On Photographic Violence Sharon Sliwinski

Western University From the SelectedWorks of Sharon Sliwinski 2009 On Photographic Violence Sharon Sliwinski Available at: https://works.bepress.com/sharon_sliwinski/7/ Photography & Culture On Photographic Volume 2—Issue 3 Violence November 2009 pp. 303–316 DOI: Sharon Sliwinski 10.2752/175145109X12532077132392 Reprints available directly from the publishers Sharon Sliwinski is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Photocopying permitted by Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests licence only include visual culture and communication, critical theory, © Berg 2009 history and theory of photography, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory. She is currently at work on a book called Human Rights In Camera which traces the visual dimensions of human rights discourse. Abstract This paper explores the significance of photographic violence in relation to a single defaced image found during the Bosnian War. The single example of pictorial violence opens a set of questions interrogating the nature of human aggression: What is the status of violence carried out in effigy? Can this particular example of defacement open understanding into the other forms of violence that took place during the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia? How does the image come to be marked by affect but also serve as the medium of its transmission? And finally, why does photography lend itself so easily to the expression of aggression? The wager of this paper is that thinking through such instances of photographic violence can shed new light on the nature of human violence writ large. Keywords: trauma, memory, violence, genocide even scratched to death a simple rectangle of thirty-five millimeters saves the honor of all the real J-L Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma Photography & Culture Volume 2—Issue 3—November 2009, pp. 303–316 304 On Photographic Violence Sharon Sliwinski One of the most potent images collected under the Muslim-led Bosnian government. during the Bosnian War was a found But upon their departure, the occupiers stole photograph (Figure 1). According to its almost everything—the furniture, appliances, finder, the photojournalist Ron Haviv, when cabinets, sinks, and even the windowpanes. the daughter of the Muslim family pictured in The defaced photograph was the sole item the image returned to Sarajevo after the war, left behind (Haviv 2000: 175). she found her family home had been looted. On the one hand, the sheer endurance Serbs who had occupied the house during of this image is remarkable. Unlike all the the war finally left once the city was reunited other household items, the photograph Fig 1 Blood and Honey: A defaced photograph that was found by a Bosnian family when they returned to their home in a suburb of Sarajevo, Bosnia, March 17, 1996. Photographer: Ron Haviv. Photography & Culture Volume 2—Issue 3—November 2009, pp. 303–316 Sharon Sliwinski On Photographic Violence 305 managed to survive as a melancholy relic of unique medium of visual reproduction, but war. In this respect, photographs—and family also as a unique medium for the expression photographs in particular—appear to hold of violence. Hannah Arendt (1970) reminds little exchange value. Their worth is usually us that violence—as distinct from power, non-transferable. On the other hand, the force, or strength—requires implements.2 narrative illustrates the way photography The history of warfare is inextricably bound lends itself to a variety of uses in times of up with the history of technology. The war. Specifically, the example shows how frightening example from the Bosnian War photographs can be pressed into service to suggests that by the close of the twentieth actually wage war. The violence done to the century, photography became one of the surface of the image appears, on first glance, exemplary implements of genocide. to echo the violence occurring throughout The violent effacement is, however, only the region. The family members’ identities one of the affective registers bound up in have been scratched out, “cleansed” of the this example. The photograph’s history of customary markers of ethnicity. In the hands uses include: the family’s initial circulation and of the occupiers, the photograph became an preservation of the snapshot, the occupier’s emissary of destructive affect, a canvas for acquisition and sadistic defacement, the expression of sadistic desires. and finally the spectator’s melancholy This solitary example of pictorial violence contemplation of the relic in the time of opens a larger set of questions about the afterwards, when one meets its reproduction nature of human aggression. What is the in Ron Haviv’s own collection of photographs status of violence carried out in effigy? of the war, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Should the defacement be read as a Journal. This is to say, the contemporary fantasy that forestalls more direct forms of spectator enters into, and indeed, becomes violence? Or is this a kind of “acting out” a participant in this narrative only at its that inevitably leads to more profound conclusion. But this last site is itself unstable forms of destruction, namely the annihilation because the spectator is actually obliged to of human beings? (Freud 2005 [1914]).1 perform a dual task: to identify the subject Can the particular violence done to the of the image and to identify with it (Olin image be read for its “psychology of style”? 2002). In order to comprehend this That is, does the particular defacement sequence of historical events, in order to open understanding into the other forms know, one has to imagine for oneself the of violence that took place during the terrifying significance of this lonely relic. The dissolution of the former Yugoslavia? And spectator, in other words, becomes both the apart from these hermeneutical questions, receiver of the object’s enigmatic message why does photography—as opposed to and the carrier of its affective resonances. the myriad of other material artifacts of a The wager of this paper is that attending home—lend itself so easily to the expression these registers—thinking through this “acting of aggression? In other words, perhaps this out” of genocide in pictures—can shed new example calls for a broader investigation light on the nature of human violence writ into the ways photography is not only a large. Photography & Culture Volume 2—Issue 3—November 2009, pp. 303–316 306 On Photographic Violence Sharon Sliwinski Community Building Muslim populations. After three and a half The old Yugoslavia boasted one of the years of bloodshed, including the nightmare world’s richest tapestries of language, religion, of Srebrenica—Europe’s worst massacre in and culture before its people turned to more than five decades—NATO intervened violence in the 1990s. The chief architect with air strikes. The Dayton Peace of this breakdown was Slobodan Milošević, Agreement, signed on December 14, 1995, a member of the Yugoslav Communist bought a brief and tense ceasefire to the Party, who rose to power in the country region. The peace only lasted a few months, in the late 1980s. During his rise through whereupon Albanians, living in a virtual the ranks, journalists sympathetic to the apartheid system in Kosovo, began attacking politician began spreading a fantasy about Serbian police units in 1996. Milošević used a grand conspiracy against the Serbian these attacks by the Kosovo Liberation nation: the KGB together with the CIA, Army to relaunch his plans for an “ethnically the Albanians, the separatists in Slovenia, cleansed” Serbian nation. By the fall of 1998 and Islamic fundamentalists in Bosnia were the Serb police had driven tens of thousands purportedly working together to weaken of Albanians from their homes. NATO again Serbia. As a result of this inflammatory demanded that Milošević withdraw his rhetoric, café life began to break down along police units after Serb troops massacred a “ethnic” lines (during this conflict the term group of civilians in the village of Ra ˇcak. The “ethnicity” was often used as a euphemism president’s negotiators refused and NATO for religious affiliation). Serbs began refusing launched a limited air campaign. This only to send their children to school with incited the Yugoslav army to expand their Muslims. Croats complained of being laid ethnic-cleansing operations. Thousands of off by Serb managers, and vice versa. In Albanians were killed and some one million June 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared people were driven from their homes. independence from Yugoslavia, which was Milošević finally withdrew his forces only quickly followed by an announcement from once NATO threatened a ground campaign Macedonia. The next spring the Federation (Gutman 1993; Maas 1997; Sudetic 2000; of Bosnia and Herzegovina announced Power 2002). The tragedies in this region its own secession. What began as local offer one of the most potent examples in skirmishes in Croatia escalated until the fall recent decades of just how difficult it is to of 1991, when the Yugoslav army launched love thy neighbor. an invasion into Croatia to “protect” the When the Bosnian War began in Serb minority who lived there. Within a 1992, Western political leaders and even few months, Serbs had seized a quarter of United Nations negotiators proposed that Croatia’s territory and convinced the UN the fighting was the result of “ancient to send a force to guard the region. The ethnic hatreds,” animosities that had been Yugoslav army then redeployed their forces smoldering for centuries in the blood of a to Bosnia and war broke out there in 1992 people prone to violence. Such portrayals when Serb paramilitary forces attacked lean on a strange—one might say infantile— Bijeljina and other towns, driving out the theorizing in which violence is believed to Photography & Culture Volume 2—Issue 3—November 2009, pp.

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