The Demise of Shame

Shortly after I started my recent hiatus from the blog, Susie Linfield published this typically smart essay at The New York Times on the ways perpetrators of atrocities, horrors and abuses are using photography to advertise their achievements.

Linfield Reads Stallabrass ... and so on.

"Reading this anthology—many of whose pieces date from 2008, and some of which were previously published—is like trolling through a flea market looking for gems. The book mounts no sustained argument, or arguments; instead, it covers—in a fairly haphazard fashion—such issues as the role of embedded photographers; the use of torture in the wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq; and the ways in which technological changes are affecting the reception of photojournalism and the work of photojournalists. Still, I like flea markets ..." ~ Susie Linfield

The passage above opens Linfield's review of the collection Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images* by Julian Stallabrass at the Aperture blog. Turns out that Stallabrass replies and Linfield responds. These are two of the best writers on photography around. Where they disagree is over the assessment of US imperialism. Here I side with Stallabrass. Linfield in many respects wants us to draw a curtain over the US role in Iraq prior to the military adventures and war crimes of Bush #2 and his minions.

"Everything that Julian Stallabrass says about how Iraq was strangled, weakened, and torn up by international sanctions and the U.S. invasion is correct. What he doesn’t say is that Iraq had been strangled, weakened, and torn up by previous decades of misrule by Saddam Hussein’s pathologically violent, repressive Baath regime. I am always mystified as to why “anti-imperialists” believe that the history of a country begins when the U.S.—or another power—invades it."

And she wants to call attention to the obvious flaws of the Iraqi resistance.

"The “resistance” in Iraq is rabidly intolerant, sectarian, murderous, and misogynistic; like the Taliban in Afghanistan, it represents a reactionary, totalitarian program. To romanticize, or even remotely defend, these movements is, I think, a cruel hoax. They do not represent any sort of liberation, or any sort of decent future, for their fellow citizens."

Let me be clear - Linfield is right in this second passage. I am not defending the opposition. However, nothing she says there excuses the US intervention. Moreover, it is disingenuous to suggest that Saddam Hussein simply emerged  as a vicious dictator of his own accord. We ought not to frame our arguments so narrowly that they neglect the documentary record.

This, of course, is Donald Rumsfeld, among the primary architects of Bush #2's foreign policy disasters, caught in a compromising pose. This was his earlier incarnation (1983) as Special Envoy to the Middle East under Reagan. The latter, of course, underwrote Hussein politically and financially. (Background here.)  Hussein surely was a pathological tyrant, but he was to some considerable extent our pathological tyrant. In other words, recognizing the disaster that is the current Iraqi opposition is wholly consistent with forcefully pointing out the duplicitous meddling (and much worse) of the US in Iraq for decades. Linfield surely knows that.
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* The book is published in the UK by Photoworks.

Best Shots (184) ~ Jodi Bieber

(211) Jodi Bieber ~ Bibi Aisha, 2010 (20 November 2011).

I typically post entries from this series at The Guardian without comment. But since I've written a bunch of posts on this one already, I feel I should link to them. You can find them here. For now, let's just say I am not a fan of Bieber on this one or of TIME virtually ever.

Local Event ~ Susie Linfield at UR (11/17/2011)

I have posted here multiple times about Susie Linfield and her smart analyses of contemporary photography. Well, she will be speaking on the University of Rochester campus Thursday evening November 17th - details here. Linfield's recent book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence is very, very good. She will be talking on "Photojournalism and Human Rights." The talk is free and open to the public.

Susie Linfield ~ The Cruel Radiance

"But one of the things that makes looking at such images especially difficult today is that we no longer have the same kind of moral and political framework to help us understand the violence. Capa’s photos of the Spanish Civil War, or of China after the Japanese invasion, were very clear on political context. You knew what to do with your anger and your horror. Today, looking at images from Sierra Leone or the Congo, one can feel horror, disgust, and great sadness—but what to do in response is much less apparent. Which of the twelve militias now fighting in the Congo do you support? Visual atrocity is much clearer today, but we no longer have the political clarity to accompany it." ~ Susie Linfield (ArtForum, November 2010)

And so, liberals, mostly in the north and the west, averse to politics and comfortable with charity blame the messenger. They wallow in resentment - aimed at the photographer - or cynicism. Both reactions (and that is what they are, reactionary) are symptoms of a politics of displacement. They are symptomatic of the emaciated state of liberal politics.

Susie Linfield, with whose extremely smart views I often disagree, has a new book coming out.* It collects (and, I assume, refines and revises) her essays on photography and politics that have appeared over the past over the past several years. She is always worth reading. The comment I lift above comes from a short notice she gives of the book.
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* Susie Linfield. 2010. The Cruel Radiance: Photography & Political Violence. University of Chicago Press ~ find details here.

Rethinking 'Humanitarian' Action

"Surely what is needed . . . is an end to the evasion of politics, and the attempt to substitute humanitarian action for it. . . . Humanitarianism is . . . an often noble enterprise . . . but it was never meant to topple tyrants, end wars, redistribute wealth or solve political conflicts. Humanitarianism has been burdened with tasks it cannot accomplish, which is part of what makes the present moment both unutterably sad and terrifying."

That is among the provocative points Susie Linfield makes in this typically provocative essay. The dichotomy that traps us as we think about how best to respond to systematic social-political-economic dislocation of various sorts consists on the one hand in the aspiration to a neutral, moralistic brand of liberal humanitarianism that, at best, treats the symptoms of man-made mayhem and, on the other hand, the use of military force, brute and blunt as it is.

Among the problematic aspects of the essay is Linfield's near wholesale misunderstanding of Hannah Arendt's analysis of compassion and its limits. That is not merely a quibble on the part of a political theorist. As rightly points out: "It is a sign of the great distance between Arendt's time and ours that compassion – whose objective form is humanitarian action – has become not only politically relevant but politically central." Actually, what institutionalized compassion does is precisely what Arendt thinks it does; it subverts the space of politics, introducing moralism for political action animated by political impulses like solidarity. It does this not just because it is an emotion, but because it undermines our ability to think in terms of large numbers. While Arendt makes a conceptual argument to this effect, her views are - as I've noted here - sustained by recent research by cognitive psychologists.

Linfield directs us to the important task of imagining new forms of politics, forms that might be effective in protecting the vulnerable and holding perpetrators, individual and collective, to account. That is a huge task one that demands not just that we cease evading politics, but work at re-configuring it by re-conceptualizing the terms on which we approach others. It seems to me that jettisoning the politics of compassion and its institutional forms is an important first step. The picture of humanitarianism and its failings that Linfield paints seems to leave us no alternative.

Using Aisha ~ Can We Get Beyond Time's Propaganda (Again)

A couple of days go I posted a response to this essay by Susie Linfield in which she agonizes (and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense) about the fate of women in Afghanistan in the event the U.S. were to withdraw from military operations there. Linfield's essay was occasioned by the notorious recent cover of Time magazine, depicting a young woman maimed by Taliban thugs for resisting an arranged marriage. My comment on Linfield was my second post on the matter.

The folks at Time importuned: "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?" And their reply was that the Taliban would be unleashed, placing the modest but real gains women have made in Afghanistan at grave risk. In the past couple of days, I've come across a couple of articles [1] [2] in The New York Times that suggest that the problem in Afghanistan is not just the Taliban, but other trends in Islam* as it is institutionalized there, putatively "moderate" or "mainstream" clerics who are more than willing to accommodate fundamentalists. In other words, the claim that we might just stay long enough to quash the Taliban (no minor feat, in itself) seems radically to underestimate the cultural problem. We are not, by military means, going to overturn or reform or whatever a traditional culture.

There are a couple of other matters. In the first place we are talking about a set of practices that we in the west deem 'barbaric' ~ "stoning — along with other traditional penalties like whipping and the amputation of hands." In the second place Afghanistan is hardly the only place where such practices ('stoning' specifically) are indulged ~ "in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria." These observations suggest that if we have concerns about human rights generally (you know, protection from 'cruel and unusual punishment') and women's rights specifically (since such punishments for 'sex crimes' tend to be meted out disproportionately to women) we ought to be intervening in those other places.

But let's set such messy, complicating factors** aside and focus exclusively and narrowly on Afghanistan. After all, such rhetorical narrowing is the point among pro-war types striking moralistic stances. Here is one telling passage:

"Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, interviewed by telephone, said Monday that stoning to death was the appropriate punishment for an illegal sexual relationship, although he declined to give his view on this particular case. An Ulema Council is a body of Islamic clerics with religious authority in a region.
And less than a week earlier, the national Ulema Council brought together 350 religious scholars in a meeting with government religious officials, who issued a joint statement on Aug. 10 calling for more punishment under Shariah law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.
Failure to carry out such “Islamic provisions,” the council statement said, was hindering the peace process and encouraging crime.
The controversy could have implications for efforts by Afghan officials to reconcile with Taliban leaders and draw them into power-sharing talks.
Afghan officials, supported by Western countries, have insisted that Taliban leaders would have to accept the Afghan Constitution, which guarantees women’s rights, and not expect a return to Shariah law."

So, all you pro-war types, what, exactly is the plan here? How long do you think we should we 'stay'? What would you count as 'success'? Uprooting the Taliban? Subverting the other "mainstream" actors who seem to endorse barbaric practices? When we finish in Afghanistan, shall we proceed to Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? (After all the connections between those countries and al-Quaeda are reasonably well documented.) What would count as 'success' there? If we want to pose the question the Time cover presses upon us, why not pose these questions too? The answer is that asking them does not allow us to be quite so moralistic, quite so certain of what we have grounds to do.
Military force is a blunt instrument. It is ill-suited to the task of trying to protect women - or anyone else - in Afghanistan from fundamentalist thugs or those who abet them. I am not sure how better to proceed. But that discussion is hampered by a preoccupation with 'winning' an impossible military mission. And propaganda of the sort that Time has spewed simply obscures that fact. But that, after all, is the point, isn't it?
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* Please Note: The practices under discussion, as the essays in The Times make clear, do not derive from the Koran but from ancillary sources. The extent to which they are "Islamic" is contested.

** We can set aside too the hypocrisy of the U.S. with its official commitment to the death penalty and huge prison population of disproportionately minority and poor men has much claim to be scolding others about barbaric practices. We'll leave aside too the newly found willingness of American administrations to blatantly ignore the principles of international law in the prosecution of the GWOT.

Talkng Back ~ Susie Linfield on Time and Afghanistan

"Bieber’s photograph of Aisha . . . is disgusting. I am very glad that Time ran it." So says Susie Linfield in this pointed essay at Dissent online. As is usual, Linfield offers smart and insightful comments on the fracas surrounding the image. She insists that "the photo, taken by South African photographer Jodi Bieber, did the opposite and is, in a sense, a model of how photography can be used."

Interestingly, though, Linfield doesn't actually discuss the use of the photograph as much as she excoriates "the antiwar Left and . . . feminists" who "[w]ith a couple of notable exceptions," have responded to the Time cover with "a dispiriting lack of appropriately complex thinking, or, one might say, a distressingly reductive reading of events and of what feminism, and leftism, might mean." Since I have already posted on the cover in a highly critical way, I feel as though it is important to engage Linfield. So, here goes.

In the first place there is ample room for agreement:

There were, however, some thoughtful responses to the Time photo and the larger issues it raises. And in this case, thoughtful means uncertain. (Contrary to what readers of this piece might think thus far, I am not an advocate of “staying in Afghanistan.” In fact, I am thoroughly confused about what the “right” thing to do is; the only thing I’m certain of is that there are no good choices—and certainly no unambiguously good choices—on offer.) For some, the agonizing question is how to respond to conflicting demands.

OK. That is a more or less accurate depiction of where I stand. Conflicted. However, nothing Linfield says there is incompatible with the following.

[1] Attributing a significant helping of hypocrisy and disingenuousness to the people at Time. As I noted earlier, to the best of my knowledge the editorial staff there showed scant concern with women's rights when, for instance, the "moderates" in the U.S. Congress negotiated to have the demands of our own fundamentalists (e.g., the Catholic Bishops on abortion rights) incorporated into the health insurance legislation.

Moreover, the notion that this story is not a brief for staying in Afghanistan is simply not credible. Linfield bemoans the fact that the Time story has not generated any debate. But, having read the report, let's be clear that it accords roughly zero attention to any alternative beyond 'stay the course.' If, as Linfield rightly insists, we read the report for evidence of what Afghan women think, why not read it for evidence of what the folks at Time think? Absent an argument to the contrary, it seems entirely appropriate to charge Time with trafficking in propaganda.

[2] Acknowledging that the Taliban are barbaric thugs and that the Afghan people and nearly everyone else would be significantly better off if they could be eliminated. Nothing I've said so far reduces to the position that "the ousting of the Taliban [is] inconsequential, or that a commitment to women’s rights is only a form of hypocrisy." I think ousting the Taliban is quite consequential. But not in the abstract. How many lives - Afghan and American and other - are we willing to expend? What means - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, imprecise drone attacks - are we willing to use? These are political questions, not as Linfield insists, questions of "conscience." And, beyond a protest about simplistic thinking she offers no answers to them.

On the charge of hypocrisy, let's agree that the matter is best addressed by attributing bad faith not to some indeterminate "we," but to identifiable actors and agencies. When discussing members of the Bush administration, various right-wing war-mongers, and, as I've just suggested, the folks at Time and other bastions of corporate media, I have no problem claiming that the newly discovered commitment to women's rights is "only hypocrisy," false concern trotted out to rationalize a disastrous policy. (By disastrous I mean a policy that has been poorly executed from the start and for which there is no plausible criterion of "success.")

[3] Questioning just what it means to speak, as Linfield does, of "the NATO presence." If this is not to work simply as euphemism for a war prosecuted by American troops, we need to be clear. How many non-American military personnel are in Afghanistan? I don't know but I suspect the answer is someplace in the vicinity of "few." And what about consequences? I recall hearing a report on npr recently that stated that Taliban and other 'insurgents' cause roughly three-quarters of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. American troops and their allies cause the remaining quarter. But, the report went on, many Afghans remain convinced that something like the opposite is the case. If we grant that our campaign in Afghanistan is of a 'hearts and minds' sort, this is troubling. Continued military intervention may simply be a losing strategy on that dimension. I am not certain of that, but absent some evidence to the contrary, it is hard to discount skepticism.

Likewise, Linfield rightly insists that we "at least call barbarism by its right name." OK, let's do. The various tactics I just mentioned - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, 'collateral damage' caused by drone attacks, and so forth - are barbaric. Agreed? (And recall that I've already conceded that the Taliban and their terrorist tactics are barbaric.) What are the alternatives? Neither the Time piece nor Susie Linfield offer any suggestions. But that is where we ought to be headed - a discussion of how to proceed that does not simply assume that our current policy and tactics will "work" (whatever that means).

[4] Questioning what it is that Afghan women (is that a homogeneous category?) "want"? There is a strange ambiguity in Linfield's essay. On the one hand she thinks we ought to be paying attention to what Afghan women say (at least as the Time folks report that). On the other hand, she dismisses those who are concerned with attributing "agency" to those same women. This ambiguity is perhaps unavoidable. I agree that the downtrodden generally are not going to, without significant aid and support, throw off their oppressors. Conversely, it is unclear that clauses in the constitution alter underlying realities in the hinterlands. And I am not so sanguine that the Time report offers an even-handed assessment of the views that Afghan women articulate. Those views, as I have noted here before, are complex. They are not, in short, determinative. They do not mitigate the uncertainty that Linfield herself feels. To assert otherwise, I think, displays a dismaying level of credulousness.

[5] Recalling that much of the current disaster in Afghanistan is the result (wholly or partly) of U.S. policy. We funded the precursors of the Taliban against the Soviets. And we prosecuted a war in Iraq instead of dealing with the Taliban and their links to al-Qaeda. How confident are we - Linfield, I, others who think the Afghan campaign is a mess - that the folks who brought us those policies can clean up even part of the mess they've made?

Being a progressive or a leftist indeed requires avoiding knee-jerk reactions. The latter, after all, make one a reactionary. Insofar as the Time cover story has prompted debate it has proven valuable. But, I suspect that any such debate has been an unintended consequence. The folks at Time used the cover photo for a quite specific purpose - to shore up support for continued American military intervention. In other words, they are seeking to thwart debate by painting those who criticize the war as fools who are willing to sacrifice women's rights. (How does their report differ from the claims of BushCo to which Linfield refers?) In my view, they have undertaken that task in what I think is a hypocritical way. That brings me round to my initial claim: Time has used photography for propaganda.
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Update: Lest you think I am overly suspicious of the good folks at Time, I recommend this post which not only claims that the CIA has been pushing the "women's rights" angle on defending the Afghan mission, but makes the following point, which should be especially pressing for a news weekly:

It’s worth noting that the Taliban are Sunni, not Shia, and that the US-backed president has enacted a law for the non-Taliban sector of society, rolling back rights for women that were written into the constitution. Before the elections, the Times Online reported that “the United States and Britain [were] opposed to any strong public protest [against the law] because they fear[ed] that speaking out could disrupt [the] election.” The bill was pushed through parliament in February of 2009 and came into effect in July of last year. Afghan women fumed, while US and UK leaders stood by, and where was Time’s cover advocating for women’s rights then? Here are the covers they ran in February 2009.

Update 2: See also this post at Conscientious.

Reading Around

"If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have." ~ Tony Judt

That is an ironic observation for someone like me who is committed to the importance of photographic images as tools of communication. You can find the NYRB essay where Judt issues it here. And, for two examples of smart women masterfully using words to probe and decipher our political predicaments, you can find essays by Rebecca Solnit on Louisiana post-Deepwater Horizon here at the London Review of Books, and by Suzie Linfield on genocide and the agony of 'reconciliation' here in Guernica.

Thinking With Photographs: Punishment & Humiliation

Wang Shouxin refuses to kneel down but the soldiers force her
by kicking her knee. Photograph © Li Zhensheng.

Wang Shouxin prepares for death. Photograph © Li Zhensheng.

Journalists take pictures over Wang Shouxin's body.
Photograph © Li Zhensheng.

I have, on several occasions, posted on the mis-uses of capital punishment in the U.S. [1] [2] [3]; in general I find the practice reprehensible. Among the things I believe is that we are very good at hiding state sanctioned murder away and that Americans ought to be susceptible to being selected at random to serve as witnesses at executions. Think jury duty with some bite to it. The premise of that argument if we had to actually witness 'cruel and unusual' punishment we might well re-consider our enthusiasm for killing.

This morning Mike Budd* emailed me a link to this story in The Telegraph regarding the response to the photos I've lifted above. It turns out that Wang Shouxin, a government official, was executed in 1980 for corruption. The recent appearance of the images of her final moments has had a thought-provoking effect. Not only have they been viewed more than a million times, but they seem to have encouraged popular enthusiasm for executing corrupt officials. This brought to mind this story I heard last night on npr about corruption and lack of accountability in the aftermath of last year's earthquake in southwest China. It also raised questions about the premise of my thinking about compelling people to witness executions. Would this simply have the effect of encouraging greater support for cruel punishment?

Interestingly, I recalled this essay by Susie Linfield on the slightly earlier work of the photographer Li Zhensheng who made the images above. Li has recently published a book containing his images of the cultural revolution (1966-76) about which Linfield remarks:

"In any case, photographs are terrible at making sense of history. They are adept, however, at showing us how things looked, and at conveying the feeling of events—or, rather, at clarifying the viewer’s feelings as she contemplates those events. (The feelings of the characters in any photograph are never decisively known.) And the feeling that emerges when I look at Li’s photos is one of almost unbearable discomfort verging on shame: discomfort that I am viewing the humiliation of others, and shame that I belong to the human race that inflicts such cruelty. (This may mark the beginnings of the misanthropy that, the political philosopher Judith Shklar warns, can result from hating cruelty.) The key question, though, that Li’s photos present for me (as opposed to the feelings they evoke) is this: how does it happen that the deliberate infliction of humiliation develops from a private, personal form of pathology into an organized, public tool of political change?"

The distinction that Linfield highlights - between accountability or responsibility on the one hand and humiliation or cruelty on the other - seems to be crucially important for politics generally and for state sponsored punishment in particular. And, in some fashion, this is the sort of distinction that I would want to compel witnesses to executions to confront. Witnessing, as I see it, is not the same as spectacle or prurient, voyeuristic looking. Instead, it would involve looking at the consequences of our legal practices, seeing that we are implicated in them, and that the cruelty is ours and reflects back on us.
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* Thanks Mike!

Gruesome Smiles

Nazi officers and female auxiliaries (Helferinnen) run down
a wooden bridge in Solahutte. The man on the right carries
an accordion. Karl Hoecker is pictured in the center. The
original caption reads: "Rain coming from a bright sky."
(Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

In The Nation this week is a long review by Susie Linfield of a set of four exhibitions at the ICP [1 2 3 4] that all revolve around photographs of the Spanish Civil War. I have posted on Linfield, whose writings I generally admire several times before. And Linfield has written on one of her themes here - Robert Capa - before. What strikes me about this essay is this set of observations prompted in part not just by the exhibitions at ICP, but by a set of photographs (newly discovered photographs of SS Troops at leisure near Auschwitz) that The New York Times published earlier in the fall. Here is Linfield:

“A smile is the strangest thing. In the right context it can illuminate the world, suggest kindness or joy, invite us into intimacy. But in the wrong setting, or on the wrong faces, it seems creepy, malevolent, even disgusting: a sign of moral corruption.

These thoughts were prompted by a visit, in October, to the four interconnected Spanish Civil War shows at the International Center of Photography in New York City (on view through January 6) and by a series of photographs that The New York Times had published the previous month...

The Times photos were full of laughter too. In one, a gleeful group of young, uniformed women and a few men - one of whom plays an accordion - surge across a wooden bridge as they try to escape a rainstorm. In another, a group of well-coiffed, pretty young women, all wearing dark pleated skirts and neat white blouses, sit on the ledge of a deck as they eat blueberries and smile for the camera. Anyone who claims we can no longer be shocked by photographs is wrong; for these banal pictures - part of a newly discovered trove of snapshots taken by an anonymous SS officer in the summer of 1944 - depict a group of Auschwitz guards relaxing and at play. (As Jean Hatzfeld showed in Machete Season, his book of interviews with Rwandan genocidaires, torture and murder are hard work.) The Auschwitz employees look healthy, strong, confident and cheerful: horror is the word for this.

All of which is to say: in looking at photographs, especially those that document the political crises of our time, context is (almost) everything. A smile can welcome a new world or announce its annihilation.”

I had noticed The Times story and slide show when it appeard but was not sure what to write at the time. I think Linfield succintly captures the deeply gruesome scenes the photographs convey.

The Treacherous Medium: Why Photography Critics Hate Photographs

Also in the new Boston Review is an essay by Susie Linfield who, with the possible exceptions of Rebecca Solnit and David Levi Strauss, is just about the best commentator on photography writing today. I have not read the entire essay but recommend her work to you , as I have several times in the past [1] [2] [3]. I would say, though, that like Solnint and Levi Strauss, Linfield departs from the lineage she describes (of photography-hating critics) and that that may account for why her writings are so remarkable.

Markets for Photographs of Atrocity

Susie Linfield writes what I think is among the most provocative commentary on photography and politics these days. Among my first posts was to her work and I have revisited recurrent themes from her writings more recently as well. In the most recent issue of Dissent Linfield has taken "The Last Page" to ponder the perplexities of photographers selling and, more chillingly, of collectors buying, images of cruelty and horror. Her reflections were prompted by recent exhibitions in NYC of work by photographers represented by the photo agencies VII and Magnum. She concludes:

"The buying of such images intrigues me. What does it mean to have the political atrocities of our time hanging on the wall of a home or business or institution? Is this a way to keep the world's suffering close at hand - or to tame it? In the days since seeing theses shows I have tried, without success, to imagine the purchasers of these photographs, and their motives; I've tried to envision too, the places where they might hang the hacked up Rwandan, the unbearably light Serb Soldier and the Cambodian corpses."

Do Photographs of Cruelty and Suffering Numb Us?

In his incisive essay (posted below) about why Salon.com decided to publish more photos from abu Ghraib Walter Shapiro writes:

"... The torture photographs that were published when the prisoner-abuse scandal first exploded have lost their power to shock. We have all seen the pictures repeatedly: a pyramid of unclothed prisoners; a naked detainee cowering in front of snarling dogs; captives wearing punitive hoods that seem borrowed from a medieval inquisition; American soldiers grinning over Iraqi dead bodies and, always, that chillingly ironic thumbs-up sign.
Eventually this visual repetition numbs the senses. ..."

One of the reasons that I found Shapiro's essay interesting is that it reiterates this familiar claim, that repeated exposure to photographs of cruelty and suffering has a causal effect - namely to diminish one's capacity to respond, to feeel outraged and so forth. This is a familiar claim made by Susan Sontag, among others and explored with greater subtlety by Susie Linfield in a series of essays I mentioned some time ago. It places a heavy expectation on photographic images. And I think that expectation is unfair. The problem, in my view, is that the mainstream media and the politicians in what passes for an opposition party in the US have not used these images of torture to place pressure on the Bush administation. Photographs by themselves do nothing. They are powerful, when they are, as instriuments in the hands of political actors. The problem resides with the politcal actors not with the implements that they refuse to wield.

Resources: Susie Linfield

Linfield is on the faculty of the Cultural Reporting & Criticism Program at the NYU School of Journalism. Over the past several years she and has written a series of perceptive review essays in Dissent and Boston Review. In particular she is concerned with the impact that photographs suffering and cruelity induced by war and political oppression have on viewers. Here is a list of some of her essays:

"A Witness to Murder: Looking at Photographs of the Condemned," Boston Review (September/October 2005).

"The Dance of Civilizations: The West, the East, and Abu Ghraib," Dissent (Winter 2005).

"Robert Capa’s Hope : Capturing the Good Fight," Boston Review (April/May 2005).

"Photographing Cruelty" Boston Review (Summer 2004).

"Memuna, Almost Smiling: Looking at a Photograph of Suffering" Dissent (Spring 2004).

"Beyond the Sorrow & the Pity" Dissent (Winter 2001).