Reconstruction 11.2 (2011)

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Looking Elsewhere / Wendy Kozol

Abstract: Amid the vitriolic nationalist responses to 9/11, social critics as early as fall 2001 observed that the mainstream media’s self-absorbed focus on the attacks has served to deflect many Americans’ attention from the complex historical impact of U.S. foreign policies. Either implicitly or explicitly, these critics of 9/11 discourse have called for Americans to "look elsewhere" in order to avoid reproducing a victim narrative. If the relentless focus on 9/11 reinforces a nationalist myopia, looking elsewhere is, however, no guarantor of recognition, much less of accountability. After all, photographs of veiled women in Afghanistan readily turned women into symbols of gender oppression that fed post-9/11 war logics just as pictures of Iraqi militants reinforced specters of terrorism.

As part of this special issue examining the ways in which 9/11 haunts contemporary national rhetorics, I explore the call to "look elsewhere" as an alternative optics intended to glean insights about international political conflicts, their histories and the suffering wrought by American foreign policies. In taking up this demand to recognize the suffering of others, I examine the ethical challenges of witnessing the war on terror for American viewers. This essay develops a critical methodology for looking elsewhere that includes engagement with the competing demands of citizenship that emerge from visual sites whose affective power draws the viewer into spaces of grief and mourning. I consider both formal elements within photographs as well as the dynamics between viewer and image in order to argue that an ethical gaze can only occur through, not despite, the encounter with spectacles of violence and suffering.

Keywords: Ethics, Peace Studies, Visual Culture

<1> Like many other Americans, I easily recall what I was doing on 9/11 and the immediate days afterwards. What stands out most to me is being transfixed by the video clips of the planes hitting the twin towers that replayed over and over again on television. Today, I still vividly recall the suspension of regular programming and advertisements that week, which seemed to mark the magnitude of this event every bit as much as did the silent sky absent of airplanes. Living far from New York and D.C., 9/11 was for me, as for most Americans, a visual act of witnessing mediated through the intimate and familiar scale of televisual repetition (Spigel 2004). As news media coverage moved from ground zero to funerals of first responders to stories about those who died in the attacks, people across the country shared in the national event through their own "where I was when the planes hit the towers" stories. Experience is a foundational claim for many forms of witnessing as personal memories locate the narrator temporally and spatially in relation to the trauma, and in so doing provide narrative coherence to inchoate events. On 9/11, the visual spectacle of the planes hitting the towers profoundly shaped the narratological elements of experiencing this event. Via the television screen and the Internet, Americans across the country affectively invested in witnessing this event as a trauma experienced within their own personal spaces. As Carrie Rentschler (2004) argues, mass media coverage of traumatic news events like 9/11 fosters a national subjectivity through a collective identification with the trauma. Anxieties and fears about the attacks narrated through normative social structures such as family ideals connected personal experiences to national claims of innocence and grief.

<2> The turn to experience that has generated a rich visual archive of 9/11 seems a highly appropriate site to take up the study of affect, an emergent theoretical focus in visual culture studies.[1] For instance, what elements within images of loss and grief compel understanding or empathy and/or mobilize political consciousness, rather than pity or distance? Or, as Mark Reinhardt asks, "what kinds of solicitations ought we to expect from a photo"(2007, 31)? Without a doubt, scholars need to examine both the news media’s production of trauma as an expression of nationalism and the visual work done by both professional artists and individuals whose lives were caught up in these violent events. Yet, I find myself deeply reluctant to write about either the news coverage or the myriad informal and formal acts of 9/11 commemoration.

<3> This reluctance stems from a concern that I share with other scholars and social commentators who critique the ahistorical and exceptionalist tenor of 9/11 discourse. Amid often vitriolic nationalist rhetoric, social critics as early as fall 2001 observed that the mainstream media’s repetitive and self-absorbed focus on these attacks has served to deflect many Americans’ attention from the complex historical impact of U.S. foreign policies. The formation of citizenship through identification with trauma, acutely evident in the aftermath of 9/11, too often results in a narrative of victimization that elides the culpabilities of U.S. political, economic and military hegemony. Repetitious pictures of the burning towers and grief-stricken families interpellate citizen-viewers into a form of witnessing frequently structured around strategies of denial and reactive patriotism. As Rentschler persuasively argues, "witnessing constitutes a form of selective attention to victims and sometimes with victims that can make invisible citizens’ own participation in state violence" (2004, 269). Among the analytical projects critical of the solipsistic gaze, Marita Sturken’s (2007) powerful analysis of the teddy bears left at ground zero exposes the ways in which sentimental kitsch draws viewers into a space of mourning in support of a narrative of American innocence. Judith Butler (2004; 2010) similarly argues that Americans’ attention to their own grief sustains nationalist agendas at the expense of political insights or social empathy for the lives and suffering of those impacted by U.S. military and economic policies in the Middle East. Either implicitly or explicitly, critics of 9/11 discourse have called for Americans to "look elsewhere" in order to avoid reproducing a victim narrative. The call to look elsewhere, premised on this critique of exceptionalism, seeks an alternative optics intended to glean insights about international political conflicts, their histories and the suffering wrought by American foreign policies.

<4> If the relentless focus on 9/11 reinforces a nationalist myopia, looking elsewhere is no guarantor of recognition, much less of accountability. After all, the news media did turn its attention quickly to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and then to Iraq in 2002. Yet, pictures of veiled women in Afghanistan readily turned women into symbols of gender oppression that fed post-9/11 war logics just as pictures of Iraqi militants reinforced specters of terrorism (Zelizer 2005; Hunt and Rygiel 2006; Kozol and DeCola 2006). As much as the camera can produce an intimate affect that hails viewers into spaces potentially productive for critical engagement, the photojournalist’s gaze has also conventionally and persistently turned suffering into a spectacle. Reinhardt, for instance, singles out images for criticism whose "aesthetic choices fail to acknowledge the humanness of suffering," that is, images that privilege universalizing signifiers of pain to the exclusion of specific histories of violence (2007, 32; my italics). Moreover, he observes, "We, the spectators, may (most likely, will) cringe before [pictures of intense suffering], we may even weep....But it is not at all clear how the photograph asks us to assess our relationship to – our complicity in – the situation" (Reinhardt 2007, 32). When the subject of the image is only represented as a victim, viewers need not address either historical causation, or, importantly, the ways in which citizenship implicates them in those histories. Yet not all war photography is simply voyeuristic nor does aestheticization necessarily produce only spectacle. As Reinhardt argues, pictures that "invite complex and pointed critical reflections on the ways we spectators tend to witness" offer the potential for more engaged viewing practices (2007, 31). What formal features within photographs of the war on terror, as well as contextual elements related to their circulation, encourage critical looking practices?

<5> As part of this special issue examining the ways in which 9/11 haunts contemporary national rhetorics, I explore the call to "look elsewhere" as an alternative optics on the war on terror. The point I want to make is that it is less a matter of where we look than how we look. If looking elsewhere is an appropriate political project for critical interrogations of the war on terror (which I believe it is), then how to do this in an ethical manner that avoids re-spectacularizing the Other?[2] In particular, I engage with Butler’s exploration of grief as a political tool to connect people across transnational spaces in order to counter nationalist ideologies of victimization and denial.[3] In taking up this demand to expand the recognition of whose lives are grievable, I examine the ethical challenges of witnessing militarized suffering for American viewers. By ethical witnessing, I refer to the process of critically engaging with the complexities of representing social violence, including the ways in which the viewer is implicated in those complexities. This essay develops a critical methodology for looking elsewhere that includes engagement with the competing demands of citizenship that emerge from visual sites whose affective power draws the viewer into spaces of grief and mourning. I consider both formal elements within photographs as well as the dynamics between viewer and image in order to argue that an ethical gaze can only occur through, not despite, the encounter with spectacles of violence and suffering.

"Looking Elsewhere" and Ethical Spectatorship

<6> In fields ranging from Holocaust Studies to Trauma Studies and Human Rights, scholars theorize witnessing as acts of exposure, that is, practices that make violence and trauma visible with the aim of individual and societal transformation. Often reliant on psychoanalytical practices and theories, scholars and activists have understood witnessing as, always, a political act that negotiates between individual experience and social interactions. Or, as Irene Kacandes writes, witnessing "refers both to the interpersonal activity required to allow the story of the trauma to come into being and to the effect of trauma on the societies in which they occur" (2001, 95-96; see also LaCapra 2001). By narrating one’s experience, on the one hand, and by listening, looking, attempting to know/comprehend something about that suffering, witnesses turn experiences of violence into social acts of shared knowledge.[4] The question is, who witnesses and for what purposes? How, for instance, can Americans witness military conflict across transnational distances when citizenship implicates viewers in those acts of violence and trauma? Moreover, how to reconcile recognition of complicity with agendas critical of nation-state policies?

<7> In addition to testimonial forms of witnessing whose intent is to expose acts of violence, visuality routinely calls upon viewers to witness national policies and in so doing, to endorse those policies. As Rentschler notes, "when militaries hail us as witnesses to their actions in war, are they not also telling us to support their actions" (2004, 302). Progressive media critics like Noam Chomsky and Robert McChesney, for instance, consistently call attention to the interconnections between the media and U.S. military policies. Lisa Parks similarly urges scholars and viewers to recognize visual culture as key to witnessing U.S. militarization. "In an age of technologized vision one of the most important functions of the witness is to demilitarize military perspectives – that is, to open the satellite image (and other forms of image data and intelligence) to a range of critical practices and uses" (2005, 83). Visual representations of both spectacular moments and more routine U.S. military practices provide important spaces for critical dissent. Such critiques, though, risk presuming an outsider status for the witness, ignoring how viewers and critics are also complicit with that militarized gaze through social positionings of citizenship, as well as gender, race, and other forms of identity. Equally significant, neither witnessing for the state nor in opposition to it is stable, as became evident with the Abu Ghraib photographs that, through their publication to unintended audiences, became (equivocal) tools of witnessing against the U.S. war on terror.[5]

<8> Concerned with the ambivalences of visual witnessing, I use the term, "ethical spectatorship," a term used by Ariella Azoulay (2008) to address the ethical demands that photographs of state violence make on spectators. Here, I further inflect this term with a feminist critique of spectatorship that addresses the camera’s gaze as a mechanism of objectification, voyeurism and spectacle. In other words, I want to trouble the desire to find visual practices of looking elsewhere that somehow could avoid voyeurism or spectacle. Ethical spectatorship comes into sharp relief in war and human rights photography as these genres rely on conventions of suffering to focus attention on conflict zones. Recognizable markers of identity such as race and gender prevalent in news coverage of military conflicts typically mobilize sympathy for some while exposing often-threatening differences. As Judith Butler (2004) argues, who becomes visible can tell us a great deal about how visual cultures articulate the boundaries of "who gets to be human."

<9> In assessing the act of looking elsewhere as an alternative optics for witnessing 9/11, visual analyses of photographs from the war on terror reveal tensions between affect and spectacle that both enable and constrain such viewing practices. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, for instance, most U.S. news media reported without skepticism or fact checking on the Bush administration’s claims of a connection between the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction and the national security threat to the United States. In so doing, the media reinforced American anxieties about terrorism by "working upon the senses" to keep alive 9/11 fears (Butler 2010). Moreover, both the media and politicians prominently referred to human rights violations to secure the narrative connections between 9/11 and the war on terror. Namely, the Bush administration repeatedly emphasized Saddam Hussein’s vicious cruelty towards his own people as evidence of a human rights crisis; as with Afghanistan, attention to actual human rights violations served as one more justification for military interventions (see e.g. Hesford and Kozol 2005; and Hunt and Rygiel 2006).

Figure 1. Iraqi women walk next to plastic bags containing remains of bodies pulled from a mass grave in Mahaweel, 60 miles south of Baghdad, central Iraq, Thursday, May 15, 2003. Villagers dug up the remains of more than 3,000 people they suspect were killed during the 1991 Shiite revolt against Saddam Hussein's regime. Uncounted bodies remained unearthed at the site. By every indication, the mass grave in Mahaweel is the largest found in Iraq since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam and his Baath Party government last month. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko

<10> Once American troops had some control over parts of Iraq in the spring of 2003, one story that gained prominence reported on the unearthing of a mass grave left by the brutal Hussein reign in Mahaweel, 60 miles south of Baghdad.[6] In a series of photographs by AP photographer Alexander Zemlianichenko, women in black chadors and men dressed in white walk among rows of wrapped bodies, some bending over to look for marks of identification (Figure 1). Significantly, the Iraqis lack subjectivity for their faces are not visible nor are they identified in the caption. Moreover, the bleakness of the desolate landscape and the seemingly endless rows of bodies hauntingly signify the enormity of violence and suffering for Iraqis. In Figure 2, the shovel marks of a ditch digger appear in the foreground while several women in chadors stand on a hill in the background. The distance between the foreground and the women creates a gaping silence around unknowable acts of torture, suffering, and death. Zemlianichenko’s stark composition with its emblematic figures produces a powerful "elegy of suffering" (Reinhardt 2007) in which the women appear as symbolic representatives of the nation in mourning. The shovel marks reference the act of uncovering evidence and with it the promise of knowledge about the atrocities. And yet, the indeterminate nature of the white object as "evidence" in the empty gravesite in the extreme foreground along with the violent marks left from digging up the earth tauntingly visualize the elusiveness of that historical knowledge.

Figure 2. Iraqi women walk passing plastic bags containing remains of bodies pulled from a mass grave in Mahaweel, 60 miles south of Baghdad, central Iraq, Thursday, May 15, 2003. Villagers dug up the remains of more than 3,000 people they suspect were killed during the 1991 Shiite revolt against Saddam Hussein's regime. Uncounted bodies remained unearthed at the site. By every indication, the mass grave in Mahaweel is the largest found in Iraq since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam and his Baath Party government last month. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko

<11> Human rights, a discourse that emerged in a dialogic relationship to genocides and other cataclysmic violence of the 20th century, has been a highly significant arena for "looking elsewhere." Far from being an independent set of practices, however, human rights activism frequently remains deeply imbricated in nation-state politics. In the realm of media representations intended to promote human rights agendas, photographs of women and children in war zones have produced a gaze of distant suffering designed to foster concern among first world viewers (Boltanski 1999; see also Cohen and Seu 2002; Grewal 2005; Kozol 2004). Rendering some victims visible makes political distinctions about whose suffering matters while the context of production and circulation further shapes the affective reception of these images (Butler 2004, 2010). The Mahaweel pictures, as with photojournalism more broadly, rely for their cultural authority on the presumption that visualizing atrocities transparently exposes the tyranny of Hussein’s rule. In so doing, visual rhetorics of objectivity complicitly hail the citizen-witness into support of the war on terror by locating this moment of Iraqi national mourning within the American rescue narrative. Produced shortly after the U.S. had declared victory, Zemlianichenko’s elegiac photographs mobilize emotional responses to human rights violations that supported the Bush administration’s focus on the Hussein’s vicious regime, a focus used to legitimize claims for the retributive actions of the U.S. war on terror. Moreover, claims of liberation, as many critics have pointed out, elide the historical complexities shaping these traumas that include American support of Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, even after information emerged of the gassing of 5,000 people in the town of Halabjah. [7]

<12> By encouraging reporters to publicize the unearthing of mass graves, the U.S. military clearly recognized the value of visualizing the remains of the dead. Here, affect trumps the ambiguities of historical evidence since the specter of a tyrannical regime hovers referentially in the background without offering a critical perspective on that history. Rather than transparent evidence of suffering, Zemlianichenko’s images of Iraqis mourning their dead from the period of the Ba’athist rule locate Iraqis as innocents who suffered at the hands of the oppressive Arab regimes. In this way, the "visual event" (Bal 2007) produces a gendered and racialized depiction of Iraqi women as both victims of oppression and representatives of the nation, a representational strategy that presumes an intimate political fellowship based on a narrative of American rescue. As compelling as such images are, they also reinforce foundational claims of 9/11 discourse, namely, Orientalist assumptions about Arab extremism as well as the oppression of Muslim women by patriarchy, religion and/or the state.

<13> We should, though, be cautious about too readily dismissing Zemlianichenko’s photographs for their complicity with U.S. war rhetoric. As much as the images work within the logics of the Bush administration’s war on terror, that logic cannot foreclose the potential for affective responses to visualizations of suffering that speak to, about, and beyond this hegemonic narrative. As Nicholas Mirzoeff (2006) argues, witnessing can and does produce ambivalent visual subjectivities. The public spectacle of mourning at Mahaweel, in other words, encourages the viewer to witness the aftermath of mass torture and death both within and beyond the imperial logic structuring U.S. militarism. The excess of meaning pushes against the constraining logics of the Occupation to produce unpredictable affects for viewers.[8] Interestingly, positioning the women in the distant background in Figure 2 reinforces their otherness to the viewer who is decidedly not called upon to identify with them for there are no individual faces with whom to care or grieve.[9] These women’s grief remains "over there" in ways that resonate with Dominick LaCapra’s (2001) powerful caution about forms of empathy that too readily appropriate another’s pain. If grief is to become a useful political tool, we also need to recognize the value in acknowledging the limits of what we can know of another’s pain.

<14> Ethical spectatorship provides an analytical framework through which to recognize the mediated processes of witnessing another’s grief. In Zemlianichenko’s pictures, viewers confront the politics of gazing at grief, suffering, and loss, finding there not ready-made understandings but a complex mixing of ethical gazes and spectacles of suffering that structure visual witnessing. Perhaps the most profound challenge of the Mahaweel’s pictures is that while grief is readily recognizable, little in the images or captions encourages the viewer to interrogate U.S. foreign policies or the state’s historical relationship with the Hussein regime. Thus, a critical reading would more probably come from an already-established political perspective on the part of the viewer, rather than from the work of the trauma image itself. While I, like many others, might find these pictures emotionally moving, such responses risk merely confirming political positions on the war on terror. I point this out in order to return to the question of citizenship and ethical spectatorship. If "looking elsewhere" is a political and social imperative through which to understand the historical complicities of US foreign policies, and in so doing resist the victimization narrative that drives so much of the 9/11 discourse, what visual strategies work effectively to represent the humanness of suffering? "Looking Elsewhere" for History

<15> Numerous commentators have critiqued the ahistorical nature of conventional war photography, instead calling for visual strategies that represent the historical specificities that produce suffering (see e.g. Kozol 2004; Reinhardt et al. 2007). Yet, perhaps we unwittingly place too much faith in the foundational nature of the historical gaze if we don’t also consider how the history of representation itself participates in knowledge production about violence and suffering. Just as testimonies are guided by narrative structures formed in specific historical contexts, so too ways of looking at conflict zones derive as much from demands of the genre as from local, regional, and global factors. In other words, along with recognition of the gaze as historically located rather than transcendent or omniscient, we need to consider how sedimented histories of representation shape contemporary ways of looking at war. Photographer Luc Delahaye’s recent work provides an opportunity to address this concern as he configures the question of historical narration as an issue of visuality. How, he asks, is history produced as a visual field? And, in what ways does that enable us to understand the relationship between affect and spectacle in representations of conflict zones?

<16> From 1994 to 2001, Delahaye worked as a photojournalist with Magnum and Newsweek, with a concentration on war reportage. In 2001, Delahaye began depicting contemporary wars and other global events through large-scale (usually 8 x 4 feet) color photographs designed for gallery and museum exhibition rather than news media circulation. Recalling the grand scale of 18th and 19th century European landscape and history paintings, these sharply detailed photographs taken from large and medium format cameras explore history as a question of representation (Fried 2006). Whether close-ups or panoramic landscapes, the monumentality of the almost life-size images, like the subjects they feature, reference canonical strategies in photography to foreground the interconnections between representation, reportage and historical narrative. As a critical engagement with traditions in photojournalism, these photographs exposes key issues at stake in looking elsewhere for contemporary viewers of global events.

Figure 3. US Bombing on Taliban Positions C-print 238,6 cm x 112,2 cm (94" x 44" 1/3) © Luc Delahaye / Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

<17> "US Bombing Taliban Locations in Afghanistan" (Figure 3) depicts an arid, uncultivated field with a few houses in the background. A large puffy cloud of dark smoke rises in the center of this negative pastoral, with several more in the distance. Otherwise, no visible signs of war’s destructiveness mark this landscape devoid of people or geographical referents. The caption alone provides temporal and geographical information about this scene. Delahaye thus implicates viewers in the construction of this historical narrative by calling upon their knowledge of events since there are no signs of bodily trauma or physical destruction or other familiar markers of war. History is both present and elusive in this empty pastoral whose only hint of war’s devastation are the dark wispy clouds. In this way, the photograph addresses the problematics of photojournalism through a deliberate refusal to engage with the spectacle of the news media’s coverage of war that so frequently moves in close in order to show destruction, blood, wounds, and dead bodies.

<18> Delahaye foregrounds the grand, even grandiose, concept of history to ask a number of questions. What does history mean? Is it in the magnitude of the events captured? Or do the details that are captured in the periphery tell the "real" story? But, what story? Here, it is helpful to consider what Martin Jay refers to as the "extraordinarily vexed term" of mimesis (1998, 122). Philippe Lacou-Labarthe, for instance, argues that mimesis is not merely duplication or imitation but "a kind of endless oscillation between proximity and distance" (quoted in Jay 1998, 129). Lacou-Labarthe’s use of spatial metaphors calls attention to the movement between the pull of the "real" as that which is recognizable and familiar, and the push away, that feeling of gaining insight or perspective from being removed or at a distance from the scene. This oscillation or push/pull effect in turn produces a destabilizing caesura. In other words, as Jay explains, "the caesura in the work is thus mimetic representation itself, the space between the original and its duplicate, the hiatus rather than either pole" (1998, 129). Mimesis, in this formulation, is not some kind of false imitation of the real but an affective space that engages with that which cannot be recovered. In Delahaye’s work, the "real" of this picture tells us little without the caption, which puts an almost impossible burden of explication onto these anchoring words. Clarity and detail depict a scene seemingly at odds with the caption to produce the caesura in which the absence of war’s destructiveness in this image calls attention to representation itself. Looking elsewhere does not, here at least, deliver an information-based narrative about Afghans, the Taliban, or the war against al-Qaeda. Such a refusal instead pointedly addresses the genre of war photography and the promise of visual knowledge.

<19> Significantly, grief is not the affect mobilized in this picture or in much of Delahaye’s recent work. Monumentality, through scale, framing, and historical references to European painting conventions, along with the lack of iconic scenes of war such as that of innocent mother and child (Kozol 2004), insistently reject these affective strategies. Instead, the desolate landscape with its inscrutable details produces the caesura between the proximate space of a seemingly readable landscape and the distancing push of not knowing what has happened there. This oscillation compels viewers into an active engagement with their own historical knowledge and expectations.

<20> The absence of a narrative center encourages a contemplative gaze in both the panoramic landscapes and the close-ups. Yet, movement between generic familiarity and unsettling absences produces the mimetic caesura that makes such contemplation uncomfortable as there is no one place or idea upon which to settle the gaze. For instance, Delahaye’s photograph of a dead Taliban fighter in a trench, a large-scale close-up taken slightly above the body, brings the viewer into an intimate viewing space with the war dead (Figure 4). In the center of the composition, a dead soldier lies sprawled horizontally across the field of view. The clarity of detail in the area surrounding the body competes for dominance with the main figure (Fried 2006). The camera gives equal attention to the dead leaves and dirt that lie next to the dead soldier as to the corpse and his fatal wound. Footprints of boots around the body call attention to the absence of shoes on the dead soldier who wears only socks. No visual evidence explains who took his boots and whether this occurred before or after he died. While the soldier wears a vest holding his ammunition, he does not wear a uniform or other military signs recognizable to most western viewers. The dead Afghan soldier is isolated and ironically decontextualized even though the title locates him in time, space, and history. No one appears to mourn for this body that does not even convey pain.

Figure 4. Taliban C-print 237 cm x 111 cm (93" 1/3 x 43" 2/3) © Luc Delahaye / Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

<21> While the photograph of the Taliban fighter would seem to comply with news media’s interest in the spectacle of death, the "realness" of the dead solder jostles with visual quotations from the genre of war photography. In particular, this image references 19th-century war photographs such as Roger Fenton’s photographs from the Crimean War and Alexander Gardner’s Civil War pictures of dead soldiers. 19th-century photographers concentrated on the aftermath of battle as a result of both technological constraints and a vision of war derived from history painting (Nudelman 2004). For viewers familiar with 20th-century war photography, pictures of war dead such as George Strock’s famous 1943 photograph of dead soldiers on Buna Beach (the first picture of dead U.S. soldiers to be published by the American news media during WWII) also resonate in this picture. Visual quotations in "Taliban" foreground the act of representation while the sharp clarity of the image confronts the impulse to turn away from this depiction of a violent death. Rather than gaze at grief or other affective signifiers of suffering, Delahaye’s concern is with representation as an act of history making, a concern that takes on the ontological claims of photojournalism. "One of the reasons photography can communicate the effect of the witness so powerfully is its aura of ontological authenticity, and our willingness to take the photograph as more than a representation, as an actual trace of the experienced world" (Vogler 2003, 190). Delahaye draws on that ontological authenticity – through the clarity and monumentality of the image – mimetically creating an image of the "real" through which the frisson of representation addresses the viewer.

<22> If media attention to war today focuses extensively on spectacles of violence, Delahaye insistently "looks elsewhere" in his representations of war. In emphasizing details as a means of visualizing war’s unspectacular aspects, Delahaye’s representation of the "real" troubles the relationships between image, narrative, and history. As James Polchin notes, "Normalisation occurs when we stabilise the complexities of the photographs by reducing them to simple documents of historical realities. If we are to avoid normalising...images [of violent death], then we need to resist this slippage between reality and image, between experience and representation" (2007, 217). The focus on details and a refusal of spectacle in "History" resists the normalization of war photography, instead encouraging a form of ethical spectatorship that confronts media-generated expectations for spectacles of suffering.

<23> Delahaye’s recent photography stages an ethical hermeneutic that problematizes the turn to suffering central to Butler’s (2004) call for witnessing grief. Without underestimating the potential for political dialogue that can result from recognizing another’s grief, the photographer’s insistence on examining the sedimented histories of representation importantly calls attention to both the possibilities and constraints structuring transnational acts of witnessing. While Butler crucially calls attention to the social location of the witness and the urgent necessity of expanding recognition of whose lives are grievable, Delahaye reminds us that looking at grief is itself located within and through representational histories.

<24> It is noteworthy, though, that the distancing perspective that so clearly displays the periphery in Delahaye’s work does not depict any of the myriad casual factors generating military violence between nation-states and between states and their populations. If "Taliban" compels viewers to recognize the ways in which war is always mediated through representational histories, historical knowledge about the military conflicts nonetheless remains elusive. For instance, in "Jenin Refugee Camp," a road in the foreground leads the eye into the cityscape in the middle ground, much like 19th-century landscape paintings that use this compositional strategy to invite the viewer into the space. Here, the viewer gazes not at an idyllic scene but at the rubble of a destroyed house with small unidentifiable figures in the middle ground. Reminiscent of postcard views, a conventional cityscape appears in the background past the destruction in Jenin. Despite the powerful emotive impact of this dual cityscape, however, the photograph provides little visual information about either Palestinian resistance or military practices of the Israeli state. The risk in Delahaye’s efforts to interrogate the visual field of history is the potential erasure of local, regional, and global specificities that have produced these violent conflicts. If Zemlianichenko’s photographs of Mahaweel provoke a form of identification with suffering that falls too readily into nationalist claims about the war on terror, Delahaye’s images drift in the different direction, that is, towards a visual construction of history that risks displacing the historical specificities of actual wars. The point, though, is not that one strategy works better than another but that "the complexities of photographic representation and historical witnessing challenge our assumptions about what an image can actually tell us" (Polchin 2007, 209). Looking Elsewhere at 9/11

<25> Media saturation of 9/11 makes it tempting to dismiss this visual archive as complicit with nationalist attempts to tether grief and fear to the war on terror. Yet, too much gets lost or evaded in such a dismissal, including the recognition that 9/11 is itself a kind of caesura that simultaneously breaks and also hinges the background and foreground of much contemporary cultural production. As we saw with both Zemlianichenko’s and Delahaye’s photographs, calls for witnessing grief and other visual strategies designed to draw attention to conflict zones must, as the examples above demonstrate, recognize the ways in which "looking elsewhere" is structured around powerfully ambivalent historical practices of spectatorship.

<26> In that regard, looking itself cannot be isolated from the social location of the viewer. In other words, I cannot simply gaze at this most recent moment of U.S. imperialism and condemn it without also recognizing the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, class, and especially national identity implicate me in those actions. Moreover, I cannot simply choose to distance myself from the privileges of citizenship that structure how I look at sites of violence and suffering. Engaging in efforts to attend to others’ grief, looking elsewhere must also address the viewer’s own historical positionings and investments, including that of the citizen-viewer. Otherwise, we risk the benevolent paternalism that has long pervaded "sympathetic" gazes at Third World violence and suffering (cf. Grewal 2005; Hesford and Kozol 2005).

<27> Recognition of historically sedimented gazes in turn raises the vexing question of efficacy, an issue at the heart of critical methodologies aimed at deconstructing the tenets of objectivity. As Reinhardt (2007) asks, while images of suffering can prompt deep reflection, can they mobilize action? This, too, shapes Robert Hariman and John Lucaites’ (2008) discussion of how iconic photographs like Nick Ut’s Accidental Napalm and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother participate in, even constitute, the terrain of political discourse that in turn encourages forms of visual democracy. Other scholars of contemporary global visual culture have turned to sites of transnational connectivities that can potentially rupture the hegemony of U.S. empire and produce alternative ways of seeing and knowing. Susan Buck-Morss, for instance, points to global information networks as having the potential to transform political imaginations beyond hegemonic Western rhetorics of terrorism "in order to engage a global public that rejects both forms of violence, terrorist and counter-terrorist alike" (2003, 4).

<28> The urgency of such calls, however, is tempered by the recognition that the preponderance of visual images is regulated through mainstream media corporations and/or government controls. As Buck-Morss notes, "As there has been no free global debate, dominant ideas, even benevolent ones, exist in a social context of domination that affects their truth content irrefutably" (2003, 93). With the intensive media repression that began with Desert Storm and led into the system of embedded reporters in this recent war, what critical resources do viewers have? Are we different readers in the era of embedded journalists? Or do we just know less, and end up as passive viewers? While recognizing viewers’ limited resources to contest this powerful control over the flow of visual information, Mirzoeff (2006) calls upon viewers to be active agents demanding the right to "see" as a means of challenging empire and seeking social justice. If the media controls access to what we can see and know, this call for visual subjectivity insists that we consider the ways in which the "visual event" can foster ethical spectatorship.

<29> While we need to acknowledge the corporate and governmental structures limiting visual knowledge of global politics, I am not willing to dismiss visual culture as simply a voyeuristic spectacle or a tool of US global hegemony, although clearly it is often both of these. Looking elsewhere necessitates that we interrogate the production of ambivalent visual subjectivities in order to address both the urgency of looking at conflict zones and the racial, gender, and sexual politics of citizenship that shape those gazes. Turning back to the United States to consider further how the war on terror is shaped by 9/11 discourse, I want to conclude with the work of Nina Berman, a photojournalist who has most recently focused on the domestic impact of the policies of the post-9/11 national security state. Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq (2004) features disabled veterans who tell their stories with a searing honesty while the photographs use either head-on shots or low-angle shots in which subjects fill up the compositional space (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Purple Hearts, 2004. Nina Berman/NOOR

Berman’s project contains photographs of veterans coping with physical and psychological challenges while their testimonials offer conflicting insights into the war. Some soldiers articulate patriotic rhetorics about national security and 9/11 while others openly critique the Bush administration and the war on terror. Like the testimonials, the photographs pose questions about the social and personal impacts of militarism. Notably, the pictures all feature veterans in isolation, even when there is another person in the frame. This isolation certainly can be read as an indictment of problems in military health care but more deeply they ask viewers to recognize the loneliness with which amputees and other disabled veterans must confront their past and current situations. Compositional strategies of isolation, moreover, position the viewer as an outsider peering in at scenes of soldiers in hospital beds or alone in dark landscapes or interiors. In this project, Berman produces a form of ethical spectatorship through the tension between an intimate view of disability and a spectatorial gaze in which the viewer gazes at the painful emotional and physical lives of war veterans. Moreover, visual strategies that focus on veterans’ disabilities juxtapose with conventional ideals about gender and militarism. For instance, in one photograph a soldier in military fatigues displays a powerfully muscular upper body even as the focal point of the composition is on his amputated leg; in another image, a man lies despondent on a bed in front of a poster of a pinup girl in a bikini hanging on the wall behind. Competing ideological expectations in both visual and verbal testimonials in Purple Hearts create mimetic caesuras that confront normative expectations about gender, military service, and patriotism. In other words, "looking elsewhere" is a gaze that here troubles simplistic assumptions about soldiers’ investments in national claims of citizenship.[10]

<30> Rather than seek viewing practices that somehow resist neocolonial structures of power, the theoretical framework of ethical spectatorship exposes the ways in which visual witnessing is implicated in transnational processes based on gender, racial, sexual, class and national differences. Media and government control as well as the conditions that structure the politics of citizenship, including emotional investments, may or may not lead to action as well as confine, constrain and implicate viewers within the practices of militarism and global empire. In this regard, moments of mimetic caesura themselves always operate within as well as work against hegemonic logics. As scholars, critics, and artists grapple with the figuration of 9/11 and its ongoing affective power within contemporary American culture, the images analyzed here remind us that "looking elsewhere" for American viewers is bound up as much with complicity in U.S. imperial military agendas as it is in attempts to empathetically recover histories of other people’s suffering.

Endnotes

I would like to thank Rebecca DeCola with whom I first worked out the ideas about mourning, nationalism and citizenship in the Mahaweel photographs, and Meredith Raimondo who initially prompted me to consider Luc Delahaye’s work. I also thank Kara Thompson for inviting me to participate in this special issue and for her incisive understanding of ethical spectatorship. She, along with Meredith Raimondo, Sandy Zagarell, and Rachel Buff pushed me to think more deeply about the relationship between affect and spectatorship.

[1] See for example Bal (2007); Bennett (2005); Maclear (2003); and Reinhardt et al. (2007). A 2009 conference at the University of Toronto, "Feeling Photography" further exemplifies the growing interest in affect in this field.

[2] Without a doubt, there is an equally urgent need to bring an ethical gaze to bear on U.S. political spaces of suffering and grief, a topic beyond the scope of this essay but one that scholars and critics are exploring, for instance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

[3] Butler first articulated this argument in Precarious Life (2004) and developed it further in Frames of War (2010).

[4] See Kacandes (2001) who identifies six circuits of witnessing from survivor testimonies to historical witnessing. See also Kleinman, Das, and Lock (1997) who coined the term "social suffering."

[5] For important critiques of the circulation and reception of the Abu Ghraib photographs, see Mirzoeff (2006) and Puar (2005).

[6] See Kozol and DeCola (2005) for an initial analysis of the Mahaweel photographs.

[7] See Zelizer for a critique of American news photographs of Afghanistan that similarly supported U.S. war objectives. As she notes, "images were used in a way that showed less of the war itself and more of the assumptions about the war held by the forces responsible for its prosecution. U.S. journalism was thus complicit, if not consciously so, in using images in ways that upheld larger strategic aims" (2005, 34).

[8] For more on affect and especially theories of excess and unpredictability, see Massumi 2001.

[9] See Butler’s (2004, 131-135) discussion of Emmanuel Levinas’ theories about the face and her analysis of the connections between faces and subjectivity.

[10] In 2007, Berman won the World Press Photo competition for portraiture for "A Marine’s Wedding," that features the wedding picture of a severely disfigured veteran and his long-time fiancé. Operating within the genre of wedding portraiture, in Berman’s photograph the bride looks away in an expression that is at least solemn, if not pained, and the marine’s face is expressionless, due to his injuries. As with Purple Hearts, the bride’s lack of a smile and the soldier’s facial disfigurement alongside his proud stance in his uniform destabilize gender norms in ways that trouble conventional ideas about military service. Webblog commentaries offer a range of interpretations of the couple’s expressions that reveal viewers’ efforts to grapple with the image’s ambiguities.

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