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[Andrea Weinstein] Good evening. I'm Andrea Weinstein, Senior Director of Academic Development
and I, in part, I oversee the libraries. Thank you very, very much for coming this evening,
and we're thrilled to have Susie Linfield with us this evening. Over dinner we were
talking, and I know that I read a review of her book in The Guardian, so it's what first
excited me about having her here. The next Neilly Series is not until February 23rd,
Roger Easton and Keith Knox will talk about ten years of imaging between and through the
lines of the Archimedes Palimpsest. This is an interesting piece, it's made a lot of national
news lately, and there was a manuscript by Archimedes that was erased, basically, and
then written over by some monks, with I think probably a religious tract. They've now gone
back and through a series of different universities, and different scientists and researchers,
gone back to make evident the original text. So it should be a very, these are two of the
scientists who worked on this particular project, so it should be very interesting. Tonight
Joan Saab who is Associate Professor of Art and Art History and Director of the Visual
and Culture Studies Program, of which I'm a graduate, is here to do the formal introduction
for Susie Linfield. Thanks Joan. [Joan Saab] Good evening. I'm extremely excited to do
this. I'm just going to begin with some questions from the preface to the book that you can
all take home with you, if you'd like, by Susie Linfield. She asks, "What does it mean
to look at photographs of violence and suffering? Is a refusal to do so a form of respect? Why
are such photographs tarred as voyeuristic, exploitative, and pornographic? What would
solidarity with the people in such photographs mean? How would we understand the world if
there were no photographs, and why do some thinkers believe that an imageless world would
be a better one? What does it mean to acknowledge another's suffering, knowing full well that
to embrace it is impossible, and how has the photography of political drama and political
witness responded to the radical changes in how war is made, and what it is made for in
the course of the past eight decades." These are not small questions, but they're very
important ones to think about and to ask. Susie Linfield is the Director of Cultural
Reporting and Critic, the Director of the Culture Reporting and Criticism program at
New York University. She writes about culture and politics for a variety of publications
including: The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Review, Descent, The Nation, Guernica,
The Forward, and The New Humanist. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The
Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Dance Ink.
Linfield was formerly the arts editor of The Washington Post, the deputy editor of The
Village Voice, the editor-in-chief of American Film, and a critic for The Los Angeles Times
Book Review. She's taught in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU since
it began in 1995. Her book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, is, as
I said, an important book, and raises questions, not just about what it means to look, but
why people don't. I'm just going to read you a sampling of the many reviews of this book.
"A brilliant, lucid, and incisive exploration of photography and political violence", begins
one. "This is a magnificent book", begins another. "Beautifully crafted, exquisitely
written and exceptionally powerful in its arguments", says the Design Observer. And
finally, this is not finally, there are many, many more positive reviews of this book, "A
profoundly thoughtful account of the role of photojournalism in an immediately, irremediably",
excuse me, "violent world. Linfield's book is as much about conscience and empathy as
it is about photography.", and I hope you'll talk about that in a few minutes. So it's
my great pleasure to introduce Susie Linfield. [Susie Linfield] Thank you very much. Thank
you for that kind introduction. Thank you for inviting me here. It's especially nice
to be at the home of Eastman Kodak, one of the pillars of photography in the 20th century.
I'm going to read a bit from some sections of chapter two of my book, which, can everyone
hear me?, which focuses specifically on photography and human rights, but I'm also going to update
my comments with reference to current political events, especially in the mideast with the
so-called Arab Spring that we've been witnessing. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Walter
Benjamin's famous statement, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the
same time a document of barbarism." When it comes to photography, the opposite is also
true. Every image of barbarism, of immiseration, humiliation, terror, extermination, embraces
its opposite, though sometimes unknowingly. Every image of suffering says not only "this
is so", but also, by implication, "this must not be". Not only, "this goes on", but also,
by implication, "this must stop". Documents of suffering are documents of protest, they
show us what happens when we unmake the world. That is the dialectic, and the hope, at the
heart of the photograph of suffering, but lodged within that dialectic and hope, is
a complicating, devastating paradox. There's no doubt, despite the claims of critics, such
as Bertolt Brecht and Susan Sontag, that photography has, more than any other twentieth century
medium, protested violence to billions of people all over the globe. Yet the history
of photography also shows just how limited, how inadequate, such protests are. Seeing
does not necessarily translate into believing, understanding, caring, or acting. That is
the dialectic, and the failure, at the heart of the photograph of suffering. This is a
picture, that is actually in my book, taken by a Danish photographer named Ulrich Jansen
at a Bangladeshi hospital that treats women who have been assaulted by their husbands
or would-be suitors for crimes such as asking for a divorce or refusing marriage. Usually
their faces are scarred with acid. What then, is photography's role in revealing injustice,
fighting exploitation, and furthering human rights? Photojournalists have been key creators
and disseminators of what the historian Samuel Moyn called, "The spectacle of blood, fastened
on extravagant bodily violation and pain." What, if anything, is there to show for this
century-long spectacle of grim images, and why is there, especially in the present moment,
such a backlash against these photographs? But first, another question. Why are photographs
so good at making us see cruelty? Partly I think, because photographs bring home to us
the reality of physical suffering with a literalness and an irrefutability, that neither literature
nor painting can claim. The Uruguayan essayist, Eduardo Galeano, observed after fearing a
photograph by Sebastiao Salgado, "Hunger looks like the man that hunger is killing." The
very thing that critics have assailed photographs for not doing -- explain causation, history,
political contradictions, -- is connected to the very thing they do so well: present
us to ourselves and each other as bodily creatures. Photographs reveal how the human body is "the
original site of reality," in Elaine Scarry's words. The body is our primary truth, our
inescapable fate. Which is precisely what Jean Amery learned, to his never-ending amazement,
when he faced his gestapo torturers. All those attributes that a man might think of as, "his
soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity are destroyed when there is that
cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints" Amery later wrote. Torture, and later Auschwitz,
taught Amery, a proud intellectual, just how real his body was. Photographs show us how
easily we are reduced to the merely physical, which is to say, how easily the body can be
maimed, starved, splintered, beaten, burnt, torn, and crushed. Photographs present us,
in short, with physical cruelty and our vulnerability to it. The vulnerability is something that
every human being shares. The cruelty is something that shatters our very sense of what it means
to be human. As the Iraqi human rights activist Kanan Makiya wrote, "The violation of the
human body is the bedrock under all the layers of horrible things that human beings do to
one another." But documentary photography's ability to confront us with powerful images
of suffering, images that we do not, cannot, always understand or master, has been the
subject of vitriolic attacks from a range of critics. This can be traced back to the
Weimar era, certainly one of modernity's most traumatic periods, and to some of the Weimar
critics and artists, including Benjamin, Brecht, and Siegfried Kracauer, but it is particularly
in the post-World War Two period that photographs depicting violence and poverty, especially
in the so-called third world, have been denounced as patronizing, imperialist, and racist. Writing
of the photograph of a starving Sudanese child, for instance, anthropologists Arthur and Joan
Kleinman charged, "The image of the subaltern conjures up an almost neo-colonial ideology
of failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and inevitability" Many others have echoed
such claims. In particular, the charge of *** is freely bandied about when it
comes to photographs of suffering. Susan Sontag, for instance, wrote, "All images that display
the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic." Countless
other critics have used this terminology. Pornographic photography has become a stock
phrase with numerous iterations. Thus, war photography is casually described and dismissed
as "war ***", while in the humanitarian aid world, photographs of the poor and vulnerable
are decried as "development ***". Jorgen Lissner, a Danish humanitarian aid
worker, summed up this outlook when he charged that the photograph of an African famine victim
is a kind of "social ***" because, "it exposes something in human life that is
as delicate and deeply personal as sexuality, that is, suffering." The use of the term ***
is not totally inapt, but in my view it belies an essential confusion. *** strikes
many viewers as a betrayal, not an expression, of human sexuality. *** reveals something
that strangers should not see, and whose worth is diminished when they do. But photographs
of suffering people, of the body in pain, are something quite different. They are the
revelation of something that ought not exist. One can argue that sex should remain private.
When it comes to torture, exploitation, and cruelty however, privacy is an integral part
of the problem. Nor is it obvious that a child starving to death is deeply personal and private.
Or rather, only deeply personal and private in the sense that making love usually is.
On the contrary, famine, by definition, is a shared condition. As are many other kinds
of misery and grief. War, we might say, is the collectivization of anguish. What is wrong
with revealing such suffering? What is right with hiding it? Why is the teller, rather
than the tale, considered obscene? And in any case, aren't some of the world's obscenities
worthy of our attention? Indeed, the word pornographic is now so widely and variously,
dare I say, promiscuously, summoned in discussions of documentary photography that is not at
all clear how it can be a key to deeper understandings. I would argue that ***, like the term
Orientalism, is now used primarily as a weapon whose main job is to shame the accused and
to stifle further discussion. Ironically, those photographers who have worked hardest
and most consciously to avoid objectifying their subjects, are fiercely derided as pornographers
and exploiters. James Nachtwey, perhaps the most prominent and controversial war photographer
working today, is a prime target of such attacks. This is a picture that Nachtwey took at a
feeding station in the Sudan during the famine of 1993 there. Also attacked is Sebastiao
Salgado, the Brazilian photographer and former marxist economist. He has spent decades documenting
the third world's peasants, manual workers, refugees, famine victims, and displaced people.
"The losers in globalization's great game", as journalist David Reef put it. Salgado's
subjects work on stony farms in jungle plantations, on ships and railroads, in factories, on oil
rigs, in diamond and coal mines. Most of them are inconceivably poor, yet Salgado imbues
his subjects with...... it confuses moral, moral weight with aesthetic clumsiness, and
it is more concerned with the clear conscience of the viewer, then with the plight of the
injured subject. This animus against looking has thrust contemporary photojournalists into
a catch-22. Some are criticized for taking too beautiful pic...... and so the important
question, when we think about photography and human rights is not how many images we
see, or how brutal, or explicit, or pornographic they are. The real issue is how we use these
images. Can they help us to make meaning of the present and the past? If so, what meanings
do we make, and how do we act upon them? The ultimate answers to such questions reside
not in the pictures, but in ourselves. Photojournalists are responsible for the ethics of showing,
but we are responsible for the ethics of seeing. This requires transforming our relationship
to photographs from one of passivity, complaint, and cynicism, to one of creativity and collaboration,
and it means regarding the violators of human rights, not the photographers who document
them, as the real agents of exploitation and death. Rowan Bard, another critic, described
photographers as "agents of death". It may be as hard for us to understand our new chaotic
visual environment as it was for Weimar critics and citizens to master theirs. Images flood
into our world in the old ways, through the printed press, films, and television, but
also through cell phones, iPods, satellite dishes, social networking sites, and the internet.
How to respond? Anxieties abound, and for good reason. On the internet all photographs
are equal, including doctored, manipulated, or constructed photographs, and those without
any meaningful -- or entirely false -- context. Thus the critic Andy Grundberg has warned
that, "the Liberty of an unchecked image environment may prove to be less a blessing, than a subtle
form of tyranny, and the democracy of the camera may prove to be a perverse kind of
fascism." Certainly the new visual technologies have changed the relationship between information,
propaganda, and war. The Taliban for instance, which used to ban photographs, movies, and
television as ungodly, now has its own video production unit, which posts its advertisements
for jihad, its videos of suicide bombings and beheadings on the web. So does Al-Qaeda.
Yet as Gilles Peress and many others have argued, digital photography and the Internet
also herald unprecedented possibilities for new, more egalitarian forms of visual participation,
and can be a boon to human rights activist everywhere. The inspiring, and sometimes bloody
photographs we saw from the 2009 Iranian protests, and more recently from Tunisia and Egypt and
Syria and Yemen, lend credence to this optimistic, pro-democracy interpretation of the new media.
Many of those photographs, especially from Iran and Syria, were taken by non-professionals
on their cell phones, then quickly circulated all over the world. One could, and can find
them everywhere from major newspapers to Facebook. Yet the techno utopianism that photographs
from the Arab and Muslim uprisings have prompted, some writers have hailed these movements as
Twitter revolutions, YouTube revolutions, or Facebook revolutions, strikes me as premature,
if not vastly overblown. In Iran it was the old fashioned forces, the old-fashioned guns,
of the police, the revolutionary guards, and the army that determined the outcome, as they
are doing today in Syria, and as they did, though to opposite effect, in Tunisia, and
Egypt. Indeed the Iranian movement has launched into a painful self-critique of its reliance
on the Internet. After the failed call for a massive turnout in the so-called Trojan
horse demonstration of last February, one Iranian blogger wondered, "Where were the
Greens of Tehran?" Then he answered, "On the Internet, reading about the Trojan horse plan.
On YouTube, learning about the action, or chatting online in the afternoon about where
we should have met in the morning." And two can play the technology game. According to
Human Rights Watch, the Iranian government has created an online surveillance center,
and it's believed to be behind a cyber army of hackers that it can unleash against opponents.
Indeed the Ayatollah himself has a Facebook page. Yes, you too can friend the Ayatollah,
or for that matter, follow President Ahmadinezhad Twitter feed for timely updates from the dictator.
In fact, since the 2009 revolt, Iran's courtrooms have hosted numerous show trials, its jails
have filled with political prisoners, charges of *** and other state-sponsored tortures
abound, and executions continue at an alarming rate. Twitter is not an adequate response
to the power of the state. Social media, indeed any media, can never replace political parties,
strategies, programs, or leadership. The new danger I fear, is that information freedom
will become synonymous with, that is become a substitute for, real political and civic
freedom. It might behoove us to remember that the medium isn't the message. The message
is the message. Iran taught us, and I suspect so will Tunisia, and Egypt, and Syria, and
Yemen, that democratic images can inspire a democracy, and strengthen a democracy, but
they cannot create a democracy. Only people, working in solidarity with each other in the
real world, not the virtual one, can do that. I'm going to end with briefly showing a few
photos that are extremely recent. They're not in my book, and that make us think, or
at least made me think about what photographs can and cannot do in helping us to confront
barbarism and suffering. I should warn you that these photographs are quite disgusting,
and I thought for a long time about whether I should or should not show them. The first
is a very controversial series of four pictures that were taken last year by a Somali photographer
named Farah Abdi Warsameh who works for the AP. They show the stoning to death of a man
named Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim in Somalia for the crime of adultery. The stoning was carried
out by a fundamentalist Muslim group called Hizbul Islam. Hizbul Islam has allied with
the main Islamist militia in Somalia, Al-Shabaab, which essentially controls the country now.
And I should say now that Sharia law is now legal in Somalia, so what we're seeing here
is not, technically, a crime. There are a lot of debates now about the reintroduction
of Sharia into Afghanistan and various other places, which I think sometimes have a sort
of abstract quality about them, so in thinking about Sharia we might remember these pictures.
The pictures are also very controversial because they obviously were taken, they could only
have been taken, with the approval of the militia that was carrying out the stoning.
This is the beginning. This is the second picture, the victim at this point is buried,
though still alive. And this is the last picture, you can also see some of his assailants smiling
in victory. And the last picture I'm going to show was taken this year by a New Zealand
photographer named Robin Hammond. He has been doing work in the DRC, the Democratic Republic
of Congo, which is neither democratic nor a republic. Congo has now been designated
the "*** capital of the world" by various humanitarian organizations. A recent study
estimates that almost two million women and girls in the Congo have been *** in the
course of the wars there. This picture shows a woman named Basemae . She had been ***,
and after the *** her assailant carved out her eyes so she would not ever be able to
identify him. The war against women and girls, which actually, is increasingly how war is
waged now, in the world, is I think something that is elided, not paid much attention to
in the press, and also in various debates about human rights, political intervention,
et cetera, but it is perhaps something that warrants a bit of our attention. Thank you.