The Cruel Radiance
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THE CRUEL RADIANCE THE CRUEL RADIANCE Photography and Political Violence Susie Linfi eld The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010. Paperback edition 2012 Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 48250- 7 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48251-4 (paper) ISBN- 10: 0- 226- 48250- 2 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-48251-0 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Linfi eld, Susie. Th e cruel radiance : photography and political vio- lence / Susie Linfi eld p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48250-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-48250-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Documentary photography. 2. Political violence in mass media. 3. Violence—Press coverage. 4. Photo- graphic criticism. I. Title. TR820.5 .L55 2010 070.4'9—dc22 2010013705 o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). For Jay, who can see in the dark; and in memory of E. W. Driven back and utterly shamed Shall be those who trust in an image. Isaiah 42:17 Urgent. Have possibility of taking photos. Send fi lm roll as fast as you can. Jósef Cyrankiewicz and Stanislaw Klodzinski, Auschwitz prisoners, in a note smuggled to the Polish Resistance, 1944 CONTENTS List of Figures xi Preface: The Black Book xiii PART ONE: POLEMICS 1 A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography? 3 2 Photojournalism and Human Rights: The Calamity of the Kodak 33 PART TWO: PLACES 3 Warsaw, Lodz, Auschwitz: In the Waiting Room of Death 65 4 China: From Malraux’s Dignity to the Red Guards’ Shame 101 5 Sierra Leone: Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity 125 6 Abu Ghraib and the Jihad: The Dance of Civilizations 151 PART THREE: PEOPLE 7 Robert Capa: The Optimist 175 8 James Nachtwey: The Catastrophist 205 9 Gilles Peress: The Skeptic 233 Acknowledgments 259 Notes 261 Bibliography 295 Index 309 FIGURES 1.1 Farnood, protest against reelection of Ahmadinejad. Tehran, Iran (2009) 2 1.2 Jerome Delay, women in cemetery. Baghdad, Iraq (2003) 26 1.3 Ahmed Dhiya, schoolboys. Baghdad, Iraq (2004) 29 2.1 Ulrich Jantzen, burnt woman screaming. Dhaka, Bangladesh (2001) 32 2.2 Unidentifi ed photographer, prisoner of Stalin. Lubyanka Prison, Soviet Union (1931) 55 2.3 Unidentifi ed photographer, child prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. Tuol Sleng, Cambodia (date unknown) 58 3.1 Heinrich Jöst, woman selling Jewish armbands. Warsaw Ghetto (1941) 64 3.2 Mendel Grossman, women kissing before deportation. Lodz Ghetto (date unknown) 80 4.1 Li Zhensheng, Cultural Revolution struggle session. Harbin, China (1966) 100 4.2 Jack Birns, captured Communists. Songjiang, China (1948) 121 5.1 Candace Scharsu, Memuna Mansarah and her father. Murray Town Amputee Camp, Sierra Leone (2000) 124 5.2 Stuart Freedman, boy looking at father’s prosthetic legs. Makeni, Sierra Leone (2004) 146 6.1 John Moore, man after suicide bombing. Rawalpindi, Pakistan (2007) 150 Figures 6.2 Josef Koudelka, woman with bloody fl ag. Prague, Czechoslovakia (1968) 161 7.1 Robert Capa, POUM fi ghters dancing. The Aragon front, Spain (1936) 174 7.2 Robert Capa, blind immigrants. Gedera, Israel (1950) 195 8.1 James Nachtwey, starving man. Ayod, southern Sudan (1993) 204 8.2 James Nachtwey, hanging man. Unidentifi ed location, Afghanistan (1996) 220 9.1 Gilles Peress, the Shah’s torture victims. Tehran, Iran (1979) 232 9.2 Gilles Peress, corpse’s feet with shoes and socks. Xerxe, Kosovo (1999) 257 xii PREFACE The Black Book When I was about three, my older sister discovered a new game called reading; and, unbeknownst to our parents, she promptly taught it to me. Soon she and I began trolling through my father’s library, and one day we discovered that a second row of secret books existed behind the public ones on the front of the shelves. All sorts of books—about sex, art, politics—were to be found on the hidden rows, and my sister and I delighted in discovering them together. (The lure of the forbidden can never be overstated.) But there was one book in this secret trove that I did not tell her about, and that I returned to many times over the years. I could not, for a long time, understand most of the text, but from the fi rst its pictures transfi xed me: they are what I re- member best. I am looking at a copy of that book now. It is called The Black Book of Polish Jewry, and it was published in 1943, in New York; it details, in words and photographs, the Nazi destruction of the Polish Jews. It is a grim book to look through, though it does not tell or show the worst: for it could not, of course, document the camps. I had never heard the word “Holocaust” when I fi rst saw this book. But I knew that something I could not understand had been done to the people in those pictures; and I knew that the abject, defeated wraiths in them were Jewish, just like—yet also not just like—me. Looking at those photographs, I felt sadness, indignation, disgust, and puzzlement, but my overwhelming emotion (I can feel it now) was shame. How, I wondered, could I belong to such a wretched group? And how could I place the people xiii Preface in those pictures within the context of the people I knew and loved— my family and our friends—who all seemed so energetic, so outspoken, so alive? The Black Book of Polish Jewry was my fi rst introduction to photographs of defeat and atrocity, which is to say to photographs of grievous history. I cannot say that this book haunted me throughout my childhood, but I cannot say that I ever forgot it, either. Still, I wasn’t particularly interested in pictures like these until about a decade ago, when I found myself look- ing, more and more, at photographs—mostly in newspapers and maga- zines but sometimes on the Internet or in galleries and museums—of the gruesome slaughters in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Congo and Soma- lia, Rwanda and Uganda, Bosnia and Chechnya. I wondered what these photographs said, and failed to say, about the new world order that was emerging in the aftermath of the cold war; they seemed to demur from, if not negate, the triumphal rhetoric of universal peace and democracy that was becoming so popular. It seemed to me that these images, so striking and yet largely ignored, were telling me things that I urgently needed to know—and at the same time that the realities they documented could not be found only, or primarily, in the pictures themselves. This book is my response to that paradox. It is also a response to my childhood self who was simultaneously drawn to and humiliated by the photographs of the Polish Jews. It is an attempt to understand, and to wrestle with, the photographs I have seen and the histories of which they speak. This is a book of criticism, not theory. It seeks to claim for photography criticism the same freedom of response championed by fi lm critics like James Agee and Pauline Kael, dance critics like Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce, theater critics like Kenneth Tynan, and music critics like Greil Mar- cus. It is written, in large part, against the photography criticism of Susan Sontag. This is not because Sontag was wrong about most things; on the contrary, many of her insights remain sharp and true. But it is Sontag, more than anyone else, who was responsible for establishing a tone of suspicion and distrust in photography criticism, and for teaching us that to be smart about photographs means to disparage them. I am writing, even more, against the work of Sontag’s postmodern and poststructural- xiv Th e Black Book ist heirs and their sour, arrogant disdain for the traditions, the practice, and the ideals of documentary photography. Unlike those critics, I believe that we need to respond to and learn from photographs rather than sim- ply disassemble them; unlike those critics, I believe that we need to look at, and look into, what James Agee called “the cruel radiance of what is.” Photographs help us do that; so would the kind of criticism that believed in their worth. This book is also written, though with great reluctance, against the pro- gressive view of history: against the belief, sustained since the Enlighten- ment by liberals and the left and taken up more recently by certain neo- conservatives, that the arc of modern history bends toward freedom and justice. This is the tradition in which I was raised; I continue to cherish it. But I have come to believe that it is the experience of degradation, immis- eration, violence, and defeat that defi nes the lives of millions, and that in large part defi nes history. Such experiences do not necessarily lead those who suff er to create a better world when they shake off their chains; on the contrary, suff ering is just as likely to warp its victims and turn them, sometimes quickly, into persecutors and tyrants. That is why we cannot talk—at least in meaningful or realistic ways—about building a world of democracy, justice, and human rights without fi rst understanding the ex- perience of their negation.