the ‘Other’ in the War on Terror," Global Change, Peace & Security 23, no. 1 (2011): 26. 138 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 33-4. 42 have also occurred in Afghanistan, the longest US-led war to date. Arguing that, “Without a clear and compelling story, and no promise of a satisfying resolution, images of war, however informative or important, seem to be ignored”, Griffin parallels the situation in Iraq with the final years of the Vietnam War where mainstream news coverage shifted to independent production.139 This meant reporters were not attached to an agency or news outlet, and so self-funded their stay in the country.

Despite media and military efforts to construct the contrary, the ongoing ‘War on Terror’ is one with increasingly indefinable boundaries and divergent ‘enemies’. It is perhaps because of this ambiguity that photojournalists draw on clearly defined photographic motifs associated with warfare, particularly those established during the world wars such as ‘heroism’ and ‘victory’. The ‘nostalgic mode’ of contemporary photojournalism criticised by Campany is not merely the fault of sentimental photojournalists but rather the coalescence of a number of political, cultural and social factors, including but not limited to: the difficulty of locating and identifying the ‘enemy’, editorial imperatives, the limitations of embedded reporting, misinformation spread by government interests, as well as the political and economic interests of individual media proprietors. In 2011, Australian photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson commented, “After almost ten years of war, these pictures start to meld into one. We have a responsibility to find a new way to look at these stories”.140 However it should be acknowledged that the standardised quality of contemporary warfare imagery identified by Gilbertson, while dominating the mass media, is not indicative of all photojournalistic and documentary practices. There are often reports contesting the American-centric narratives, as the Jessica Lynch story proves, and images detailing the horrific human cost of war, despite (or perhaps in spite of) unspoken editorial codes of ‘taste’ and ‘decency’.141

In providing a sketch of the history of war photography, this chapter tracked the changing conventions of representing war tied to advances in technology, ideological imperatives and the shifting conduct of warfare. Focusing on the various tropes, visual clichés and standard practices of photojournalism forms a useful backdrop for considering the artistic

139 Griffin, "Media Images of War," 34. 140 Ashley Gilbertson quoted in Kennedy, 5. 141 For example, A-Jazeera broadcast footage directly from Iraq’s national television network, showing casualties on all sides of the war. See David Campbell, "Representing Contemporary War," Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2003): 107. 43 practices of Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye as critically engaging with the assumptions underlying photojournalistic representations of war. Their practices variously eschew, transgress and subvert these conventions in order to offer an alternate representation of contemporary war. Moreover, this chapter has provided a brief contextual overview of military conflicts in the Middle East since the 1990s that these artists specifically respond to. Extending some of the issues raised here, the following chapter will unpack how photojournalism registers and constructs historically significant events by explaining Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the ‘decisive moment’. As such, Chapter Two demonstrates how the current literature discussing ‘late’ photography reinforces the assumption that temporal and spatial proximity to the event is predicated on the ‘arrest’ of action or movement. I seek a more nuanced theoretical account of the event and the ‘lateness’ of photographic representation by turning to Derrida’s theory of the event and time.

44 Chapter Two

Representing the ‘Event’ of War

Various commentators have placed the practices of Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye under the rubric of ‘aftermath’ or ‘late’ photography, alongside their contemporaries Paul Seawright, Sean Hemmerle, Willie Doherty, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach and Shai Kremer, to name a few. What links this disparate group of artists is an interest in photographically documenting the physical traces of military conflict on the landscape.1 Moreover, commentators highlight the general aesthetic features of this brand of art photography. These include visual precision and sharp focus; saturated, or inversely, subdued colour; large scale; formally ‘straight’ composition; and a sense of stillness attributed to the absence of people and decisive action. While some of the works included in this study do comply with these aesthetic features, others do not—for example, Ristelhueber deliberately plays with abstract camera angles and forms to disrupt the ‘straight’ framing associated with documentary photography. Therefore, it is necessary to approach ‘aftermath’ photography as more than simply a stylistic genre of art. This chapter outlines the key approaches to ‘aftermath’ photography in the current literature and explains some of the theoretical assumptions undergirding these positions. Specifically, the idea of ‘lateness’ discussed by David Campany and John Roberts implies that the events of war are temporally bounded and therefore beyond photographic registration after a certain time. In response, I offer a more theoretically nuanced understanding of temporality and the event by drawing on Derridean philosophy in order to account for the critical potential of ‘aftermath’ photography to disrupt homogenous and conventional accounts of the events of contemporary war.

As noted in the previous chapter, photographing the aftermath of wars and scenes of their destructive effects is not a new phenomenon. However, it was not until 1995 when Ian Walker described Ristelhueber’s images as ‘post-reportage’ that this type of photography

1 Although war and conflict form the predominant subject matter, ‘aftermath’ photography may also apply to sites of natural or human-made disasters. See for example the work of Edward Burtynsky. 45 gained significant notice in art discourse.2 Since that time, there has been a rise in exhibitions and books concerned with the aftermath of war in photography. In 2010, the conference Imaging History: Photography After the Fact was held in Brussels, and resulted in a book that included essays on a range of contemporary artists. Nathalie Herschdorfer’s 2011 photo-book Afterwards: Contemporary Photography Confronting the Past gathers a collection of artists who contemplate the physical effects of historically significant events, such as the Srebrenica massacre, the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the Holocaust. Significant exhibitions include The Sublime Image of Destruction (part of the 2008 Brighton Photo-Biennial Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War) curated by Julian Stallabrass, and the 2013 travelling exhibition WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. More recently, the 2016 exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East at the Harn Museum of Art, Florida, demonstrates the continuing interest in this mode of war photography. Perhaps most noteworthy was the 2014-5 exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography at Tate Modern, where the curatorial orientation directly engaged with the concept of the aftermath. In this case, rather than displaying the images chronologically or according to geographic location, curator Simon Baker took the innovative approach of arranging exhibits according to how long after the events of war the photographs were taken—from seconds, to weeks or decades. This unusual approach created intriguing connections between wars from disparate times and places.

A number of prominent art theorists and historians, including Ian Walker, David Campany, Sarah James and John Roberts, have addressed the emergence of aftermath photography in contemporary art. These writers have explored socio-political factors related to the advent of such photography, the changing nature of warfare, and the status of the photographic medium in contemporary culture as key areas of enquiry. In his essay ‘Desert Stories or Faith in Facts?’, Walker considers this photographic strategy as an artistic response to the Gulf War, with its sterilised, censored reportage of military conflict and changing modes of combat. Walker perceives a shift away from earlier forms of photojournalism where the public had come to expect photography to show the

2 Ian Walker, "Desert Stories or Faith in Facts?," in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister (London: Routledge, 1995), 239. 46 “intimate horror and drama of war”.3 The latter is exemplified by Robert Capa’s blurred snapshots of soldiers in the midst of battle or the humanitarian focus of images from the Vietnam War. Alternatively, not only were media reports from the Gulf War severely censored and generic, but the perception of a highly technologised war waged with ‘precise’ aerial strikes as claimed by the US military was combined with the newly developed ‘media pool’ system. This system ensured that photojournalists were prevented from imaging hand-to-hand combat typically associated with war. Walker uses the term ‘post-reportage’ to designate the precarious position of photojournalism after the Gulf War because of the limitations placed on photographers’ physical access to the theatre of war.4 He also uses the term post-reportage to designate what photography can still do in the face of these restrictions. It can: “record, document what comes after, what has been left when the war is over. It can still speak in considered retrospect”.5 Here Walker references Ristelhueber’s photographic series titled Fait (1992), which depicts the debris and traces of the Gulf War on the Kuwaiti landscape six months after the cessation of fighting.6 Locating the work between art and documentary, he views this deliberately ambiguous and symbolically ‘silent’ photography as fostering renewed contemplation of warfare and its representation.7 Walker observes that while we are conditioned to skim images of war zones in the media, relying on easily digestible information supplied by captions and commentary, Ristelhueber’s images stymie the transmission of determined knowledge through a general lack of signifying and contextual detail. Because of this they demand prolonged consideration from those who view them. Walker says of Ristelhueber’s images, they “don’t tell me what to think, what to feel. I work it out for myself. (Or rather don’t, can’t.)”8

Eight years later, in his oft-cited essay ‘Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on the Problems of “Late Photography”’, David Campany also identifies a contemporary turn away from the arrest of action associated with the ‘golden age’ of photojournalism, towards consideration of the aftermath of events.9 Applying the term ‘late photography’

3 Walker, 236. 4 Walker, 240. 5 Walker, 240 (emphasis in original). 6 The English translation is generally accepted as Aftermath, although Walker does note that the French title has a much “flatter tone”, translating to ‘that which has been done’. Walker, 244. 7 Walker, 244. 8 Walker, 243. 9 David Campany, "Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Problems of 'Late Photography'," in Where Is the Photograph, ed. David Green (Brighton & Kent: Photoforum & Photoworks, 2003), 127. 47 he describes the production of “static, often sombre and quite ‘straight’ kinds of pictures” akin to forensic photography.10 Like Walker, Campany makes his argument in the wake of a major war event, this time the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York by al-Qaeda terrorists. However, he proposes that the current predilection to photograph the aftermath of violent or destructive events has not occurred due to the changed nature of such events, but rather because of the displacement of the photographic medium from the event itself. Campany writes of a shift in the late 1960s where the introduction of handheld video cameras in news reporting resulted in photography losing its privileged relationship to imaging the event—the static ‘decisive moment’ of photojournalism is replaced by the ‘real time’ technology of video. Video, Campany claims, “gives us things as they happen […] in the present tense”. Consequently, photojournalists today “are as likely to be at the scene of the aftermath because photography is, in relative terms, at the aftermath of culture. Photography is much less the means by which the event is grasped”. He argues photographers now arrive at the site of an event “as the video cameras are packed away”, which suggests their temporal distance from battle and a propensity to capture still visible vestiges of events that have passed.11

Temporality is also addressed by Campany when he suggests that ‘late’ photographers take up “a slower relation to time” to differentiate their images from the instantaneity of contemporary media networks.12 He also observes that their images appear in ‘slower’ settings such as illustrated magazines and galleries, placing the image “at one further remove” from the immediacy of news media, and by implication, from the event.13 While acknowledging the increased prevalence of ‘late photography’ in “photojournalism, documentary, campaign work and even news, advertising and fashion”,14 Campany notes that belated photography is particularly prevalent in contemporary art, citing Willie Doherty, Paul Seawright, Sophie Ristelhueber and Richard Misrach as significant examples. He views this turn towards the aftermath in art photography as signalling a renewed dialogue with documentary practices and a reflection on the indexical status of the medium.15

10 Campany, 124. 11 Campany, 127. 12 Campany, 131. 13 Campany, 127. 14 Campany, 124. 15 Campany, 130. 48 Yet Campany has reservations about the assumed critical superiority of the late photograph, writing “its retreat from the event is no guarantee of an enlightened position or a critical stance. Its formality and visual sobriety secure nothing in and of themselves”.16 Like Walker, Campany views the symbolic reticence of such images remaining open to varied interpretation. But while Walker positions this conceptual indeterminacy as offering a valuable counterpoint to the instant gratification offered by news images, and as a self-reflexive strategy that affirms the difficulty of representing contemporary events of war,17 Campany is more circumspect in his judgment. He argues that by disjoining the image from the contextual specificities of the events of war, late photography risks affirming a withdrawal from social or political responsibility. He goes on to claim that critical analysis and political explanation is eradicated when the meaning of the image remains in “permanent limbo”.18

Before considering the political debates provoked by aftermath photography in more detail, it is necessary to unpack the implicit assumptions underlying the dichotomy between photojournalism and aftermath photography set up by these commentators. This requires attention to how these two modes of photography supposedly register time and the event differently. In her discussion of the stance against conventional reportage in aftermath photography Charlotte Cotton identifies three key differences from photojournalism: “slowing down image-making, remaining out of the hub of action, and arriving after the decisive moment”.19 As discussed in Chapter One the ‘decisive moment’ idea was posited by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952, although it articulates a more general ideal of instantaneity affirmed in photojournalism since its emergence in the 1920s. The idea that photography has a privileged capacity to fix, freeze or capture a “precise and transitory instant” is founded on a technological feature: the rapidity of the camera’s shutter.20 Over the course of the nineteenth century, advancements in photographic technology meant that the length of time required to expose the photographic plate to light was reduced from minutes to seconds. By the mid-1880s the invention of celluloid film saw shutter speeds measured in fractions of a second. As Mary Ann Doane explains,

16 Campany, 132. 17 Walker, 249. 18 Campany, 132. 19 Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson: London, 2004), 167. 20 Henri Cartier-Bresson, "The Decisive Moment," [1952] in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel, 2007), 44. 49 photographic instantaneity “names a relation of simultaneity between the event and its recording”, registering various instants in linear time.21 Valorising the photographic instant reflects a chronological thinking of time that pervades Western metaphysics, and can be traced back to Aristotle’s analogy between the instant and geometric point. Berber Bevernage describes this conception of time as prevailing in common sense and scientific discourse where a linear continuum is divided into instants or ‘nows’. The isolated instant or ‘now’ “has no length of its own and is reduced to a pure limit that both unites and divides past and future”.22 Thus, the instantaneous photograph or snapshot registers a ‘now-point’ that both connects what came before and what comes after, but also differentiates itself from the before and after in its uniqueness. As such, each photographic instant can be located as a point along a universal continuum of time.

Yet in order to attain the photographic ideal of the ‘decisive moment’ the photographer must not simply release the shutter at any point in time but “‘at precisely the correct time’, neither too early nor too late”.23 According to Cartier-Bresson, the ‘correct time’ of the photograph is when the import of an event converges with its formal arrangement in order to “give the event its proper expression”.24 John Roberts rightly draws attention to the highly subjective nature of this ‘spontaneous’ convergence, which is more concerned with pictorial coherence than capturing an “imagined moment of temporal intensity”.25 Despite this quality of contingency, the element crucial to differentiating a ‘decisive moment’ from just any moment is the apprehension of movement made possible by shutter speeds faster than ‘the blink of an eye’. If we think about the event here in the ordinary sense, as an occurrence in a particular time and space, the ‘correct’ or ‘decisive’ time manifests as the event occurs, materialises in action, between the before and after. Cartier-Bresson writes: “inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in

21 Mary Ann Doane, "Real Time: Instantaneity and the Photographic Imaginary," in Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, ed. David Green and Joanna Lowry (Brighton: Photoforum & Photoworks, 2006), 35. 22 Berber Bevernage, "Time, Presence, and Historical Injustice," History and Theory 47, May (2008): 156. 23 Jean Clair, "Kairos: The Idea of the Decisive Moment in the Work of Cartier-Bresson," in Henri- Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World—A Retrospective (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 50. 24 Cartier-Bresson, 47. 25 John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 98. 50 motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it”.26

This moment is conventionally assumed to be the event’s apex, and by extension, its essence. As Roberts suggests above, the purported ‘essence’ of the event is actually subjectively constructed by the photographer. Moreover, underlying the ‘decisive moment’ is the assumption that by photographically arresting movement and capturing a ‘now-point’, what came immediately before and what comes immediately after this ‘now’ is intelligible in the photograph. Cartier-Bresson’s iconic image Man Jumping Over a Puddle (1932) [fig. 2.1] is commonly thought to exemplify the theory of the ‘decisive moment’. A man is shown suspended in mid-air above a reflective puddle of water, his legs split between the take-off and landing of a jump. We can safely assume that seconds after this photograph was taken, the man’s foot ruptures the stillness of the puddle beneath him. The image itself articulates the chronological succession of time, as an instant between past and future. As Damian Sutton observes: “Henri Cartier-Bresson’s axiomatic ‘decisive moment’ served to ratify chronology as an order of the world merely waiting to be discovered”.27 However, as Mary Ann Doane notes, the irony of the instantaneous photograph’s celebrated capacity to represent movement, and therefore a chronological conception of time, “is attained at the expense of movement’s petrification and paralysis”.28

The purported evidentiary power of photography lies not only in indexicality—the causal connection between the referent and its representation—but also this ability to freeze motion and give visual permanence to that which is fleeting, momentary or imperceptible to the human eye. Herein lies the temporal ambiguity of photography that has concerned various theorists—the very action that enables the timeliness of the snapshot renders this moment effectively timeless. Walter Benjamin describes the ‘snapping’ of the photographer as having great relevance to the experience of modernity: “A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were”.29 This ‘shock’ arises from a temporal

26 Cartier-Bresson, 45. 27 Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 52 (emphasis in original). 28 Doane, 26. 29 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 175. 51 disjuncture in the chronological, where a past moment intrudes into the present moment, and is potentially available for all future moments too. As Roland Barthes explains, the photograph inaugurates a new ‘space-time category’: “spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then”.30 The disturbing or ‘traumatic’ force Barthes attributes to photography is brought about by this “possibility of re-experiencing the past, or of experiencing a past for the first time without a subjective intermediary”.31 The preservation of the now- moment in the photograph draws our attention to a time that is no longer accessible beyond or outside of representation—we acknowledge the presence of the instant while simultaneously acknowledging its irrevocable absence. According to Barthes, the immobility of the photograph (as opposed to the animation of the cinema) is intrinsic to the temporal paradox of the photograph as ‘that-has-been’.32 As an evocation of death, the phrase ‘that-has-been’ points to the singular existence of the referent as once present, but now past. Conventional approaches to photography, such as found in the media, assuage the potentially disjunctive force of the photograph to chronological thinking by stressing the historicity of the photographic document. As Doane explains, photographs “produce the sense of a present moment laden with historicity at the same time that they encourage belief in our access to pure presence, instantaneity”.33 In other words, photography is thought to afford us unrestricted access to capturing the singularity of the moment for the collective historical archive.

Arriving at ‘the right place at the right time’, photojournalists have traditionally been positioned as holding privileged access to events of historical significance. Their function as an ‘eye witness’ has a dual function; to render events visually coherent and intelligible for distant audiences, and record these events for historical posterity. As Michel Frizot asserts, the “photographic image has defined the concept of an event”, noting that the popular history of the twentieth century is founded on iconic photographs that have come to symbolise events of significance. Equally, those events not photographed fall from

30 Roland Barthes, Image - Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 44. 31 Michael S. Roth, "Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consiousness," History and Theory 48, no. 4 (2009), 86. 32 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 78-9. 33 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 104. 52 collective consciousness.34 Therefore, we can recognise that the import of the event (or what makes it historically significant) is tied to a mode of photographic representation founded on immediacy, the arrest of action and chronological ordering of ‘slices of time’ or ‘now-points’. This is to say that the ‘decisive moment’ model underlying conventional photojournalism is a representational construct of historically significant events—not only does it constitute what is ‘seen’ and ‘not seen’, but the single moment or instant comes to metonymically stand in for the entire event. For example, as discussed in Chapter One, Nick Ut’s iconic photograph Accidental Napalm Attack (1972) depicting young children and soldiers fleeing a napalm explosion is often considered coextensive with the Vietnam War. However, this is not to suggest that there are not examples in the history of photojournalism that diverge from this temporal logic or are critical of its assumed authority, but rather that the ‘decisive moment’ has become synonymous with a thinking of photography that most readily lends itself to the temporal imperatives of news reportage.

Campany contends that the emphasis in popular and artistic discourse on photography’s stasis emerged to differentiate the medium from the rising popularity of cinema in the 1920s.35 He argues, “Photography began to pursue this stillness as ‘arrestedness.’ It mastered and monopolized arrestedness roughly until video intruded as a mass form to become widespread by the 1970s”.36 Similarly, in his recent book Photography and its Violations, Roberts proposes that still photography has existed in a culturally subordinate role ever since the invention of the moving image.37 Subsequently, he argues, photography has had to reposition and reinvent its cultural value, first in relation to cinema, and more recently in relation to video and digital technology.38 Roberts too considers the concept of the ‘decisive moment’, or more broadly the arrest of action, as defining the cultural significance of the medium for most of the twentieth century.

34 Michel Frizot, "Who’s Afraid of Photons?," in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 280-1. 35 David Campany, "A Few Remarks on the Lens, the Shutter, and the Light-Sensitive Surface," in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 305. 36 Campany, "A Few Remarks," 305. 37 Roberts, 104. 38 Roberts, 104-7. It should be noted that by positioning photography as subordinate to video and digital technology, Roberts is not attempting to reinvigorate the analogue/digital divide in photography, based on the assumption that digitalisation destroys the indexical integrity of the photograph and therefore its veridical claims. He acknowledges that both analogue and digital photographs are susceptible to manipulation. Rather, his argument is founded on the assumption that video and digital imaging are the dominant forms in which we encounter visual representation today. 53 However, he does not simply position photography as antithetical to the moving image, which would overlook the necessity of photographic technology for the invention of cinema. Rather, he suggests the ‘arrestedness’ of the photographic ‘decisive moment’ actually echoes cinematic conventions in its attempt to situate the image within an “imaginative and dramatic continuum”.39 This recalls my previous account of the intelligibility of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ implicit in the photographic immobilisation of movement. Moreover, photographic records of historically significant ‘moments’ (events) are positioned chronologically in relation to one another to form a narrative chain of ‘History’ (a narrative that is ideologically driven and historically contingent). Yet in order for photography to carve out its relevance as a medium divergent from cinema, the ‘decisive moment’ model highlights a dual meaning of immediacy—that is, proximity to the event in space and time—that was technologically unavailable to early cinematic cameras.

This argument is relevant to issues addressed in this study because Roberts suggests that today, in the wake of the demise of ‘documentary-image culture’ (associated with political praxis and social mobility), photography “no longer believes it speaks to the moment”.40 According to both Roberts and Campany, photography’s unique position to register events of significance has been supplanted by video. While photojournalism certainly continues to operate in this mode (the media is still rife with generic ‘action’ photographs of war), it no longer defines the event. Like Campany, Roberts positions the contemporary turn to photographing the aftermath of events as a self-reflexive acknowledgement of the cultural subordination of the medium. While in some respects photography may resign itself to this subordinate position, Roberts nevertheless stresses the potential for the photographic document to position itself as a “countervailing force for negation, liberation, and self-transformation”, much as early documentary photography did.41 The following elucidation of his discussion considers whether ‘late’ photographic art practices assert this political and critical capacity for Roberts.

Occupying an entire chapter of Photography and its Violations, Roberts develops a more theoretically nuanced account of ‘late’ photography than offered by Campany and

39 Roberts, 105. 40 Roberts, 97. 41 Roberts, 112. 54 Walker. He begins by acknowledging that much reportorial photography today, displaced from the immediacy of the event, is “photography of the event, after-the-event”.42 Despite the assumption of timeliness underlying the ‘decisive moment’, he recognises that all photography is in a sense ‘after’ the event because there is no singular moment that fully defines and identifies an event. Nevertheless, it is ‘late’ photography’s emphasis on what remains, or the evidential traces that suggest something significant has occurred, that renders the event over. According to Roberts, ‘late’ photography “tends to stress the ineluctability of the recent past through emphasizing the melancholic allure of photographic stillness”, with historical precedents of this form exemplified by the work of Roger Fenton and Mathew Brady.43 Yet for Campany, the continued reference to early nineteenth-century photographs in the literature on contemporary aftermath photography actually institutes a “false homology in key respects”.44 Echoing his argument about photographic ‘arrestedness’, the idea of ‘stillness’ in photography only became apparent due to the invention of cinema. Until that point, all representations were implicitly ‘still’.45 Roberts does assert, however, that aftermath photography is more than a simple reformulation of a historical genre. In line with his theoretical position on the cultural redundancy of photography, for Roberts ‘late’ photography signals a virtuous attempt to “reposition its relationship to the event in order to establish a new reportorial role for itself by making a case for the necessary lateness of the photograph”.46 In other words, photography gains a renewed relevance in the face of video by focusing on the static elements of the event that cannot be registered by a durational medium without breaching the very quality (movement) that differentiates it from photography.

Roberts’ position becomes less clear in his discussion of the artistic practices of Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye that are also addressed in later chapters of this study. He notes that both Norfolk and Delahaye’s shift from photojournalism to art photography stemmed from their disillusionment with the news media to foster critical spectators. Their large- format photographs of war zones exhibited in an art context “secure a cognitive delay in perception”.47 This focus on the temporality of reception reflects much of the literature

42 Roberts, 107 (emphasis in original). 43 Roberts, 107. 44 Campany, "Safety in Numbness," 128. 45 Campany, "Safety in Numbness," 129. 46 Roberts, 107 (emphasis in original). 47 Roberts, 109. 55 on aftermath photography, which typically describes the images as ‘slow’ and in contrast to the ‘fast paced’ and distracted way we consume media images. For example, Sarah James writes: “In moving against the shocking televised images that are assumed to have lost their power, these careful, slow photographs force a deeper kind of reflection on important subjects too often lost in the media’s glare”.48 The fast and cursory consumption of media images stems from their highly-circumscribed content. As discussed in Chapter One, meaning is directed in these images by framing devices such as the repetition of visual clichés and symbolic cues, textual captions, juxtaposition with other content and context. Furthermore, Justin Carville explains that photojournalistic images follow a temporal logic instigated by the economy of the media “that necessitates their atrophy, the fading from public consciousness”. This logic, which ensures news stories and their images are perpetually replaced by an ensuing story, is intensified by the instantaneity of the global media network.49 Aftermath photography viewed in an art context, while nonetheless determined by a kind of contextual framing, offers an alternative cognitive and perceptual experience of war. However, whether this constitutes political or critical efficacy for Roberts remains uncertain.

Much of Roberts’ discussion of ‘late’ photography lacks theoretical substantiation and explanation. While briefly diverging into Derrida’s conceptualisation of the archive, he nevertheless makes a number of theoretical jumps and assumptions in order to arrive at his conclusion. Roberts settles on two possible outcomes for artistic applications of ‘late’ photography, discussed specifically in the context of war. The first is worth quoting at length:

There is the lateness of those who in missing the conflictual ‘event’ find solace in the aestheticizing tendencies of the photographic sublime and, as such, use such lateness in conjunction with the critique of realism in order to ‘refictionalize’ documentary practice in the manner of recent photography-as-painting. This is a lateness that is essentially trapped in its melancholic attachment to the ‘lost’ event.50

48 Sarah James, "Making an Ugly World Beautiful? Morality and Aesthetics in the Aftermath," in Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, ed. Julian Stallabrass (Brighton: Photoworks, 2013), 118. 49 Justin Carville, "Conflict and Post-Conflict Photography in Northern Ireland," in The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, ed. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2014), 71. 50 Roberts, 118. 56 Although Roberts does not explicitly align this undesirable assessment with the practices of Norfolk and Delahaye he discusses earlier, the implication is clear. Both artists are framed in the literature as evoking traditions of painting, while the ‘glacial’ contemplation of aesthetic experience he attributes to some forms of pictorial late photography echoes his rudimentary use of the term ‘sublime’ here.51 Furthermore, elsewhere in Photography and its Violations, Roberts takes direct issue with Michael Fried’s aesthetic account of contemporary art photography in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). Not coincidentally, Delahaye’s work is favourably discussed by Fried in this book. Roberts’ account of late photography seems at first to offer a fairly positive appraisal of the genre based on a reconfiguration of photography’s traditional relationship to historical events. Regrettably, here he falls back on stale criticisms based on the aestheticisation of violence and an uncritical understanding of the philosophy of the sublime as utilised in artistic discourse.52 Moreover, the reproach of melancholia implicitly carries a pathological weight attributable to Freudian psychoanalysis and aligns with the current literature on aftermath photography that criticises the socio-political inefficacy of this brand of image making.53

The ‘melancholic’ associations of late photography raised by both Campany and Roberts seem to stem from the paradoxical structure of photography formulated by art theorist Thierry de Duve in the late 1970s. He outlines two mutually exclusive yet coexisting perceptions of photography: the snapshot, exemplified by press photography, and the time exposure, exemplified by funerary portraiture.54 These modes evoke conflictual accounts of time according to de Duve:

Whereas the snapshot refers to the fluency of time without conveying it, the time exposure petrifies the time of the referent and denotes it as

51 Roberts, 110. 52 For example, Sarah James links aftermath photography to an aesthetic of the sublime. She briefly mentions a number of proper names associated with modern thinking on the sublime: Kant, Burke, Schiller, Adorno and Lyotard. However, her approach to this topic is confused and lacking in philosophical rigor, as indicated by her tendency to conflate the beautiful and the sublime when discussing works by Norfolk, and to equate the sublime with an aesthetic of harmony and unity, when this is definitely not the case for most of the philosophers she cites on the topic. 53 See Campany, and Hilde Van Gelder, "Artistic ‘Non-Compliance’ with the Protocol Rules of Photojournalism. A Comparative Case Study of Luc Delahaye, Gilles Saussier, and Bruno Serralongue," Depth of Field 4, no. 1 (2014). 54 Thierry de Duve, "Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox," October 5, Summer (1978): 113. 57 departed […] the snapshot stole a life it could not return, the time exposure expresses a life that it never received.55

De Duve outlines the corresponding psychological consequences of these temporalities. The snapshot is associated with a form of trauma based on the recognition of the inaccessibility of the present, always arriving too early or too late.56 On the other hand, the time exposure (although not actually necessitated by the length of the exposure time, but rather a stillness that anticipates the image) institutes a mourning process for the ‘lost’ person (or for our purposes, the ‘event’) that manifests as depression or melancholia.57

Speaking of the situation during the Gulf War, where photographers were prevented from imaging the conflict, Campany notes many photojournalists travelled to Kuwait following the cessation of battle to document the “destroyed tanks, bodies, scarred desert and burning oil fields”. Describing the tone of these images as “elegiac, poetic and muted”, he suggests these photographers realised “that sombre melancholia was a seductive mode for the still image”.58 This strategy is based on the naïve assumption that the residual traces of the ‘lost’ event will allegorically reflect the ‘lost’ lives of war, which are both symbolically too vast to capture photographically and physically inaccessible due to censorship restrictions. I suggest that the art photography of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye is differentiated from the ‘cheap moodiness’ (to use Campany’s term) of aftermath photography circulating in the media (also labelled ‘ruin porn’). Subsequent chapters of this study suggest these aesthetic strategies offer renewed critical engagement with the vexed topic of war. Furthermore, the deliberate, sometimes transgressive, deployment of photojournalistic tropes provide a critique of prevailing representations of war. Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye’s varying utilisation of art historical aesthetic conventions are typically cited by commentators seeking to criticise the works as melancholic and politically ineffectual, or as merely ‘beautifying’ scenes of conflict. Rather, the following chapters of this study will demonstrate the critical potential of these aesthetic modes by explicating their theoretical and historical underpinnings. For example, Norfolk’s aesthetic strategies are more theoretically nuanced than Sarah James’ unjustified reading of his photographs from war zones in the Middle East. She suggests

55 De Duve, 116. 56 De Duve, 117. 57 De Duve, 123-4 58 Campany, "Safety in Numbness," 130. 58 the formal ‘unity’ and ‘harmony’ of his images reflect the situation of Western control against the rupturing threat of the Islamic ‘other’, rendering them “morally dubious”.59 Returning once more to John Roberts, in contrast to his assessment of the melancholic and aestheticising tendencies of late photography, he outlines another possible outcome for this mode of image making, this time in more positive terms:

But there is the lateness of those who choose to work outside of the temporal constraints of arriving on time and who, therefore, at a significant level, have worked through a process of mourning for the lost event […] Thus, arriving late may also free the photography from the fetishization of immediacy.60

Here, Roberts champions counter-archival art practices, particularly the reworking of the photo-text book form, as an appropriate form of ‘letting go’ of the event that is now unavailable to photographic representation. Roberts footnotes the fictional archival practice of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, whose work is exhaustively mobilised in the current literature on politically engaged art.61 What started as a stimulating opportunity to reframe and rethink late photography in artistic discourse ends with Roberts recalling predictably and overtly political works. It is unclear what differentiates the pictorial practices of photographers like Norfolk and Delahaye, from the conceptual art practices he admires, other than diverging aesthetic strategies. Arguably, both praxes approach the event through the lens of lateness.

It is here that Roberts’ final statement on time proves useful for exploring a more “nuanced understanding of lateness” than what he previously put forth:

[A]rriving on time may not be congruent with arriving on time at all. Arriving on time, in fact, may be the most inauspicious of times, the most premature of times, for what is ‘on time’ may, in its expectations of ‘directness’ and ‘clarity’ and ‘truth’ (and the ‘decisive moment’), conspire with preformatting and the generic and, therefore, with what is already known, with ‘dead time,’ with politics-as-spectacle.62

59 James, 127-8. 60 Roberts, 118. 61 Roberts, 181. 62 Roberts, 118. 59 Here, he gestures to the fecundity of reimagining a thinking of time based on lateness rather than immediacy. If photography of the ‘decisive moment’ merely reiterates and conforms to pre-established narratives of the event, perhaps arriving late offers something new and unknown? While Roberts’ account of late photography invites a renewed reading of the genre, unfortunately he falls short of explicating the philosophical undergirding of key terms such as ‘singular event’, ‘atemporality’ and ‘archive’. Jae Emerling notes in his review of Photography and its Violations that Roberts is fully aware that “the power of dissent needs a theory of an event” yet unfortunately this is never convincingly theorised or explicated.63

The remainder of this chapter will explore Jacques Derrida’s theory of the event and time in order to theoretically extend the politics of lateness discussed by Roberts. In so doing, I will demonstrate the critical relevance of ‘late’ photographic practices in contemporary art that both Roberts and Campany dismiss. The literature establishes a dichotomy between capturing the ‘right time’ of the event of war and the ‘inopportune’ or ‘late’ time of arriving once the action of conflict has ceased. The terms ‘post’, ‘aftermath’ and ‘lateness’ used in the current literature contribute to a linear, diachronic temporal logic when thinking about events of war. Moreover, these readings imply the event is ‘lost’ or missing from the photograph based simply on the refusal to depict decisive human action and movement. This seems a limiting understanding of the event which employing a Derridean thinking seeks to expand.

Positioning ‘aftermath’ or ‘late’ photography against photojournalism in terms of the registration of the event (decisive moment versus after-the-event) fails to account for the complex temporality of both the event and photography, that the media functions to supress or contain. As this study will demonstrate, Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye actively engage with temporal and conceptual tensions in order to activate and engage a thinking of war that departs from the status quo. Furthermore, setting up a simple division between photojournalism and ‘late’ photographic practices fails to account for how these artists deliberately engage with, and disrupt, the conventions of media representations of war. Rather than interpreting these artistic practices as a commentary on the ‘lost’ event of photography (therefore eliciting criticisms of a melancholic ‘sublimation’ of loss),

63 Jae Emerling, "Photography and Its Violations Review," History of Photography 39, no. 4 (2015). 427. 60 employing a Derridean thinking of the event demonstrates that something is always ‘lost’ or resists representation. As such, it is a fallacy to assume the singularity of the event, its ‘essence’, can be captured in the decisive moment; moreover, it is a delusional attempt at control and mastery over the meaning of events in order to position them in an ordered, historical continuum. As Roberts alludes to in the quote above, photographing the ‘right time’ merely conforms to the dominant regimes of knowledge. This is what Jacques Rancière terms the prevailing ‘distribution of the sensible’, that is the established framework of perception that dictates what “is visible and audible, as well as what can be said, thought, made, or done” within a social order.64 Perhaps attending to the wrong time, an irregular time or multiple times enacts a departure from, or rupturing of, the homogeneity of media representations of war?

***

This thesis considers how events of war are represented photographically, both by photojournalists and artists. To this end it asks, what exactly defines an event and moreover, how is it differentiated from our everyday experience of the world? What makes an event ‘worthy’ of representation? When we think of events, we typically think of those major moments that have come to shape the course of history—The French Revolution, The Industrial Revolution and World War I & II to name a few. This conventional understanding of history is described by Martin Jay as ‘narrative historiography’ and Sande Cohen as ‘normative historical thinking’.65 Events are considered significant markers or “sites of heightened meaning”, given a ‘proper name’, and located within a linear framework where the cause of such occurrences has a definable and corresponding effect.66 This thinking follows the concept of cause-effect determinism, where each event is casually bound by an antecedent consequence or effect. Normative historical thinking is reflected in our global media network, where ‘newsworthy events’ are given discrete parameters and packaged into easily digestible bites of supposed neutral information. However, as Michelle Ballif suggests, this “elides

64 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 85. 65 Sande Cohen, History out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 173. 66 Martin Jay, "Photography and the Event," in Double Exposure: Memory and Photography, ed. Olga Shevchenko (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 2014), 96. 61 the radical singularity of the event” by subsuming it under generalised categories of knowledge that cannot (by definition) include the singularity of ‘what happened’. According to Ballif this process views the event as significant only in its reduction to a satisfying chronological narrative.67

Philosophical negations of this normative conception of historical events in recent decades are as extensive as they are divergent. The Annales School and French Marxist theorists such as Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar attempted to liberate history from the primacy of the event in favour of studying the long-term social, political and cultural undercurrents of history.68 In response, there has been a noted resurgence in the concept of the event for poststructuralist thinkers. While the political and philosophical import of the event differs for various poststructuralist theorists, they nevertheless share an understanding of the event as a surplus that exceeds epistemological attempts to contain it.69 For example, according to Jean-Luc Nancy the event is always a surprise that “does not belong to the order of representation”, suggesting something unassimilable to our everyday thoughts and experiences.70 Similarly, Jean-François Lyotard considers events as unpredictable occurrences that exceed interpretation, where “there is always something ‘left over’ that an interpretation does not account for”.71 It is for this reason that Lyotard employs the Kantian sublime to account for aesthetic experiences that signal the limits of representation in the face of certain events. Extending Adorno’s dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Lyotard suggests that the role of art when addressing traumatic events is to register the alterity of the event by negating representation of it: art “does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it”.72 Lyotard’s position is often referenced to justify the critical value of artistic practices that deny the figurative or empirical representation of horrific events, such as the Holocaust. For example, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985) is notable for refusing to screen any archival images of the event, it being based entirely on verbal testimonies from survivors. Griselda Pollock observes that an orthodoxy has emerged in readings of Lanzmann’s film,

67 Michelle Ballif, "Writing the Event: The Impossible Possibility for Historiography," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 243. 68 Jay, 92. 69 Jay, 100. 70 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 173. 71 Ashley Woodward, "Jean-François Lyotard (1924—1998)," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource, http://www.iep.utm.edu/lyotard/. 72 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the Jews’, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 47. 62 which suggests “that the Shoah is unimaginable and has, even should have, no image”.73 Similarly, Michael Roth describes a “doctrine of the intrinsic unrepresentability” of traumatic events, which deems them to be beyond any representation—that is, wholly ‘unimaginable’ or ‘unimagable’. Any attempt at representation is judged morally as denying the traumatic enormity of the event and as repeating the historical injustice associated with it.74 In The Future of the Image, however, Jacques Rancière questions Lyotard’s position on this matter by pointing to the critical passivity and theological iconoclasm of the claim that only certain artistic forms are appropriate for registering the unrepresentable singularity of any traumatic event of history. He charges Lyotard with fallaciously implying that anti-representational strategies (such as abstract painting) solely approximate an art of the unrepresentable.75 Highlighting the contradictory logic of the unrepresentable argument, Rancière writes: “In order to assert an unrepresentability in art that is commensurate with an unthinkability of the event, the latter must itself have been rendered entirely thinkable, entirely necessary according to thought”.76 In other words, rendering the event accessible to systems of knowledge cancels its status as ‘unthinkable’ and therefore ‘unrepresentable’.

Sharing an emphasis on the singularity of the event, a number of poststructuralist thinkers also posit the event’s non-diachronic relationship to time. This approach supplies an alternative understanding of the event to that assumed in historicist models of linear narrative progression. In his philosophy of the event, Gilles Deleuze describes the ‘pure’ event as always in a process of ‘becoming’, and as characterised by a logic of simultaneous temporalities rather than a linear unfolding of time. He speaks of the paradoxical nature of the event as “always both at once. It is eternally that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening”.77 This notion of time, which following the Stoics, Deleuze calls Aion (differentiated from historical time or Chronos), destabilises the premise of a lived and stable present. As Tom

73 Griselda Pollock, "Photographing Atrocity: Becoming Iconic?," in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Geoffrey Batchen, et al. (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 67. 74 Michael S. Roth, "Why Photography Matters to the Theory of History," History and Theory 49, no. 1 (2010): 93. 75 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London & New York: Verso, 2007), 137. 76 Rancière, The Future of the Image, 138. 77 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 8. 63 Lundborg puts it, Deleuze’s theory “frees the event from a static location in time”. 78 Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’ implies that the content or interpretation of the event are never fully determined, and are thus open to the possibility of future reconfiguration or rethinking. Jacques Derrida likewise stresses the political potential of events to resist authoritative systems of knowledge based on a temporal structure of the event that sees it open to both the future and the past. I have found Derrida’s thinking of the event particularly useful for addressing the complex temporality and aesthetic strategies enacted by the aftermath photographs of events of war studied in this thesis. By detailing in the following section Derrida’s thinking of the event—as both singular (unrepresentable) and ‘iterable’ (basically repeatable or representable)—I wish to present an alternative account of traumatic or destructive events of war or atrocity to that of Lyotard and others who claim the proper way for art to engage with such events is according to an order of sublime unrepresentability. Rather than ceding all ground to the impossibility or failure of representation as a position, or the complete suspension of meaning, I propose that the ‘late’ photographers addressed in this study offer critical reflections on contemporary warfare, while maintaining a certain resistance to determinate or predictable interpretive conclusions.

In a 2003 lecture titled ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, Derrida states: “an event implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable” and therefore cannot be predicted or planned in advance.79 This initial conceptualisation of the event as ‘surprise’, ‘unique’ and ‘singular occurrence’ recalls our ordinary usage of the term, as something significant that happens to interrupt ordinary experience.80 Yet as was alluded to earlier, this meaning does not take into account the complicated temporal structure of the event, or the conditions of its representation, nor can it explain why some occurrences are considered ‘historically significant’ and others are relegated to oblivion. So how does Derrida’s conceptualisation of the event differ from our everyday usage of the term, to use Derrida’s idiom, what makes an event ‘worthy of the name’? As Geoffrey Bennington asserts, a ‘real’ event for Derrida “seems to derive its eventhood from some quality of

78 Tom Lundborg, "The Becoming of the ‘Event’: A Deleuzian Approach to Understanding the Production of Social and Political ‘Events’," Theory & Event 12, no. 1 (2009): 2. 79 Jacques Derrida, "A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event," Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (2007): 441. 80 Daniel Smith, "An Event Worthy of the Name, a Name Worthy of the Event," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29, no. 3 (2015): 388. 64 out-of-the-blueness”.81 The event is always unpredictable and unforeseeable; it ‘befalls’ us, vertically, because for it to be an event, as such, it cannot exist within our horizon of expectation. This means that a predicted event does not count as an event for Derrida.82 However, Bennington modifies this absolute law by noting that the dimension of any event you can predict is simply not its ‘eventhood’ or what makes it ‘worthy’ of being called an event.83

Derrida’s theorising the event is undoubtedly riddled with conceptual contradictions. If the condition of the event is that it is a surprise, then anything we can discuss with any foresight is not strictly speaking an event. Yet Derrida insists that this does not mean we should not seek to know or theorise about the event, as philosophy takes this conundrum as something promising.84 Nevertheless, he is wary of providing clear ontological boundaries for the event. Daniel Smith points out that Derrida’s assignment of largely negative terms to the event, such as ‘unappropriability’, ‘unforeseeability’ and ‘incomprehension’ is an attempt not to anticipate the event and thereby eradicate the very singularity that makes it ‘eventful’ for him.85 Singularity here is that which is irreducible to an established concept, code or system, it speaks of a uniqueness that can never fully be accounted for within general categories or criteria.86 We might think of this as the event’s irreducibility to established modes of representation. However, the radical singularity of the event is complicated by Derrida’s paradoxical claim that it is simultaneously and necessarily iterable. The ‘once-and-for all’ occurrence only manifests or ‘marks’ itself on the possibility of ‘re-marking’. As Simon Morgan Wortham states, “It is a condition of the ‘singular’ that it remain structurally reliant upon the possibility of its own iterability”.87 In layman terms, this means that the unique event only exists because it has ‘real world’ effects, which can then be translated into our systems for understanding the world, such as visual representation or language.

81 Geoffrey Bennington, "In the Event," in Derrida's Legacies: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 31. 82 Derrida, 451. 83 Bennington, 31. 84 Derrida, 457. 85 Smith, 389. 86 Simon Morgan Wortham, The Derrida Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010), 190. 87 Wortham, 190. 65 These Derridean terms require elaboration in order to account for the implications of such a seemingly contradictory thinking of the event. Firstly, the term ‘mark’ can be understood as a material manifestation, whether spoken, written, gestural, pictorial or otherwise. Derrida uses the word in a way that might seem interchangeable with ‘sign’, however more specifically it is the sign decanted of presence, or the sensory manifestation of the signifier without the concept (signified) of the sign.88 In other words, the mark refers to that which is registered before a sign exists as presence or fully realised meaningfulness. Niall Lucy uses the example of a written word—before it makes sense to us, it is simply a black mark on a page. The comprehensible sign retains a trace of the ‘originary’ mark or signifier, which exists as a kind of absent-presence.89 This is a presence void of determined meaning. These concerns are reflected in Derrida’s overall deconstructive project to reconsider the ‘presence of metaphysics’ that pervades Western thought, that privileges the presence of determined meaning or being rather than contending with what eludes prevailing systems of signification.

Importantly, however, the unmasterable singularity of the event according to Derrida does not simply consign it to an absolute outside of experience, or position it as a mere illusion. If that were the case, events would always occur in some ‘other’ sphere and never collide with or affect human lives. Rather, as Wortham explains, “it is precisely what is non- appropriable in the event…which charges it with world-opening force”.90 Put simply, the event must “make a difference to something or someone within the world”, and it does so by leaving material traces that ‘mark’.91 It is in this sense that Derrida moderates assertions of the wholly unrepresentable nature of the event found, for example, in Lyotard’s thinking. For Derrida, every event makes a material ‘mark’. Smith interprets this as follows: “what we could call the ‘body’ of an event, its real, material existence, can be nothing other than the traces it leaves behind in the world”.92 And it is these traces or ‘marks’ that are precisely iterable and therefore available for representation.

88 Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008), 73. 89 Lucy, 73. 90 Simon Morgan Wortham, "The Archive, the Event and the Impression," in Libraries, Literatures, and Archives, ed. Sas Mays (London: Routledge, 2014), 187. 91 Smith, 390. 92 Smith, 390 (emphasis in original). 66 In his essay ‘Signature, Event, Context’, Derrida highlights iterability as an essential characteristic of the linguistic mark. Although his philosophy is primarily concerned with writing, the feature of iterability is applicable to all signifying marks. While the term iterability—etymologically akin to iteration—has been used synonymously with repetition or duplication, the term has more complex implications in Derridean deconstruction. He defines iterability as “the logic that ties repetition to alterity”.93 Iterability does not denote the identical repetition of something. Rather the term, combining the Latin ‘iter’ (‘again’) with the Sanskrit ‘itara’ (‘other’), pertains to the transformation or displacement that occurs with each iteration, which nevertheless retains a part of its ‘originary’ substance or meaning so that repetition can still be recognised.94 In other words, each mark or sign is reliant on the logic of iterability in order to be legible across various contexts. Iterability “implies both identity and difference”, as an inextricable link to the original despite necessary change, which explains why the sign “can never be entirely certain or saturated”.95 The fact that alterity is conditional within the logic of iteration “thwarts the homogenization of the unity of interpretation”, giving the receiver the potential power to resist or create new or alternate readings.96

Regarding the event, iterability can be aligned with representation, as those structures that present the event in intelligible forms (such as written descriptions, a photograph, or video) beyond individual or direct experience. For example, if we are to understand a representation of the Gulf War as pertaining to the events known as the Gulf War, then there must be an element that makes the representation identifiable as such. The logic of iterability discussed by Derrida means that we have different versions and accounts of the ‘same’ event (in the form of representation—whether it be written, verbal, visual). Yet each iteration also involves change or alteration, thus we can say that “something new, a new event, also takes place in every account of an event”.97 So when we say that the singularity of the event is structurally reliant on the logic of iteration, for the material manifestation or mark to be intelligible (or comprehendible to us) it must be repeatable (in representation) across various contexts. However, as Gasché notes, repetition doesn't

93 Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Limited Inc (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 7. 94 Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature (California: Stanford University Press, 2007), 67-68. 95 Derrida, "Signature Event Context," 3. 96 Nicole Anderson, Derrida: Ethics under Erasure (London: Continuum, 2012), 104. 97 Bennington, 33. 67 have to occur, but rather the possibility of iteration (repetition and alterity) inhabits the mark from the outset, as part of its ‘originary’ moment.98 He explains, “Everything, hence, begins with representation; the possibility of reproduction, representation, and citation must be inscribed in any entity, sign, or act of speech in order for an entity, sign, or speech act to be possible in its singularity in the first place”.99 This formulation departs from a conventional idea of representation as simply re-presenting the event, remaining faithful to its supposed truth and essence through a process of mimesis. Instead, Derrida’s paradoxical, tension-filled thinking of the event harnesses singularity (unrepresentability) to representation, understood as both repetition and transformation.

By insisting that it is only through employing iterability that we can approach the singular, Derrida is aware of the potential criticism that the very nature of iterability destroys the singular, yet he questions “how do we speak otherwise without taking the risk?”.100 As Szafraniec explains, “Derrida insists that there is nothing disrespectful in this; according to him, the metonymy that allows us to speak about what is otherwise ineffable is as much a way of ‘speaking’ as of ‘keeping silent’”.101 In other words, the term ‘singularity’ is used as a metonym to stand in for a concept, which by its very definition is indefinable or unknowable. Or as Lucy notes, Derrida at times ‘couches’ singularity in terms of secrecy because the very nature of the secret requires that it remain unpresentable: “While it’s possible to tell a secret, it is not possible to tell secrecy as such: the secrecy of every secret is always unpresentable”.102 Derrida acknowledges that this idea of the event as open to experience yet resistant to comprehension is indebted to Heidegger, who spoke of “a certain unappropriability of what comes or happens”. He goes on to explain: “The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better, the event is first of all that I do not comprehend”.103 Again, Derrida stresses the paradoxical structure that governs the event: in order for there to be an event that affects us (through experience) we must be able to appropriate it, that is recognize, identify,

98 Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), 213. 99 Gasché, 214. 100 Derrida quoted in Szafraniec, 61. 101 Szafraniec, 61. 102 Lucy, 19. 103 Jacques Derrida, "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida," in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 90. 68 interpret or describe it as a given event. However, any event ‘worthy of its name’ must also carry a potential to resist incorporation into our existing systems of recognition, comprehension, interpretation and description.104 As Paul Patton elucidates, “In this sense, every event carries within itself the potential to be unimaginable to a greater or lesser extent”.105

Rather than directing us to a ‘pure’, unmediated experience of the event, Wortham suggests that Derrida calls for an “always irreconcilable yet necessary negotiation” between the unappropriable, and the drive of appropriation (which always inescapably ‘falters’).106 This is why we construct and preserve archives of historically significant events, as Herman Rapaport observes, “because there is something in them that defies understanding but that we want to grasp”.107 Nevertheless, Derrida notes paradoxically that the more we try to grasp the event through linguistic or visual appropriation (representation, description, analysis, framing, interpretation etc.), the more the unique ‘thing’ asserts its irreducibility.108 We might think about this in terms of the surplus of information and imagery circulating in our contemporary media climate. However, the advancements of the Internet or video technology, or any other invention founded on offering us increasingly unfettered access to ‘reality’ does not, in fact, get us any closer to securing the singularity of the event. While representations of war in the media saturate the event with reassuring or familiar meanings, the artists included in this study deliberately impede or slow down cognitive resolution. Thus, they problematise the pretence that the media offers us informational access to events of war. Although the truth status of photojournalism has been somewhat tarnished since the ‘golden age’ of photojournalism discussed in Chapter One, conviction regarding on the spot witnessing of events of war by either journalists or amateurs caught up in such events retains some currency in contemporary media culture.

Derrida outlines two ways of ‘saying’ (or representing) the event in order to highlight the role of the media in constructing and directing interpretation. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s

104 Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 90. 105 Paul Patton, "The Unimaginable and the Sublime," in Unimaginable, ed. Dennis Del Favero, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 43. 106 Wortham, "The Archive, the Event and the Impression," 189. 107 Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York: Routledge, 2003), 75-6. 108 Derrida, "Autoimmunity," 89. 69 speech act theory, which he takes issue with elsewhere, Derrida first accounts for a ‘saying’ of the event which is commensurate with constative utterances (or language). This is a saying closely bound to information and knowledge, where one attempts to say ‘what is’ and ‘what happens’, “enunciating, referring to, naming, describing, imparting knowledge, informing”.109 Constative language says “what is, saying things as they present themselves, historical events as they take place”, thereby converting the event into information.110 Yet Derrida views this kind of saying as problematic as it is structurally bound to a certain belatedness, always coming after the event. In the context of our discussion, we can understand Derrida’s point here as disputing the assumption that the instantaneity of photography ensures a structural relation of simultaneity between the event and its recording—the event and its record cannot be coextensive because their times are disjointed or ‘out of joint’, a point which will become prevalent later in this chapter. This is akin to Roberts’ concession noted earlier that photography is actually always after the event, because there is no single moment that is representative of the event. Furthermore, as representation follows the logic of iterability to facilitate comprehension, it always structurally fails to account for the ‘absolute singularity’ of the event.111 Taken to its radical conclusion, this inability to designate and describe in representation the very quality that makes the event unique points to the ‘impossibility’ of simply saying the event.

The second form of ‘saying’ or representing the event is one that makes something happen, and is termed a performative utterance in Austin’s theory. Derrida uses the example of marriage vows, where the spoken words ‘I do’ do not describe the event but actually constitute it, entering the couple into a contractual union. This is a ‘saying’ of the event tangled up with its ‘making’. This has grave significance for Derrida when considering the situation of the global media network, which purports to present the event as pure information, through ‘saying’ and ‘showing’, yet actually contributes to the event’s production or ‘making’. According to Derrida, media outlets are in fact making the event happen through selective framing, filtering, subjective interpretation and selection.112 Having gathered momentum with technological innovation and increased

109 Derrida, "A Certain Impossible Possibility," 445. 110 Derrida, "A Certain Impossible Possibility," 446. 111 Derrida, "A Certain Impossible Possibility," 446. 112 Derrida, "A Certain Impossible Possibility," 447. 70 communication networks, the coverage of the event today is packaged as ‘live’ yet the aforementioned strategies of production are occurring near instantaneously. This production or ‘making’ of the event is offered under the guise of providing neutral information, or ‘saying’ the event. Or as Derrida articulates, “Event-making is covertly being substituted for event-saying”.113 In passing he refers to the example of the events of the Gulf War, noting that despite the apparent ‘immediacy’ of that news coverage, highly sophisticated devices of filtering and editing were occurring at the moment of recording, a process that ‘makes’ the event. This idea of ‘making’ the event can be extended to those examples where events of war are constructed for audience consumption—a notable example being the staged rescue of Private Jessica Lynch during the Iraq War as discussed in Chapter One.

Derrida encourages a “critical vigilance” in not only analysing, but also contesting and transforming the power and global influence of media outlets that contribute to ‘making’ the event.114 Similarly, in her book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler calls for recognition of those framing devices that make the event perceptible, yet simultaneously blind us to normalising modes of representation. She argues that one role of critical art during times of war is to “thematize the forcible frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed, what can be”.115 By deploying and disrupting conventions of photojournalism, the artists in this study draw attention to these framing devices. Their works offer a reconfiguring of established frames, troubling the assumption that photography can provide us with direct access to the event of war. Sometimes calling the frame into question might be obvious, as is Ristelhueber’s confounding use of scale to problematise the intelligibility of ‘straight’ photography. Other approaches are more subtle. For example, Simon Norfolk’s photographs are often accompanied by lengthy captions akin to those used in journalism and documentary photography, detailing the specificities of time, place and import of the event represented. Yet when this instructive material is combined with Norfolk’s images of landscapes devoid of action or even people, a cognitive disconnect occurs as we try to reconcile the scene depicted with the written description provided. By taking a transgressive approach to photojournalistic conventions, the artists in this study “show

113 Derrida, "A Certain Impossible Possibility," 447. 114 Derrida, "A Certain Impossible Possibility," 447. 115 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable (London & New York: Verso, 2009), 100. 71 that the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable”.116 In recognising that something problematises our secure sense of reality, Butler’s thinking overlaps with the Derridean notion of singularity as that which exceeds or resists representation. Thematising or making salient normalised representational frames demonstrates how the event is bounded in our hyper-connected 24-hour media culture, without actually attempting to represent the singularity of the event that resists representation (which would be precisely impossible and impolitic according to a Derridean premise). This is not to lament or simply accept the failure of representation in the face of the singularity of events, for without iterability, significant events would not touch us. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that the ‘unsayable’ always escapes representation, but nevertheless photography still has something to ‘say’.

It is important to stress this capacity to ‘say’ because the artworks analysed in this study are not radically abstract, a strategy regularly championed by those who subscribe to the unrepresentable doctrine. Rather, Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye might be said to echo Derrida’s formulation of the ‘impossible possibility’ of ‘saying’ (or showing) the event, in this case the events of war. The following chapters demonstrate how these artists comment on the ‘framing’ of the events of war in the media. For example, by constructing digital composites of bomb craters Ristelhueber highlights the standardised nature of photographs addressed to contemporary Middle Eastern conflicts. Alternatively, Delahaye deliberately references Christian iconography (mentioned in Chapter One) as a recurring trope in humanistic photojournalistic practice. But their works are more complex than a simple self-reflexive investigation into the construction of photographic representation. These artists don’t deny the possibility of representing war, indeed they show us its destructive power. Their images depict the landscapes and human settlements shattered by combat, the topographical impact of bombs, collapsed buildings, urban redevelopment, trenches and artillery. They register the relentless and indiscriminate face of war through the shelters of people displaced by war, borders and roadblocks, destroyed infrastructure, craters and bullet marks, and death. Yet their images are without the clear ideological or moralistic demands of the media. There are no ‘heroes’ to champion or

116 Butler, 9. 72 ‘enemies’ to detest in their works. We cannot identify the side of the war on which we stand. In fact, these artworks are not obvious, didactic protestations against war.117 It is not apparent at first glance exactly what ‘late’ photographs of war are saying, and it is precisely this ambiguity of meaning that Campany charges the images with encouraging ‘political withdrawal’ and ‘ideological paralysis’.118 I would argue, however, that this resistance to epistemological certainty is a ‘political’ strategy, and one that reflects the double structure of the event as formulated by Derrida. The representational status of these photographs of war zones indicate the event’s iterability, yet their indeterminate structure signals a certain singularity of the event that cannot be entirely circumscribed by representation. Importantly, this study does not seek to name the ‘thing’ in the image that resists meaning, as this would thwart the very logic of singularity according to Derrida. Roland Barthes faced this problem in Camera Lucida as he went about identifying details that transmit the ‘punctum’ effect in various photographs while simultaneously claiming “what I can name cannot really prick me”.119 Rather, the work of the photographers addressed in this study are situated according to Derrida’s conception of the event in that their works both ‘speak’ and ‘keep silent’ about events of war. The following chapters of this study explore various theories of indeterminacy that echo Derrida’s critique of the structure of representation. Rancière’s conception of the pensive image as a mode of representation that configures the potential for multiple interpretations of the image is drawn on to discuss the conceptual indeterminacy of Sophie Ristelhueber’s work, including the difficulty of fixing her practice according to conventional categories of representation. The ambiguous temporal structure of Simon Norfolk’s photographs is analysed in conjunction with Rancière’s reformulation of anachronism as a positive trope for rethinking the connection between temporal junctures of history. Finally, explications of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s eighteenth-century theory of the ‘pregnant moment’ of painting is reformulated to discuss the structure of Delahaye’s photographs that elude to narrative without dictating a fixed conclusion as a strategy for inviting the imaginative engagement of audiences. These disparate theories afford a consideration of how the works included in this study refuse

117 The artists are divergent in the political claims of their work. Ristelhueber denies any political engagement, being neither ‘for’ or ‘against’ war. Delahaye is similarly ambivalent, while Norfolk is very clear on his opposition to warfare, whether it be traditional land warfare, cyber or biological, and is particularly vocal about his condemnation of Western imperial interests in the Middle East. 118 Campany, "Safety in Numbness," 132. 119 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 51. 73 univocal meaning by resisting or disrupting photojournalistic conventions that saturate the image with easily comprehensible signs and symbols. In so doing, the works challenge the conventional assumption that representation can contain the singularity or ‘essence’ of the event.

Moreover, the various visual strategies of indeterminacy employed by the artists in this study are understood as delaying or suspending cognitive resolution, thereby prolonging contemplation and arousing thinking on the vexed topic of war. At the same time, these images critically reflect on the representation and the conduct of contemporary events of war. This dual structure aligns with Rancière’s understanding of the politics of aesthetics. According to Rancière political artistic practice is not limited to the critique or protest of political ideologies. Rather, any form of art that destabilises or disrupts normative modes of perception is engaged with politics. By violating photojournalistic conventions, and by constructing a level of conceptual indeterminacy in their images, the artists in this study disrupt dominant and ubiquitous representations of war as they circulate in the media— instituting a rupture in the prevailing ‘distribution of the sensible’. Rancière insists that political art should not merely produce a “meaningful spectacle” in order to call attention to the inequality or injustices of the world. Rather, it must produce a “double effect” that echoes the double structure of the Derridean event already discussed: “the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused conversely by the uncanny, by that which resists signification”.120 Rancière calls for a “negotiation between opposites” that sustains a tension between the perceptible meaning of the artwork and an indeterminacy that threatens to destroy meaning.121

This tension is important for my purposes for two reasons. Firstly, the conceptual indeterminacy or complexity of these images demonstrates that meaning is never entirely fixed or stable (à la Derrida) and therefore offers a potential space to reconfigure or debate how events of war have been and currently are represented. Secondly, because reading the photographic image is complicated by aesthetic modes of indeterminacy, the artworks discussed here prolong contemplation. Those critics of ‘late’ photography who dismiss the critical efficacy of this mode of photography are drawing on a larger debate in photography theory about the responsibility of audiences when faced with images of war

120 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 59. 121 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 59. 74 and atrocity, reinstating the assumption that action is the only appropriate response. David Campbell identifies the classic dream or myth of photojournalism: “when a crisis is pictured the image will have an effect in its audience leading to action”.122 But as Rancière highlights, the idea that the representation of an ‘intolerable spectacle’ will lead to an awareness of the situation and therefore inspire action to change it is “sheer presupposition”.123 In contrast with the belief that photographs inspire change is the argument of ‘compassion fatigue’, where the sheer volume of photographs of atrocity circulating in the media is cited as numbing our empathic response. In her discussion of ‘late’ photographic practices Debbie Lisle asks why must photography of war be tasked with the responsibility of eliciting empathy and compassion from viewers? She goes on to suggest the role of photography is not to incite action against injustice or act as a call to arms to protest the atrocities of war—it may be used for this purpose, but it is not its sole function, nor responsibility.124 Instead, she suggests ‘late’ photographs of war provoke an alternative viewing relation that negates typical responses of pity. Lisle’s assessment that the ambivalent structure of this mode of photographing war “should be celebrated for it political possibilities rather than lamented for its inability to secure political action” is sound.125 By reconfiguring the dominant perceptual modes of experiencing and responding to photographs of war, ‘late’ photography can be understood as a political practice in Rancièrian terms.

Derrida’s conception of the event discussed thus far has further implications for this study in order to reframe the conception of ‘lateness’ ascribed to the mode of photographic representation concerned with imaging the destructive consequences of war. Importantly for Derrida, the event (of war) signals a rupture in temporal flow that disorders any chronological demarcation of time as before and after, or past, present and future. A normative historical thinking, that media representations subscribe to, considers time as a line of successive events that are organised under ‘proper names’, providing ‘event- markers’ to the dating and periodising of historical time.126 Thinking time chronologically

122 David Campbell, "The Myth of Compassion Fatigue," in The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, ed. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 97. 123 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London & New York: Verso, 2009), 103. 124 Debbie Lisle, "The Surprising Detritus of Leisure: Encountering the Late Photography of War," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 5 (2011). 125 Lisle, 889. 126 Cohen, History out of Joint, 173. 75 and situating events within a linear sequence means the past remains fixed and stable, and the future is predicted from present conditions. As Tamsin Lorraine argues, in chronological time “We erase incongruities and smooth out paradox in order to create the delusion of time as a seamless whole”.127 In Spectres of Marx, Derrida disrupts this seamless relationship between past, present and future by proffering a disjointed or dislocated sense of time that he calls, echoing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘out of joint’.128

He reflects on Hamlet’s words ‘the time is out of joint’ as follows: “Literally, ‘to be out of joint’ is said of a shoulder or a knee that has gone out of its socket that is dislocated, disjointed. Thus time ‘out of joint’ is time outside itself, beside itself, unhinged; it is not gathered together in its place, in its present”.129 Time ‘out of joint’ is not without temporality, but rather runs counter to linear time by collapsing clear boundaries between the before and after of the event. When Hamlet makes the aforementioned declaration, he means that the events pertaining to the murder of his father and his mother’s remarriage to his uncle have “monstrously violated” his world order.130 There is a delay or belatedness before Hamlet is able to take the necessary actions to avenge his father’s death. It is this ‘undecidability’ of “not knowing what to do and how to be” that is precisely the time of the event for Derrida.131

Derrida’s thinking of time is based on deferral and delay, and is part of his consistent effort to question Western philosophy’s ‘metaphysics of presence’. This privileging of presence (over absence) pertains to the proximity of objects, an indivisible subjectivity or self-presence and a ‘temporal immediacy’ based on the ‘now’. Such temporality conceives the past as that which was present (past-present), the present as that which is present (present-present or now), and the future as that which will become present (future- present). As such, the future can be anticipated according to the conditions (systems of knowledge, ideology, socio-political conventions etc.) that structure our present moment. Alternatively, Derrida suggests that our so-called ‘present’ moment or ‘now’ is never

127 Tamsin Lorraine, "Living a Time out of Joint," in Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi (London: Continuum, 2003), 44. 128 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), xx. 129 Jacques Derrida, "I Have a Taste for the Secret," in A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 6. 130 Reynolds, 60. 131 Reynolds, 61. 76 simply temporally autonomous. The ‘present’ is always complicated by traces, or past experiences, as well as an unknown future.132 This unknown future that cannot be predicted or anticipated is what ensures the openness of the event to alternate or resistant meanings.

Considering the ‘open’ structure of the photographs discussed in this thesis, the artists deliberately disrupt a conventional approach to the photograph as simply a historical document recording an irretrievable past that was nevertheless present at a particular ‘point’ in time and space—or the Barthesian ‘then-there’ in the ‘here-now’. Instead, attending to indeterminacy means the works leave themselves open to the possibility of future meanings to be garnered. This is not to suggest the photographs stimulate an endless restructuring of meaning or an infinite number of readings; as the following chapters will demonstrate, there are many signifying elements in the images that would deny such a radically open attitude to meaning-making. Rather, the potential of these artworks lies in their capacity to prolong our thinking about particular conflicts, as well arouse a more general reflection on the troubling nature of warfare, both today and in an unknown future.

In his keynote address at the ‘Deconstruction Is/In America’ conference in 1993, titled ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, Derrida elaborates on the references to Hamlet he makes in Spectres of Marx (published in French that same year). He suggests a certain ‘impossibility’ of assigning a determinate date, “an external, objective reality” to the death of Hamlet’s father,133 referencing also the complex chronology of Shakespeare’s play and its contradictory references to time.134 This disordering of dating highlights the difficulty of measuring time when for Derrida the present is always ‘out of joint’.135 Writing specifically on photography some seventeen years later, Derrida again refers to the difficulty of dating, specifically questioning the time of photography:

When exactly does a shot [prise de vue] take place? When exactly is it taken? And thus where? Given the workings of a delay mechanism, given the ‘time lag’ or ‘time difference,’ if I can put it this way, is the photograph

132 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 19-22. 133 Jacques Derrida, "The Time Is out of Joint," in Deconstruction Is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 33. 134 See Derrida, "The Time Is out of Joint," 23-24. 135 Derrida, "The Time Is out of Joint," 33-4. 77 taken when the photographer takes the thing in view and focuses on it, when he adjusts the diaphragm and sets the timing mechanism, or else when the click signals the capture and the impression? Or later still, at the moment of development?136

Here, Derrida alludes to ongoing debates in photography theory regarding the automatism of the camera versus the authorial intention of the photographer. Yet the difficulty of pinpointing the ‘now’ of photography, which as the quote above suggests is inherently structured by delay, asserts that there is no ‘now’ to be wholly grasped, or instantaneous moments that gather together to form a chain of temporal continuity. Therefore, we can understand the temporality of the instantaneous photograph as a direct and unfettered record of the ‘now’ exemplified by the ‘decisive moment’ as merely a constructed illusion. Derrida suggests the present is ‘out of joint’ because, as Berbe Bevernage articulates, it “fuses and incorporates elements of the past and the future”.137 Therefore, the temporal ambiguity or slipperiness of photography that Derrida highlights positions the medium as ideal for critiquing the representation of the event, because both the event and the photograph are perpetually ‘out of joint’. The photographers in this study do not arrive at sites of war ‘too late’ to capture the event photographically—rather they offer a representation of the event that acknowledges their always untimely position.

While this thesis acknowledges that Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye’s works offer a variety of readable responses to contemporary wars in the Middle East and their representation, each of their projects share a disruptive approach to the presumed temporal order of the photograph as a ‘present’ that is now ‘past’. Following Derrida, this demonstrates the difficulty of ‘dating’ or defining strict temporal boundaries for both the event and the medium of photography. Instead, their images imply a thinking of time fractured into past and future. Not only do their practices invite a slowed down viewing experience that differs from high velocity consumption of war imagery in media contexts, as following chapters will demonstrate, their works break with the temporality of ‘now’. The following chapters analyse the various aesthetic strategies and subject matter these artists adopt to disrupt a linear conception of events of war and their unthinking

136 Jacques Derrida, Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme, trans. Pascale- Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 25. 137 Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2012), 142. 78 consumption. For example, while using different strategies, Ristelhueber and Norfolk reference historical representations of war in their images of contemporary conflicts. The various aesthetic modes of representation employed by the artists in this study suggest that current understandings of war are inflected by multiple pasts, as well as implying an openness to the temporality of the future. Constructing a relationship between historical wars and the seemingly endless wars currently consuming the Middle East disrupt simplistic historical schemas that position war securely in clearly demarcated conceptual parameters. Instead, Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye invite audiences to read the ‘present’ through the past, and the past through the ‘present’, while also acknowledging that these wars may entail future reverberations, re-inscriptions and interpretations.

In closing this chapter, it seems necessary to reconsider the terms ‘late’ or ‘aftermath’ to discuss a mode of photographic imaging that depicts the traces and destructive effects of war. The term ‘lateness’ implies these artists have arrived at the scene ‘too late’, they’ve missed the ‘now’ of the event that is irrevocably ‘past’. The works of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye suggest that time is not so simply linear—it is fragmented, delayed, fractured, out of joint. They draw attention to the effects of war, or the ‘after’, which invite us to consider the causes, or the ‘before’. Yet by resisting the circumscription of determined or familiar markers of meaning, the works remain open to future interpretations and inscriptions. In fact, the etymology of the word ‘aftermath’ does not simply denote the consequences of that which has been done but implies a futurity. Long associated with agriculture, the ‘aftermath’ in this context refers to a second crop of grass cultivated after the first had been mown or harvested. In this sense, aftermath does not necessarily signal the end of an event but rather a liminal space between past and future.

This chapter begun with an outline of the ‘genre’ of aftermath photography, also termed late photography. I considered how this mode of imaging sites of war and conflict has been historically, theoretically and conceptually positioned in the current literature, drawing on key accounts by Ian Walker, David Campany and John Roberts. Although these commentators sometimes diverge in their conclusions, they all position aftermath photography as temporally removed or distanced from the event of war. As such, I demonstrated how the event is conventionally registered in photography by explicating the temporal structure of instantaneity and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the ‘decisive moment’. However, this is merely a representational construction of the event

79 based on temporal and spatial proximity to movement. By expanding our understanding of the event, and how it is constructed in photographic representation, this chapter highlighted the critical and political saliency of artistic practices that register the material marks and traces of conflict.

The previous chapter and this chapter have provided a historical, contextual and theoretical backdrop to analyse the works of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye, particularly how they disrupt our assumptions of media representations of war and provoke reflection on the functions and character of contemporary warfare. The following chapters demonstrate how conceptual indeterminacy is differentially inscribed in each artistic practice as a critical strategy for prolonging spectatorial engagement. Ristelhueber’s works are discussed through the prism of Rancière’s concept of the ‘pensive image’ as a process of mixing different modalities of representation within single images; Rancière’s reformulation of anachronism is drawn on to account for the multi- temporal structure of Norfolk’s works; and the theory of the tableau in history painting and Lessing’s ‘pregnant moment’ account for the precise formal structure of Delahaye’s panoramic images that nevertheless generate an imaginative futurity.

80 Chapter Three

Sophie Ristelhueber: pensiveness and the wounds of war

After studying literature at the Paris-Sorbonne University, French artist Sophie Ristelhueber turned to photography (and later film), to produce a systematic oeuvre since the early 1980s exploring the impact of armed conflict on the landscape throughout the Balkans and the Middle East. While she has produced a limited number of series dealing with autobiographical or domestic themes, such as Vulaines (1989) and Les Barricades Mystérieuses [The Mysterious Barricades] (1995), Ristelhueber notes these works still connect to her projects on war as they are all “concerned with the action of time on the environment”.1 However, she is clear that her practice is not an ecological or environmental statement, but rather a more conceptual investigation into what she variously describes as ‘wounds’, ‘the deep mark’, ‘scars’ and ‘traces’.2 This chapter will explore these themes in relation to key works by Ristelhueber including the series Fait [Aftermath] (1992) and Eleven Blowups (2006). While much of the commentary considering her photography focuses on the lack of contextual detail or symbolic markers, Caren Kaplan notes her works are far from ‘empty’, actually offering many interdisciplinary, historical and cultural references.3 This chapter will draw on these references to demonstrate how Ristelhueber both disrupts conventional representations of war, and extends a critical reflection on contemporary warfare in the Middle East. Drawing on Judith Butler’s account of corporeal vulnerability, and Jacques Derrida’s configuration of the process of mourning, I argue Ristelhueber’s works conjure the universal violence of death and injury that underlies war, without recourse to sentimental or exploitative strategies of photographic representation.

Like the scar, which implies a temporal ambiguity between cutting and healing, Ristelhueber’s practice can be characterised by its conceptual indeterminacy, sustained

1 Sophie Ristelhueber, "Sophie Ristelhueber: Scarred Landscapes," Art World, no. 11 (2009): 104. 2 Sophie Ristelhueber in "What Are You Looking At?," Tate Etc., no. 19 (2010), http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/what-are-you-looking. 3 Caren Kaplan, "The Space of Ambiguity: Sophie Ristelhueber's Aerial Perspective," in Geohumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place, ed. Michael Dear, et al. (Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2011), 159. 81 by setting up a tension between presumed oppositional structures. These include truth and fiction, documentary and art, realism and abstraction, construction and destruction, proximity and distance, word and image, ‘us’ and ‘them’. For example, her interest in photographing territorial borders points to a broader conceptual concern with liminal spaces and the perviousness of the ‘in between’. Yet what makes Ristelhueber such a considered artist is that these tensions are not only evident in her chosen subject matter, but also her formal and aesthetic strategies, exhibition display and the relationship constructed between the various photographic series that constitute her practice. Various commentators have noted the ambivalence, hybridity, ambiguity and resistance to fixed meaning generated by Ristelhueber’s work.4 In particular, an apparent instability exists in defining her practice, which Ian Walker suggests is between art and documentary, simultaneously both and neither.5 Yet to date, there has been little attention in the literature to how indeterminacy operates in her practice, and the theoretical implications of her aesthetic strategies when considered in the context of war. I suggest that in order to analyse how Ristelhueber traverses constructed dichotomies, I draw on Jacques Rancière’s concept of the ‘pensive image’ formulated in his book The Emancipated Spectator.

Rancière defines the condition of pensiveness as someone who is ‘full of thoughts’ yet not necessarily aware or consciously thinking them. Yet how can an image be pensive? Rancière acknowledges that images are not supposed to think; rather they contain “unthought thought” which has an effect on the viewer that cannot be linked to determinate meaning, nor attributed to authorial intention.6 Therefore, the pensive image signals “a zone of indeterminacy between thought and non-thought, activity and passivity, but also between art and non-art”.7 Here, Rancière navigates a space between ‘activity’, understood as the intended meaning or ‘thought’ of art, including poetic and metaphorical operations, and ‘passivity’ as the ‘as yet unthought’ (the absence of cause and determined effect). ‘Art’ is used by Rancière in an expanded sense, and linked to any representational

4 See Ann Hindry, Sophie Ristelhueber (Paris: Editions Hazan 1998), 63 and Thomas Schlesser, "Taking Stock: The Works of Sophie Ristelhueber and Their Critical Reception," in Sophie Ristelhueber: Operations (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009). 5 Ian Walker, "Desert Stories or Faith in Facts?," in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister (London: Routledge, 1995), 244. 6 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London & New York: Verso, 2009), 107. 7 Rancière, 107. 82 process of giving form to passive matter or the creation of intended meaning. Conversely, ‘non-art’ refers to the unintentional, the contingent or accidental. In the pensive image concept, art and non-art are not conceived as antithetical, as conventionally assumed, nor does either term subsume the other. Rather, according to Rancière, they exist in a suspended relation that opens up space for the emergence of multiple potential meanings. Significantly, Rancière begins his discussion of the pensive image with photography, a medium he considers “paradigmatically ambivalent” in the sense of being both an art and non-art.8 The mechanical automaticity of the camera and the indexical nature of the photographic image suggests a unique relation to non-art, or contingency, which has been a catalyst for numerous debates about the ontological status of photography. Rancière acknowledges the history of photography’s precarious relationship with art, seen either as a threat to artistic imagination (Charles Baudelaire) or celebrated as a reproducible and reliable social document that breaks with the ‘cult value’ of the unique art object (Walter Benjamin).9 But it is Roland Barthes’ influential text Camera Lucida that Rancière both questions and reconfigures to develop his conception of the pensive image. He counters the weight that Barthes assigns to accident, contingency and photography conceived as non-art, noting that ironically Camera Lucida has “become the bible of those who wish to think about photographic art, whereas it aims to show that photography is not an art”.10 Rancière highlights inconsistencies in Barthes’ argument centred on the invented concepts of ‘studium’ (culturally coded and meaning-bearing signifiers of the photographic image), and the ‘punctum’, a detail or details in photographs that impact emotionally upon individual viewers but cannot be pinned down to a determined meaning or coded recognition. Barthes is relatively neglectful of the ‘studium’, which for him merely holds “polite interest”. Instead he privileges the ‘punctum’ as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”.11 However, Rancière points out that when Barthes identifies the punctum in a range of photographic examples, he actually relies on historically and culturally coded signifiers of the studium to isolate the punctum, which he claims eludes coded meaning.12

8 Rancière, 107. 9 Rancière, 108. 10 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London & New York: Verso, 2007), 10. 11 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 27. 12 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 111. 83 Rancière also alights upon and reconfigures for his own theoretical purposes Barthes’ passing use of the term ‘pensive’ in Camera Lucida. Barthes mentions that the editors of Life magazine rejected André Kertész’s photographs because they ‘spoke too much’. As he explains, “they made us reflect, suggested a meaning—a different meaning from the literal one”. Barthes goes on to state, “Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks”.13 Here, Barthes seems to imply that pensive photographs generate meaning beyond or outside the informational realm of the studium. Rancière amplifies this reflective capacity of the pensive image described by Barthes. Yet rather than simply negating the informational pole of the studium, he formulates pensiveness as arising from a tension sustained between the studium and the punctum (between meaning and non-meaning). Rancière takes issue with Barthes’ account of photography, which views the medium as antithetical to art (or representation) by instead maintaining a relational tension between artistic agency and the unintentional, the contingent and the accidental. This afoundational, somewhat deconstructive approach, echoes something of Derrida’s theory of the event discussed in Chapter Two, where singularity or uniqueness is necessarily tied to iterability or representation.

Modifying Barthes’ reading of Alexander Gardner’s 1865 photograph of Lewis Payne [fig. 3.1], who had been condemned to death for the attempted assassination of the US Secretary of State, Rancière speaks of three forms of indeterminacy operative in the image: the visual composition (was the position of the sitter dictated by the photographer, and if so was it for increased visibility or an aesthetic ‘reflex’?); time (the materiality of the photograph denotes time has passed, yet the body of the young man is in accord with our present); and the attitude of the character (we cannot know the man’s reasons or feelings simply by his gaze).14 Rancière therefore concludes:

The photograph’s pensiveness might then be defined as this tangle between several forms of indeterminacy. It might be characterized as an effect of the circulation, between the subject, the photographer and us, of the intentional and the unintentional, the known and the unknown, the expressed and unexpressed, the present and the past.15

13 Barthes, 38. 14 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 113-4. 15 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 114-5. 84 Taking a similar approach, Rancière considers a black and white close-up photograph of a wall and kitchen shelf by Walker Evans titled Kitchen Wall in Bud Field's Home, Hale County, Alabama (1936) [fig. 3.2]. This photograph was reproduced in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the photographer’s collaboration with writer James Agee. The project began as a commission by Fortune Magazine to document the living conditions of impoverished white farmers in the American South, and crossed over with Evans’ work for the Farm Security Administration. In this particular image, a vertically slatted timber wall forms the support for makeshift shelves on which various kitchen items are arranged—a tin can hangs from a slightly curved horizontal beam, and framed in the centre of the image is a simple rack holding a mismatched array of utensils. While the photograph exists as a descriptive documentation of the domestic life of the inhabitants living in poverty, Rancière also notices a number of details typically reminiscent of the realm of art. He likens the rectilinear boards to the quasi-abstract décor found in the photographs of Edward Weston, and the wooden cutlery-holder as evoking the simplicity of modernist design and its appreciation of raw materials. Moreover, he considers the skewed arrangement of the kitchen objects as corresponding to an aesthetic of the asymmetrical.16 However, Rancière emphasises the impossibility of ever knowing whether these visual elements were intentionally highlighted and framed by the photographer or simply a product of chance, or even derived from the unassuming taste of the inhabitants of the farmer’s home.17 He notes that the image itself cannot offer a certain explanation for its status as either artistic expression or social reportage: “The photo does not say whether it is art or not, whether it represents poverty or a game of uprights and diagonals, weights and counterweights, order and disorder”.18 However, this is not to suggest the photograph is wholly dumb or mute, but rather to reveal the possibility of variable interpretive responses to the image. The suspension of fixed or conclusive meaning key to the logic of the pensive image is why Derrida also invokes pensiveness when discussing photography in his book Right of Inspection, in collaboration with contemporary Belgian photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart. He says of Plissart’s photographs that they induce much thinking, or many thoughts, “a pensiveness without a voice, whose only voice remains suspended”.19

16 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 117. 17 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 117-8. 18 Jacques Rancière, "Notes on the Photographic Image," Radical Philosophy 156, July/August (2009): 15. 19 Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection, trans. David Wills (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), ix. 85 The existence of dimensions within the image that resist ‘thought’, both “of the person who has produced it and of the person who seeks to identify it”, is key to Rancière’s pensive image concept.20 Importantly, however, the condition of pensiveness is not simply our ignorance in the face of a ‘mystical’ art object, or our inability to decipher the author’s intention, nor is it “the resistance of the image to our interpretation”.21 Rather, it is the intersection of the logic of silence (resistance to meaning) with the logic of the spoken (clarity of meaning) that constitutes pensiveness, or “unthought thought”. In his formulation of the pensive image, Rancière acknowledges his debt to Kant’s notion of the ‘aesthetic idea’. Kant describes an aesthetic idea as “a representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking, though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it”.22 Rancière notes that the aesthetic idea is the merging of two ‘forms’ as articulated by Kant: that of ‘artistic form’, determined by authorial intention, and ‘aesthetic form’ as that which is “perceived without a concept and declines any idea of intentional purpose”.23 This is another way of explaining the tension between intentionality and contingency. For Kant, aesthetic ideas mediate between rational ideas and the imagination. As Diarmuid Costello surmises, “In effect, aesthetic ideas indirectly present what cannot be presented directly”.24 As such, works of art can “present ideas that would otherwise remain unavailable to intuition in sensible form by using their ‘aesthetic’ attributes in ways that provoke ‘more thought’ than a direct conceptual elaboration of the idea itself could facilitate”.25 This process ‘expands’ the idea itself.

For Rancière, art generates pensiveness by conjoining different logics, expressive styles and representational modalities within a single image, but without them being reconciled or homogenised.26 Thus, meaning and reference remain open rather than finalised questions. This openness to thought disrupts prevailing modes of communication based on the unidirectional transmission of clear, conclusive meaning. We can therefore deduce that for Rancière pensiveness encompasses both determined and indeterminate meaning.

20 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 131. 21 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 122. 22 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1987) §49, 314. 23 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 131. 24 Diarmuid Costello, "Greenberg's Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (2007): 225. 25 Costello, 225. 26 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 122. 86 The comingling of various modes of expression in the image delays or suspends our ability to define and understand that which we see and experience. Not only does this open the work up to a range of potential meanings external to any referential content, it also occasions a reflective engagement with concepts in order to expand those concepts beyond their limited framing in the established orthodoxy. For example, as this chapter will demonstrate, Sophie Ristelhueber’s pensive images expand our thinking about the events of war beyond their platitudinous representation in the media.

Like Evans’ photograph of the Alabama kitchen that Rancière describes as neither “a raw record” nor a product of “art for art’s sake”, Ristelhueber’s practice can be viewed as combining different, conventionally conflicting ways of making us see.27 Despite her work being firmly placed in art world contexts, Ristelhueber’s practice has struggled to shake off the documentary label. This might be due in part to the fact that one of her earliest projects was a documentary film co-directed with well-known photojournalist Raymond Depardon.28 Since then various commentators have categorised her work as documentary photography and photojournalism, placing it within an historical lineage founded on the evidentiary and veridical status of the photograph.29 However, many of Ristelhueber’s works actually disrupt longstanding assumptions regarding photography’s direct access to historically significant, politically charged or socially relevant events. Her work conjoins documentary ways of seeing, with other vehicles of expression such as abstraction, poetry, cinema, and aerial reconnaissance imagery, making it impossible to categorise as either exclusively reportage or art.

Similarly, the tension between documentary and modern art currents that Rancière attributes to Walker Evans’ photography does not simply stem from the retrospective exhibition of his images in art gallery and museum contexts. Instead, Rancière argues that this “tension is already at the heart of the image”, converging indices of life with quasi- abstract forms.30 Ristelhueber has admitted to being inspired by Evans’ approach to photography. Speaking of his book collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ristelhueber states: “When I saw these images I understood for the first

27 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 124. 28 San Clemente (1982) explores the interpersonal relationships at a psychiatric hospital in Venice. 29 For an outline see Schlesser, 406. 30 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 117. 87 time that experiment and the reportage genre could also produce art”.31 Ristelhueber’s practice not only combines heterogeneous expressive modes within individual images, but also between images that form particular series. Unlike Luc Delahaye, who produces monumental, tableau-style photographs that operate as discrete artworks, Ristelhueber always works with a serial format.32 However, she does not employ seriality to confect narratives or to unify single works under overarching themes. In a vein reminiscent of Minimalist and Conceptual Art of the 1960s, the works exist like linear fragments devoid of hierarchy or progressively unfolding denouements. Ristelhueber’s serial methodology might also be compared with the structure of the cinematic cut, which both separates two scenes while joining them together.

Ristelhueber’s practice is also clearly indebted to alternative modes of exhibition and display explored in Conceptual Art. Photo-books often accompany her exhibited series, along with unexpected exhibition layouts, such as arranging unframed poster prints against gallery walls in a haphazard fashion, or exhibiting in domestic settings rather than art institutions. For example, in 2006 the prints that make up her Eleven Blowups series were adhered directly to the wall of a disused apartment in Arles [fig. 3.3], adding an intriguing dimension to the commonly used phrase “living room war” to describe media coverage of distant conflicts. On the issue of exhibition Ristelhueber has stated: “I really like to give freedom to the viewer to interpret the work, to make his own story. I often dislike the way exhibitions can make everything obvious and regular and I prefer complex installations where things are not clear at first sight”.33 This blocking of immediate comprehension informs all aspects of her practice.

The juxtaposition of expressive logics, which fosters pensiveness, is evident in one of Ristelhueber’s earliest and most ambitious series titled Fait (1992). After seeing an aerial photograph of the Kuwaiti desert scarred by bombing in Time magazine of February 1991, Ristelhueber became interested in traces and material marks of conflict inflicted on landscapes in arenas of war. Later that year Ristelhueber travelled to Kuwait, some six

31 Sophie Ristelhueber, "Sophie Ristelhueber on Walker Evans," in In My View: Personal Reflections on Art by Today's Leading Artists, ed. Simon Grant (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2012), 138. 32 À cause de l'élevage de poussière [Because of the dust breeding] (1991-2007) is the only exception. While created at the same time as Fait (1992), this work is exhibited as the only stand-alone image in Ristelhueber’s oeuvre. 33 Ristelhueber, "Scarred Landscapes," 104. 88 months after the retreat of Iraqi forces from the country signalled the official cessation of the First Gulf War. From this visit she created a series of seventy-one black-and-white and colour photographs of the desert, shot both aerially and from the ground. The title is generally translated from French as ‘aftermath’, however Ian Walker notes that the French term ‘fait’ “strikes a much flatter tone” than the “doom-laden and elegiac” resonance of the term ‘aftermath’.34 While ‘fait’ and ‘fact’ share the same Latin etymology, the French word implies ‘that which has been done’ while the English ‘fact’ is more emphatically associated with truth.

Notably, the term ‘fait’ also means an event or occurrence, and when used in the phrase ‘faits de guerre’ translates to ‘acts of war’. Ristelhueber often activates linguistic polysemy in her titles, utilising homonyms, euphemisms, double entendre, figures of speech and acronyms. In other words, her titles tend to engender a surplus of potential meanings, rather than pinning meaning down. Moreover, her titles eschew a conventional correspondence between word and image, where meaning is cemented by matching image and text logically. Either the image seems at first glance to be just as enigmatic as the title, or the multiple meanings generated by the title encourages an expanded interpretation of the image that would otherwise have remained dormant.

The seventy-one numbered photographs that make up Fait are uniformly sized at 100cm by 127cm, a standard landscape format. But these are far from ‘standard’ landscape photographs. By employing oblique camera angles, close-ups and aerial shots, Ristelhueber belies common conventions of landscape photography that favour a discernible horizon line or vanishing point. In so doing, she confounds our ability to decipher both the scale and subject matter of the image with ease. While the title Fait may infer that the images present photographic evidence or facts, combining close-ups of the desert landscape with vastly distant aerial views disorders the perception of scale, thereby blocking any straightforward path to grasping exactly what facts or evidence the images record. Moreover, Fait presents us with effects on the landscape without clearly revealing what they are or what caused them. This is not simply a reflexive undermining of photographic ‘truth’, nor is it a simple discounting of the medium’s evidentiary applications. Rather, by amplifying the kind of ontological indeterminacy of the medium

34 Walker, 244. 89 as both art and non-art formulated by Rancière, Ristelhueber not only acknowledges the limitations of the medium to impart unambiguous meaning, but fractures interpretive possibilities in various directions.

Fait is typically exhibited in a grid formation, with no single image holding particular importance. The height and breadth of the grid is dependent on the limitations of the exhibition space. When installed at the Imperial War Museum in London in 1993, the grid was made up of only two images on the vertical axis, while in the exhibition at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto in 1999, the grid stood four images high [fig. 3.4]. Either way, when the total seventy-one images are exhibited together the effect is overwhelming in its visual presence and scope. Mounted on aluminium, each of the photographs is framed by hand-gilded boxes 5cm deep, a process that the artist describes as linking them together by the repetition of “a sort of glowing halo”.35 Standing before the grid, we encounter a mosaic of abstract patterns and muted tones of ochre, dusty yellow, tawny brown and various gradations of black and white. It is apparent from this colour palette and various ground shots of sand and tumble weeds that these images were taken in the desert—yet the lack of contextual detail makes pinpointing precise geographical or country locations difficult. In fact, when the work was exhibited in Johannesburg, Ristelhueber remarked that audiences assumed the images were shot in Africa because “they recognised the sand, weapons and trails of violence”.36

The abstract photographic lattice of Fait draws us in to take a closer look. Yet deciphering the subject matter of individual images proves difficult. Is the curved metallic object of Fait #60 [fig. 3.5] a helmet? Only on second glance does it materialise as remains of spent artillery. Does Fait #69 [fig. 3.6] depict indexical traces of water droplets on sand or something more ominous such as bomb craters? Are track marks visible in Fait #67 [fig. 3.7] left by human feet or by massive tanks? As Ian Walker has observed, Ristelhueber’s images “don’t tell me what to think, what to feel. I work it out for myself. (Or rather don’t, can’t.)”37 While we may expect photographic images of war zones, if accompanied by captions, to convey determinate information, Ristelhueber disappoints this expectation

35 Ristelhueber, Operations, 282. 36 Sophie Ristelhueber in Sarah Phillips, "Sophie Ristelhueber's Best Shot," The Guardian, 29 April 2010, 23. 37 Walker, 243. 90 and prompts us to look more closely and carefully. In this way Ristelhueber’s works eschew both the rhetorical habits of photojournalism and their familiar symbolic strategies. This is not to claim, however, that her works are simply indecipherable, as Walker seems to suggest. Rather, more sustained contemplation is called for to make sense of fragments and clues in the works that are notably untethered from obvious political agendas or points of view.

The idea that Ristelhueber’s practice is suspended between documentary and art photography is operative in Fait because the artist confects collisions between photographic realism and abstract configurations. In very general terms, realism eschews any expressive or idealistic aims of representation in favour of objectivity, truth and authenticity. The presumed transparency of photography, the automatism of the camera and the causal link between the analogue photographic image and its referent are cited as evidence of the realist aptitude of the medium. On the other hand, abstraction is known more for fragmenting the visual field in opposition to mimetic verisimilitude, and is therefore associated with concepts and forms. The distinction between realism and abstraction is fraught with assumptions about the nature of truth, reality and perception. Theorists and artists who privilege the image-maker’s agency and manipulation in the creation of photographic imagery have long refuted the mediums supposed objectivity. Nevertheless, for thinkers such as Régis Durand, the veridical core of photography persists. As Durand explains, “I know very well that there is off-screen space and manipulation in the photograph, but I want to believe anyway that there is also truth”.38 It seems to me that Ristelhueber’s aftermath images of war zones assume the unstable balancing act described by Durand.

The typically opposed traditions of realism and abstraction both join and separate in the photography of Fait. Ristelhueber remains faithful to the objectivity of the camera by recording the Kuwaiti landscape without recourse to postproduction manipulation or editing. Yet by simply shifting the angle of her camera downwards, either from the air or while on the ground, she disrupts vision of a recognisable ‘reality’. The squiggly marks, zigzagging lines and random geometric patterns discernible in Fait are in a sense ‘reality’ abstracted from orthodox perceptual experience. What we see is indeed a record of the

38 Régis Durand, "Event, Trace, Intensity," Discourse 16, no. 2 (1993): 122. 91 Kuwaiti landscape, but one that is defamiliarised, rendered strange, abstract and flat. Various trenches and bunkers dug by soldiers, oil wells set alight by the retreating Iraqi military, track marks of caterpillar tanks, and countless bomb craters formed by aerial missiles and landmines, are registered in Fait as geometric lines and shapes, reminiscent of the attention to abstract form in modernist ‘straight photography’.

Considering her French heritage, it is also useful to consider Ristelhueber’s practice in relation to the artistic device of ‘dépaysement’ as does Henrik Gustafsson in his account of her work. Referring to the condition of exile or dislocation, ‘dépaysement’ was developed by the Surrealists “to disorient the senses by uprooting prosaic objects from their familiar habitats”.39 In Fait and other works, Ristelhueber dislocates images of war from their familiar perceptual habitats. In Fait #20 [fig. 3.8] a zigzag line violently cuts down the centre of the image, while the snaking lines of Fait #61 [fig. 3.9] seem like interconnected roads that lead only to cul-de-sacs. Even objects that are clearly identifiable in some of the photographs assume a strange air when juxtaposed with the more abstract forms. For example, the twisted tartan blankets lying abandoned on the sand in Fait #19 [fig. 3.10] seem incongruous with the desert landscape. Speaking of the series, Ristelhueber states, “I wanted to capture a desert full of the garbage of war, trenches, abandoned military weapons, not empty as a desert should be”.40 She seems to be suggesting here that the Gulf War entailed a violent incursion into a pristine desert landscape that fragmented and scarred its seamless emptiness. This is certainly echoed by the fractured and scarred vision of a desert landscape we encounter in Fait.

While Ristelhueber’s practice amplifies conceptual and expressive indeterminacy this is not to say that she makes a fetish of meaninglessness, nor does she have nothing to say about the topic of war—after all, she obsessively returns to war zones to make her art.41 In an interview with Guy Lane, Ristelhueber acknowledges that while she is a politically engaged person, her work doesn’t seek to judge or take a particular side in conflict.42 This

39 Henrik Gustafsson, "The Cut and the Continuum: Sophie Ristelhueber’s Anatomical Atlas," History of Photography 40, no. 1 (2016): 68. 40 Sophie Ristelhueber quoted in Claire Barliant, "After the Fact," Modern Painters 21, no. 3 (2009): 64. 41 Ristelhueber has variously described her art practice as an ‘obsession’ with destruction, scars and traces. See Operations, 290. 42 Ristelhueber, "Scarred Landscapes," 103. 92 points to the open-ended interpretive potential of her works. However, I also want to propose some thoughts about the event of war provoked by her works.

Ristelhueber’s oft-discussed interest in wounds and scars has been read as a metaphor for the destruction of warfare wrought upon both people and places. I wish to extend this theme by suggesting that Ristelhueber employs motifs of wounding and scarring to break with common wartime rhetoric divided between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The thematic and metaphorical relevance of wounds and scars can be traced back to Ristelhueber’s first solo photography project produced in 1982. The untitled series of black and white photographs were taken in the operating theatre of a Parisian hospital. Shot as close-ups, the works variously depict the anonymous gloved hands of surgeons as they operate on patients, their bodies fragmented by the folds of white sheets that isolate and expose the site of repair. These are not the grisly or chaotic scenes of emergency surgery we have come to expect from reality television. Rather, Ristelhueber’s use of spotlighting produces chiaroscuro effects that lends serenity to the scenes. It is perhaps no coincidence here that Walter Benjamin compared the cameraman with the surgeon in his influential essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. According to Benjamin, the surgeon penetrates the human body as the mechanical apparatus of the camera penetrates the ‘web’ of reality.43 Ristelhueber draws a similar parallel, stating “my camera became just one among many instruments, just as familiar as those being used for the operation”.44 Like the surgeon who cuts into the body in order to reassemble or remove matter, then sutures the incision, Benjamin argues that the cameraman takes multiple fragments from reality and assembles them “under a new law”.45 Benjamin is speaking of the moving image of film, where fragments or ‘shots’ of reality are pieced together to form a narrative. Yet the analogy resonates with Ristelhueber’s photographic practice in that individual images function as indeterminate fragments, or as she describes them, “details of the world”.46 These pieces are assembled together as part of the larger series, not in order to offer a coherent narrative, but rather to create a ‘new law’ that accents gaps and fractures within and between representations of war. We might even consider the singularity of the event of war, the irreducibility that resists interpretation according to

43 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 233-4. 44 Ristelhueber, Operations, 240. 45 Benjamin, 234. 46 Sophie Ristelhueber quoted in Cheryl Brutvan, Sophie Ristelhueber: Details of the World (Massachusetts: MFA Publications, 2001), 18. 93 Derrida, as deliberately ‘slipping through the gaps’ of Ristelhueber’s mode of representation. These gaps also include breaches between recognition and distortion, gaps that destabilise comprehension or create a surplus of meaning, literal gaps between images when displayed as a series, or the subject matter of ‘gaping wounds’ in landscapes ravaged by war.

Metaphors of surgery and operations in Ristelhueber’s Fait have extra significance in the context of the Gulf War. As discussed in Chapter One, the US military deliberately controlled the media narrative of the war by restricting ground access, monitoring content and directly supplying the media with internally produced imagery and written releases. The outcome was a homogenous portrayal of war that focused on the technological sophistication of the US military, particularly their use of precision-guided munitions. This was despite the fact that this type of aerial attack made up only a small percentage of the campaign against Iraq. The bodily, environmental and infrastructural impact of the conflict was largely absented from media imagery, giving the impression of a ‘clean’ and ‘humane’ war. Medical rhetoric and euphemisms aided in sanitising the corporeal reality of warfare, most obviously in the use of terms such as ‘surgical precision’ and ‘surgical strike’ to describe the actions of ‘smart bombs’. In this context, ‘surgery’ evokes the efficiency and accuracy of the surgeon’s knife, and the clean, sterile environment of the operating room. Moreover, the analogy positions the US military as a highly skilled surgeon cleanly eradicating an insidious disease from Kuwait. Even the codename ‘Operation Desert Storm’ used to refer to the war, and the ‘Kuwaiti Theatre of Operations’ to describe the aerial offensive in the desert, serves to analogise warfare with a necessary medical procedure.

In Fait, Ristelhueber adopts both the aerial viewpoint and the medical metaphors emphasised in the media reports of the Gulf War in order to rupture the narrative implied by these modalities of representation. By utilising aerial photography to document the topography of Kuwait, Ristelhueber connects her work to aerial reconnaissance, first implemented during World War I. Bernd Hüppauf notes how the merging of new technologies of photography and aviation in war profoundly impacted on perceptions of landscape and space, transforming the profusion of worldly details into ordered and

94 abstract patterns.47 He describes the scenes of destruction viewed from an aerial distance as ‘soulless’, failing to prompt any “feelings of empathy, pity, or sorrow”.48 As mentioned in Chapter One, while aerial photography offers a sense of the sheer vastness of battlefields, the detached perspective arguably diminishes human identification. Ristelhueber also assumes a detached perspective, heightening the dislocating effects of the aerial photograph by juxtaposing it with the close-up, as previously discussed. Commenting on the experience of photographing from the sky, she tellingly observes, “it was as if I were fifty centimetres from my subject, like in an operating theatre”.49 However, it is also clear Ristelhueber is less concerned with the vast scope of vision aerial photography allows, than with registering marks and scars that violate the surface of landscapes.

Ristelhueber has largely avoided criticisms of ‘aestheticising’ the violence of war, in part due to the restrained tone of her images, which Charles Merewether describes as ‘anti- sublime’.50 However, she is criticised, or at least regarded warily, for this distanced and detached perspective. She avoids imaging people, as do many of the artists associated with aftermath photography. Much of the current literature considers this strategy to de- cathect events of war from bodily experience as indicating indifference to the human dimension of conflict. Sarah James argues that Ristelhueber’s works concerned with the landscape of war are “in danger of displacing violence from the political (carried out by subjects and inflicted upon subjects) to the natural”.51 Divested of corporeal proximity, James asks how the experience of such images can “produce empathy, or awareness of fellow suffering?”.52 Not only does James privilege the idea that representations of war are obligated to elicit empathy from viewers, she also assumes that the only way to achieve such a response is through identification with recognisable human figures or faces. Despite acknowledging that aftermath war photography presents an alternative to the nationalistic agendas of much contemporary photojournalism, her criticism of the

47 Bernd Hüppauf, "Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War and Destruction," in Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, ed. Roger Hillman and Leslie Devereaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 106. 48 Hüppauf, 105. 49 Sophie Ristelhueber quoted in Hindry, 76. 50 Charles Merewether, "After the Fact," Grand Street, no. 64 (1998): 177. 51 Sarah James, "Making an Ugly World Beautiful? Morality and Aesthetics in the Aftermath," in Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, ed. Julian Stallabrass (Brighton: Photoworks, 2013), 125. 52 James, 125. 95 genre appeals to the humanistic tenets underlying socially ‘concerned’ documentary photography. This mode of photography seeks to elicit empathy from viewers faced with the devastating plight of fellow human beings, in the hope of recognising a shared universal humanity. This brand of photography is routinely challenged by scholars who highlight the unequal power relations that are sustained between the photographer and subjects photographed, arguing that it exploits those already subjected to the horrors of war.

Ristelhueber’s works deliberately avoid the sentimental inclinations of humanistic photography, as well as the sensationalism of photojournalistic images of war. Yet just because she doesn’t represent people does not mean that she is unconcerned with the human cost of war. The metaphors of the wound and scar that she deploys conjure corporeality as an experience of injuring and healing. Wounds and scars are indexical traces of past violence to the body, a rupture or break in the continuity of the body surface. And all bodies are susceptible to experiences of physical violence. In her book, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler posits an ethics based on a shared vulnerability of human corporeality. Importantly, the universalism underpinning Butler’s argument is founded on the ontological certainty of materiality, rather than the abstract principles of rationality and reason central to orthodox philosophies of humanism. She argues that the precariousness of human life, our vulnerability to violence and death, emerges from life itself.53 In other words, from the moment we are born, before any sense of an autonomous selfhood is formed, our bodies are susceptible to the actions of others (for example, our parents).54 Butler acknowledges that the corporeal reality of vulnerability is aggravated under certain social and political conditions, so that some lives are more precarious than others.55 As such, she is mindful that vulnerability is differentially weighted between humans, as well as how vulnerability might be exploited. Butler reformulates a universal understanding of humanity based on bodily materiality, rather than on the limiting cultural frameworks that define what it is to be human, based on the possession (or denial) of certain abstract qualities.56 For example, the construction of Arab people by Western governments and the media as

53 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 31. 54 Butler, 28. 55 Butler, 29. 56 Butler, 89. 96 ‘evil’, ‘uncivilised’, ‘blood-thirsty animals’ serves to dehumanise the ‘enemy’—render them less than human—thereby justifying violence against them. Unlike the humanistic tenants of ‘concerned’ photography that relies on the subjective recognition of what a human ‘looks like’ in order to enact the process of empathy, Butler’s argument accounts for representations unbound from subjectivity.

Abstract images in Ristelhueber’s Fait focus attention on the ‘skin’ of the landscape. The dappled pockmarks, hard-edged lines, jagged cuts and curved contours that fragment the surface of the desert are the scars left by the military surgeons of the Gulf War. In Precarious Life Butler argues “dominant forms of representation can and must be disrupted for something about the precariousness of life to be apprehended”.57 Following Butler, we might view Ristelhueber’s Fait indirectly evoking the corporeal vulnerability of the human body in war by showing ruptures and incisions upon the desert landscape. Not only does her oblique strategy refuse sentimentalism and sensationalism, she also conjures the corporeal signs of violence to bodies absented from Gulf War discourse in its celebration of techno-superiority and the ‘cleanness’ of contemporary warfare.

The forms in Fait that suggest scars feature explicitly in Ristelhueber’s following series Every One (1994). The series consists of fourteen black and white, large scale photographs depicting the freshly sutured bodies of post-operative patients. Despite this work conjuring the injurious impact of war, it falls outside the ‘aftermath’ rubric discussed in this project. Nevertheless, it is interesting to briefly note that like the ruptured surfaces of the desert, Ristelhueber’s camera focuses on the materiality of the naked flesh—from the intricate creases of the face to the supple contours of a woman’s curved back [fig. 3.11]. Yet the continuity of these surfaces is violently interrupted by the dark line of a cut, and the haphazard stiches binding the skin together. The parallel between the surface of the landscape and the surface of the body becomes particularly compelling considering the installation of Every One #3 on the floor when exhibited in Zweibrücken, Germany in 1995. Not only did the body and the ground literally converge, but the audience’s altered viewing position recalls Ristelhueber’s experience of looking down from the sky when flying across the Kuwaiti desert for Fait.

57 Butler, xviii. 97 A later work by Ristelhueber titled Eleven Blowups (2006) explicitly deals with the theme of wounding. Like Fait, the artist initiated the series after seeing a media image. This time the scene of devastation was the site where the ex-prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, was killed by a bomb explosion in Beirut on 14th February of 2005. Ristelhueber’s series consists of eleven digital composite images of bomb craters meticulously pieced together from stills from Reuters video footage in Iraq, computer simulations of bomb craters, and her own photographs from Syria, Turkmenistan, Palestine and the West Bank. The resulting images initially appear to be ‘straight’ documentary records of bomb craters that regularly tear up roads in the Middle East, yet something about the images feels awry. For example, in Eleven Blowups #7 [fig. 3.12] the unidentifiable debris strewn across the road is sharply focused, yet the road itself is blurred in the foreground. The hilly terrain in the background has a simulated appearance, akin to a screen grab from a video game, yet it would take a keenly trained eye to ascertain that this is a thoroughly manipulated composite image.

The Eleven Blowups series is perhaps Ristelhueber’s most overt effort to address and disrupt the ‘decisive moment’ model of photographic temporality discussed in Chapter Two. Through the use of digital construction multiple moments and locations converge in single images so that as the artist comments, “everything is true and false at the same time”.58 In Eleven Blowups #2 [fig. 3.13], Ristelhueber revealed that the building featured in the background is the ancient ruins of the city of Ctesiphon, which lies south of Baghdad; while the crater in the foreground is from a photograph taken in Armenia in 1989.59 The conflation of images from different times and places in Eleven Blowups draws attention to the standardised nature of contemporary photojournalistic images of conflict. As Gunnar Schmidt recognises, the bomb crater is now a recurring motif in photojournalism linked to “new forms of proto-military engagement”.60 In media images, prominence is given to the crater that fills much of the foreground and middle ground of the shot, acting as an indexical trace (and therefore corroborating evidence) of an explosion. Burning cars, destroyed buildings and people gathered around the site are common, and serve as a stark contrast to the cavernous void of the crater. In Eleven

58 Ristelhueber, Operations, 382. 59 Ristelhueber, Operations, 384. 60 Gunnar Schmidt, "Gazing into Bomb Craters," European Photography Summer, no. 77 (2005): 20. 98 Blowups, Ristelhueber plays on our assumption that these images could be from any war, anywhere.

The construction of Eleven Blowups undermines any assumed evidentiary status of photography and the indexical link between image and referent. These themes are also invoked by the title. While ‘blow ups’ refers to the subject matter of bomb craters, it also recalls the photographic technique of ‘blowing up’ or enlarging parts of an image. Also hinted at is Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, the story of a fashion photographer who believes he has inadvertently documented a murder. After photographing two lovers in a park, the protagonist returns to his studio to enlarge the negatives to reveal what he believes is a corpse among bushes in the park. In his quest to understand the scene, he continues to enlarge the photographs, which become increasing blurred to the point of abstraction. By the end of the film, his efforts to comprehend the event he thought his camera has witnessed remain in vain. In the film, Antonioni suggests that the evidentiary status of photography is deceptive. These ideas are reflected in a statement made by Ristelhueber in relation to the disorientating perceptual effects of Fait: “it is a good illustration of our relationship to the world: we have at our disposal modern techniques for seeing everything, apprehending everything, yet we see nothing”.61 Here, she is not necessarily suggesting that we literally do not see anything, but rather that meaning becomes more obscure or elusive the more we seek to contain it. Ristelhueber’s statement resonates somewhat with Derrida’s theorisation of the event as both singular and iterable. To recall, the structure of the event according to Derrida is such that the more we try to apprehend the event through representation, the more the event reasserts its irreducible singularity. In Ristelhueber’s work, the violence of the photographic ‘blow up’, which voids the event of meaning, parallels the violent ‘blow up’ of a bomb, which leaves nothing but a void or rupture in the surface of land and urbanscapes.

Eleven Blowups reflects Ristelhueber’s interest in the metaphorical potential of scarred surfaces. Yet while the metaphor of the scar implies both violence and healing, the bomb crater is more akin to an open wound. In all eleven photographs, Ristelhueber implements a slightly elevated camera angle to foreground the smashed tarmac and crumbling dirt of the bomb craters, drawing our eye into their unknown depths. The series ends with a tight

61 Sophie Ristelhueber, "On My Work Fait," in Art and Photography, ed. David Campany (London: Phaidon Press, 2007), 242. 99 close-up of a jagged-edged cavity in the surface of an unidentified mottled grey road, the centre leading to a deep pit of darkness [fig. 3.14]. Despite the implication of violence, the photographs also convey a sense of quiet after the storm. The solemnity created by looking down in each of the images into gaping holes in the ground suggests some similarity to looking in an open grave, or as the artist describes, a ‘tomb’.62 Like her use of the metaphor of the scar, here Ristelhueber draws our attention obliquely and indirectly, that is to say symbolically, to the reality of death in war.

It will be recalled that in the discussion of the genre of ‘aftermath’ photography in Chapter Two, both David Campany and John Roberts refer to a ‘melancholic’ attachment to the immediacy of the event ‘lost’ to photography with the advent of video technologies. However, they also seem to imply that the melancholic tone of aftermath photography indicates that its image-makers revel in this subordinate, passive or defeatist position for the sake of it, rather than engaging politically with events of war. For example, Roberts contrasts this melancholia with photography that successfully ‘mourns’ the lost event in order to create an overtly critical response to the topic of war. Roberts’ contrast between mourning and melancholia is indebted to Freud, who considers mourning—a slow process of severing all attachments to a deceased loved one or lost object—a healthy response. In contrast, the pathological condition of melancholia suggests an unhealthy attempt to cling to the lost object. However, the eleven bomb crater images of Ristelhueber’s series resist a simple dichotomy between mourning and melancholia. The symbolism of the void certainly suggests something is lost, however precisely what or who is lost remains unknown. Considering the shattered surfaces of the roads depicted by Ristelhueber as open tombs or graves, I suggest these images deny an uncomplicated closure to the event of war.

In order to unpack the theoretical implications of Eleven Blowups, it is useful to turn to Michael Naas’ interpretation of Derridean mourning in relation to collective forms of remembrance. Drawing on Plato’s classical text Laws, Naas reveals how societal frameworks since Ancient Greece have constructed various restrictions on private and public mourning. These restrictions do not simply deny or prohibit the experience of mourning, but rather seek to limit potentially ‘harmful’ effects on the living of endlessly

62 Ristelhueber, Operations, 382. 100 grieving the dead. For example, in the context of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have rituals of recognition and remembrance for those who have died serving their nation in times of war, such as Memorial Day in the US or ANZAC Day in Australia. However, Naas argues that these contained forms of collective remembrance and mourning end up glorifying and recuperating death in order to serve the ideological interests of the nation state.63 In this sense, the process of remembering becomes one of forgetting—the particularities of war become subsumed within established national narratives of the ‘event’. Thus, the successful ‘closure’ of mourning the event of war necessitates mastery over the event so that it can be safely relegated to the historical past. However, according to Derrida’s theory of the event, the event’s singularity invariably eludes complete incorporation into established systems of signification. Derrida’s ruminations on both private and collective mourning follow a similar trajectory. Death is an event in so far as it is both iterable and singular; as such, the work of mourning entails the necessary responsibility to incorporate the death of the ‘other’ within ourselves, which is nevertheless impossible because the singularity of the ‘other’ always exceeds our subjectivity.64 In more general terms this means that mourning the event (of war) must negotiate between what is known (to our existing systems of identification, comprehension, interpretation and description) and what is unknown (singularity). Rather than considering mourning in Freudian psychoanalytic terms as ‘successful’ and melancholia as a form of ‘failure’, Derrida suggests mourning “would have to fail in order to succeed. In order to succeed, it would well have to fail, to fail well”.65 By this, Derrida suggests that recognising the impossibility of ever fully knowing the ‘lost’ event (or loved one) in order to psychically detach from it constitutes a certain kind of successful mourning founded on failure.

Naas considers the memorial of ‘the tomb of the unknown soldier’ as a salient symbol of Derridean mourning. Although Naas specifically addresses the memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, similar memorials were established in the UK and Australia following World War I. As Naas notes, the technological advances in weaponry of that war meant the maimed bodies became increasingly difficult to identify. One

63 Michael Naas, "History's Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event," Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 88. 64 Naas, 79. 65 Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 144 (emphasis in original). 101 unidentified body was laid to rest in the tomb in 1921; subsequently, one unidentified body from each ensuing national war is interred there. The singular unknown soldier acts as a symbol of all the unknown soldiers, as well as of all lives sacrificed during times of war. Naas therefore suggests that despite patriotic rhetoric “the fact that a tomb exists in our national cemetery commemorating the remains of unidentified and unknown soldiers leaves open a gaping wound”.66 Thus within the very structure of the memorial, created as an aid to ‘successful’ collective mourning by bestowing a sense of closure to events of war, lies a certain resistance to narrative and discursive closure. In this sense, for Naas an ‘impossible mourning’ remains possible. However, this is not to suggest that the remains of all those killed in war remain literally unidentified, but rather “that every mourning is and should remain ‘ambiguous’, that every mourning that succeeds too well is doomed to fail, while the mourning given over to failure—like the mourning of the unknown—is exemplary of a certain kind of success”.67

The eleven unnamed ‘tombs’ of Ristelhueber’s Eleven Blowups address the unknown deaths of war, as if the dark depths of the craters have swallowed up the victims to leave only a void. As digital amalgamations of different times and places of war in the Middle East, the images of Eleven Blowups resist a too successful mourning of the victims of war because they are ‘impossible’ or ‘unreal’ constructions. Both the symbol of the crater as ‘open wound’ and the mixed composition of the images challenge attempts to close the event and therefore conclude the work of mourning. In this sense, we might consider the Eleven Blowups as ‘ambiguous’ memorials or aids to interminable mourning. Speaking of the series, Ristelhueber comments: “This work has meant mixing up so many images and obsessions that I’ve held onto for the last 25 years that I can now say that I have probably finished with these epics”.68 It seems only fitting that one of her final works dealing with wounds and scars of war in the Middle East would leave the multitude of deaths arising from geopolitical tensions in the region open to mourning.

This chapter has considered select examples of Sophie Ristelhueber’s practice through the lens of Jacques Rancière’s theory of the ‘pensive image’ and other post-structuralist theoretical frameworks. Combining multiple modalities of expression, Ristelhueber’s

66 Naas, 88. 67 Naas, 94. 68 Ristelhueber, Operations, 380. 102 work elicits ‘many thoughts’ on the nature of contemporary warfare and its representational translation in order to expand and extend our thinking beyond the status quo. In particular, her inversion of surgical metaphors established during the First Gulf War to support the US military’s campaign of ‘humane warfare’ enacted by technological sophistication emphasises the material violence of warfare that was largely missing from media reports. Taking the artist’s evocation of scars and wounds as a conceptual starting point, this chapter advanced these metaphors by drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the shared material vulnerability of human existence and Jacques Derrida’s reframing of Freudian mourning. Interpreting the series Fait and Eleven Blowups through these frameworks offers an ethically engaged consideration of the destructive consequences of contemporary warfare.

103 Chapter Four

Simon Norfolk: anachronism and unfixing the event of war

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1963, Simon Norfolk completed his tertiary education in philosophy and sociology at Oxford University and Bristol University. After completing a course on documentary photography at Newport College of Art, Norfolk worked as a photojournalist for a number of left-wing British publications including Living Marxism and Searchlight. However, in 1994 Norfolk renounced his photojournalistic career to focus on exhibiting and publishing his photography in fine art contexts. In an interview, he explains: “I didn’t get fed up with the subjects of photojournalism—I got fed up with the clichés of photojournalism, with its inability to talk about anything complicated”. 1 Norfolk’s art practice seeks to expand the repertoire of photographic representations of war and conflict in order to understand the complicated nature of warfare, the invisible structures shaping it, and how it has informed our contemporary world. A statement on his website points to his interest in “how so many of the spaces we occupy; the technologies we use; and the ways we understand ourselves, are created by military conflict”.2 The subjects of his images are varied, ranging from makeshift refugee camps, clandestine surveillance systems, and huge supercomputers that store vital military intelligence. However, the most discernible photographs interrogating the effects of warfare are those landscapes and urbanscapes that have become battlefields. This chapter considers two series he produced in response to war in Afghanistan: Afghanistan: Chronotopia (2001-2) and Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk (2010). These works share a concern with depicting the urban and natural landscape of a country that has suffered many years of imperial and civil conflict.

Norfolk’s first series of photographs from Afghanistan were shot just a few months after the US invasion of the country in 2001. Despite the fact that US and NATO troops continue to operate in Afghanistan, the Chronotopia series is often considered

1 Simon Norfolk, "Simon Norfolk in Interview," Irish Pages 4, no. 1 (2007): 211. 2 Simon Norfolk, "Et in Arcadia Ego," bitedigital, http://simonnorfolk.com. 104 emblematic of the ‘after-the-event’ structure of late photography. In particular, Norfolk’s focus on crumbling buildings set against the sandy hues of the desert bathed in sunlight is cited as evidence of the aestheticising tendencies of this mode of photography. However, carefully attending to Norfolk’s images taken in Afghanistan reveals that the scenes he photographs are rendered as palimpsests of a long history of wars in the country. It is not that Norfolk arrived ‘late’ to the scene of the US invasion of Afghanistan or the subsequent military operations against the Taliban, as combat missions were still very much underway at the time he was in the country. Rather, the US war in Afghanistan is but one of many conflicts fought on and within the Afghan landscape. The Soviet intervention in the late 1970s into the country’s civil war sparked a proxy war between the Cold War superpowers, which included Pakistan and the US funding mujahideen fighters against the USSR. The term mujahideen refers generally to people engaged in jihad—the struggle or fight for religious cause—but more specifically refers to the ideologically disparate factions of tribal groups who formed an unsteady alliance to defeat the USSR. However, the power vacuum created by the Soviet army withdrawal in 1989 saw in-fighting between mujahideen factions and the rise of the Taliban regime, supported by Pakistan. By 1996, the Taliban controlled ninety percent of the country, practicing ethnic cleansing and terrorism against civilians in attempts to instil their fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Former enemy warlords joined forces to form the Northern Alliance who continued to fight the Taliban, and were eventually supported by the US in 2001.

While this extremely abridged history of the conflict in Afghanistan—now spanning nearly four decades—fails to account for the geopolitical complexities of these events, it serves to indicate the divergent international and civil interests that have vied for control of the strategically located country. In the Chronotopia series, Norfolk reveals how the history of incessant warfare in Afghanistan has shaped the natural and human-made landscape of the country. In so doing, the traces of many conflicts converge within his photographs—bullet holes from Soviet Kalashnikov’s pepper the face of collapsing buildings, unexploded ordnance litter the desert, and the carcases of the Taliban air force lie abandoned after being hit by US bombs. This is an ‘after-the-event’ photography where the events are multiple, and the precise ‘before’ and ‘after’ of events are difficult to discern.

105 The layered nature of the events of war that Norfolk attends to in his images is amplified by his formal approach. In her discussion on the ‘late’ photography of war, Debbie Lisle argues that this mode of image making is not only temporally removed from the action of conflict, but “is also formally anachronistic”, stating, “These are classically composed shots that follow the canonical rules of photographic composition”.3 While this argument certainly does not apply to all artistic practitioners placed under the late photography genre (e.g. Sophie Ristelhueber), it is applicable to Norfolk’s images, which are compositionally symmetrical and formally balanced. Moreover, on numerous occasions the artist has mentioned his adaption of aesthetic traditions of painting. In particular, features of Baroque, Romantic and early Impressionist painting are evident in the two photographic series to be discussed in this chapter. Although Norfolk aligns his work with the philosophical concept of the sublime, I argue that his work engages more with the aesthetic formula of the picturesque introduced in the early eighteenth century. The depiction of ruins by painters such as J.W.M Turner and Claude Lorrain, and early war photographers such as Roger Fenton and John Burke, is revived in a contemporary context by Norfolk. In light of Norfolk’s aesthetic influences, Lisle’s reference to formal anachronism offers a generative line of enquiry, but unfortunately, she does not explore it in any depth. In this chapter, I draw on Jacques Rancière’s reframing of anachronism as a critical device for analysing the coexistence of multiple temporalities in Norfolk’s work. This chapter explicates this theory and demonstrates how Norfolk’s photographs generate parallels between seemingly distinct historical times. Not only does this differ from conventional media representations of war, it also offers an alternative to the historicist commitment to linear narrative progression. Whereas normative historical thinking in art history or other fields might dismiss the efficacy of drawing on past modes of representation, Rancière’s approach to anachronism sees critical potential in using supposedly outdated modes of representation for new effect.

Anachronism is conventionally considered an error or historical inaccuracy—for example, the use of a metal beach umbrella in the movie Troy (2004) set in the eleventh century BCE, where such an item was not only non-existent but also impossible to manufacture at the time. Yet according to historians from the Annales School, and by extension New History more generally, anachronism is not merely a ‘problem’ for

3 Debbie Lisle, "The Surprising Detritus of Leisure: Encountering the Late Photography of War," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 5 (2011): 876 (emphasis in original). 106 cultural representations of history, but for the writing of history itself. In his essay, ‘The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth’, Rancière takes issue with the fear of anachronism perpetuated by Annales historians, in particular quoting Lucien Febvre from his 1942 book The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais who brands anachronism as the “worst of all sins, the sin that cannot be forgiven”.4 The premise of Febvre’s argument is that various historians have incorrectly deemed the French sixteenth-century literary scholar François Rabelais to be an atheist or ‘non- believer’. He particularly takes aim at Abel Lefranc’s ‘misreading’ of Rabelais’ pentalogy of novels The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel as evidence of anti-Christian sentiments. Instead, Febvre argues it was structurally impossible for Rabelais to be a rationalist atheist as such philosophical and scientific frameworks did not yet exist in sixteenth-century France, an unfailingly Christian society. He suggests Lefranc’s study suffers from the sin of anachronism, since it collapses inherent differences between Rabelais’ time and Lefranc’s own by examining his life and works through a contemporary religious lens.5

Febvre uses this criticism to promote a historiography that attends to the ‘mentalité’ of the time, that is the “ideas, information, beliefs, attitudes, and values shared by social groups”.6 An emphasis on mentalities, or social attitudes, means the historian must try to understand the thoughts and feelings of the time that they are researching, and try to separate this from their own contextual perspective. According to Febvre, not doing so results in the fundamental error of anachronism. As Beatrice Gottlieb states in her introduction to The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, anachronism “comes from not respecting the past, seeing false analogies with the present, and jumping to conclusions”.7 While such a contention may seem appropriate for the writing of history, Kristen Ross characterises it as an extreme version of ‘cultural respect’ where we fall into the trap of only judging the past according to the overarching beliefs and attitudes of that particular time, remaining critically indifferent.8

4 Lucien Febvre quoted in Jacques Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian's Truth," InPrint 3, no. 1 (2015): 21. 5 Beatrice Gottlieb, "Translators Introduction," in Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1982), xxiv. 6 Gottlieb, xxiii. 7 Gottlieb, xxiv. 8 Kristin Ross, "Historicizing Untimeliness," in History, Politics, Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière, ed. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2009), 26. 107 Rancière takes issue with Febvre’s premise that people, objects and events can only exist by way of belonging to or resembling their ‘time’. According to Febvre and the Annales School more generally, to be an historical subject or event is to coincide with the mentalité of the time; to be an historian, in pursuit of historical truth, is contingent on attending to this principle by never representing people or events as ‘out of joint’ with their time.9 But as Rancière contends, this assumes that all adhere to the norms of their own time through absolute belief, and therefore are ignorant of the limits of these norms.10 Such thinking not only serves to limit individual agency but secures an idea of fixed and stable chronological epochs, where different mentalities never mix or clash. Rancière highlights the falsely homogenising aspect of the ‘mentalité’ methodology, which fails to account for the unconventional, the revolutionary or atypical, those events or people who break with the dominant ideologies of a particular epoch or people. In fact, he goes one step further to suggest historical subjects are only agents of change in so far as they do not completely resemble or coincide with the thinking of their ‘time’—they exist as anachronies.11 Therefore, Rancière does not treat anachronism as an error, but rather as a fruitful device for thinking about ruptures in time and things that do not fit into neat, ordered and contained historical packages. This is indicative of his overarching treatment of time, which does away with the conventional idea that one historical time regulates everything and instead thinks of history as made of co-existing temporalities.

While Rancière does not proffer an explicit philosophy of time, a stress of the political significance of the untimely in history or representation undergirds much of his thinking. He often draws on marginal figures, such as nineteenth-century educator Joseph Jacotot, who are untimely or ‘figures of non-contemporaneity’. Speaking of his treatment of historical figures, Kristen Ross asserts: “History, in fact, is given much the same power Rancière grants to fiction: that of reframing, and thus expanding, perception, reconfiguring what is thinkable”.12 The potential for the new in history, that is treating history as fluid and open rather than static and unchanging, echoes Derrida’s theory of the event and time discussed in Chapter Two. Derrida posits that both the past and an unknown future inflect our experience of the ‘present’, which serves to disrupt any

9 Tim Stott, "Introduction to Jacques Rancière's 'the Concept of Anachronism and the Historian's Truth'," InPrint 3, no. 1 (2015): 13. 10 Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism," 36. 11 Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism," 46. 12 Ross, 25. 108 reassuring fixity or coherence of history. Rancière is careful to pay attention to the particularity of individuals such as Jacotot and their circumstances, yet, as Ross notes, he mobilises their actions and beliefs against contemporary ideologies, despite the apparent time lag between ‘then’ and ‘now’.13 While this kind of strategy could be said to apply to revisionist histories that refute the existence of major historical events (for example, the abhorrent Holocaust deniers), the purpose of Derrida’s and Rancière’s thinking of history in this way is to allow alternate perspectives to any current status quo, dictated by politics and the media information machine, as always a possibility. Rancière seeks to unhitch anachronism from negative connotations perpetuated by Febvre and others, in order to free historical thinking from domination by the category of the possible, and disengage time from enslavement to co-presence or contemporaneity. He proposes, “The concept of ‘anachronism’ is anti-historical because it obscures the very conditions of all historicity. There is history insofar as men do not ‘resemble’ their time, insofar as they act in breach of ‘their’ time, in breach of the line of temporality that puts them in their place by obliging them to ‘use’ their time in some way or other”. But, he explains further, this rupture with chronological time is contingent on the possibility of multiple lines of temporality existing at any ‘one’ time.14 In an interview, he states:

There is an event, history happens (in the sense that things happen) insofar as the human being is a being who is non-contemporaneous with itself. Events happen because there are different times which are jumbled together, events happen because there is futurity, the future in the present, because there is also a present which repeats the past, because there are different temporalities within the ‘same’ time, etc.15

Highlighting a “multiplicity of temporal lines”,16 a multi-temporality of intertwined plots,17 is the very “condition of historical activity” according to Rancière.18 Against Febvre, Rancière argues “there are modes of connection that in a positive sense we can call anachronies: events, ideas, significations that are contrary to time, that make meaning

13 Ross, 25. 14 Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism," 46. 15 Jacques Rancière quoted in Alex Thomson, "On the Shores of History," in Reading Rancière, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London & New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 210. 16 Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism," 47. 17 Jacques Rancière, "Afterword / the Method of Equality: An Answer to Some Questions," in History, Politics, Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière, ed. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2009), 282-3. 18 Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism," 47-8. 109 circulate in a way that escapes any contemporaneity, any identity of time with ‘itself’”.19 Anachronies offer new and original insights, rupturing any sense of homogenised contemporaneity, by leaping from “one temporal line to another”.20 Here the uniformity of thought implied by the historical ‘mentalité’ concept is countered by an idea of clashing, recursive or intersecting temporalities that inhabit any historical ‘moment’.

From this summary it is apparent that Rancière’s primary concern is to develop a more positive evaluation of anachronism as able to account for events and individuals that may not necessarily resemble or reflect the prevailing values, ideas and practices of their time. This may be extended to cultural artefacts and a consideration of how time is staged within them. In his introduction to Rancière’s essay on anachronism, Tim Stott notes that art historians are often drawn to the concept of anachronism because an artwork “references variously, sometimes in a way that is contradictory, often temporally dispersed, and always unstable, and can fold these references into the continuity of the work”.21 In fact, one of the characteristics of much modern and contemporary art for Rancière is the “co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities”.22

Speaking of artworks, Rancière says that an ‘anachronic’ element can exist as, “that which does not belong or does not suit the time in which it is found”.23 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood adopt this idea in Anachronic Renaissance, where they argue that works of art activate a ‘bending of time’. They suggest that the artwork, made in a specific historical moment, always points back in time or outside of its own time while simultaneously pointing forward when future audiences will “activate and reactive it as a meaningful event”.24 While Nagel and Wood reconsider time in Renaissance art, a more recent example of this approach is Christine Ross’ book The Past is the Present; it's the Future too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art. Ross identifies a ‘temporal turn’ in contemporary art, particularly focusing on artists who question a conventional sense

19 Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism," 46. 20 Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism," 47. 21 Stott, 17. 22 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 21. 23 Rancière, "The Concept of Anachronism," 40 (emphasis in original). 24 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 9. 110 of linear time, but also time’s relation to memory and historicity.25 However, the artworks she discusses have an overt durational dimension, such as film or performance. Ross steers away from the arrested time of photography. The following analysis of Norfolk’s practice employs the concept of anachronism to investigate how multiple temporalities may be activated in the static images of photography.

Any study of the role of temporality and anachronism in Norfolk’s photography is best begun with consideration of one of his earliest series, Afghanistan: Chronotopia (2001- 2), the title of which signals a preoccupation with time. Derived from the Greek words for time (chronos) and place (topos), chronotopia references Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s use of the term ‘chronotope’ to describe how literature represents interconnecting temporal and spatial relationships. Moreover, the term is used to account for how these relationships are historically constructed and changing.26 Discussing his series of photographs, Norfolk describes the chronotope as a site where “layers of time fit upon each other. Either satisfactorily or uncomfortably”.27 In Chronotopia architectural ruins form the predominant subject matter, which not only recalls a long tradition in European art, but also serves as a visual motif signifying layers of time. Norfolk noticed that “the sheer length of the war in Afghanistan […] means that the ruins have a bizarre layering; different moments of destruction lying like sedimentary strata on top of each other”.28 Despite his noted interest in archaeology, Norfolk does not mimic archaeological methodology or photography in this series, unlike Archaeological Treasures from the Tigris Valley (2003) where he performed superficial excavations of sites around Baghdad, and then catalogued and photographed his various finds in a makeshift on-site studio. Rather, the ‘satisfactory’ and ‘uncomfortable’ layering of time identified by Norfolk is reflected in Afghanistan: Chronotopia through both subject matter and aesthetic portrayal, utilising the eighteenth-century visual template of the picturesque.

25 Christine Ross, The Past Is the Present; It's the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (New York: Continuum, 2012). 26 Simon Dentith, "Chronotope," The Literary Encyclopedia, http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=187. 27 Norfolk, "Simon Norfolk in Interview," 215. 28 Simon Norfolk, Afghanistan: Chronotopia (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2002), unpaginated. 111 The forty-seven photographs which make up the Chronotopia series can be roughly divided into five subject types: sites of culture and leisure such as swimming pools, a teahouse and outdoor cinema; government buildings; transport and communication infrastructure such as a radio tower and bus terminals; detritus of war including spent munitions, abandoned tanks and aeroplanes; and signs of rebuilding and renewal like brickwork manufacture and makeshift shops set up amongst derelict buildings. What ties these urban fixtures together is their varying degrees of ruination. The motif of deteriorated human-made structures or ruins has persisted in Western art since the seventeenth century.29 The fact that the ruin collapses constructed binaries between nature and culture, between enigmatic temporality and fixed meaning, perhaps provides a clue as to our fascination with ruins. Brian Dillion has discussed the temporal paradox of ruins. While decayed built structures point to the passage of time, he suggests that they also compel us to imagine our future in ruins.30 But he also views the ruin “a site not of melancholy or mourning but of radical potential—its fragmentary, unfinished nature is an invitation to fulfil the as yet unexplored temporality that it contains”.31 Michael S. Roth notes that despite admirers of ruins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries having different interpretations of decay—as a warning against earthly hubris, or a promise of harmony with nature—all considered ruins as occurring with and through time.32

Ruins also became synonymous with the emergence of the aesthetic category of the picturesque, first theorised by Reverend William Gilpin in 1782. Gilpin sought an alternative to the categories of the beautiful and the sublime proposed by Edmund Burke in 1757. Taken from the conventional meaning of ‘picturesque’ as that which is suited to pictorial representation, Gilpin extends his theory of the picturesque in art to emphasise ‘roughness’, derived from the seventeenth-century landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Salvator Rosa. Fragmentation, irregularity and decay are privileged by Gilpin over the ‘smoothness’ and symmetry of beauty as categorised by Burke.

29 However, as Wolfgang Kemp notes, European interest in ruins has not always been so—art from the 14th to 16th Centuries was concerned with the magnificent, clean, finished and smooth as a representation of an ideal. Wolfgang Kemp, "Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition," October 54, Autumn (1990): 104. 30 Brian Dillon, "Introduction: A Short History of Decay," in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon (London & Massachusetts: Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, 2011), 18. 31 Dillion, 18. 32 Michael S. Roth, "Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed," in Irresistable Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, ed. Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons, and Charles Merewether (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997), 7. 112 Subjects suitable for picturesque landscapes included overgrown foliage, fallen or decaying trees, winding rivers and crumbling abbeys, churches and castles. Gilpin’s aesthetic appreciation of ruins is founded on a sense of fragmentation they impart, which he contrasts with classical architecture:

A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree. The proportion of its parts—the propriety of its ornaments—and the symmetry of the whole may be highly pleasing. But if we introduce it in a picture, it immediately becomes a formal object, and ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other and throw the mutilated members around in heaps. In short, from a smooth building, we must turn it into a rough ruin.33

Gilpin is specific in detailing certain pictorial elements that constitute a picturesque landscape scene, highlighting “roughness of texture, with irregularity of outline, with contrasting lights and shades, with variegated and graduated colours”.34 He advocates the use of the ‘Claude glass’, a tinted convex mirror, in order to assist artists to emulate the tonal gradation and framing of landscape so admired in the work of Claude Lorrain.35

Norfolk acknowledges Claude’s landscape paintings as a key influence for the Chronotopia series, and in particular the painter’s skillful treatment of golden light that floods his scenes in varying gradients.36 For example, in Norfolk’s photograph King Amanullah’s Victory Arch built to celebrate the 1919 Independence from the British. Paghman, Kabul Province (2001-2) [fig. 4.1], the strong contrast between the foreground cast in shadow and the architectural ruin engulfed in bright sunlight recalls paintings by Claude such as Capriccio with ruins of the Roman Forum (1634) [fig. 4.2] or Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus (1644) [fig. 4.3]. Norfolk’s photograph depicts a partially destroyed neoclassical style victory arch located near the Afghani capital Kabul.

33 William Gilpin quoted in Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 69-70. 34 Walter John Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in 18th Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illionois University, 1957), 201. 35 Despite the apparent lack of theoretical development in Gilpin’s argument, which was later revised with more philosophical rigour by Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, his understanding of picturesque characteristics was influential for practitioners of the time, contributing to the rise of ‘picturesque tourism’ in Britain and new developments in garden design. 36 He states: “I wanted to try to copy some motifs from those paintings—in particular, that amazing golden light that someone like Claude Lorrain always used”. Norfolk, "Simon Norfolk in Interview," 209. 113 Originating in Ancient Rome, the victory (or triumphal) arch acts as symbol of military victory, of national greatness and to commemorate the fallen. They feature heavily in the art of ruins from the seventeenth century on, particularly in the semi-fictitious picturesque scenes by French painter Hubert Robert. Interestingly, while this particular victory arch was erected in 1919 to symbolise the independence of Afghanistan from British control, King Amanullah Khan subscribed to Western aesthetic models in an attempt to ‘modernise’ the country. Norfolk’s composition draws on the formal balance and harmony aligned with classical notions of beauty—the arch sits squarely in the middle of the frame, with a few manicured trees on either side and a view through the arch showing glimpses of silhouetted mountains beyond. Yet it is the warm golden light contrasted against the muted cloudy sky that is in keeping with a picturesque aesthetic, drawing our attention to crumbling features of the arch. A man sits in the right corner of the image leaning against a barely distinguishable sign, his head turned towards the arch. Cast in shadow, he is barely visible—considering Norfolk’s documented interest in the ‘rise and fall of empires’, the man who sits in contemplation perhaps reflects our own contemplation of this mighty structure that was supposed to represent the end of imperial rule in Afghanistan, but instead stands shattered, much like the country’s precarious sovereignty.

The use of golden light to highlight fragmentation and decay is also particularly striking in Norfolk’s photograph The interior of the utterly destroyed Presidential palace at Darulaman, damaged firstly by the Soviets and later in fighting between Rabbani and the Hazaras in 1992 (2001-2) [fig. 4.4]. Taken from within a cavity of a dilapidated structure, we see three stories of what we can only assume from the ornamental archways and pillars was a once grand palace. This structure was also built by King Amanullah Khan in the early 1920s, and was intended to house parliament. Ironically, the palace name (and surrounding suburb) Darul Aman translates as ‘abode of peace’ but as Norfolk’s caption attests, the building has been subjected to bombardment by imperial forces and internal Afghani factions. The intense golden light that emanates from beyond the frame to illuminate the hallway entrances gives the scene a sense of warmth. The photograph invites us to take interest in details and fragments: the pillar leaning at a precarious forty- five-degree angle, the hanging web of tangled metal wire, the contrast between smooth and mottled surfaces, the perilous balance of the rubble.

114 Norfolk warns in his introduction to Afghanistan: Chronotopia that “Art historical references may be intriguing, but the destruction of Afghanistan is first and foremost a human tragedy in which millions lost their lives […] Seeing Afghanistan as a chronotope can reconnect the evidence in the landscape to the story of this human disaster”.37 Pre- empting potential criticism of his work, Norfolk insists that his project is not some self- indulgent naval-gazing on the history of pictorial art, but rather an effort to create alternatives to clichéd photojournalistic images of war-torn Afghanistan circulated in the media. A Google search of ‘war in Afghanistan’ shows an overwhelming predominance of images of heavily armed US and allied troops, either crouching or mid stride, the detonation of bombs, helicopters in flight, with scenes of general destruction scattered throughout. The overall colour palette of army khaki and muted greys set against the Afghan desert is the antithesis of Norfolk’s atmospheric, golden hued photographs, created by shooting at dawn. Moreover, his attention to the long history of war wrought on the country goes beyond a simplistic timeline of war in the country that emphasises US military involvement since 2001.

While Norfolk describes the art historical references in his practice as merely ‘intriguing’, I contend that the picturesque aesthetic he adapts also facilitates the coexistence of mixed temporalities discussed by Rancière. This is not to simply collapse temporal lines between the seventeenth-eighteenth century and 2001 when the photographs were taken, but rather to deploy a pictorial aesthetic that now might be considered anachronistic or outdated to create alternative images of war ravaged Afghanistan to those of current photojournalism. Moreover, intersecting and overlapping signs of historical period in King Amanullah’s Victory Arch [fig. 4.1], make exact dating a challenge. This temporal ambiguity is conveyed by both the subject matter and formal composition of the photograph. Here we are see an arch designed in a classical style characteristic of Ancient Greece, built in 1919 using modern materials, and represented via picturesque aesthetic developed in the eighteenth century to depict ruined medieval and ancient structures. Furthermore, this mixed temporal convergence is established by the knowledge that this arch was erected to commemorate the end of the Third Anglo-Afghan War against the British Empire, and has since been partially destroyed, presumably as a result of the US-led war in Afghanistan which was a few months underway when Norfolk took the photograph.

37 Norfolk, Afghanistan: Chronotopia, unpaginated. 115 These various ‘anachronic’ elements imply that war cannot be securely bounded to a ‘date’ or ‘place’ in time. Notwithstanding the divergent historical contexts registered in the image, Norfolk’s anachronistic strategy also hints at the imperial adventurism Afghanistan has been subjected to for over a hundred years.

It should be noted here that while the picturesque ‘style’ formulated by Gilpin was aimed primarily at painters and draughtsmen, the invention of photography saw many practitioners emulate the compositional elements and subject matter of the picturesque, as in the landscape photographs of Francis Bedford and Roger Fenton.38 James S. Ackerman suggests that these photographers were drawn to ruins in natural settings “more because they fulfilled the criteria of picturesque beauty than because of an impulse to document the monuments of the medieval past”.39 At a time when photography’s purported realism saw it positioned as a ‘pencil of nature’, Ackerman concludes it is this incorporation of the picturesque into early photography which helped legitimise claims for the medium’s art status by situating it within an established tradition of landscape painting.40 However, Norfolk does not draw on the aesthetic conventions of historical painting in order to legitimise photography as an art, as this has surely been firmly established. Rather, his transfer of painterly codes to photography sustains a tension between the image as a ‘truthful’ document and an aesthetically compelling image.

Discussing the emergence of war photography, Bernd Hüppauf also affirms that early photographers drew on picturesque aesthetics, as this was an established framework for appreciating fragmentation and decay.41 The picturesque preference for ruins was aptly translated into scenes picturing the aftermath of war, apparent in James Robertson and Felice Beato’s photographs from the Crimea and later Beato’s from the Second Opium War in China. Yet Hüppauf notes that despite picturesque aesthetics contributing to the popularity of early war photography, it nevertheless suffered the same criticism levelled at picturesque painting for its perceived depoliticisation of the landscape:

In the conditions of war, the constant presence of the death threat not only added a unique dimension to this aesthetic preference, but led to an

38 James S. Ackerman, "The Photographic Picturesque," Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 82. 39 Ackerman, 89. 40 Ackerman, 92. 41 Bernd Hüppauf, "Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation," New German Critique, no. 59 (1993): 138. 116 intensification of the problematic relationship between morality and aesthetics, inherent in the concept of the picturesque, to the point where images of the picturesque were no longer capable of reconciling this tension and consequently disappeared.42

As Hüppauf suggests above, since its inception photography has grappled with the tension sustained between a drive to document scenes of destruction and the moral conundrum of doing so in a ‘visually pleasing’ way. Some critics have expressed reservations about Norfolk’s images and their emulation of the aforementioned painting traditions for aestheticising scenes of military destruction. In the same essay detailing her concern with Sophie Ristelhueber’s ‘inhuman’ imagery, Sarah James says that: “Norfolk’s expert use of different photographic aesthetics brings one back to the uncomfortable partnership of aesthetics and politics”.43 The implication made by James and those who question any ‘aestheticisation of suffering’ in war photography is that any attentiveness to formal aesthetic concerns does some kind of disservice, or worse injustice, to those affected by war. However, for Norfolk, the tension sustained between formal features of his images and their subject matter is a deliberate strategy. He states: “I’m endeavouring to set up a tension in the image between beauty and horror, two things that are normally separated in modern culture […] these two categories are kept apart, but I think it is more realistic to collide the two together”.44 For Norfolk the horror of war is not sublated by beauty. Rather than responding to the ‘shock’ of documentary photographs depicting atrocities of war through conventional pathways to either elicit empathic identification, voyeuristic pleasure or numbness, as outlined in Chapter One, Norfolk speaks of beauty as a strategic device for ‘drawing’ audiences into the confronting subject matter of war.45 Our ability to quickly scan and cognitively register the determined meaning of photojournalistic images of war (tied to the repetition of symbolic clichés and contextual framing) is thwarted in Norfolk’s photographs. His images prolong our attention as we struggle to reconcile the beauty of the photograph with the reality of what is depicted: smashed buildings, deadly munitions, abandoned villages.

42 Hüppauf, 139. 43 Sarah James, "Making an Ugly World Beautiful? Morality and Aesthetics in the Aftermath," in Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, ed. Julian Stallabrass (Brighton: Photoworks, 2013), 122. 44 Simon Norfolk quoted in Paul Lowe, "The Forensic Turn: Bearing Witness and the Thingness of the Photograph," in The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, ed. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 223. 45 Norfolk, Afghanistan: Chronotopia, unpaginated 117 The staging of mixed temporalities in Norfolk’s Afghanistan: Chronotopia also occurs in the juxtaposition of culturally constructed categories of time, such as ‘leisure time’ and ‘war time’ manifested in the urban environment. Lisle has identified a number of works in Norfolk’s oeuvre where leisure facilities such as swimming pools, basketball courts and stadiums are featured, “to remind us that war zones are also places where everyday life flourishes—including the everyday practices of leisure”.46 Norfolk’s images featuring places of leisure activity include a close-up of concrete diving blocks titled The swimming pool of the former Palace of Culture, Karte Char district, Kabul (2001-2) and the most reproduced image of the series that depicts the remains of an outdoor cinema: Bullet- scarred outdoor cinema at the Palace of Culture in the Karte Char district of Kabul (2001-2) [fig. 4.5]. In The swimming pool of the destroyed Presidential palace at Darulaman (2001-2) [fig. 4.6], the foreground of the image is filled with a dilapidated, concrete swimming pool, drained of water and littered with rubble and weeds. The pool’s derelict state jars with typical associations of a site of leisure, relaxation and pleasure. A few buildings in various states of disintegration lie behind a bullet-riddled wall that roughly divides the composition in half. Silhouetted mountains fade into the background, as a golden yellow light transmutes into shades of orange, dusty pink and lilac. The velvety colours of the sky are more reminiscent of a J.M.W Turner painting than the rugged, inhospitable terrain usually associated with depictions of Afghanistan. The representation of ‘leisure time’ marred by indices of ‘war time’ serves to destabilise and merge these two temporal frameworks.

Another much reproduced image from the Chronotopia series is Former teahouse in a park next to the Afghan Exhibition of Economic and Social Achievements in the Shah Shahid district of Kabul (2001-2) [fig. 4.7]. The extended caption contains the following information: Balloons were illegal under the Taliban, but now balloon-sellers are common on the streets of Kabul providing cheap treats for children. The photograph depicts the skeletal structure of a destroyed teahouse that Norfolk describes as akin to the pre-historic monument of Stonehenge because the circular structure of the teahouse, reduced to its frame, visually reflects the ring of standing stones. Both structures continue to stand precariously, the teahouse in defiance of the decimating power of war. In Norfolk’s photograph, the structure is positioned in the centre of the frame and bathed in

46 Lisle, 886. 118 sunlight pouring through atmospheric grey clouds. A balloon seller stands on the right of the teahouse facing the camera. His presence, coupled with the vivid colours of the cluster of balloons in his hand, strikes a discordant note in the desolate scene of brick, rubble and dirt. This anachronistic juxtaposition of what appears to be an ‘ancient’ cultural ruin with modern balloons undermines any sense of the photograph capturing a fixed or single moment in time; instead, it enacts temporal ‘leaps’ between the cultural history of the country, and the destruction of that history, between both pre-modern and modern culture. In light of the caption, which informs us that balloons were banished by the Taliban, the balloon seller may be viewed as a symbol of hope. While years of cultural heritage may have been destroyed under the Taliban rule, we are invited to imagine children enjoying the simple pleasure of a colourful, disposable balloon. In the midst of destruction, conjuring children playing suggests optimism for the future, but without resorting to the clichéd photojournalistic trope of soldiers with children discussed in Chapter One.

Discussing his inspiration for the Chronotopia series, Norfolk speaks of the recurring motif of ‘golden light’ in his photographs as informed by the use of light in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Romantic paintings. As discussed above, the contrast between light and dark was particularly crucial to picturesque aesthetics as a means of highlighting fragmentation and decay. Similarly, Romantic painting utilised dramatic contrast between light and dark, often to symbolic effect. Many Romantic artists and thinkers, particularly the poets Wordsworth and Shelley, were influenced by the theology of pantheism that stressed the divinity of nature. For them, sunlight became a symbol of hope in the face of darkness. In response to the situation in Afghanistan in 2001, following the dismantling of the Taliban regime by US and NATO forces, Norfolk says that he used golden light to gesture towards a better future following the years of destruction. He describes his photographs as capturing a “liminal moment at the close of one thing and the beginning of something new. To use the golden kiss of the dawn light seemed the right approach at the time”.47 However, upon returning to Afghanistan in 2010 to create a new series of photographs he titled Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk (2010), Norfolk expresses disillusionment with the continued

47 Simon Norfolk, "In Conversation: Simon Norfolk & Paul Lowe," in Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011), 7. 119 presence of US and NATO forces.48 In this series, the golden light of hope is replaced by darker, more ominous atmospheric tones of blues and pinks created by taking photographs pre-dawn and post-sunset.

The Burke + Norfolk series may also be interpreted via the Rancièrian idea of anachronism, since this work engages with an historical archive to again complicate a linear schema of before and after by intermingling photographs from the nineteenth century with Norfolk’s own. For this series, the artist mined the archive of photographs by Irish commercial photographer John Burke from 1879 that documented the Second Anglo-Afghan War, held at the National Media Museum in Bradford. In order to protect their standing in India, the British army invaded Afghanistan in 1878 in response to growing threats of Russian expansion into the region. Norfolk noticed an affinity between the imperial war documented by Burke in 1879 and the current situation in Afghanistan, and so decided to collaborate with the nineteenth-century photographer, in his absence. But rather than simply re-photographing at the sites of Burke’s images to indicate a rudimentary idea of historical progression, Norfolk ‘shadowed’ Burke by visiting similar locations and utilising similar visual motifs to that of Burke’s images. On the website display of the artwork, the series of photographs are divided into scenes of the ‘city’, the ‘military’ and ‘portraits’. Considering limits to the scope of this study, I focus predominately on images depicting structural apparatuses of war, such as huge logistical compounds at the US army bases, modes of security and surveillance, and various stages of destruction and construction of the urban landscape.

Burke + Norfolk is a series of photographs taken in Afghanistan by John Burke in 1879 and by Simon Norfolk in 2010, yet the temporal and authorial distinction between the photographs is strategically destabilised. The photographs are not positioned chronologically or by author, but are rather interspersed in exhibition form [fig. 4.8], the published photo-book and the website format. Nor are dates or authors names listed alongside the titles. This, together with the fact that Norfolk’s images shifted between pre-dawn/post-sunset hues and sepia tones reflective of Burke’s wet-collodion process, ensured that the historical time of the photographs is often ambiguous. Moreover, the subtitle of the exhibition Photographs from the War in Afghanistan does not designate a

48 Norfolk, "In Conversation", 7. 120 specific war, but rather points to war traversing time from the past to an unknowable future. Norfolk’s project signals the problem of cleanly periodising war for normative historical thinking in a country such as Afghanistan that has arguably seen little respite from imperial and civil war in over 150 years. This is a place where geopolitical interests overlap and contradict each other, and the after effects of one war are felt long into the next. Norfolk stages the coexistence of times (or to use Derrida’s terminology, the ‘coexistence of the non-contemporaneous’) in order to reconfigure our perception of the event of war. In particular, he draws our attention to echoes between the interminable ‘War on Terrorism’ staged in Afghanistan, and the imperial expansion of the British empire in the nineteenth century. However, this is not in order to collapse or undermine the historical and geopolitical particularities of war, but rather to instigate reflection on how we represent and think about war more generally.

Anachronism is not only registered by Norfolk’s ‘artistic partnership’ with John Burke, who is now long dead, but also in the subject matter of the series. While Chronotopia focused on the symbolic significance of ruins, the photographs in Burke + Norfolk focus on an interplay between destruction and construction within the urban landscape, that hints at a strange sense of revitalisation occurring in the country, despite (or perhaps in spite of) ongoing military occupation. For example, the work titled, A security guard’s booth at the newly restored Ikhtyaruddin citadel, Herat (2010) [fig. 4.9], depicts an ancient building that dates back to 330 BCE, thought to have been established by Alexander the Great. The building is photographed against a rich blue sky that fades from right to left into a pink sunset. In the foreground, a roughly constructed booth is illuminated externally by a harsh fluorescent green light, its windows glowing from within by a contrasting orange light. In front, a young slender tree stands tall, casting a thin shadow on the booth. Two plastic outdoor chairs lie haphazardly next to it, waiting to be filled by human presences. The unnatural green light of the security booth establishes a stark contrast with the organic tones of the citadel structure. While the colour green is known to symbolise a diverse range of things from nature to money, in this context it has strong connotations with security, particularly military defence. The dramatic use of light in the scene highlights the incongruity of the two structures; one is centuries old, the other relatively contemporary; one is highly detailed, vast and permanent, the other is diminutive, ramshackle and seems temporary. Contrasting temporal indicators are further complicated by Norfolk’s caption that alerts us to the fact

121 that we are looking at a restored ruin. This particular citadel has experienced centuries of destruction from war and neglect, as well as periods of reconstruction and restoration. The most recent restoration, completed in 2011 (just after Norfolk’s image was taken) was funded by the US and German governments.

The attempt to preserve an architectural accomplishment from the past has slippery implications for a conception of history based on clear and discrete temporal boundaries or periods. In reconstructive projects, there is often a desire to stay authentic to the style of the building, yet out of economic necessity most reconstructions end up taking advantage of modern methods and technologies. This is signalled in A security guard’s booth at the newly restored Ikhtyaruddin citadel, Herat, by four metal shafts, most likely drainage pipes, attached to the facade of the citadel. Answers to questions such as ‘when was this structure built?’, ‘what era is it from?’, ‘who built it and why?’ are complicated by this push and pull between destruction and construction. As Derrida suggests, architecture “carries within itself the traces of its future destruction, the already past future, future perfect, of its ruin”.49 Yet this is not a structure that was built and then left to decay with time. Rather intermittent human interventions have attempted to thwart the drive towards future decay.

Norfolk has said of the Burke + Norfolk series that he did not want to return to Afghanistan ten years after completing Chronotopia and merely reshoot the same sites he did in 2001, which he states would imply a “false and shallow idea of progress”.50 In fact, given the tone of the later series, coupled with his own explanation of it, it is evident he feels a sense of failure and frustration with the current state of Afghanistan, where Western intervention continues unabated. The unfinished buildings and construction sites Norfolk photographs do not seem to signal progress, hope, shelter or a sense of permanency and belonging, but rather they seem untethered to the surrounding landscape, unoccupied and in a state of perpetual incompleteness. His lengthy, documentary style titles attempt to explain the situation that his photographs depict—for example: The peripheries of the city of Kabul, especially near the north and east are endless building sites. Since most of the documentation concerning land title was lost during the war, much of this speculative and illegal construction is concerned more with establishing

49 Jacques Derrida, "A Letter to Peter Eisenman," Assemblage, no. 12 (1990): 11. 50 Norfolk, "In Conversation", 7. 122 undisputable ‘facts on the ground’. Apartments and shops are, almost exclusively, unoccupied (2010) [fig. 4.10]. In this image, taken from a mid to high angle, we see the organised chaos of a construction site blanketed in haze. The area appears still and empty, apart from a few solitary figures dwarfed by the construction materials around them. The irregular height of unfinished buildings in the background seems to echo undulating mountains silhouetted in the distance. Although the denotive force of photography cannot attest to the ‘illegality’ of the site that Norfolk’s title asserts, the atmosphere of low, muted light certainly reflects the site’s dubious nature.

In some respects, Norfolk’s interest in construction sites in Burke + Norfolk echoes his earlier fascination with ruins; both are suspended between a state of wholeness and fragmentation. Ingrid Gjermstad speaks of a certain abstractness that exists while a building is still under construction, before it has a utilitarian function.51 Somewhere between a pile of bricks and a fully functioning building, the temporality of these sites is often ambiguous. Other photographs in the series depicting building construction include: Some of the astonishing new architecture mushrooming up in cities all over Afghanistan. Part Disney, part wedding cake; inspired by Bollywood but reverential to Greek classicism; it represents as architectless kind of architecture (2010) [fig. 4.11] and Unfinished, speculative property development near Kabul Airport (2010) [fig. 4.12]. Considered alongside the refugee camps and provisional shelters Norfolk also photographs, the contrast is clear. These large, empty and sometimes rather ostentatious buildings seem absurd when juxtaposed with the small, confined camps littered throughout the country.

In Refugees from fighting between NATO and the Taliban in Nangarhar province, close to the Pakistan border, now sheltering on wasteground in Kabul (2010) [fig. 4.13] this contrast is made apparent within a single frame. A group of makeshift tents erected on an uneven dirt road is bordered by a main road. On the other side, lined across the top third of the image, are modern buildings, the left one apparently still under construction due to the absence of windows. The division between these discordant modes of dwelling is visually inscribed by the streams of yellow and red light captured from the headlights of passing cars, splitting the image in two. As is fairly characteristic of Norfolk’s practice,

51 Ingrid Gjermstad, "On the Unfinished in Architecture: A Reflection on Temporality, Superposition and the Indetermined Life of a Building" (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 2015). 123 no people populate this image, despite the caption implying the presence of refugees. Instead, the many makeshift tents stand in for displaced people, pointing to how war has impacted on their way of life and how they are now compelled to live. In these various images of the urban landscape, Norfolk alludes to the human impact of war by using shelter as a metaphor—while some have prospered and taken advantage of the uncertain status of land ownership, many remain displaced and living in poverty. Yet both the temporary shelters of the refugee camps and the new, yet uncompleted buildings appear in a state of flux, much like the country itself. Even in 2017, there is still no definitive exit strategy for US and allied forces that exists. Despite media representations of war attempting to provide clear and discernible demarcations between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘peacetime’ and ‘wartime’, Caren Kaplan acknowledges the fact that “war itself is utterly confounding of divisions; perceptions of time and space are altered, certainties are destabilised”.52 Through the various anachronic tropes that destabilise any assumed temporal fixity of the photograph, the two series by Norfolk discussed in this chapter prompt us to reflect on the uncertainty and instability of life in the times of wartime.

Afghanistan: Chronotopia and Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk reveal the difficulty of fixing the event of war in a country such as Afghanistan, which for much of its modern history has been a battleground. In portraying the layered history of Afghanistan, Norfolk eschews a thinking of wars as distinct and temporally demarcated. This chapter has traced anachronistic strategies employed in Norfolk’s photo series that address the topic of war in Afghanistan and more broadly. These strategies include adopting the outmoded pictorial template of the picturesque, combining contemporary and archival photographs, and focusing on the temporal puzzle of buildings in various states of ruin and construction. Following Rancière’s rehabilitation of anachronism against historicist chronology, I have argued that Norfolk’s brand of war photography not only presents a memorable, thought provoking alternative to much contemporary photojournalism, but also departs from a still normative idea of news photography as capturing a single ‘now’ within a linear model of time.

52 Caren Kaplan, "Desert Wars: Virilio and the Limits of ‘Genuine Knowledge’," in Virilio and Visual Culture, ed. John Armitage and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 69. 124 Chapter Five

Luc Delahaye: the expectant moment of tableaux photography and reframing the ‘other’ in war

French photographer Luc Delahaye began his career as a photojournalist in the mid-1980s covering war zones for the French photo-agency Sipa Press. After winning the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1992 for excellence in photographic reportage (which he was awarded again ten years later in 2002), in 1994 he joined Magnum Photos and Newsweek Magazine, further cementing his career as a leading photojournalist. Yet like many notable photojournalists before him, Delahaye dipped his toe into the art world, working on a number of sustained projects that also resulted in a number of published books. Portraits/1 (1996) consists of a series of images of homeless Parisians taken in a photo booth. This was followed by L’Autre (1999), a selection of ninety black and white portraits captured with a concealed camera on the Paris Métro, inspired by Walker Evans subway photographs taken in New York between 1938 and 1941. During the winter of 1998, Delahaye travelled to Russia to photograph the everyday lives of people affected by severe economic depression, which was later published as Winterreise (2000). However, in 2001, Delahaye became disillusioned by the constraints of photojournalism. He actively renounced his established career in order to focus on making and exhibiting photographic works exclusively in a fine art context, officially relinquishing his Magnum membership in 2004.

Since his first solo show in 2001, Delahaye has been producing a limited number of large scale colour photographs (ranging between 2.3 and 3 metres in width) predominantly shot using a Linhof medium-format panoramic film camera. The subject matter and locations of these images vary greatly, but can be loosely characterised as documentations of internationally ‘newsworthy’ events, such as natural disasters, war zones, international conferences and meetings, typically the domain of photojournalism. Yet as Michael Fried notes, Delahaye’s subjects are “treated in a manner that could not diverge further from

125 photojournalistic norms”.1 Sharply focused, richly detailed, uniformly lit and predominately taken from a distant perspective and frontal viewpoint, Delahaye’s photographs bear little resemblance to the tightly cropped drama of war photojournalism.2 In fact, the monumental size of the photographic prints is a deliberate strategy employed by the artist to render the images “incompatible with the economy of the press”.3 While Delahaye situates his art photography in the same realm as the ‘news event’, he seeks to avoid picturing stereotypical war scenarios already widely visible in the media. As he explains, he aims to “gain access to situations which, by virtue of their direct relationship with the topical event […] are worthwhile primarily for their own sake”.4 While many of his works depicting war zones were actually shot while conflict continued to rage, it is his divergence from the presumed ‘apex’ of the event, discussed in Chapter Two, that has resulted in his work being placed under the rubric of ‘aftermath’ or ‘late’ photography. The photograph most often addressed in the literature on aftermath photography is US Bombing on Taliban Positions (2001) [fig. 5.1], a strikingly serene panoramic shot of a sparsely grassed landscape. A plume of smoke rises and dissipates above the horizon line, yet the cause and consequences of this index of battle remain unseen. However, echoing Delahaye’s expressed interest in human relationships, a number of his images depict people and therefore appear to depart from the unpopulated landscapes of much late photography. Moreover, signs of destruction wrought by conflict in his works are more muted than in Sophie Ristelhueber and Simon Norfolk’s images.

It is perhaps for this reason Hilde Van Gelder disapprovingly defines Delahaye’s practice as ‘near photojournalism’, describing it as “an artistic method that facilitates the transformation of a potentially shocking image into a neutral, artistic picture”.5 She derives this term from characterisations of Jeff Wall’s photographs as ‘near documentary’, in order to draw a parallel between the ‘constructedness’ of Wall’s photographs with the overt aesthetic strategies employed by Delahaye. Arguing that the

1 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008), 182. 2 The aerial views of Taliban (2001) and September 11 Memorial (2002) and UN Security Council (2003) are a rare exception. 3 Delahaye quoted in Bill Sullivan, "The Real Thing: Photographer Luc Delahaye," Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/sullivan/sullivan4-10-03.asp. 4 Luc Delahaye, "A Conversation with Quentin Bajac," in Luc Delahaye 2006-2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011), unpaginated. 5 Hilde Van Gelder, "Artistic ‘Non-Compliance’ with the Protocol Rules of Photojournalism. A Comparative Case Study of Luc Delahaye, Gilles Saussier, and Bruno Serralongue," Depth of Field 4, no. 1 (2014): sec. 7. 126 formal structure of Delahaye’s images neutralises any political impact of the photographic image, Van Gelder contrasts his work with what she considers the more politically engaged ‘counter photojournalistic’ practices of Bruno Serralongue and Gilles Saussier.6 This chapter will counter Van Gelder’s evaluation by explaining the theoretical and art historical underpinnings of Delahaye’s representational strategy in order to draw out what I consider to be critical dimensions of his work. Employing concepts of the ‘tableau’ and the ‘pregnant moment’ associated with discourses and practices of history painting since the eighteenth century, I argue that the ‘mode of address’ (to use Michael Fried’s terminology) of Delahaye’s photographs retrieves his practice from the indictment that he simply scales up photojournalistic images for art contexts, or that he aesthetically neutralises the horror of war. I will further argue that his construction of pregnant moments in his photographs correlates with the temporal structure of lateness that deviates from war photojournalism premised on the assumed instantaneousness and climatic action of the ‘decisive moment’. The idea of the ‘pregnant moment’ of history painting explored in this chapter is derived from the eighteenth-century aesthetician Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. However, because of the awkward gender connotations of the term, I will also use the more multivalent term ‘expectant moment’.

It should be noted that Delahaye originally exhibited his panoramic photographs produced since 2001 under the title History, however, for his show at the Getty Museum in 2007 he revised it to Recent History. In the last few years, Delahaye has rejected both the description of these works as a ‘series’ and the title History, which now only refers to the limited-edition photo-book published by Chris Boot in 2003. When asked in 2004 what the project is to be called, Delahaye responded “It has no name. It's just my work. That's all”.7 In keeping with the artist’s wishes, I do not refer to his work as part of a continuing series. However, for the sake of clarity, when discussing his work, I am only referring to the panoramic and large-scale photographs produced since 2001 (not his early book publications or photojournalistic images). Furthermore, I primarily focus on the earlier photographs taken at sites of conflict in the Middle East including Taliban (2001), US Bombing on Taliban Positions (2001), Kabul Road (2001), Jenin Refugee Camp (2002), Baghdad IV (2003) and The Palestine Hotel (2003).

6 Van Gelder, sec. 7. 7 Luc Delahaye quoted in Peter Lennon, "The Big Picture," The Guardian (January 31, 2004), https://www.theguardian.com. 127 Due to the grand scale and panoramic format of these photographs, many commentators have linked Delahaye’s works to the Western tradition of history painting. For example, Michel Guerrin says they are reminiscent of the ‘tableaux d’histoire’ or ‘history tableaux’ of painting,8 and specifically links them to a shift in nineteenth-century history painting from depicting allegorical scenes to recording contemporary events.9 Mark Durden also submits that Delahaye’s photographs are informed by painting, referencing the French masters Eugène Delacroix, Jacques-Louis David and Théodore Géricault, as well as paralleling his work with the contemporary photographic practices of Jeff Wall, Andres Serrano and Andreas Gursky.10 Furthermore, in his Frieze magazine review of Delahaye’s 2011 exhibition at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris, Manuel Cirauqui hints at a tension in his work between careful construction of the images and their documentary status, stating: “The spontaneity of a direct visual account of events should remove Delahaye’s pictures from the category of ‘history painting’, but their suspicious compositional perfection appears to suspend all documentary value”.11 This amalgamation of disparate modes of representation is also highlighted by Patrick Henry who remarks: “Delahaye’s latest work combines the cool detachment of the documentary style, the palpable realism of history painting and the photojournalistic imperative of ‘being there’”.12 This convergence of different modes of expression echoes Jacques Rancière’s ‘pensive image’ formulation as discussed in Chapter Three. Yet despite numerous comparisons drawn between Delahaye’s contemporary photographic practice and history painting, to date there has been no sustained analysis of how and why this parallel operates in his work. According to Rancière, the tension sustained between variant aesthetic logics in the pensive image ensures that conclusive meaning is suspended, leaving the imaged event open to a range of possible readings. While investigating the pensiveness of Delahaye’s photographs via the tableau specific concept of the ‘expectant moment’, this chapter will also interpret specific works as fostering critical reflection on the nature of contemporary warfare and biases that inform contemporary media representations of war.

8 Michel Guerrin, "Les ‘Tableaux D’histoire’ Contemplatifs De Luc Delahaye," Le Monde (March 2, 2003), http://www.lemonde.fr.17. 9 Michel Guerrin, "Luc Delahaye, Du Photoreporter à L'artiste," Le Monde (November 23, 2005), http://www.lemonde.fr. 10 Mark Durden, "Global Documentary," Portfolio: Contemporary Photography in Britain, no. 39 (2005): 14. 11 Manuel Cirauqui, "Luc Delahaye (Review)," Frieze, no. 39 (May, 2011), https://frieze.com. 12 Patrick Henry, "Luc Delahaye: Photographs," in Archive Magazine (Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, 2004): 15. 128 History painting has a more specific definition than any style of painting that simply depicts scenes from history. Therefore, the equivalence posed between Delahaye’s images and history painting is more complex than the historically significant subject matter of war and conflict he depicts. Rather, I submit that the aesthetic concepts of the ‘tableau’ and the ‘pregnant moment’ that undergird the genre of history painting is reflected in the formal structure of Delahaye’s large-scale photographic images. The genre itself is relatively unstable, undergoing several iterations and revisions over time, but can loosely be described as the representation of scenes from religion, mythology or ancient history, originating in Italian Renaissance theory. Drawing on the philosophy of Aristotle, Renaissance scholar Leon Battista Alberti asserted that the highest form of painting represents significant human action.13 However, it wasn’t until the foundation of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648 under the rule of Louis XIV that history painting was given a theoretically coherent form. In 1667, leading academician and historiographer André Félibien formulated a hierarchy of genres based on the supremacy of humans and their actions, designating history painting (specifically allegorical scenes) as the highest genre, followed by portraiture, genre (scenes from everyday life), landscape and still life. The hierarchy of genres was paralleled by a hierarchy of size; the sheer significance and moral weight of ‘history’ was to be reflected in the grand scale of its representation, making the genre a laborious and costly exercise for artists, but also one through which they could garner esteem.

It should be noted that history painting was not confined to France, but French culture’s acknowledged position as a forerunner in the genre warrants attention. The academic model first initiated in France that perpetuated the intellectual pursuit of artistic expression over the craftsmanship of the guild system was influential in Europe, inspiring similar systems in Germany, Russia and Spain; later in 1768 the Royal Academy of London was formed. As Peter Cooke and Nina Lübbren note, despite the abolition of the Académie Royale during the Revolution, it was largely replaced by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the early nineteenth century with a similar prominence given to history painting, cementing academic authority for nearly three centuries.14 They do concede

13 Michael Fried, "Toward a Supreme Fiction: Genre and Beholder in the Art Criticism of Diderot and His Contemporaries," New Literary History 6, no. 3 (1975): 547. 14 Peter Cooke and Nina Lübbren, "Narrativity and (French) Painting " in Painting and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gauguin, ed. Peter Cooke and Nina Lübbren (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 12. 129 however, that while theoretically the rules that governed history painting remained relatively stable until the end of the nineteenth century, there are many instances where these rules were subverted by artists seeking new subjects and experimental modes of representation.15

During the eighteenth century, many critics and academicians postulated the formal qualities and structure most appropriate for painting, particularly the genre of history painting. A preference for the single, self-supporting image which could be comprehended as a whole, saw a break from Renaissance modes of painting reliant on architecture, such as frescos.16 An early proponent of the autonomous painting was Lord Shaftesbury who in 1712 offered the word ‘tablature’ as the English equivalent to the French ‘tableau’ “for which we have yet no name in English, besides the general one of picture”.17 He defines the tableau as singular, comprehended in ‘one view’, immediately intelligible and containing individual parts which serve to make a unified whole. It is this form Shaftesbury considers most applicable to the genre of history painting.18

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the ideals of classicism were revived in reaction to the excessive decorativeness and sumptuousness of Rococo painting. As such, the tableau concept became critical to the success of a painting. In an echo of Shaftesbury, prominent eighteenth-century French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot proposed: “A well-composed picture [tableau] is a whole contained under a single point of view, in which the parts work together to one end and form by their mutual correspondence a unity as real as that of the members of the body of an animal”.19

Delahaye translates the tableau format of history painting into his photographic practice by stressing the autonomy and compositional unity of his photographic images. Unlike media and documentary photographs that are supplemented and determined by contextual information, Delahaye speaks of constructing his photographs as “a perfectly autonomous ‘world’ in itself”.20 The sovereignty of his images is created by a deliberate formal staging

15 Cooke and Lübbren, 11. 16 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 89. 17 Lord Shaftesbury quoted in Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 89. 18 Lord Shaftesbury quoted in Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 89. 19 Denis Diderot quoted in Roland Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein*," Screen 15, no. 2 (1974): 34-5. 20 Delahaye, "A Conversation with Quentin Bajac," unpaginated. 130 to give the impression that the scene is fully contained within and by the frame. As outlined in Chapter Two, photojournalistic images are often perceived as distilling the ‘essence’ or import of an event within a single frame, operating as a visual fragment of a larger scene. In particular, the use of tightly cropped camera angles emphasises the intimacy of the scene. In contrast, the scenes framed by Delahaye’s lens are discrete and unified within the picture plane. Human figures are not cut off by the frame, a device often used to suggest a world outside or beyond what is immediately in view. Nor is our eye led beyond the frame by an action that points elsewhere. In fact, more often than not our eye is led into the centre of Delahaye’s photographs by strong vector lines implicit in his compositions. For example, in Jenin Refugee Camp (2002) [fig. 5.2] mounds of rubble and the remnants of a building are positioned equally on the left and right thirds of the image, drawing our attention to the centralised pathway. Our eye is immediately drawn into the centre of the image by this framing device, coupled with the flood of light that reflects the concrete buildings partially destroyed by bombing. The autonomy of Delahaye’s photographs is further stressed by the diversity of his subject matter. While it is possible to draw thematic threads across his works, there is never a sense that a subject is repeated to construct any relation to his other images. Here we can identify Delahaye’s coherent, autonomous large-scale tableau photographs as antithetical to the serial works produced by Sophie Ristelhueber, which emphasise distortion, fragmentation and recurring motifs.

Of critical importance for eighteenth-century scholars of history painting was the idea established by the tableau form that the compositional unity of an image aids in the transmission of meaning. Fried terms this an anti-Rococo emphasis on ‘radical intelligibility’, meaning that the “painting as a whole be instantaneously and, within reasonable limits, universally intelligible”.21 Tellingly, the preference for immediate comprehension coincides with the decline of allegory in history painting. Diderot was emphatic in his derision of the convoluted and multi-temporal structure of allegory, stating “nothing so testifies to an artist’s lack of genius as resorting to allegory”.22 Instead, priority was given to the singular ‘instant’ or ‘moment’ that stresses the narrative potential

21 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 89-90. However, it wasn’t until 1858 Academie des Beaux-Arts officially opposed allegory—see Peter Cooke, "Gustave Moreau and the Reinvention of History Painting," The Art Bulletin 90, no. 3 (2008): 404. 22 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 212-3. 131 (that is, the storytelling capabilities) of the tableau painting. However, intelligibility was also based largely on the assumption that audiences were familiar with the stories depicted and the excellence of the artist was aligned with their skill in translating these stories into static pictorial form.

Delahaye’s tableaux also depend on a dialogue with contemporary media representations for their intelligibility. Discussing ‘late’ photography in contemporary art, David Campany maintains: “These photographers know full well that their restrained images are read through the barrage of mass-media coverage of the events they so studiously avoid”.23 In departing from the ‘decisive moment’ modality, which for John Roberts merely conspires with what is already known about an event, Delahaye provides strategic contextualising clues to register the intelligibility of his images and situate them within a wider narrative. While his photographs diverge aesthetically from typical media representations, his laconic titles conjure the iconic events of war that circulate in the media and which are now fully embedded in collective imagination. For example, it is entirely probable that news-savvy audiences will recognise The Palestine Hotel (2003) as the international media headquarters for journalists covering the 2003 invasion of Baghdad, and possibly the controversy surrounding an American tank that fired a shell at the hotel which killed two journalists and wounded three. The iconicity of the Jenin Refugee Camp (2002) [fig. 5.2] is representative of the broader, ongoing Palestine/Israeli crisis. The titles Taliban (2001) [fig. 5.4] and US Bombing on Taliban Positions (2001) [fig. 5.1] draw associations with the war in Afghanistan and the ‘enemies’ of 9/11, including the infamous al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The connotations of this war have recently become reinvigorated in the press by the current Trump administration calling for more troops to support the United States’ longest foreign war to date. Even the seemingly prosaic title Baghdad IV (2003) [fig. 5.3], designating the capital of Iraq, are likely to evoke memories of the 2003 US invasion of that country and the toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein.

Quentin Bajac, then Chief Curator of Photography at the Centre Pompidou, conducted a significant interview with Delahaye that was translated into English and published in 2010. Bajac identifies a ‘fictional dimension’ in Delahaye’s photographs that he

23 David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 47. 132 associates with narration.24 Certainly, the function of his titles discussed above locates the works in a historical narrative of contemporary warfare. But there is also the sense in Delahaye’s photographs that we are observing a scene, a stage where a story is being played out, rather than a simple re-presentation of the appearance of things. Responding to Bajac, Delahaye is critical of photography that refuses the narrative potential of the medium, which he describes as merely offering an inadequate form of description and “a literalness without any opening for the imagination”.25 The narrative dimension of Delahaye’s images can be precisely understood as the direction of meaning, made possible by the intelligibility of the image, and the deliberate suspension of conclusive meaning that appeals to the imagination of the viewer. Turning again to history painting will help explain how Delahaye’s images choreograph this imaginative engagement.

Described by Cooke and Lübbren as “the narrative genre par excellence”, history painting was tasked with the representation of stories from religion, mythology and ancient history.26 Yet the question of how to adequately represent diachronic actions in the synchronic form of the tableau became of theoretical interest. The most influential answer was provided by German philosopher and art critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whose formulation of the ‘pregnant moment’ is of particular relevance for contemporary studies of pictorial narrative. In Laocoön: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing sought to determine the respective medium specifics of painting and poetry, designating the former as bound by a singular moment or instant while the latter is driven by narrative succession and duration. Laocoön was an attempt to institute a new mode of representing pictorial narrative, in contradistinction to earlier formats found in Ancient Western art. These were later categorised by art historian Franz Wickhoff as the ‘complementary’ mode where two or more events happening at different times are represented in one scene, but without the repetition of characters, which was typical of Hellenic art.27 The other predominant mode Wickhoff termed ‘continuous’, which sees a character repeated multiple times in multiple scenes within the single picture plane.28

24 Quentin Bajac in Delahaye, "A Conversation with Quentin Bajac," unpaginated. 25 Delahaye, "A Conversation with Quentin Bajac," unpaginated. 26 Cooke and Lübbren, 1. 27 Cooke and Lübbren, 4-5. 28 Cooke and Lübbren, 5. 133 Lessing’s ‘single moment’ corresponds with Wickhoff’s third mode of pictorial narrative termed ‘isolating’, which reveals itself in the tableau form.29

If narratives are made of a succession of events that unfold in time, how is an artist to decide which particular moment to represent in stasis? 30 Lessing’s solution is as follows: “painting can only make use of a single instant of action, and must therefore choose the one, which is most pregnant, and from which what has already taken place, and what is about to follow, can most easily be gathered”.31 As such, the ‘pregnant moment’ is not the apex of action, nor is it the aftermath of action but rather a moment of dramatic tension that unifies the picture. Significantly, this is a conception of drama linked to heightened tension that either precedes or proceeds from climactic action. Peter Cooke demonstrates the difference between the pictorial representation of climatic action and the ‘pregnant moment’ in a comparative analysis of Nicolas Poussin’s The Massacre of the Innocents (1631-32) [fig. 5.5] (an artist considered the forefather of history painting), and Léon Cogniet’s Scene from the Massacre of the Innocents (1824) [fig. 5.6]. The former work depicts the climactic moment, seconds before a child is slaughtered by sword at the hands of a soldier. The few characters illustrated metonymically stand for all the soldiers, innocent children and bereaved mothers of the biblical story. By contrast, Cogniet shows a mother and child hiding from the impending chaos, leaving the audience to wonder if they in fact escape the massacre. The dramatic suspense imbued in the particularity of the subjects gives the viewer “an important degree of control over a plot that offers alternative endings”.32

This activation of the viewer’s imagination is key to Lessing’s formulation of the ‘pregnant moment’. He clarifies that the chosen moment cannot be “too fruitful” by offering too much visual information, thereby overwhelming the viewer. Rather “that alone is fruitful which gives free play to imagination”.33 In keeping with the agricultural metaphor, the tableau acts as a perfectly formed kernel from which imagination sprouts. As Cooke and Lübbren explain “Lessing displaces the work of narration from the image

29 Cooke and Lübbren, 5. 30 Cooke and Lübbren, 5. 31 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. E.C. Beasley (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1853), 102. 32 Peter Cooke, "Narrativity, Temporality and Allegorisation," in Painting and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gauguin, ed. Peter Cooke and Nina Lübbren (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 203. 33 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing quoted in Cooke and Lübbren, 3. 134 onto the viewer’s mental activity. Ultimately, the story is located not so much in what is represented as in what is not shown”.34 Lessing’s appeal to imagination is reflected in Diderot’s writing from the same time. He vociferates, “When one paints, is it necessary to paint everything? For pity’s sake, leave something to be supplied by my imagination”.35 As Wolfgang Kemp explains, despite calls for the complete and unified intelligibility of history tableaux, there nevertheless exists an appreciation of a certain intentional indeterminacy inserted into the image.36

Despite the medium specificity of Lessing’s argument, a conventional understanding of photography is similarly bound to the temporal and spatial moment. Like the history of painting, numerous strategies have been implemented by practitioners seeking to exceed the limitations of the photographic medium—for example, the use of motion blur to designate movement or serial photography that mimics sequential structure. Despite critic Victor Burgin considering the ‘decisive moment’ of photojournalism discussed in Chapter Two as theoretically equivalent to Lessing’s ‘pregnant moment’, a number of crucial differences exist between them. Firstly, it should be recalled that in Chapter Two I drew on Derrida’s thinking of the event to question the notion that photography can capture the ‘apex’ of an event. While David Campany stresses that the ‘decisive moment’ model of photography has been outranked by video, which can register the duration of the event ‘as it happens’, thinking the event in Derridean terms acknowledges something always escapes or exceeds representational registration. Nevertheless, photojournalism typically strives to capture climactic action; the very moment a grenade is thrown, a bomb explodes or a soldier cocks their gun. The enduring photojournalistic imperative to be close to the action is therefore more akin to the climactic action of Poussin’s painting described previously. Moreover, the reliance of media images on linguistic additions and symbolic markers closes down the imaginative potential that is key to Lessing’s ‘pregnant moment’. The meaning and import of the photojournalistic image is firmly established by contextual framing—leaving little space or time for the mind to wander or ponder.

34 Cooke and Lübbren, 4. 35 Denis Diderot quoted in Wolfgang Kemp, "Death at Work: A Case Study on Constitutive Blanks in Nineteenth-Century Painting," Representations, no. 10 (1985): 108. 36 Kemp, "Death at Work," 108. 135 Delahaye shifts the temporality of photography from the ‘decisive moment’ to what I term the expectant moment, instituting an imaginative, less determined engagement with the event of war, as I will elaborate in relation to specific images in a later section of this chapter. But first I need to address some questions that might be raised by the links I’m making between Delahaye’s photographs and the tableau. The specificity of the ‘pregnant moment’ concept formulated by Lessing as applicable to painting suggests that it may not be easily transferred to photography. Roland Barthes similarly notes that painting is bound to representing a single moment; therefore, the artist must choose to immobilise that moment which will generate the most meaning and pleasure. Yet, for Barthes, this moment is not derived from actuality. As he explains: “Necessarily total, this instant will be artificial (unreal; this is not a realist art), a hieroglyph in which can be read at a single glance […] the historical meaning of the represented action”.37 Erika Balson contrasts the constructedness of the painterly moment with the photographic instant, which she suggests is “anchored in the real”. As such, for Balson, “The pregnant moment secures its meaningfulness at the price of its authenticity”, implying that the fabrication of the moment compromises its ‘real world’ veracity.38 I propose, however, that the critical significance of Delahaye’s images derives from the tension they sustain between the artificiality of the pregnant moment, bound to narrativity and imagination, and a connection to reality, founded on the indexicality of the photographic medium. Delahaye’s scenes are carefully composed, based on the dramatic unity of the tableau format, but they are also loaded with potential meaning that encourages imaginative engagement from beholders. At the same time, his photographs are allied with the real— these are not staged scenes, but rather real people subjected to real events in real places. In other words, Delahaye’s photographic tableaux strike a precarious balance between artistic manipulation (indicated by his choice of framing, lighting, scale, and adoption of a history painting format) and the contingency of the scene captured photographically.

We might understand this as Delahaye amplifying the tension within photography between artistic intention and contingency as identified in Rancière’s ‘pensive image’ concept discussed in Chapter Three. It is in this sense that Delahaye’s photographs differ from the unified, comprehensible vision of tableau painting. Barthes describes the tableau

37 Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein," 35-6. 38 Erika Balsom, "David Claerbout's Indecisive Moments," Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 32 (2013): 90. 136 as “a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view”.39 Here, Barthes highlights the frame’s important function of containing or binding meaning inside the unified pictorial composition.40 In other words, Barthes sees the tableau format as ensuring clarity of meaning without any distracting fragments or details unassimilated to the pictorial whole.41 While the composition of Delahaye’s photographs emulates the classical unity of history painting, this unity is thwarted by the plenitude of visual detail registered by the photographic medium. Unlike painting, where every element on the canvas is attributable to the artist’s intention, the wealth of detail registered by photography is tied to contingency. The compositional clarity and the visual detail of Delahaye’s large-scale panoramic photographs invite the viewer to look closely, or as Michael Fried describes: “to become engrossed or indeed immersed in prolonged and intimate contemplation of all that the image offers to be seen”.42 The viewer shifts between what Jean-François Chevrier terms the ‘distancing’ of the tableau form—viewed as a unified whole—and the proximity of small and arresting details.43

The tableau composition and imaginative potential of the expectant moment of history painting is evident in Delahaye’s Kabul Road (2001) [fig. 5.7] measuring 111cm by 238cm in size. The photograph was taken on the same day Northern Alliance forces seized the Afghan capital from Taliban control, yet Delahaye has arrived ‘late’ to the action of battle. A group of men stand in an almost uniform semi-circle around two bodies, one laid horizontally on the asphalt road, and the other vertical to the former’s corpse. Both figures, who are fully dressed, are wearing no shoes. Some blood-soaked rags lie between them, and crimson blood stains the sand coloured shirt of one body. These details, combined with the rigidity of the bodies and the sobriety of the scene indicate they are recently deceased—after the fact of climactic action. Recalling the tableau structure, the group are centrally positioned within the frame and surrounded by symmetrical borders of sky and ground, giving the impression that nothing of significance

39 Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein," 34. 40 Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein," 35. 41 Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein," 35-6. 42 Fried, Why Photography Matters, 184. 43 Jean-François Chevrier, "The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography," in The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 114. 137 exists beyond the frame. This isn’t the fragmented, tightly cropped perspective of embedded photojournalism, but rather a composed scene that appears constructed, as if Delahaye had ushered the men into position to take a formal portrait. Yet many are turned away or their attention is on the dead bodies, suggesting Delahaye possibly released the shutter before they were ready.

The unity of the picture plane is reflected in the tonal balance and subdued natural light of the scene. The muted colours of the men’s clothing in various earthy shades of olive green, brown, pale blue and lilac harmoniously reflect and coalesce with the mountainous landscape surrounding them. Only red stripes on the sweater of one man, with his head turned, jar with the chromatic uniformity of the scene. Furthermore, there appears to be parity between the gestures of the men, equally balanced throughout the scene. Some stand with their arms behind their backs, others with arms across their chests, and a few with cloths held up to their faces. The heads of two boys in olive green tunics are lowered towards the bodies, with their weight resting on their right legs. Both covey an air of solemnity. The all-male configuration in Kabul Road echoes the pyramidal composition of classical aesthetics typically employed in history painting to draw our eye to the centre of the scene. Towards the apex, a young man with his arms folded behind his back captures our attention, possibly due to the distinctive colour of his lilac tunic. His brow is furrowed as he looks directly at the camera, and by extension at us as viewers. Mark Durden surmises that the apparent indifference to the dead bodies displayed by men in the scene who return our gaze is perhaps a reflection of our own detachment to distant conflicts.44 I further contend that their acknowledgement of the viewer invites audiences to consider how the enemy ‘other’ of war is represented in the media, as subjects who typically have little agency over their representation. In particular, the apathy of the men in Kabul Road directly contrasts with the highly emotive trope of the ‘grieving woman’ regularly galvanised in the media, as discussed in Chapter One. Depictions of the mourning ‘other’ is utilised in photojournalism as a symbol of hopelessness in order to reinforce the paternalistic drive of Western military intervention into countries such as Afghanistan, masked as ‘protection’. Delehaye’s image directly undermines the media’s appropriation of grief and its stereotypical expression in photography. Moreover, the imaginative potential of the image is in contradistinction to the circumscription of

44 Durden, "Global Documentary," 15. 138 meaning characteristic of photojournalism. Despite the wealth of detail recorded by the camera and the intelligibility afforded by Delahaye’s tableau-like composition, the scene is not ‘too fruitful’ as Lessing warned against. The laconic title, Kabul Road, provides little contextual information other than an approximate location. Instead, we are left wondering who these men are, how did they die, and what will happen to their bodies once the group disperses? Who are their families? Who are these men gathered around the bodies, and why are they there?

Despite Delahaye’s expressed ambition to ‘bear witness’ to events of war, as we know, photographic theorists have long queried the presumed ‘transparency’ of the medium, have cast the evidentiary authority of photography as questionable. As Georges Didi- Huberman expands: “it is very possible to have before our eyes the irrefutable ‘proof’ of an event, evidence of it, while at the same time not knowing what, which reality, which event, the image is proof of”.45 In this sense, Delahaye’s images bear witness, while at the same time he divests them of informational specifics (places, dates, times, identification of subjects) one would expect to accompany the documentation of photojournalist images. And turning his attention away from politicians, leaders, combatants and persons of media interest, he photographs people who are largely kept anonymous.46 He uses bluntly laconic titles in English, because as he explains, English “increases the neutrality, since the image seems less threatened by a title in an impoverished language. And for me as a French-speaker, there’s also a certain beauty in that purely functional language: the words, in their banality and transparency, ultimately resist meaning”.47 While the titles situate the works within larger collective narratives of contemporary warfare, they fail to reveal much about the specifics of events photographed. The simplicity of titles such as ‘Taliban’ and ‘Baghdad’ blatantly fail to encompass the complexity of the images or the events they tag, and in this sense, they may be described as almost meaningless. The paucity of information provided by the

45 Georges Didi-Huberman, "Emotion Does Not Say ‘I’: Ten Fragments on Aesthetic Freedom," in Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of Images, ed. Nicole Schweizer (Zurich: JRP-Ringier, 2007), 65. 46 In Lunch at the Belvedere (2004) and 132nd Ordinary Meeting of the Conference (2004) the people depicted may be more recognisable due to their presence in the media, however they are still treated by Delahaye with the same detached anonymity as other works in his oeuvre. Furthermore, with time their specificity as ‘important individuals’ loses relevance and so they take on the more general, nameless position of ‘officials’. 47 Delahaye, "A Conversation with Quentin Bajac," unpaginated. 139 titles is likely another way in which Delahaye draws us in to carefully consider and reflect on his images.

Like each of the artists addressed in this study, Delahaye has been criticised for his aesthetic approach to the contentious topic of war. Dominique Baqué accuses him of aestheticising his images in a way that suggests “a more than dubious spectacularization of the event”.48 When questioned about the apparent contradiction that in trying to avoid the habituations of news media, he is guilty of a similar ‘theatricalisation’ or ‘spectacularisation’ of events due to the large scale and artistic finish of his images, Delahaye responds that people in his pictures are generally ‘absorbed’ in their actions and that this ‘unconsciousness’ avoids theatricality.49 Although this statement is not true for all of his images, such as Kabul Road where the men depicted return our gaze, it recalls Michael Fried’s extensive consideration of the ‘absorptive mode’ of representation that he traces back to eighteenth-century French painting. Fried argues that in contrast to theatrical representation, the depiction of subjects who are fully immersed or absorbed in their activities deny the presence of the beholder of the scene, thereby establishing an autonomous ‘world’ that is metaphorically distinct from the viewer’s reality.50 Delahaye’s aforementioned remark echoes Fried’s analysis, and because his images approximate the confected drama of history painting they are not theatrical in the sense described by Fried.

Offering an alternative view to those who criticise Delahaye for aestheticising events of war, Mark Durden argues that Delahaye lends gravitas to his subjects through his aesthetic and formal choices.51 The artist himself has stated “the absence of dignity of the image necessarily leads to the absence of dignity of the subject of the image”.52 I will return to this issue of dignifying the subject of the image at a later point. Nevertheless, Delahaye is fairly regularly condemned for casting an aesthetic veil over human suffering and atrocity. As outlined in Chapter One, this argument is founded on a concern about

48 Dominique Baqué quoted in Gaëlle Morel, "Photojournalism as Formal Paradigm in Contemporary Art," in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Jason Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 268. 49 Magali Jauffret, "Luc Delahaye, Reporter Passé À L'art," L'Humanité 2005. 50 Fried, Why Photography Matters, 127. 51 Mark Durden, "Documentary Pictorial: Luc Delahaye's Taliban, 2001," in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Geoffrey Batchen, et al. (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 242. 52 Luc Delahaye quoted in Durden, "Documentary Pictorial," 242. 140 the revictimisation or exploitation of vulnerable people, as well as the purported politically neutralising effects of artistic photography. But as Julian Stallabrass asks, what is the alternative? Should an anti-aesthetic form of photography be employed to parallel the ‘ugliness’ of these situations?53 Or should we resist depicting the devastating effects of human induced and natural disasters altogether, remaining blind to the plight of others for risk of exploiting their situation?

There is no one easy answer to these questions. Yet certainly the moralising tendency to deem some photographic practices ‘good’ and others ‘bad’—often based on an unverifiable hypothesis that beautiful photographs will fail to incite political action against the contentious, tragic or unjust subjects they represent, and that ugly or obviously confronting images will motivate such action—remains dubious. Moreover, Delahaye seems to consider that the principal political import of his work is to both honour the complexity of his subjects, and to present an alternative way of seeing these subjects to that of press photography. As he has claimed “it is just true that there are beautiful landscapes in Afghanistan where there is also death. To not show this complexity? Reporters in the press see the Afghan landscape but they don't show it, they are not asked to”.54 In fact, as war photographer Eddie Adams’ refusal to depict the verdant Vietnam jungle mentioned in Chapter One confirms, photojournalists often avoid including the landscape of war zones for fear of ‘beautifying’ the scene and therefore not remaining faithful to the seriousness of the situation.

The beauty Delahaye identifies in the Afghan landscape is pictured by utilising a classical template of beauty founded on compositional balance, harmony, unity and symmetry (which also informed the neo-classical style of seventeenth and eighteenth-century history painting). In US Bombing on Taliban Positions (2001) [fig. 5.1], a panoramic view of the Shomali Valley in Afghanistan where a US B52 aircraft had recently dropped bombs on suspected Taliban locations, the landscape format of the photograph is equally divided between the green and golden tones of the flat uninhabited land, and a blue-grey sky. The extreme distance from any action combined with the harmony of the subdued colours and compositional symmetry lends the scene a tranquil atmosphere—the

53 Julian Stallabrass, "Sebastião Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism," New Left Review May-June, no. 223 (1997): 143. 54 Luc Delahaye quoted in Sullivan, "The Real Thing." 141 antithesis of the chaos and devastation one would expect after a bomb has exploded. The only note of drama in the photograph emanates from an unfurling cloud of smoke hovering above the horizon line.

In the interview with Bajac, Delahaye attributes the beauty of his photographs to a competition between the form of the images and their subjects.55 Those following a Sontagian-type critique of the ‘aestheticising’ tendency of photography would consider such a strategy morally reprehensible. It is also possible that superimposing a Western aesthetic of beauty on Middle Eastern countries might be interpreted as yet another modality of cultural imperialism. Yet, counter arguments to the ‘aestheticisation of suffering’ accusation (such as Durden’s) view the considered aesthetic choices made by photographers such as Delahaye as showing respect for their subjects, who are otherwise ignored or superficially ‘skimmed’ over in news reportage. As Stallabrass suggests when writing of fine art photojournalism, these practices “show an expenditure of time and skill which may be taken as a homage, especially when compared with the speedy gathering of horrific images by the newspaper photographers”.56 I contend that Delahaye’s photographs bestow ‘dignity’ and ‘gravitas’ upon the subjects he depicts. These terms, connected to the formal qualities and scale of his images, hark back to French history painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to which I shall now return.

By the time of the French Revolution and the subsequent expansion of the French Empire by Napoleon, the grandeur previously only bestowed to figures from ancient history, religion or mythology was extended to high-ranking military officials and key political leaders, usually for propagandistic purposes. Previous academic rules governing history painting were further contravened in the nineteenth century by artists, influenced by artistic realism, who represented everyday people as historically significant. For example, Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa (1818-19) [fig. 5.9] portraying the emaciated bodies and desperation of shipwrecked sailors from a French naval frigate was not only controversial for depicting a contemporary event reported in the newspapers, but also for detailing the disastrous effects of the event on anonymous sailors. Yet it should be noted that the ‘elevation’ of the everyday man into the genre of history painting meant that

55 Delahaye, "A Conversation with Quentin Bajac," unpaginated. 56 Stallabrass, "Sebastião Salgado," 143. 142 human bodies were still rendered in a relatively idealised form as a way to bestow dignity and humanity upon the dead and dying.

The large scale and autonomous structure of Delahaye’s photographic tableaux, typically exhibited in simple birch frames, lends a monumental quality to their subject matter analogous to history painting. Yet, like The Raft of the Medusa, the subjects of Delahaye’s photographs are not state-sponsored representations of military victories or commemorations of notable fallen soldiers, as was common in the eighteenth century. Rather, he depicts scenes of anonymous people and places marked by war. By reconfiguring the history painting format to frame subjects of contemporary ‘news’, Delahaye memorialises events that would otherwise receive only passing reference in the media, as Durden recognises.57 Campany makes a related point about ‘late’ photography more broadly, asserting that: “Slower working procedures are producing images more akin to monuments than moments”.58 It is true that both the panoramic camera Delahaye employs and his compositional approach is more time consuming than the use of handheld cameras and the snapshot mentality of photojournalism. But slowness is also signalled by the tableau format, where his subjects appear suspended within the composition. Their viewing requires patience as we shift between taking the scene in as a whole and the desire to inspect visual details up close. Moreover, the imaginative potential of Delahaye’s photographs generated by the expectant moment structure slows down the spectatorial experience. Searching the image for clues, we fill the gaps in the incomplete narrative constructed by Delahaye with our imagination. By loosening the image from the hold of familiar conventions and formats that we habitually rely on to form meaning, Delahaye offers an alternative, reflective engagement with the events of contemporary war.

In his discussion of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Mark Godfrey speaks of the “slow time of remembrance” elicited by the site, in contrast to the bustle of the surrounding urban environment.59 Similarly, the ‘slow time’ of Delahaye’s images exhibited in gallery contexts activates a space for prolonging contemplation, antithetical to our typically fast-paced consumption of media images,

57 Durden, "Documentary Pictorial," 242. 58 Campany, Photography and Cinema, 44. 59 Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 240. 143 which are routinely replaced and forgotten. Alternatively, Delahaye encourages viewers to take time to reflect more deeply on people and places affected by war. This feature, I propose, indicates that some of his images participate in a politics of memorialisation. The varying modes of public commemoration of warfare constitute a long history, reflecting changing ideological and cultural attitudes. It is often acknowledged by scholars that the devastating and widespread impact of World War I, particularly on civilian populations, instituted a modern approach to remembrance. As James E. Young explains, a tension exists between the traditional war monument as a valorisation of suffering in order to justify it, and an attempt to avoid glorifying the harsh realities of modern war.60 Nevertheless, state-sanctioned remembrance continues to perpetuate a common memory of war as a means of unifying the population: “Public monuments, national days of commemoration, and shared calendars thus all work to create common loci around which seemingly common national identity is formed”.61 Yet as Dan Todman observes, the very nature of commemoration means “privileging some versions of the war and discounting others”.62 In order to remember, who and what remains forgotten? Peter Nias recognises those people often ignored by institutionalised remembrance; the wounded (particularly psychologically damaged veterans), the ‘collateral damage’ of civilians, the military ‘enemy’, and indigenous or racially ‘other’ service personnel.63

Memorials and acts of commemoration feature in Delahaye photographs such as Musenyi (2004), which depicts a tenth-anniversary ceremony for anonymous victims of the Rwandan genocide, and September 11 Memorial (2002), taken one year after the events of 9/11 in New York. Moreover, speaking of Kabul Road, discussed earlier, Delahaye seems acutely aware of a disparity between the memorialisation of Arabs and US citizens killed in the interminable global ‘War on Terrorism’. He observes: “There will be no ceremony for these dead Taliban in Kabul Road, they are the losers of history, they died for nothing”.64 The formality of the men grouped in a semi-circle around the two dead soldiers who lie in the centre of the image lends the scene a ceremonial, even funereal

60 James E. Young, "Memory/Monument," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 238. 61 Young, "Memory/Monument," 237. 62 Dan Todman, "Remembrance and Memorials " British Library, https://www.bl.uk/world-war- one/articles/remembrance-and-memorials. 63 Peter Nias, "What’s War Remembrance Really For? To Remember the Fallen…or to Prepare Us for the Next Time?," Discover Society, no. 14 (2014), http://discoversociety.org/2014/11/04/whats-war- remembrance-really-for-to-remember-the-fallen-or-to-prepare-us-for-the-next-time/ 64 Luc Delahaye quoted in Durden, "Global Documentary," 15. 144 atmosphere. By both formalising and monumentalising the scene, Delahaye bestows some sense of dignity on the otherwise overlooked ‘other’ of war. Yet it is precisely this imaging of the ‘other’—anonymous people rendered powerless by the gaze of the camera—that has sparked criticism of his practice. Lucy Soutter asserts, “Delahaye will continue to be controversial because he incorporates actual people’s misfortune in his photographic constructions”.65 Yet we need only recall the motif of the weeping woman in war photojournalism, or depictions of the injured and dead in World War II motivated by US President Roosevelt’s call to show more ‘blood and gore’ discussed in Chapter One, to recognise that photojournalism similarly captures the suffering of people, justified under the guise of ‘news’. Soutter’s moral stand against Delahaye’s images seems to lie more with their formal construction and context, veiled as concern for the representation of the ‘other’.

In fact, Delahaye’s work differs markedly from Western media representations of the ‘other’ of war, that demonise the enemy and therefore legitimise war against ‘them’. This issue comes to the fore in Delahaye’s most controversial yet arguably most effective image, Taliban from 2001 [fig. 5.4], depicting a young man lying in a ditch, his prone body centred within the panoramic format of the photograph. His khaki jacket and utility vest indicate that he is a solider, and one recently killed in combat, as signalled by the red gash on his neck and dark splatter of blood on the ground near his leg. The photograph is taken from a slightly elevated position, so that we gaze down on the body as we might gaze into a coffin or grave. The slackened face of this anonymous man, identified only by the title Taliban, faces the camera. His partially open eye lids and parted lips lends an unnerving quality to the scene, as does the piece of straw lying across his face. The extreme visual clarity of the image reveals other details. Footprints in the dirt around the body point to someone’s recent presence, and fallen autumnal leaves and a black wallet are discernible near the uppermost edge of the frame. Despite being fully clothed, the realisation that the man is without shoes in rough terrain begs questions without answers—perhaps the shoes were removed by his killer or by a comrade retrieving them for a living fighter. And why are his shoes seemingly more valuable than his wallet? As Durden notes, the black socks that remain on his feet “accent a sense of vulnerability”.66

65 Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 59. 66 Durden, "Documentary Pictorial," 244. 145 The subdued green and brown tones of the Taliban fighter’s uniform merges with dirt, grass and leaves around him: “This body, one senses, is returning to the ground”,67 again gesturing to the ritual of burial. The earthy colour palette, uniform lighting and overlooking perspective (an anomaly in Delahaye’s oeuvre, which typically features a discernible horizon line) gives the image a sense of flatness. Yet what is most striking about Taliban, as Bill Sullivan has observed, is that “the corpse has a grace that almost seems posed”.68 The twisted yet graceful arrangement of the body, with bent legs and outstretched arm, has led Durden to draw an analogy between the Taliban soldier and the Christian symbol of the Pietà.69 Made famous by Michelangelo’s sculpture of the same name, the Pietà depicts the Virgin Mother Mary holding the slumped dead body of Christ following his crucifixion [fig. 5.9]. As a scene of mourning, veneration and solemnity, the Pietà serves to remind Christians of Christ’s bodily sacrifice and suffering for humanity. Yet the purported physical violence inflicted on the crucified Christ is minimised in Michelangelo’s idealised representation, so that the slumped figure almost appears as if he is sleeping. The bodily arrangement of the soldier in Delahaye’s image is analogous to this figure of Christ. Additionally, signs of violence are minimal; his body is whole and therefore recognisable as human—unlike gruesome ‘trophy’ photographs taken of dead enemy soldiers that serve to further degrade and dehumanise the body in death. Here, Delahaye neither sensationalises nor exaggerates the violence of the Taliban soldier’s death, but neither does he retreat from presenting the corpse to our view with discomforting clarity.

In his analysis of Taliban, Durden observes that similarities between the Taliban soldier and Christian iconography might be perceived as yet another form of cultural imperialism and a further desecration of the already slain and robbed man.70 Moreover, Michael Griffin argues that war images “redolent of religious themes, for example, with figural poses or gestures that reflect the Crucifixion, the Pietà, the Madonna and Child” are most widely circulated as defining icons that do little to portray the realities of war.71 Similarly, in her analysis of the mourning woman trope in photojournalism also evocative of the Pietà, and specifically in relation to the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year by Samuel

67 Durden, "Documentary Pictorial," 245. 68 Sullivan, "The Real Thing." 69 Durden, "Documentary Pictorial," 247. 70 Durden, "Documentary Pictorial," 247-8. 71 Michael Griffin, "Media Images of War," Media, War & Conflict 3, no. 1 (2010): 36. 146 Aranda depicting a Muslin women in a niqab cradling her son [fig. 5.10], Marta Zarzycka comments: “The success of the photograph can be understood to assimilate Islamic politics to a distinctly Christian iconographic tradition and to anchor the colonial gaze on the suffering other, thus consolidating the sovereignty of a Western point of view”.72 Yet Durden tempers such accusations by pointing out that Delahaye takes images in both foreign war zones and at sites of Western power.73 For example, his photograph of the Vatican titled Ordinary Public Consistory (2003) [fig. 5.11] highlights “the continued spectacle of the Western Christian faith”.74 Furthermore, as a former photojournalist, Delahaye would be acutely aware of the prevalence of Christian iconography in war reporting as analysed by Griffin and Zarzycka. The Pietà reference in Taliban might therefore be read not as cultural insensitivity or imperialism but a strategy to draw attention to the often unconscious repetition of such motifs in Occidental culture. When religious extremism is positioned as a threat to Western democratic ideals, it is poignant to consider how so many of these ideals are founded on the religious principles of Christianity.

Furthermore, by transferring this Christian trope to the enemy ‘other’, the mythic sacrifice and suffering of Christ is bestowed upon the Taliban soldier, thus providing a recognisable vehicle for identification with (and perhaps even finding empathy for) the enemy ‘other’. As Durden argues, “This monumental figure radically upsets the binary rhetoric—democracy versus evil fundamentalism—which is used by many in the West to continue to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”.75 By collapsing the dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘ally’ and ‘enemy’, we come closer to a form of war remembrance based on a shared humanity rather than polarising ideologies. In his discussion of the culture of commemoration following 9/11, David Simpson cites Derrida’s ‘autoimmunity’ argument to describe the Western relationship to the catastrophic event. Instead of perpetuating the myth of democracy (us) against religious fundamentalism (them), the concept of autoimmunity takes account of the West’s role in the rise of terrorism, and by extension the subsequent ‘War on Terrorism’. While acknowledging that such ideas might be challenging, Simpson, who is not alone among scholars, sees

72 Marta Zarzycka, "The World Press Photo Contest and Visual Tropes," Photographies 6, no. 1 (2013): 180. 73 Durden, "Documentary Pictorial," 247. 74 Durden, "Documentary Pictorial," 248. 75 Durden, "Global Documentary," 15. 147 Islamic and other fundamentalisms as the consequence of capitalist modernisation, and the Abu Ghraib atrocities as proof that “We too are torturers”.76 Simpson argues for our identification with the ‘other’: “Every imagining of the other is an encounter with the self: they are us”.77 It is worth citing Simpson at length here:

There is every evidence to support and contribute to theory’s emphasis on the self-generated identity of the other and on the reflexivity of a violence that cannot be restricted to one part of the system, as we are promised it might be by the language of revenge, justice, of good and evil. That identity is also, in its more positive potential, the common identity of the human form and the suffering body, which also must be supressed if the idea of a war of good and evil is to be maintained.78

By portraying the corpse of the Taliban soldier within the frame of Christian iconography, Delahaye not only makes the ‘self-generated identity of the other’ salient, he also offers an identification with the suffering body that rejects prevailing discourses of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in war reportage.

In her essay for the publication Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, Erina Duganne is quite critical of Taliban. Referencing Sontag’s claim that “the more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead or dying”,79 Duganne argues that if Delahaye had represented an American soldier in a similar way the response would have been close to outrage.80 While this assumption may be probable, it is also perhaps part of Delahaye’s point—by monumentalising the dead ‘other’ in the gallery space, we are confronted with an image we would otherwise skim over in the media. But instead of turning the page of our magazine or newspaper, scrolling down our internet browser or switching the television channel, Taliban commands attention in the quiet sanctuary of the exhibition space.

76 David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 138. 77 Simpson, 136 (emphasis in original). 78 Simpson, 138. 79 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 70. 80 Erina Duganne, "Photography after the Fact," in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago & Williamstown: The University of Chicago Press & Williams College Museum of Art, 2007), 62-4. 148 Examining Delahaye’s photographic tableaux through the formal and conceptual matrix of history painting, this chapter has argued that his images open up a space and time for imaginative engagement from viewers. I have proposed the combination of tableau format and photographic verisimilitude in Delahaye’s works invites prolonged contemplation from beholders, aided by their exhibition in gallery contexts. This differs from our high velocity but often cursory encounters with photography in everyday life. This chapter also provides analysis of responses to one of the most controversial images considered within the aftermath of war art photography ‘genre’, due to the uncensored depiction of a dead body. However, considering Taliban as a form of memorialisation and identification with the ‘other’ disrupts narratives of war perpetuated by the media that serve to dehumanise and vilify the enemy ‘other’. By collapsing clear demarcations between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, or in this case, between ‘religious martyr’ and ‘religious barbarian’, Western audiences might be drawn to reflect on the self that shadows every construction of the enemy ‘other’ in times of war.

149 Conclusion

Thinking the ‘Event’ of War

Early nineteenth century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz is known for his maxim from his book On War that “war is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means”.1 Despite marked differences between the character of warfare in Clausewitz’s time and our own, the means of war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will” is unchanged.2 Regardless of whether war is fought with sword or musket, or by a laser-guided missile or unmanned drone attack, it inevitably results in the physical devastation and destruction of people and places. Although we can safely say that the scale of this devastation seems ever increasing. Since the invention of photography, image-makers have grappled with how to best represent actions and effects of war, or whether to represent them at all. The drive to document war to provide historical evidence and information for posterity has also been met with caution and apprehension. In particular, critics against the pictorial representation of war cite risks of exploiting, diminishing or spectacularising the ineffable horror of war. In their over proliferation, such images of war are said to encourage apathetic or voyeuristic responses. However, as Jacques Rancière affirms in The Emancipated Spectator, discourses of the ‘unrepresentable’ and the ‘spectacle’ that are suspicious of the political capabilities of images arose out of disappointment with the conviction that images can convey the reality of the event depicted in order to generate socio-political action. Yet the supposedly straightforward path from the event to its representational translation, and then to comprehension and action, is generally unsubstantiated. Instead, Rancière argues that the political capacity of images today lies in their rejection of this schematic. As he writes: “The images of art do not supply weapons for battle. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible”.3

1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War [1832], trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (London: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7 (italicised in original). 2 Clausewitz, 13 (italicised in original). 3 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London & New York: Verso, 2009), 103. 150 This thesis has argued that art photographers Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye present alternative representations of war to those prevalent in news reporting or disseminated by state institutions including the military. By eschewing or reconfiguring common conventions and clichés of photojournalism, these artists invite reflective engagement with events of war untethered from simplistic moral imperatives or crude ideological agendas. By focusing on the destructive consequences of warfare, their works undermine rhetoric deployed by the US military and their allies since the First Gulf War. This rhetoric celebrates the techno-superiority of current weaponry as able to conduct surgically precise strikes that limit collateral damage on civilians and infrastructure in war zones. Of course, this is despite regular reporting in the media of ‘accidents’ that contradict ‘clean’ war propaganda. Arriving at theatres of war after the heat of battle has ceased, these artists highlight material traces of the long-lasting impacts of war on places and people that are less visible in media representations.

For Rancière, the critical potential of artistic images to question the status quo is based on the “condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated”.4 This study has proposed that Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye inscribe a level of conceptual indeterminacy in their images that allows various interpretative possibilities to remain in play. A significant aim of this study has been to show how the transmission of conclusive meaning is differentially suspended in each of their practices. I have adapted theoretical constructs of the ‘pensive image’, ‘anachronism’ and the ‘expectant moment’ to this end. Moreover, following a Janus-faced thinking of the event by Jacques Derrida, I have also argued that aesthetic strategies implemented by each artist to delay conceptual sedimentation thus acknowledges that the singularity of the event escapes appropriation, as opposed to historical constructs aligned with photographic technology such as the ‘decisive moment’ that claim to capture and contain the essence of the event. Further, by inviting various interpretations of their works, these artists stymie predictable response of moral indignation or compassion when faced with representations of tragedy and suffering. Anger, pity, compassion, appreciation, confusion, apathy, fear, indifference and pleasure are just some of the possible responses to the works addressed in this study. My interpretation of these works suggests that their critical dimension lies in the capacity to slow down the viewing experience. This mode of reception radically diverges from the

4 Rancière, 103. 151 speed of our everyday consumption of images, particularly those published in the media. As such, viewing works by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye in the gallery space we are afforded more time for thinking about the events of contemporary war.

But what use is simply ‘thinking’ when confronted with the confounding and shocking realities of warfare? Despite Susan Sontag’s doubts about the political capacities of photography expressed in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, she concludes that: “There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: ‘Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time’”.5 Here, Sontag contends that despite the unlikelihood of photography to activate any universal ‘call to arms’ against injustice and violence, it can provoke much thinking—and when we are thinking, we are less likely to engage in impulsive actions without reflecting on possible consequences. Perhaps Sontag’s point is also a response to the dearth of reflective activity in our current neoliberal climate. Maggie Nelson asserts, we live in “a culture obsessed with pitting thought against action (in order to privilege the latter), not to mention a culture perpetually dubious of the cash value of rumination”.6 By frustrating the direct transmission of meaning and offering aesthetically nuanced, engaging and memorable (because unusual) representations of war, the works in this study open up space for reflection in contrast to our habitual encounters with photography. As Simon Norfolk has said of his aesthetic strategy: “I want you to stay in my sphere of influence for slightly longer, so that you can think about these things”.7

The works in this study contravene the assumption that the ‘decisive moment’ photograph can contain the event of war, in the sense that by arriving ‘late’ to the conflict these photographs can still provide insights into the specific wars they engage with and the topic of war more generally. The other key ambition of this study has been to elaborate historically, formally and theoretically informed interpretations of select works of aftermath war photography by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye. Ristelhueber’s series Fait (1992) and Eleven Blowups (2006) highlight the material violence of war on the landscape. Considering Fait through the metaphor of the scar, I argued that the surfaces of the Kuwaiti desert depicted are evocative of the vulnerability of the human body.

5 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 118. 6 Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 45. 7 Simon Norfolk, "Simon Norfolk in Interview," Irish Pages 4, no. 1 (2007): 211-2. 152 Focusing on the material dimension of humanity occasions a reflection on the injurious effects of war without exploiting the distress of an individual. This chapter also argued that the wounding bomb craters of Eleven Blowups deny closure to the events of war in the Middle East, instead leaving the possibility of mourning open. In the fourth chapter on Norfolk’s series Afghanistan: Chronotopia (2001-2) and Burke + Norfolk (2010) I analysed the multi-temporal structure of these works. I demonstrated how Norfolk highlights the unfixed nature of war in Afghanistan by teasing out how the aesthetic influences, formal structure and subject matter of his images converge to disrupt an orthodox, chronological thinking of time. Finally, the aesthetic form of Delahaye’s panoramic photographs were analysed according to the conventions of history painting. In particular, I argued that Kabul Road (2001) provokes an imaginative engagement with the scene depicted, while his controversial tableau Taliban (2001) enacts a form of memorialisation for the ‘enemy’ that inaugurates an unconventional thinking about the ‘other side’ of war. By providing fresh insights into these works, this thesis has sought to overturn negative appraisals of ‘aftermath’ war photography by highlighting features that, while not necessarily possessed of overt or determined political content, may nonetheless be considered critical or non-conformist in other ways.

By both signalling the limits of conclusively containing or demarcating the event of war via representational consolidation, and confecting representations of war whose meaning must be deciphered and reflected upon rather than simply consumed, the works of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye analysed in this study are ‘full of thoughts’ (to use Rancière’s phrase regarding the pensive image). Inviting audiences to reconsider the histories, operations and after effects of war, and how these are conventionally represented, these artists activate modes of audience address that discourage the kind of distracted consumption associated with the high-velocity circulation, appearance and disappearance, recognition and forgetting of war imagery in media networks. In so doing, they prolong and expand our thinking about war, initiating new thoughts and perhaps “a new landscape of the possible” when it comes to picturing events of war.8

8 Rancière, 103. 153 Illustrations [Images have been removed due to copyright laws]

Chapter One

Figure 1.1: Frank Hurley, Episode after Battle of Zonnebeke, 1918. Gelatin silver print, 35.8x48.5cm.

Figure 1.2: Robert Capa, US troops assault Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings, 1944. Gelatin silver print, 24.1x35.5cm, International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos.

154

Figure 1.3: Huynh Cong ‘Nick’ Ut, Accidental Napalm Attack, 1972. Gelatin silver print, Associated Press.

Figure 1.4: Malcom Browne, The Burning Monk, 1963. Gelatin silver print, Associated Press/Wide World Photos.

Figure 1.5: Joe Rosenthal, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, 1945. Gelatin silver print, Associated Press.

155

Figure 1.6: Dmitri Baltermants, Attack—Eastern Front WWII, 1941. Gelatin silver print, 22.6x29.8cm.

Figure 1.7: Roger Fenton, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855. Salted paper print, 27.6x34.9cm.

Figure 1.8: Roger Fenton, Distant View of Sevastopol, with the Lines of Gordon’s Battery, 1855. Salted paper print, 21.9x34.6cm.

156

Figure 1.9: John Warwick Brooke, An officer of the 10th Battalion leads the way out of a sap and is being followed by the party, 1917. Gelatin silver print.

Figure 1.10: Edward Steichen, Aerial view of ruins of Vaux, France, 1918. Gelatin silver print.

Figure 1.11: Robert Capa, The Falling Soldier, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 24.7x34cm.

157

158

Figure 1.14: Still from video footage of precision-guided munition, Iraq, 1991. US Military.

Figure 1.15: Patrick de Noirmon, Anti-aircraft tracer fire lights up Baghdad, 1991. Reuters.

Figure 1.16: Saibal Das, Taliban fighters with a vehicle on highways in Afghanistan, 1996. Getty Images.

159

Figure 1.17: Ramzi Haidar, Smoke covers the presidential palace compound in Baghdad, 21 March, 2003. Getty Images/AFP.

Figure 1.18: Still from video footage of POW US Private First Class Jessica Lynch being loaded into a military helicopter on her way out of Iraq, 2 April, 2003. Getty Images.

160 Chapter Two

Figure 2.1: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Jumping Over a Puddle [Behind the Gare St. Lazare], 1932. Gelatin silver print, 35.2x24.1cm, Magnum Photos.

161 Chapter Three

Figure 3.1: Alexander Gardner, Portrait of Lewis Payne before Execution, 1865. Albumen silver print from collodion wet plate negative.

Figure 3.2: Walker Evans, Kitchen Wall in Bud Field's Home, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 20.3x24.8cm.

162

Figure 3.3: Installation view of Eleven Blowups (2006) in the disused apartment of the governor of the Banque de France, Arles, France, 2006.

Figure 3.4: Installation view of Fait (1992) at Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1999.

163

Figure 3.5: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #60, 1992. Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm.

Figure 3.6: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #69, 1992. Black and white photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm.

Figure 3.7: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #67, 1992. Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm.

164

Figure 3.8: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #20, 1992. Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm.

Figure 3.9: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #61, 1992. Black and white photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm.

Figure 3.10: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #19, 1992. Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium, 100x127cm.

165

Figure 3.11: Sophie Ristelhueber, Every One #14, 1994. Black and white photograph, silver print laminated on wood fibre plaque, 270x180cm.

Figure 3.12: Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups #7, 2006. Colour silver print, 110x133cm.

166

Figure 3.13: Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups #2, 2006. Colour silver print, 110x133cm.

Figure 3.14: Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups #11, 2006. Colour silver print, 110x133cm.

167 Chapter Four

Figure 4.2: Claude Lorrain, Capriccio with ruins of the Roman Forum, 1634. Oil on canvas, 79.7x118.8cm.

168

Figure 4.3: Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus, 1644. Oil on canvas, 102x135cm.

169

Figure 4.6: Simon Norfolk, The swimming pool of the destroyed Presidential palace at Darulaman, 2001- 2. From Afghanistan: Chronotopia series. Digital chromogenic print, 100x126cm.

170

Figure 4.8: Installation view of Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk (2010) at Moeller Fine Art, New York, 2011.

171

Figure 4.9: Simon Norfolk, A security guard’s booth at the newly restored Ikhtyaruddin citadel, Herat, 2010. From Burke + Norfolk series. Fujicolour crystal archive print, 100x126cm.

172

Figure 4.11: Simon Norfolk, Some of the astonishing new architecture mushrooming up in cities all over Afghanistan. Part Disney, part wedding cake; inspired by Bollywood but reverential to Greek classicism; it represents as architectless kind of architecture, 2010. From Burke + Norfolk series. Fujicolour crystal archive print, 100x126cm.

Figure 4.12: Simon Norfolk, Unfinished, speculative property development near Kabul Airport, 2010. From Burke + Norfolk series. Fujicolour crystal archive print, 100x126cm.

173

174 Chapter Five

Figure 5.1: Luc Delahaye, US Bombing on Taliban Positions, 2001. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 112x238cm.

Figure 5.2: Luc Delahaye, Jenin Refugee Camp, 2002. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 111x239cm.

Figure 5.3: Luc Delahaye, Baghdad IV, 2003. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 111x240cm.

175

Figure 5.4: Luc Delahaye, Taliban, 2001. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 111x237cm.

Figure 5.5: Nicholas Poussin, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1631-32. Oil on canvas, 148x175cm.

Figure 5.6: Léon Cogniet, Scene from the Massacre of the Innocents, 1824. Oil on canvas, 265x235cm.

176

Figure 5.7: Luc Delahaye, Kabul Road, 2001. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 111x238cm.

Figure 5.8: Théodore Géricault, The Raft of Medusa, 1818-19. Oil on canvas, 491x716cm.

177

Figure 5.9: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà, 1498-99. Marble, 174x195cm, St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City.

Figure 5.11: Luc Delahaye, Ordinary Public Consistory, 2003. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminium, 114x240cm.

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