linfield_why photo critics hate photography

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The Treacherous Medium

Why photography critics hate photographs

Susie Linfield

In his New York Times blog called "Zoom," filmmaker Errol Morris (Standard Operating

Procedure) has argued that photographs contain no truth valueno realityat all. In this

view, nothing real exists outside of language:

The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to

statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity "adheres" not to the photograph itself

but to the statements we make about a photograph All alone shorn of context,

without captions a photograph is neither true nor false For truth, properly

considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about

photographs and the world.

Yet the undeniable limitations of the photograph, especially its inability to reveal

relationships or explicate causes, don't negate its distinctive essence: unlike a painting

or a piece of writing, it is a document of the real. Sometimes a photograph baldly

proclaims; at others, it whispers. It may be hard for us to know what a photograph says,

but that does not mean it is silent; it may be hard for us to understand the full reality at

which a photograph hints, but that does not mean it is empty. The fact that we need to

go outside the frame to discover larger, deeper truths doesn't mean that what's inside

the frame is meaningless, useless, or not-there. As theorist Georges Didi-Huberman

writes in his book about four photographs from Auschwitz, "Images do not say the truth


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but are a fragment of it. . . . The image is neither nothing, nor one, nor all."SL

In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called What is the Good of Criticism?

This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some

have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didnt think

that criticism would save the world, but he didnt think it was a worthless pursuit, either.

For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism,

Baudelaire wrote, passion raises reason to new heights. A few years later, he

would explain that through criticism he sought to transform my pleasure into

knowledgea pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaires American

contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us to

love wisely what we before loved well.

By pleasure and love Baudelaire and Fuller didnt mean that critics should write only

about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a

critics emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of

criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critics choice of subject. Who can

doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literatureand that, to him, it simply mattered more

than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most

challenging, most meaningfulhell, most alivewhen she sat in a dark movie theater,

or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? For these critics and othersthose I

would consider at the center of the modern traditioncultivating this sense of lived

experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Randall Jarrell, certainly no anti-

intellectual, wrote that criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness. . . . All he


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has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such

responses. Alfred Kazin agreed; the critics skill, he argued, begins by noticing his

intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with

perception at the pitch of passion.

The great exception to all this is photography criticism. There, you will hear precious

little talk of love or passion or terrible nakedness. There, critics view emotional

responsesif they, or their readers, have anynot as something to be experienced

and understood but, rather, to be vigilantly guarded against: to these writers, criticism is

a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment. When we enter the world of photography

criticism we travel far from Baudelaires exploration of his pleasure; for there is little

pleasure to be had, and even that is condemned as voyeuristic, pornographic, or

exploitative. Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics havent

really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach

photographynot specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but

photography itselfwith suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into

what Kazin called a community of interest with their subject, these critics come armed

to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be

defanged rather than an experience to embrace.

Susan Sontags On Photographywas published in 1977, and it remains astonishingly

incisive. It has been, rightly, immensely influential on other photography critics. And

immensely influential, too, in setting the particularly reproachful tone of photography

criticism. Look, for instance, at Sontags description of photography in the first chapter


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of the book, which establishes a voice, an attitude, an approach that is maintained

throughout. Sontag describes photography as, among other things, grandiose,

treacherous, imperial, voyeuristic, predatory, addictive, reductive, and the

most irresistible form of mental pollution. A typical sentence reads, The camera

doesnt rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort,

exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinateall activities that, unlike the

sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.

Metaphor indeed! On Photographywas written by a brilliant skeptic.

So, too, was Roland Barthess Camera Lucida, first published in France in 1980.

Delicate and playful, this book is a love letter to the photograph. Barthes celebrates the

quirky, spontaneous reactions that photographs can inspireor at least the quirky,

spontaneous reactions they inspire in him: A photographs punctumis that accident

which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). Still, Camera Lucidais a very

odd valentine, for Barthes describes photographers as agents of Death and the

photograph as a catastrophe; also as flat, platitudinous, stupid, without culture,

andmost unkind undialectical. The photograph teaches me nothing, Barthes

insists: it completely de-realizes the world of human conflicts and desires.

Continuing this classic-modern tradition of photography criticism is John Berger, the

most urgent, morally cogent critic that photography has produced. My first interest in

photography was passionate, Berger has written (as a young man, he wanted to

compose a book of love poems illustrated with photos), and when you read him, you

believe him. Berger has frequently worked with photographs, producing, among other

works, four books with the Swiss documentarian Jean Mohr. More important, he has


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argued that photographs represent an opposition to history by affirming the subjective

experiences of ordinary people that modernity, science, and industrial capitalism have

done so much to crush: And so, hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images,

often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that

which historical time has no right to destroy.

And yet in Bergers canonical photography essays he took a decidedly dark view of the

practice. Photographs of political violence, he insisted, were at best useless and at

worst narcissistic, leading the viewer not to enlightenment, outrage, or revolution but

instead to a sense of his own personal moral inadequacy. (In Sontags last

book,Regarding the Pain of Others, she softened her stance toward photography, but

she too concluded that photographs of war do nothing to bridge the chasm between

victims and voyeurs: We dont get it. . . . Cant understand, cant imagine.) More

generally, Berger described the photographall photographsas a form of violence

and, drawing on a metaphor clearly derived from the atom bomb, as a fission whereby

appearances are separated by the camera from their function. Berger allowed that

photography is a god, but he called it the most cynical oneand one that, he

believed, made amnesiacs rather than critical thinkers of us all.

In the 1980s, the postmodern children of Sontag, Berger, and company transformed this

skepticism into outright antipathy. 1 Indeed, for the postmoderns, suspicion of the

photograph was an ethical stance, though I see it as closer to a pathological one. For

these critics, the photograph was simply a tool of late capitalism, exploiting its subject

and duping its viewer. Thus, Abigail Solomon-Godeau charged, the documentary photo

or what she grandly called the regime of the imagecommits a double act of
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subjugation in which the hapless subject is victimized first by social forces, then by the

photographer and viewer. John Tagg went further: photography, he wrote, is ultimately

a function of the state, deeply implicated in the ruling classs apparatus of ideological

control and its reproduction of . . . submissive labour power. (In an interview, Tagg

explained that he drew on the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault to formulate

his ideas, though it is not clear why these two theorists were the best guides to

understanding a photograph.) And it was not fashion or art photographers who incited

the wrath of these critics but, rather, socially conscious photojournalists, with their

foolish belief in such old-fashioned fictions as progress, truth, and justice. The liberal

documentary assuages any stirrings of conscience in its viewers the way scratching

relieves an itch, Martha Rosler scoffed in a seminal, oft-quoted piece. Documentary is

a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy.

Most important, these critics denied that a scintilla of autonomyfor either

photographer or viewerwas possible; denied, that is, that the photographer could ever

offer, or the viewer could ever find, even a moment of surprise, originality, or insight

through looking at a photograph. To think otherwise was to partake in a sham: The

wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection,

a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude, Victor Burgin

wrote. In the view of these critics, it was impossible to ever see the world anew, for the

gaze of both the photographer and his audience was predetermined, and irreparably

infected, by reactionary ideological forces beyond our control; in their scheme, we are

all simply helpless spiders caught in capitalisms web, which is spun, apparently, not of

silk but of iron. (As Berger would tartly note, Unlike their late master, some of Barthes


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structuralist followers love closed systems.) Indeed, Burgin condemned the actual

activity of lookingan odd stance, one would think, for a photography critic: Our

conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the

complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking, he insisted. In short,

these critics regarded the photograph as a prison and the gift of vision as a crime.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here might well have been the epigraph to their

books, which are no fun at all to read.

Compare all thisthis obsession with victimization and predetermination, this utter

refusal of freedom, this insistent morosenessto the opening pages of Pauline Kaels

essay Trash, Art, and the Movies, written in 1969. Kael, too, set a certain tone, both

for her readers and for numerous other critics. Here it is:

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often

goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can . . . make you care, make you

believe in possibilities again. . . . The movie doesnt have to be great; it can be stupid

and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy of just a

good line. An actors scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone

tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

Kael continued, Because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we

have, these reactionsthat is, the reactions of the moviegoer sitting in front of the

screencan seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.

Trash, Art, and the Movies was written by a brilliant lover.

Kael had two great insights in this piece. One is that trash, far from blinding viewers to

art, actually prepared them for it; or, rather, that through understanding ones visceral


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enjoyment of trash, a viewer could begin to formulate her own, independent aesthetic

that could lead to an equally visceral enjoyment of art. Kaels second truth was that the

only capacious and intelligent way to experience movies was to combine ones deepest

emotional reactionswhich should never be disownedwith a probing analysis of

them. She did not, as some have mistakenly thought, champion unadulterated emotion

or unexamined fandom; on the contrary, she insisted that the viewer who approaches

movies in such unthinking ways does not respond more freely but less freely and less

fully than the person who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a movie,

who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his senses in reacting,

not just his emotional vulnerabilities. But this, after all, is the same insight that

Baudelaire had come to when he wrote of seeking the why of his pleasure; it was the

view of Randall Jarrell when he wrote that the good critic combines the sense of fact

with the personal truth; it was what Alfred Kazin meant when he wrote that the unity of

thinking and feeling actually exists in the passionate operation of the critics

intelligence. It is this quest for the synthesis of thought and feelingand the essentially

comradely, or at least open, approach to art that it impliesthat photography critics

reject. The question is: why?

Photography is a modern inventionone that, from its inception, inspired a host of

conflicts and anxieties. Indeed, when we talk about photography we are talking about

modernity; the doubts that photography inspires are the doubts that modernity inspires.

Photography is a proxy for modern life and its discontents.

What are some of these troubles? From the first, the essential nature of photography


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was puzzling. It tended to blur categorieswhich can be both exciting and unsettling.

Was photography a kind of art? of commerce? of journalism? of science? of

surveillance? Was it a form of creativity, a way of bringing newness into the world, or

was its relation to reality essentially mimetic or, even, that of a parasite?

One thing was clear early on: photography was, and perhaps still is, the great

democratic medium. Baudelaire, who launched his famous diatribe against photography

in 1859, hated the new form for many reasons, one of which was certainly its populist

character. In these deplorable times, Baudelaire warned, a new industry has

developed, one supported by what he called the stupidity of the masses. Like an Old

Testament prophet, he railed,

An avenging God has heard the prayer of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.

Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the

metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-

worshippers.2

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that every butcher, baker, and candlestick

makerat least in developed countries such as England, Germany, France and the

United Stateswould be able to purchase photographic reproductions. But with the

introduction of lighter, cheaper cameras, which began in the late 19th century and

continued throughout the 20th, it became clear that the butcher and baker could not

only purchase photos but could make them, too. Even more startling: they could

makegoodphotos. This is one of several things that sets photography apart from the

other arts. Most people, after all, cant paint a wonderful painting or compose a

wonderful poem or write a wonderful play. But lots of ordinary peoplewith no training,


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no experience, no education, no knowledgehave taken wonderful photos: better,

sometimes, than those of the great artists. Yet this, tooand the leveling tendencies it

impliesis troubling. (This is what Sontag meant, I think, when she wrote of the

disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken.) For where such

egalitarianism dwells, can the razing of all distinctions be far behind? Who can admire

an activitymuch less an artthat so many people can do so damn well?

Photographys democratic promise has always been photographys populist threat.

Then, too, photography stirs up our anxieties about our love-hate relationship to

technology. Unlike painting, writing, dancing, music making, and storytelling,

photography began not thousands of years ago with innocent, primitive man but less

than 200 years ago with compromised, modern man; and unlike those other arts, it is

dependent on a machine. It is, therefore, an impure and highly contingent art, and we

have approached it with that trepidatious mixture of expectation and distrust, of glorious

hope and tremendous gloom, with which we approach the machine age itself.

Yet beyond all this, there is something else at the heart of photography criticisms

peculiarities. Most photography criticsSontag, Berger, Barthes, and certainly the

postmodernswere heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School critics: especially

Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, who was

Benjamins friend and comrade. In fact, none of these men wrote mainly about

photography, but what they did write has been treated with biblical respectand

undergone hermeneutical scrutinyby late-20th-century critics.

It would be false to say that Benjamin and Kraucauer hated photographs. On the

contrary: as great dialecticians, they (and especially Benjamin) believed the photograph


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held out liberating, indeed revolutionary, possibilities. In his now enormously influential

essay Little History of Photography, originally published in 1931, Benjamin argued that

photography had created a new way of seeing and would enable people to achieve

control over works of art. Several years later he wrote of the ways that film and

photography contributed to the smashing of tradition: Mechanical reproduction

emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . Instead of

being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practicepolitics.

Equally important, Benjamin understood the subjective power of the photograph, its

spooky ability to make us want to enter into the world and even, sometimes, change it.

For Benjamin, the photo wasnt a dead thing; on the contrary, it could embrace not just

the past but the future. Looking at one photographa 19th-century portrait of a man

and his fiance (she would later commit suicide)he mused:

Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent

opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical

value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. . . . The beholder feels an

irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here

and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the

inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future

nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.

At the same time, these critics were highly suspicious of photography and the passive,

aestheticized society they feared it would help create. Benjamin wrote that mass events

including monster [political] rallies, . . . sports events, and . . . war were all

intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and


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photography. He believed that photography was a form of mystification, for it can

endow any soup candid he foresee the age of Warhol?with cosmic significance but

cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists. And he charged

somewhat bizarrelythat with the rise of photography a new reality unfolds, in the

face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions. (Instead, One

appeals to the lens.) Both he and Kracauer regarded the photograph as a kind of

diminution: The photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted

from him or her, Kracauer wrote. The photograph annihilates the person. And while

many artists and journalists working in Weimar Berlins cacophonous, newly

uncensored pressnotable for its plethora of heavily illustrated publicationsviewed

the photograph as a harbinger of modernity, Kracauer was decidedly unimpressed. The

flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory, he charged. Never before has a

period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of

illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against

understanding. . . . The image-idea drives away the idea.

Most of all, though, I believe it is Brecht whose shadow hangs over photography

criticism. Brecht, its fair to say, really did dislike photographs, or at best deeply distrust

them; in 1931 he described them as a terrible weapon against the truth. In Little

History, Benjamin quotes Brecht: Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality

reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEGthe

massive German armaments and electric companies, respectivelytells us next to

nothing about these institutions. 3

These two sentences have been quoted ad infinitum and launched a million Ph.D.


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theses. And on one level, there is no doubt that Brecht was right. Photographs dont

explain the way the world works; they dont offer reasons or causes; they dont tell us

stories with a coherent, or even discernible, beginning, middle, and end. Photographs

live on the surface: they cant burrow within to reveal the inner dynamics of historic

events. And though its true that photographs document the specific, they tend, also, to

blurdangerously blurpolitical and historic distinctions: a photograph of a bombed-

out apartment building in Berlin, circa 1945, looks much like a photograph of a bombed-

out apartment building in Hanoi, circa 1969, which looks awfully similar to a photograph

of a bombed-out apartment building in Baghdad from last week. Yet only a vulgar

reductionistor a complete pacifistwould say that these three cities, which is to say

these three wars, are fundamentally the same cities or the same wars. Still, the photos

lookthe same: theres a very real sense in which if youve seen one bombed-out

building you have indeed seen them all. (War is a horrible repetition, Martha Gellhorn

wrote, and this is even truer of photographs than of words.) It is this anti-explanatory,

anti-analytic quality of the photographwhat Barthes called its stupiditythat critics

have seized on with a vengeance and that they cannot, apparently, forgive.

But the problem with photographs is not only that they fail to explain the world. A greater

problem, for Brecht and his followers, is what photographs succeedin doing, which is to

offer an immediate, emotional connection to the world. People dont look at photographs

to understand the inner contradictions of monopoly capitalism or the reasons for the

genocide in Rwanda. Theyweturn to photographs for other things: for a glimpse of

what cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or suffering, or love, or disease, or natural

wonder, or artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like. And we turn to


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photographs, also, to find out what our intuitive reactions to such otherness might be.

(This curiosity is not, as the postmoderns have charged, an expression of imperialism,

racism, or orientalism: the peasant in Kenya and the worker in Cairo are as

fascinatedif not more soby a picture of New Yorkers as we are by an image of

them.) None of us is a creature solely of feeling, and yet there is no doubt that we

approach photographs, first and foremost, on an emotional level.

For Brecht, of course, this was the worst possible approach to anything. Brechts entire

oeuvre is an assault not just on sentimentality but on sentiment itself; indeed, for Brecht,

the two were synonymous. Brecht regarded all feelingany feelingas dishonest and

dangerous; he associated emotion with the chaos and irrationality of capitalism. As

George Grosz once remarked, Brecht clearly would have wanted a sensitive electric

computer instead of a heart. And George Grosz was a friend.

There is much that is bracing, and revelatory, and so wonderfully challenging about

Brechts emotional astringency. Who can not admire a man who, in one of his very first

poems, announces to the women in his life, Here you have someone on whom you

cant rely. What is often forgotten, however, is that Brechtlike Moseswas a

particular man who lived in a particular time and place and who observed particular

things. Brechts time and place was Weimar Germany, and he sawcorrectlythat his

compatriots were drowning in a toxic bath of unexamined emotion: of rage over their

defeat in World War I, of ressentimentagainst Jews and intellectuals and others, of self-

pity, of bathos, of fear. Brecht sawcorrectlythat this poisonous mix of increasingly

hysterical feeling, and the voodoo conspiracy theories to which it lent itself, was the

perfect incubator for fascism.


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Like Brecht, we live in dark times, which is to say times of confusion, violence, and

injustice. And yet there are real differences between our darkness and Brechts. We do

notunlike Brechtlive in a society that is the precursor, much less the architect, of

Treblinka and Sobibor. Brechts relentless war on emotion was ethically, politically, and

artistically necessary for him, but it has been taken up in an all too uncritical way by

Anglo-American photography critics working in very different times and places and

facing a very different set of challenges.

And while Brecht feared, and fought against, what he saw as the thoughtless, Pavlovian

responses of the audience, I suspect that the postmoderns are motivated by a different

anxiety. That is, they worry not so much about the obedient, automatic reactions of the

viewer but about her disobedient, politically incorrect ones. 4 This strange, confounding

ability of photographs to make us feel things that we do not think we should was brought

home to me recently as I perused a book of photos, taken by photojournalists from

many nations, called Witness Iraq: A War Journal FebruaryApril 20003.5

One image in the book, reproduced in color as a double-page spread, shows six women

in a cemetery outside Baghdad. (Cemeteries in Baghdad are busy places; in the

background of this photo we see two fresh, unfilled graves and the scaffolding for an

unfinished structure.) The women are gathered around a wood coffin that is adorned

with Arabic writing on two sides. Five of the women face each other and seem to be in

conversation; one rests her open palm on the coffin as her other hand cups her face.

The sixth woman, who is in the pictures foreground, turns away from the others and

toward the camera; her head tilts to the side, her arms are folded. All the women wear
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long black abayas; several have covered not only their heads and bodies but parts of

their faces too. The picture was taken by Jerome Delay, a French war photographer for

the Associated Press, and the caption tells us, Relatives of Mohammed Jaber Hassan

weep over his coffin . . . Hassan, 22, died when a bomb fell on a busy market in

Baghdads Shula district, killing 52 and wounding scores. Because the picture is dated

03/29/03, we know that the bomb was probably an American one, 6 and that it was

dropped on the civilian marketplace almost certainly by accidentwhich is not the same

as forgivably. (If the picture, and the bomb, were dated yesterday or today or tomorrow,

we would know that it was planted by members of the Baathist or Islamist insurgency,

and on purpose.)7

This is a portrait of deep sadness that merges into anguish; it is amazing how much

emotion partially hidden faces can convey. The woman in the foregroundwho is

clearly part of the group and yet seems isolated from ithas covered her eyes and

mouth; what we see is, mainly, her flat nose and her plump, deeply creased cheek. But

what an eloquent crease! Something in it speaks of deepest pain. It is as if the

accumulated experience of a lifetimea universe of sorrowhas been compressed into

that one carved line. The crease howls.

That universe of sorrow is, in all likelihood, a wide one, and did not originate in the

premature death of Mohammed Jaber Hassan. It is probable that the lives of these

women, all of whom look middle-aged, have not been good; probable that they suffered

through the brutal years of Saddam, the IranIraq War, the first Gulf War and the

ensuing, immiserating sanctions; that they have suffered at the hands of the Americans,

and perhaps at the hands of their own fathers and husbands too; 8 that they are
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suffering, right now, through the increasingly sadistic sectarian-political-criminal violence

sweeping Iraq. I cannot pretend to approach, much less share, the depth and the

number of these sorrows, and I cannot pretend that, as an American, I am not deeply

implicated in crucial parts of this pain.

And yet, and yet: looking at Delays picture, that universe of pain did not encompass

me, or pull me in; the photo created no bond between me and the Iraqi women. I did not

feel empathy, or sympathy, or guilt, though I wished I could and thought I should.

Instead I felt impatience, and even disgust: rather than embracing these women, I

wanted to shake them. We have seen, and we will continue to see, countless pictures of

women in black abayas (or chadors, or burkas) wailing over their sonsand often, also,

celebrating them as martyrs. That wailing and that celebrating have persisted for a very

long time, and I am pretty sure they will continue long after the United States pulls out

its troops and grounds its planes. In fact, I doubt that such sorrows can even begin to

abate until the women in the cemetery take off their veils, and stop wailing and

mourning and celebrating, and enter into the modern world to begin making modern

politics. Such politics can be cognizant of, but cannot be founded on, mourning; they

cannot be made by people who dwell in shadows with their faces covered and their

ideas unformed; they cannot be created by those who live in what Michael Ignatieff has

called the dream time of vengeance.

I have felt a similar impatience and a similar revulsion looking at other photographs of

bottomless, impotent suffering, including some from the Holocaust. It is not a pretty

reactionand yet why should it be otherwise? Why should our relation to victimhood,

suffering, and loss, and to the histories of which they speak, be less thorny than our


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relation to anything else? In 1944, Hannah Arendt approached this question in a

provocative essay called The Jew as Pariah. She described, with obvious admiration,

the French author and political activist Bernard Lazare:

He demanded . . . that the pariah . . . come to grips with the world of men and women.

In other words, he wanted him to feel that he was himself responsible for what society

had done to him. . . . . However much the Jewish pariah might be, from the historical

viewpoint, the product of an unjust dispensation . . . politically speaking, every pariah

who refused to be a rebel was partly responsible for his own position and therewith for

the blot on mankind which it represented. From such shame there was no escape.

This was an unsparing view for Lazare to hold, and it was an unsparing thing for Arendt

to write, and it would be an unsparing thing to say to the grieving relatives of

Mohammed Jaber Hassan. But I am not sure it is any more harsh, or any less useful,

than empathy or sympathy or guilt.

It may be that the images that move us most nownot necessarily into empathy, but

into fresh thinkingare not those of pure grief. Perhaps, at this blood-soaked moment,

cemeteries can teach us little.9 There is another kind of picture that, while it surely

documents suffering, speaks also of the strange and jarring contradictions that mark so

many of todays violent conflicts. Two such pictures in Witness Iraqstruck me.

One was taken by Damir Sagolj, a Bosnian photographer who works for Reuters. It

shows a pudgy U.S. Marine. He wears wire eyeglasses, and goggles pushed onto his

forehead, and he sits outdoors on a patch of parched ground (we are not told the exact

location, only that it is in central Iraq); in the blurry background we see soldiers with


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machine guns. Our Marine seems unarmedthe caption tells us he is a doctorand

we see, placed neatly in his front vest, a pen, a toothbrush, and a pair of scissors. He

wears blue plastic gloves and looks down impassively into his lap, where he holds . . . a

small, dark-haired Iraqi girl cradled in his arms. She looks to be about four; she is

barefoot, and her naked little toes curl downward, as if her feet are clenching into fists.

She is dressed in what look like knit pajamas; they are pink, and one arm is stained with

blood. The girl looks straight ahead at her feetnot at the Marinebut one of her

hands grasps his chest. The bulkiness of the Marine seems to overwhelm and yet

protect her; she nestles almost perfectly within the enclosure of his arms.

What are we to make of this photo? It is a picture of contingent refuge in the midst of

violence; of dependence, but of the most unequal kind; of tremendous strength and

tremendous vulnerability; of two people who are neither enemies nor friends. Is the

Marine savior or villain? The soft pink of the girls outfit contrasts sharply with the

muddy, grayish-green color of the soldiers uniforms and the dry, unforgiving earth, and

thus echoes the jarring discordancies of the war itself. One could make up many stories

the Marines killed the girls family; the Marines protected the girls familybut who

knows what is true? And what of the future of the people in the photo? What has

happened to the girl, and to her family? Is the Marine dead or alive? A photograph, John

Berger wrote, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen, and this was never

truer than in this case. I almost gasped when I saw this picturenot in alarm, but in

surpriseand the more I have looked at it, the less I understand it. It is a mystery that

will not be solved.

Another weird and intriguing image, taken by the French AP photographer Jean-Marc


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Bouju, has been widely seen; it won the World Press Photo of the Year Award in 2003.

(Over 63,000 images were considered for the prize.) The combination of cruelty and

kindness that it depicts is discomfiting, almost creepy, and upends any ideas we might

have that the two can always be cleanly separated. Bouju traveled with the 101st

Airborne Division (so much for the charge that embedded journalists are merely

government propagandists), and he took this picture on March 31, 2003, in Najaf.

The photo shows an Iraqi man in what the caption identifies as a POW camp. He sits on

dusty ground behind massive coils of barbed wire (they are the first thing that we see).

The unnamed prisonerwho might be guilty of vicious murders, and might be

completely innocent, and might be somewhere in betweenwears a loose white shirt

and pants, and sandals. His head and face, like those of the women in the cemetery,

are hidden, though not voluntarily: his are covered by a pointy, shiny black hood, a

seemingly medieval artifact many of us now associate with the tortures of Abu Ghraib.

The mans head tilts forwardtoward his four-year-old son, who sits pressed up close

against him, held within his arms. The boy is dressed in a green shirt and pants, and is

barefoot; there is a pair of small sneakers nearby. The boys mouth is slightly openhe

looks stunned, and tiredand mucus drips from his nose; his face is dirty. The man, like

parents the world over, holds his sons forehead in one palm, as if calming him; his

other arm wraps around his sons body. Bouju has said that the boy was crying when

his father was arrested and so the American soldiers allowed the two to stay together,

then cut off the fathers plastic handcuffs so he could hold his child.

One can read this picture as a symbol of compassion (of the soldiers toward the

prisoner, of the father toward his son), and equally of its opposite; the dissonance is


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symbolized by the way the harsh, ugly inkiness of the black hood contrasts with the

softness of the boys face. The photo is simultaneously obscene (what is a four-year-old

doing behind barbed wire? and what can he make of his fathers monstrous hood?) and

immensely moving: the tenderness with which the father holds his boy in the midst of

what are obviously horrific circumstances shines through, and suggests that a fathers

love is stronger than barbed wire. But it would be a mistake to sentimentalize this photo:

it shows us one innocent, but not necessarily two.

These photos speak not just of the plight of children in wartime, though they depict that

too. But perhaps more important, they suggestthough do not explainthe strange

incongruities of the Iraq war, which cannot be summed up by phrases like U.S.

imperialism or war on terror. It is a war in which an army of liberation quickly became

an army of occupation, offering an unusual, catastrophic blend of negligence and

oppression; in which the overthrow of a dictator led to the unleashing of tremendous

violence against his already wounded people; in which a nation newly freed from

decades of brutal rule turned, furiously, inward, its lessons in sadism learned all too

well.

It is precisely because these photos are so confusingsuch utter failures at providing

answersthat they are so valuable: by refusing to tell us what to feel, and allowing us

to feel things we dont quite understand, they make us dig, and even think, a little

deeper. In approaching photos such as these, the point is not to formally disassemble

them in the hope of gaining mastery; nor to reject them as feeble, partial truths; nor to

deny the uncomfortable, unfamiliar reactions they elicit. Instead, we can usethe photos

ambiguities as a starting point of discovery, a tool with which to delve into the larger


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historic realities at which the images can only hint. By connecting these photographs to

the world outside their frames, they begin to live, to breathe, more fully; otherwise they

simply devolve into spectacles.

With changed circumstances should come changed approaches. The world we live in is

not Brechts, and photography critics today dont needto fear all emotion, as did Brecht;

they dont need to purge all emotion, as did Brecht; they dont need to spend such

ferocious energy distancing us from images. In doing so, they have made it easy for us

to deconstruct photographs but difficult to see them; they have made it difficult, that is,

to grasp what Berger called the therenessof the world. And though most photography

criticsor at least those I have been discussingidentify themselves with the left, this

detestation of the photograph is not a subversive or progressive or revolutionary stance,

but in fact aligns them with the forces of the most deplorable backwardness: aligns

them, for instance, with the frenzied crowds in Kabul and Karachi, Damascus and

Tehran, who called for the execution of the Danish cartoonists and promised what they

called a real holocaust. Here is where pre-modernism and postmodernism merge, for

those demonstrators, too, view images as an exploitation, an insult, a blasphemy: as an

act of subjugation indeed.

It is time, and it is possible, for photography critics to come out of the cold. They can join

the great critical tradition of Kael and Jarrell and Kazin, of James Agee and Arlene

Croce and so many others: not to drown in bathos or sentimentality, but to integrate

emotion into the experience of looking. They can use emotion as a starting point, an

inspiration, to analysis rather than maintain an eternal war between the two. They can,


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in short, allow themselves and their readers to come to the photograph as full human

beings: as men and women of heart and mind, of immediacy and history. Along with

Baudelaire, they can turn pleasureand its oppositeinto knowledge, and they can

even teach us, perhaps, how to love more wisely.

1 In the past several years, some curators and art historians, such as Michael Fried,

have devoted much attention to photography. However, they tend to be most enamored

ofor at least interested inartists such as Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, who are

known for their elaborately constructed or digitally manipulated photographs and who

have therefore seceded, I would argue, from the traditional definition of photography, if

not actually negating it.

2 Baudelaire feared that photography would weaken if not destroy painting. So did

George Bernard Shaw, but this thrilled rather than enraged him: we might think of him

as the anti-Baudelaire. Writing in 1901, Shaw derided what he saw as the fussy

mannerism of painting, with its "barbarous smudging and soaking, . . . faking and

forging." Shaw loved the modern, truthful clarity of the photograph, and he heralded its

triumph: "The old game is up. . . . The camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and

paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation . . . . As to the painters and their

fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over."

3 With Brecht, though, nothing is simple. He was an admirer of the AIZ(Arbeiter

Illustrierte Zeitung), an illustrated newsweekly published between the wars by the

Communist activist and entrepreneur Willi Mnzenberg. And in 1955 Brecht'sKriegsfibel

(War Primer), a book of assembled photographs he had begun working on 15 years

earlier, was published in East Germany. It contains 85 photos, culled from mass-
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circulation newspapers and magazines, of Hitler and other Nazis, Allied leaders, war

victims, partisans, ruined cities, etc. Each photo is accompanied by a sardonic four-line

poema sort of anti-nursery rhymewritten by Brecht. The effect is quite . . .

Brechtian.

4 Abigail Solomon-Godeau admitted that when looking at a photo, "trajectories of power

and desire, mastery and projection . . . . run between the perceiving eye, the subjective

I, and the visual field," but she quickly called on the "insights of semiotics, linguistics,

psychoanalysis, and poststructural theories of representation" to rescue us from such

pesky, potentially uncontrollable subjectivity.

5 Other photo books documenting the war include Bruno Stevens's Bagdad: Au-del du

miroirand Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.

6 Though not definitely. In his book Night Draws Near, Anthony Shadid of The

Washington Postwrites that Iraqi antiaircraft fire may have caused the blast.

7 The day after I wrote this sentence, the front page of The New York Timesbore the

headline "Car Bomb Kills More Than 60 in Iraq Market." The dispatch began, "A

powerful suicide car bomb ripped through a bustling street market here in a Shiite slum

here on Saturday, killing at least 62 people and wounding nearly 120 . . ."

8Unembeddedcontains a series of photos, taken by Rita Leistner, of women in

Baghdad's Rashad Psychiatric Hospital. A psychiatrist there told Leistner that since

many Iraqis fear that a daughter with a mental disorder will render other girls in the

family unmarriageable, the presumably ill daughters are "cast away from society by their

families, who will often provide false addresses so hospital staff can never find them

again. Some mentally healthy women fnd refuge at the hospital from beatings and
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honor killings . . . Most of the women have no choice but to live at the hospital for the

remainder of their lives." Western reporters have noted a rise in so-called honor killings

a euphemism for intra-familial murderas religious fundamentalism increases and

the dismal security situation worsens.

9 Though the cemeteries, alas, are filling quickly. As I write this, Israel and Hezbollah are

at war, and newspapers, news Web sites, and television screens are filled with images

of Lebanese civilian sufferingand to a lesser degree, that of Israelis. One particularly

startling photograph, published on the front page of The New York Times, showed a

long row of coffins, identified by stark numbers, in the Lebanese city of Tyre; they would

be temporarily buried in a mass grave. This newer war is being covered more

thoroughly, and visually, than the one in Iraq, where many areas are too dangerous for

reporters and photographers to venture into. In contrast, the media has extensive,

though not complete, access to Lebanon and Israel, and Hezbollah membersfar from

attacking journalists, as the Iraqi insurgents doare happy to escort the media around

the ruins of southern Lebanon. Yet the fact that in the newer conflict so many casualties

on both sidesare civilian makes it moredifficult, I think, for onlookers to understand

the political realities behind the undeniably searing images.

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