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In June, 1938, Virginia Woolf pub-lished Three Guineas, her brave, un-

welcomed reflections on the roots ofwar. Written during the preceding twoyears, while she and most of her inti-mates and fellow-writers were rapt bythe advancing Fascist insurrection inSpain, the book was couched as a tardyreply to a letter from an eminent lawyerin London who had asked, “How inyour opinion are we to prevent war?”Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them maynot be possible. For though they belongto the same class, “the educated class,”a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men makewar. Men (most men) like war, or at least they find “some glory, some neces-sity, some satisfaction in fighting” thatwomen (most women) do not seek orfind. What does an educated—that is,privileged, well-off—woman like her

know of war? Can her reactions to itshorrors be like his?

Woolf proposes they test this “diffi-culty of communication” by looking atsome images of war that the beleagueredSpanish government has been sendingout twice a week to sympathizers abroad.Let’s see “whether when we look at thesame photographs we feel the samethings,” she writes.“This morning’s col-lection contains the photograph of whatmight be a man’s body,or a woman’s; it isso mutilated that it might, on the otherhand, be the body of a pig. But thosecertainly are dead children, and that un-doubtedly is the section of a house. Abomb has torn open the side; there is stilla bird-cage hanging in what was pre-sumably the sitting room.” One can’t al-ways make out the subject, so thoroughis the ruin of flesh and stone that thephotographs depict. “However differ-ent the education, the traditions behind

us,” Woolf says to the lawyer, “we”—and here women are the “we”—and hemight well have the same response:“War, you say, is an abomination; a bar-barity; war must be stopped at whatevercost.And we echo your words.War is anabomination; a barbarity; war must bestopped.”

Who believes today that war can beabolished? No one, not even pacifists.We hope only (so far in vain) to stopgenocide and bring to justice those whocommit gross violations of the laws ofwar (for there are laws of war, to whichcombatants should be held), and to stopspecific wars by imposing negotiated al-ternatives to armed conflict.But protest-ing against war may not have seemed sofutile or naïve in the nineteen-thirties. In1924, on the tenth anniversary of thenational mobilization in Germany forthe First World War, the conscientiousobjector Ernst Friedrich published War M

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82 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 9, 2002

A CRITIC AT LARGE

LOOKING AT WAR

Photography’s view of devastation and death.

BY SUSAN SONTAG

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Against War! (Krieg dem Kriege!), analbum of more than a hundred andeighty photographs that were drawnmainly from German military and med-ical archives, and almost all of whichwere deemed unpublishable by govern-ment censors while the war was on.Thebook starts with pictures of toy soldiers,toy cannons, and other delights of malechildren everywhere, and concludes withpictures taken in military cemeteries.This is photography as shock therapy.Between the toys and the graves, thereader has an excruciating photo tour offour years of ruin, slaughter, and degra-dation:wrecked and plundered churchesand castles, obliterated villages, ravagedforests, torpedoed passenger steamers,shattered vehicles,hanged conscientiousobjectors, naked personnel of militarybrothels, soldiers in death agonies after apoison-gas attack, skeletal Armenianchildren.

Friedrich did not assume that heart-rending, stomach-turning pictures wouldspeak for themselves. Each photographhas an impassioned caption in four lan-guages (German, French, Dutch, andEnglish), and the wickedness of mili-tarist ideology is excoriated and mockedon every page. Immediately denouncedby the German government and by vet-erans’and other patriotic organizations—in some cities the police raided book-stores, and lawsuits were brought againstpublic display of the photographs—Friedrich’s declaration of war against war was acclaimed by left-wing writ-ers, artists, and intellectuals, as well as by the constituencies of the numerous anti-war leagues,who predicted that the bookwould have a decisive influence on pub-lic opinion. By 1930, War Against War!had gone through ten editions in Ger-many and been translated into manylanguages.

In 1928, in the Kellogg-Briand Pact,fifteen nations, including the UnitedStates, France, Great Britain, Germany,Italy, and Japan, solemnly renounced waras an instrument of national policy.Freud and Einstein were drawn into the debate four years later, in an ex-change of letters published under thetitle “Why War?” Three Guineas, whichappeared toward the close of nearly twodecades of plangent denunciations of

war and war’s horrors, was at least origi-nal in its focus on what was regarded as too obvious to be mentioned, muchless brooded over: that war is a man’sgame—that the killing machine has agender, and it is male. Nevertheless, thetemerity of Woolf ’s version of “WhyWar?” does not make her revulsionagainst war any less conventional in itsrhetoric, and in its summations, rich inrepeated phrases. Photographs of thevictims of war are themselves a species ofrhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify.They agitate. They create the illusion ofconsensus.

Woolf professes to believe that theshock of such pictures cannot fail tounite people of good will. Although sheand the lawyer are separated by the age-old affinities of feeling and practiceof their respective sexes, he is hardly a standard-issue bellicose male. After all, his question was not, What are yourthoughts about preventing war? It was,How in your opinion are we to preventwar? Woolf challenges this “we” at thestart of her book, but after some pagesdevoted to the feminist point she aban-dons it.

“Here then on the table before us arephotographs,” she writes of the thoughtexperiment she is proposing to thereader as well as to the spectral lawyer,who is eminent enough to have K.C.,King’s Counsel, after his name—andmay or may not be a real person. Imaginea spread of loose photographs extractedfrom an envelope that arrived in themorning mail. They show the mangledbodies of adults and children. Theyshow how war evacuates, shatters,breaksapart, levels the built world.A bomb hastorn open the side of a house. To besure, a cityscape is not made of flesh.Still, sheared-off buildings are almost aseloquent as body parts (Kabul; Sarajevo;East Mostar; Grozny; sixteen acres ofLower Manhattan after September 11,2001; the refugee camp in Jenin). Look,the photographs say, this is what it’s like.This is what war does. And that, that iswhat it does, too. War tears, rends. Warrips open,eviscerates.War scorches.Wardismembers. War ruins. Woolf believesthat not to be pained by these pictures,not to recoil from them, not to strive toabolish what causes this havoc, this

carnage, is a failure of imagination, ofempathy.

But surely the photographs could justas well foster greater militancy on behalfof the Republic. Isn’t this what they weremeant to do? The agreement betweenWoolf and the lawyer seems entirelypresumptive, with the grisly photo-graphs confirming an opinion alreadyheld in common.Had his question been,How can we best contribute to the de-fense of the Spanish Republic againstthe forces of militarist and clerical fas-cism?, the photographs might have rein-forced a belief in the justness of thatstruggle.

The pictures Woolf has conjured updo not in fact show what war—war

in general—does. They show a particu-lar way of waging war, a way at that timeroutinely described as “barbaric,” inwhich civilians are the target. GeneralFranco was using the tactics of bom-bardment, massacre, torture, and thekilling and mutilation of prisoners thathe had perfected as a commanding offi-cer in Morocco in the nineteen-twenties.Then,more acceptably to ruling powers,his victims had been Spain’s colonialsubjects, darker-hued and infidels toboot; now his victims were compatriots.To read in the pictures, as Woolf does,only what confirms a general abhorrenceof war is to stand back from an engage-ment with Spain as a country with a his-tory. It is to dismiss politics.

For Woolf, as for many antiwarpolemicists, war is generic, and the im-ages she describes are of anonymous,generic victims.The pictures sent out bythe government in Madrid seem, im-probably, not to have been labelled. (Orperhaps Woolf is simply assuming that aphotograph should speak for itself.) Butto those who are sure that right is on oneside, oppression and injustice on theother, and that the fighting must go on,what matters is precisely who is killedand by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a pho-tograph of a child torn apart in the at-tack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtownJerusalem is first of all a photograph ofa Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. To a Palestinian, a pho-tograph of a child torn apart by a tankround in Gaza is first of all a photo-

Robert Capa’s famous “The Falling Soldier” was taken in 1936, a few weeks after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.


Felice Beato, “Ruins of Sikandarbagh Palace,” 1858; Alexander Gardner, “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg,” 1863;

George Strock, “Dead G.I.s on Buna Beach,” 1943; Yosuke Yamahata, victim of atomic-bomb attack, Nagasaki, August 10, 1945; Larry

W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko Uemura Is Bathed by Her Mother,” Minamata, 1971; Ron Haviv, Serb militia, Bijeljina, Bosnia, 1992;

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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 9, 2002 85

Anonymous, British soldiers blinded by German gas attack, 1918; Anonymous, lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, 1930.

Burrows, “Reaching Out,” Mutter Ridge, Nui Cay Tri, Vietnam, 1966; Don McCullin, food-distribution center in Biafra, 1968.

Sebastião Salgado, Kosovar refugee, Kukes, Albania, 1999; Tyler Hicks, Taliban fighter killed by Northern Alliance, Afghanistan, 2001.

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graph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, iden-tity is everything. And all photographswait to be explained or falsified by theircaptions. During the fighting betweenSerbs and Croats at the beginning ofthe recent Balkan wars, the same photo-graphs of children killed in the shell-ing of a village were passed around atboth Serb and Croat propaganda brief-ings. Alter the caption: alter the use ofthese deaths.

Photographs of mutilated bodies cer-tainly can be used the way Woolf does,to vivify the condemnation of war, andmay bring home, for a spell, a portion ofits reality to those who have no experi-ence of war at all. But someone who ac-cepts that in the world as currently di-vided war can become inevitable, andeven just, might reply that the photo-graphs supply no evidence, none at all,for renouncing war—except to those forwhom the notions of valor and of sacri-fice have been emptied of meaning andcredibility.The destructiveness of war—short of total destruction, which is notwar but suicide—is not in itself an argu-ment against waging war, unless onethinks (as few people actually do) that vi-olence is always unjustifiable, that force isalways and in all circumstances wrong:wrong because, as Simone Weil affirmsin her sublime essay on war, “The Iliad,or, The Poem of Force,” violence turnsanybody subjected to it into a thing. But

to those who in a given situation see noalternative to armed struggle, violencecan exalt someone subjected to it into amartyr or a hero.

In fact, there are many uses of the in-numerable opportunities that a modernlife supplies for regarding—at a distance,through the medium of photography—other people’s pain. Photographs of anatrocity may give rise to opposing re-sponses:a call for peace;a cry for revenge;or simply the bemused awareness, con-tinually restocked by photographic infor-mation, that terrible things happen.Whocan forget the three color pictures byTyler Hicks that the New York Times ranon November 13,2001, across the upperhalf of the first page of its daily sectiondevoted to America’s new war? The trip-tych depicted the fate of a wounded Taliban soldier who had been found in a ditch by some Northern Alliance sol-diers advancing toward Kabul. Firstpanel: the soldier is being dragged onhis back by two of his captors—one hasgrabbed an arm, the other a leg—along a rocky road. Second panel: he is sur-rounded, gazing up in terror as he ispulled to his feet. Third panel: he issupine with arms outstretched and kneesbent, naked from the waist down, abloodied heap left on the road by thedispersing military mob that has just fin-ished butchering him. A good deal ofstoicism is needed to get through thenewspaper each morning,given the like-

lihood of seeing pictures that couldmake you cry. And the disgust and pitythat pictures like Hicks’s inspire shouldnot distract from asking what pictures,whose cruelties, whose deaths you arenot being shown.

II

Awareness of the suffering that ac-cumulates in wars happening else-

where is something constructed. Princi-pally in the form that is registered bycameras, it flares up, is shared by manypeople, and fades from view. In contrastto a written account, which, dependingon its complexity of thought, references,and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger orsmaller readership, a photograph hasonly one language and is destined po-tentially for all.

In the first important wars of whichthere are accounts by photographers, theCrimean War and the American CivilWar, and in every other war until theFirst World War, combat itself was be-yond the camera’s ken. As for the warphotographs published between 1914and 1918, nearly all anonymous, theywere—insofar as they did convey some-thing of the terrors and devastation en-dured—generally in the epic mode, andwere usually depictions of an aftermath:corpse-strewn or lunar landscapes leftby trench warfare; gutted French villagesthe war had passed through.The photo-graphic monitoring of war as we know it had to wait for a radical upgrade ofprofessional equipment: lightweight cam-eras, such as the Leica, using 35-mm.film that could be exposed thirty-sixtimes before the camera needed to be reloaded. The Spanish Civil War wasthe first war to be witnessed (“covered”)in the modern sense: by a corps of pro-fessional photographers at the lines ofmilitary engagement and in the townsunder bombardment, whose work wasimmediately seen in newspapers andmagazines in Spain and abroad. Pic-tures could be taken in the thick ofbattle, military censorship permitting,and civilian victims and exhausted, be-grimed soldiers studied up close. Thewar America waged in Vietnam, the firstto be witnessed day after day by televi-sion cameras, introduced the home frontto a new intimacy with death and de-struction. Ever since, battles and mas-


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sacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen enter-tainment. Creating a perch for a par-ticular conflict in the consciousness ofviewers exposed to dramas from every-where requires the daily diffusion andrediffusion of snippets of footage aboutthe conflict. The understanding of waramong people who have not experiencedwar is now chiefly a product of the im-pact of these images.

Non-stop imagery (television, stream-ing video, movies) surrounds us, but,when it comes to remembering, the pho-tograph has the deeper bite. Memoryfreeze-frames; its basic unit is the sin-gle image. In an era of information over-load, the photograph provides a quickway of apprehending something and acompact form for memorizing it. Thephotograph is like a quotation, or amaxim or proverb. Each of us mentallystocks hundreds of photographs, subjectto instant recall. Cite the most famousphotograph taken during the SpanishCivil War, the Republican soldier “shot”by Robert Capa’s camera at the samemoment he is hit by an enemy bullet,and virtually everyone who has heard of that war can summon to mind thegrainy black-and-white image of a manin a white shirt with rolled-up sleevescollapsing backward on a hillock, hisright arm flung behind him as his rifleleaves his grip—about to fall, dead, ontohis own shadow.

It is a shocking image, and that is thepoint. Conscripted as part of journal-ism, images were expected to arrest at-tention, startle, surprise. As the old ad-vertising slogan of Paris Match, foundedin 1949, had it: “The weight of words,the shock of photos.”The hunt for moredramatic—as they’re often described—images drives the photographic enter-prise, and is part of the normality ofa culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption andsource of value. “Beauty will be con-vulsive, or it will not be,” André Bre-ton proclaimed. He called this aestheticideal “surrealist,” but, in a culture radi-cally revamped by the ascendancy ofmercantile values, to ask that images bejarring, clamorous, eye-opening seemslike elementary realism or good businesssense.How else to get attention for one’sproduct or one’s art? How else to make

a dent when there is incessant exposureto images, and overexposure to a hand-ful of images seen again and again? The image as shock and the image ascliché are two aspects of the same pres-ence. Sixty-five years ago, all photo-graphs were novelties to some degree. (Itwould have been inconceivable to Vir-ginia Woolf—who did appear on thecover of Time in 1937—that one dayher face would become a much repro-duced image on T-shirts, book bags, re-frigerator magnets, coffee mugs, mousepads.) Atrocity photographs were scarcein the winter of 1936-37: the depic-tion of war’s horrors in the photographsWoolf discusses in Three Guineas seemedalmost like clandestine knowledge. Oursituation is altogether different. Theultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image—of an agony, of ruin—is an unavoidablefeature of our camera-mediated knowl-edge of war.

Photography has kept company withdeath ever since cameras were in-

vented, in 1839. Because an image pro-duced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before the lens,photographs had an advantage over anypainting as a memento of the vanishedpast and the dear departed. To seizedeath in the making was another matter:the camera’s reach remained limited aslong as it had to be lugged about, setdown, steadied.But,once the camera wasemancipated from the tripod,truly portable, and equipped witha range finder and a variety oflenses that permitted unprece-dented feats of close observationfrom a distant vantage point,pic-ture-taking acquired an immedi-acy and authority greater thanany verbal account in conveyingthe horror of mass-produceddeath. If there was one year when thepower of photographs to define, notmerely record, the most abominable re-alities trumped all the complex narra-tives, surely it was 1945,with the picturestaken in April and early May in Bergen-Belsen,Buchenwald, and Dachau, in thefirst days after the camps were liberated,and those taken by Japanese witnessessuch as Yosuke Yamahata in the daysfollowing the incineration of the popu-lations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inearly August.

Photographs had the advantage ofuniting two contradictory features.Theircredentials of objectivity were inbuilt,yet they always had, necessarily, a pointof view.They were a record of the real—incontrovertible, as no verbal account,however impartial, could be (assumingthat they showed what they purported toshow)—since a machine was doing therecording. And they bore witness to thereal, since a person had been there totake them.

The photographs Woolf received aretreated as windows on the war: trans-parent views of what they show. It was of no interest to her that each had an“author”—that photographs representthe view of someone—although it wasprecisely in the late nineteen-thirties thatthe profession of bearing individual wit-ness to war and war’s atrocities with acamera was forged. Before, war photog-raphy had mostly appeared in daily andweekly newspapers. (Newspapers hadbeen printing photographs since 1880.)By 1938, in addition to the older popu-lar magazines that used photographs asillustrations—such as National Geo-graphic and Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung,both founded in the late nineteenth cen-tury—there were large-circulationweekly magazines, notably the FrenchVu, the American Life, and the BritishPicture Post, devoted entirely to pictures(accompanied by brief texts keyed to thephotos) and “picture stories” (four or five

pictures by the same photogra-pher attached to a story that fur-ther dramatized the images); in anewspaper, it was the photo-graph—and there was onlyone—that accompanied the story.

In a system based on themaximal reproduction and diffu-sion of images, witnessing re-quires star witnesses, renowned

for their bravery and zeal. War photog-raphers inherited what glamour goingto war still had among the anti-belli-cose, especially when the war was felt to be one of those rare conflicts in which someone of conscience would be impelled to take sides. In contrast tothe 1914-18 war, which, it was clear tomany of the victors, had been a colossalmistake, the second “world war” wasunanimously felt by the winning side to have been a necessary war, a war thathad to be fought.Photojournalism came


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into its own in the early nineteen-forties—wartime. This least controver-sial of modern wars, whose necessity was sealed by the full revelation of Naziinfamy in Europe,offered photojournal-ists a new legitimacy. There was littleplace for the left-wing dissidence thathad informed much of the serious use of photographs in the interwar period,including Friedrich’s War Against War! and the early work of Robert Capa,the most celebrated figure in a genera-tion of politically engaged photogra-phers whose work centered on war andvictimhood.

In 1947, Capa and a few friendsformed a coöperative, the MagnumPhoto Agency. Magnum’s charter,moralistic in the way of the foundingcharters of other international organiza-tions and guilds created in the immedi-ate postwar period, spelled out an en-larged, ethically weighted mission forphotojournalists: to chronicle their owntime as fair-minded witnesses free ofchauvinistic prejudices. In Magnum’svoice, photography declared itself aglobal enterprise. The photographer’sbeat was “the world.” He or she was a rover, with wars of unusual interest(for there were many wars) a favoritedestination.

The memory of war, however, likeall memory, is mostly local. Armenians,the majority in diaspora, keep alive thememory of the Armenian genocide of1915;Greeks don’t forget the sanguinarycivil war in Greece that raged throughmost of the second half of the nineteen-forties. But for a war to break out of itsimmediate constituency and become asubject of international attention it mustbe regarded as something of an excep-tion, as wars go, and represent more thanthe clashing interests of the belligerentsthemselves.Apart from the major worldconflicts, most wars do not acquire therequisite fuller meaning. An example:the Chaco War (1932-35), a butcheryengaged in by Bolivia (population onemillion) and Paraguay (three and a halfmillion) that took the lives of a hundredthousand soldiers, and which was cov-ered by a German photojournalist,WilliRuge, whose superb closeup battle pic-tures are as forgotten as that war. But the Spanish Civil War, in the secondhalf of the nineteen-thirties, the Serband Croat wars against Bosnia in the

mid-nineties, the drastic worsening ofthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict that beganin 2000—these relatively small warswere guaranteed the attention of manycameras because they were invested withthe meaning of larger struggles: the Span-ish Civil War because it was a standagainst the Fascist menace, and was un-derstood to be a dress rehearsal for thecoming European, or “world,” war; theBosnian war because it was the stand of a small, fledgling European countrywishing to remain multicultural as wellas independent against the dominantpower in the region and its neo-Fascistprogram of ethnic cleansing; and theconflict in the Middle East because theUnited States supports the State of Is-rael. Indeed, it is felt by many who cham-pion the Palestinian side that what is ul-timately at stake,by proxy, in the struggleto end the Israeli domination of the ter-ritories captured in 1967 is the strengthof the forces opposing the juggernaut ofAmerican-sponsored globalization, eco-nomic and cultural.

The memorable sites of sufferingdocumented by admired photographersin the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and earlyseventies were mostly in Asia and Af-rica—Werner Bischof ’s photographs of famine victims in India, Don Mc-Cullin’s pictures of war and famine inBiafra,W. Eugene Smith’s photographsof the victims of the lethal pollution of aJapanese fishing village.The Indian andAfrican famines were not just “natural”disasters: they were preventable; theywere crimes of the greatest magnitude.And what happened in Minamata wasobviously a crime; the Chisso Corpora-tion knew that it was dumping mercury-laden waste into the bay. (Smith was se-verely and permanently injured by Chissogoons who were ordered to put an end to his camera inquiry.) But war is thelargest crime, and, starting in the mid-sixties, most of the best-known pho-tographers covering wars set out to show war’s “real” face. The color photo-graphs of tormented Vietnamese vil-lagers and wounded American con-scripts that Larry Burrows took and Lifepublished, starting in 1962, certainly for-tified the outcry against the Americanpresence in Vietnam. Burrows was thefirst important photographer to do awhole war in color—another gain inverisimilitude and shock.

In the current political mood, thefriendliest to the military in decades, thepictures of wretched hollow-eyed G.I.sthat once seemed subversive of mili-tarism and imperialism may seem inspi-rational. Their revised subject: ordinaryAmerican young men doing their un-pleasant, ennobling duty.

III

The iconography of suffering has along pedigree. The suffering most

often deemed worthy of representationis that which is understood to be theproduct of wrath, divine or human.(Suffering brought on by natural causes,such as illness or childbirth, is scantilyrepresented in the history of art; thatbrought on by accident virtually not at all—as if there were no such thing as suffering by inadvertence or misad-venture.) The statue group of the writh-ing Laocoön and his sons, the innumer-able versions in painting and sculpture of the Passion of Christ, and the im-mense visual catalogue of the fiendishexecutions of the Christian martyrs—these are surely intended to move andexcite, to instruct and exemplify. Theviewer may commiserate with the suf-ferer’s pain—and, in the case of theChristian saints, feel admonished or in-spired by model faith and fortitude—but these are destinies beyond deploringor contesting.

It seems that the appetite for picturesshowing bodies in pain is almost as keenas the desire for ones that show bodiesnaked. For a long time, in Christian art,depictions of Hell offered both of theseelemental satisfactions.On occasion, thepretext might be a Biblical decapitationstory (Holofernes, John the Baptist) ormassacre yarn (the newborn Hebrewboys, the eleven thousand virgins) orsome such, with the status of a real his-torical event and of an implacable fate.There was also the repertoire of hard-to-look-at cruelties from classical an-tiquity—the pagan myths, even morethan the Christian stories, offer some-thing for every taste. No moral chargeattaches to the representation of thesecruelties. Just the provocation: Can youlook at this? There is the satisfaction at being able to look at the image with-out flinching. There is the pleasure offlinching.



To shudder at Goltzius’s rendering, inhis etching “The Dragon Devouring theCompanions of Cadmus” (1588), of aman’s face being chewed off his head isvery different from shuddering at a pho-tograph of a First World War veteranwhose face has been shot away.One hor-ror has its place in a complex subject—figures in a landscape—that displays theartist’s skill of eye and hand.The other isa camera’s record, from very near, of areal person’s unspeakably awful mutila-tion; that and nothing else. An inventedhorror can be quite overwhelming. (I, forone, find it difficult to look at Titian’sgreat painting of the flaying of Marsyas,or, indeed, at any picture of this sub-ject.) But there is shame as well as shockin looking at the closeup of a real horror.Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could dosomething to alleviate it—say, the sur-geons at the military hospital where thephotograph was taken—or those whocould learn from it. The rest of us arevoyeurs, whether we like it or not.

In each instance, the gruesome in-vites us to be either spectators or cow-ards, unable to look. Those with thestomach to look are playing a role au-thorized by many glorious de-pictions of suffering.Torment,a canonical subject in art, isoften represented in paintingas a spectacle, something beingwatched (or ignored) by otherpeople.The implication is:No,it cannot be stopped—and themingling of inattentive withattentive onlookers under-scores this.

The practice of represent-ing atrocious suffering as some-thing to be deplored, and, ifpossible, stopped, enters thehistory of images with a spe-cific subject: the sufferings en-dured by a civilian populationat the hands of a victoriousarmy on the rampage. It is aquintessentially secular sub-ject, which emerges in the sev-enteenth century, when con-temporary realignments ofpower become material forartists. In 1633, Jacques Callotpublished a suite of eighteenetchings titled The Miseries

and Misfortunes of War, which depictedthe atrocities committed against civil-ians by French troops during the inva-sion and occupation of his native Lor-raine in the early sixteen-thirties. (Sixsmall etchings on the same subject thatCallot had executed prior to the largeseries appeared in 1635, the year of hisdeath.) The view is wide and deep; theseare scenes with many figures, scenesfrom a history, and each caption is asententious comment in verse on thevarious energies and dooms portrayed inthe images. Callot begins with a plateshowing the recruitment of soldiers;brings into view ferocious combat, mas-sacre, pillage, and rape, the engines oftorture and execution (strappado, gal-lows tree, firing squad, stake, wheel),and the revenge of the peasants on thesoldiers; and ends with a distribution ofrewards. The insistence in plate afterplate on the savagery of a conqueringarmy is startling and without precedent,but the French soldiers are only theleading malefactors in the orgy of vio-lence, and there is room in Callot ’sChristian humanist sensibility not justto mourn the end of the independentDuchy of Lorraine but to record thepostwar plight of destitute soldiers who

squat on the side of the road, beggingfor alms.

Callot had his successors, such asHans Ulrich Franck, a minor Germanartist who, in 1643, toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War, began mak-ing what would be (by 1656) a suite of twenty-five etchings depicting sol-diers killing peasants. But the preëmi-nent concentration on the horrors of warand the vileness of soldiers run amok is Goya’s, in the early nineteenth cen-tury. The Disasters of War, a numbered sequence of eighty-three etchings madebetween 1810 and 1820 (and first pub-lished, except for three plates, in 1863,thirty-five years after his death), depictsthe atrocities perpetrated by Napoleon’ssoldiers, who invaded Spain in 1808 toquell the insurrection against Frenchrule. Goya’s images move the viewerclose to the horror. All the trappings of the spectacular have been elimi-nated: the landscape is an atmosphere,a darkness, barely sketched in. War is not a spectacle. And Goya’s print se-ries is not a narrative: each image, cap-tioned with a brief phrase lamenting thewickedness of the invaders and themonstrousness of the suffering they inflicted, stands independent of the

“I warned you it was lighthearted holiday fare!”

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others.The cumulative effect is devastating.The ghoulish cruelties in The Disas-

ters of War are meant to awaken, shock,wound the viewer. Goya’s art, like Dos-toyevsky’s, seems a turning point in thehistory of moral feelings and of sor-row—as deep, as original, as demand-ing. With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art.(And new subjects for fellow-feeling:for example, the painting of an injuredlaborer being carried away from a con-struction site.) The account of war’scruelties is constructed as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer. The ex-pressive phrases in script below eachimage comment on the provocation.While the image, like all images, is an invitation to look, the caption, moreoften than not, insists on the difficultyof doing just that. A voice, presum-ably the artist’s, badgers the viewer: Canyou bear this? One caption declares,“No se puede mirar” (“One can’t look”).Another says, “Esto es malo” (“This isbad”). “Esto es peor” (“This is worse”),another retorts.

The caption of a photograph is tradi-tionally neutral, informative: a date, aplace, names. A reconnaissance photo-graph from the First World War (thefirst war in which cameras were used ex-tensively for military intelligence) wasunlikely to be captioned “Can’t wait tooverrun this!” or the X-ray of a multiple

fracture to be annotated “Patient willprobably have a limp!” It seems no lessinappropriate to speak for the photo-graph in the photographer’s voice, of-fering assurances of the image’s veracity,as Goya does in The Disasters of War,writing beneath one image, “Yo lo ví” (“Isaw this”).And beneath another,“Esto eslo verdadero” (“This is the truth”). Ofcourse the photographer saw it. And,unless there’s been some tampering ormisrepresenting, it is the truth.

Ordinary language fixes the differ-ence between handmade images likeGoya’s and photographs through theconvention that artists “make” draw-ings and paintings while photographers“take” photographs. But the photo-graphic image, even to the extent that itis a trace (not a construction made out ofdisparate photographic traces), cannotbe simply a transparency of somethingthat happened. It is always the imagethat someone chose; to photograph is toframe, and to frame is to exclude.More-over,fiddling with the picture long ante-dates the era of digital photography andPhotoshop manipulations: it has al-ways been possible for a photograph tomisrepresent. A painting or drawing isjudged a fake when it turns out not to beby the artist to whom it had been attrib-uted. A photograph—or a filmed docu-ment available on television or the Inter-net—is judged a fake when it turns out

to be deceiving the viewer about thescene it purports to depict.

That the atrocities perpetrated byNapoleon’s soldiers in Spain didn’t hap-pen exactly as Goya drew them hardlydisqualifies The Disasters of War. Goya’simages are a synthesis. Things like thishappened. In contrast, a single photo-graph or filmstrip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera’slens. A photograph is supposed not toevoke but to show. That is why photo-graphs, unlike handmade images, cancount as evidence.But evidence of what?The suspicion that Capa’s “Death of aRepublican Soldier”—recently retitled“The Falling Soldier,” in the authorita-tive compilation of Capa’s work—maynot show what it has always been said toshow continues to haunt discussions ofwar photography. Everyone is a literalistwhen it comes to photographs.

Images of the sufferings endured inwar are so widely disseminated now

that it is easy to forget that, historically,photographers have offered mostly pos-itive images of the warrior’s trade, andof the satisfactions of starting a war orcontinuing to fight one. If governmentshad their way, war photography, likemuch war poetry, would drum up sup-port for soldiers’ sacrifices. Indeed, warphotography begins with such a mis-sion, such a disgrace. The war was theCrimean War, and the photographer,Roger Fenton, invariably called the firstwar photographer, was no less than thatwar’s “official” photographer, havingbeen sent to the Crimea in early 1855 by the British government, at the insti-gation of Prince Albert. Acknowledg-ing the need to counteract the alarmingprinted accounts of the dangers and pri-vations endured by the British soldiersdispatched there the previous year, thegovernment invited a well-known pro-fessional photographer to give another,more positive impression of the increas-ingly unpopular war.

Edmund Gosse, in Father and Son,his memoir of a mid-nineteenth-centuryEnglish childhood, relates how theCrimean War penetrated even his strin-gently pious,unworldly family,which be-longed to an evangelical sect called thePlymouth Brethren:“The declaration ofwar with Russia brought the first breathof outside life into our Calvinist cloister.


“Some freshly mined salt?”

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My parents took in a daily newspaper,which they had never done before, andevents in picturesque places, which myFather and I looked out on the map,wereeagerly discussed.” War was, and still is,the most irresistible—and picturesque—news, along with that invaluable substi-tute for war, international sports.But thiswar was more than news. It was badnews.The authoritative,pictureless Lon-don newspaper to which Gosse’s parentshad succumbed, the Times, attacked themilitary leadership whose incompetencewas responsible for the war’s draggingon,with so much loss of British life.Thetoll on the soldiers from causes otherthan combat was horrendous—twenty-two thousand died of illnesses; manythousands lost limbs to frostbite duringthe long Russian winter of the protractedsiege of Sebastopol—and several of themilitary engagements were disasters. Itwas still winter when Fenton arrived inthe Crimea for a four-month stay,havingcontracted to publish his photographs(in the form of engravings) in a less ven-erable and less critical weekly paper, theIllustrated London News, exhibit them ina gallery, and market them as a bookupon his return home.

Under instructions from the War Office not to photograph the dead, themaimed, or the ill, and precluded fromphotographing most other subjects bythe cumbersome technology of picture-taking,Fenton went about rendering thewar as a dignified all-male group outing.With each image requiring a separatechemical preparation in the darkroomand a long exposure time, he could pho-tograph British officers in open-air staffmeetings or common soldiers tendingthe cannons only after asking them tostand or sit together, follow his direc-tions, and hold still. His pictures aretableaux of military life behind the frontlines; the war—movement, disorder,drama—stays off-camera.The one pho-tograph Fenton took in the Crimea thatreaches beyond benign documentation is“The Valley of the Shadow of Death,”whose title evokes the consolation of-fered by the Biblical Psalmist as well asthe disaster in which six hundred Britishsoldiers were ambushed on the plainabove Balaklava—Tennyson called thesite “the valley of Death” in his memorialpoem, “The Charge of the Light Bri-gade.” Fenton’s memorial photograph is

a portrait of absence, of death withoutthe dead. It is the only photograph thatwould not have needed to be staged, forall it shows is a wide rutted road, studdedwith rocks and cannonballs, that curvesonward across a barren rolling plain tothe distant void.

A bolder portfolio of after-the-battleimages of death and ruin, pointing notto losses suffered but to a fearsome Brit-ish triumph over the enemy, was madeby another photographer who had vis-ited the Crimean War. Felice Beato, anaturalized Englishman (he was born inVenice), was the first photographer toattend a number of wars: besides beingin the Crimea in 1855, he was at theSepoy Rebellion (what the British callthe Indian Mutiny) in 1857-58, theSecond Opium War in China, in 1860,and the Sudanese colonial wars in 1885.Three years after Fenton made his ano-dyne images of a war that did not gowell for England, Beato was celebratingthe fierce victory of the British Armyover a mutiny of native soldiers under its command, the first important chal-lenge to British rule in India. Beato’s“Ruins of Sikandarbagh Palace,” an ar-resting photograph of a palace in Luck-now that has been gutted by bombard-ment, shows the courtyard strewn withthe rebels’ bones.

The first full-scale attempt to docu-ment a war was carried out a few yearslater, during the American Civil War,by a firm of Northern photographersheaded by Mathew Brady, who hadmade several official portraits of Presi-dent Lincoln.The Brady war pictures—most were shot by Alexander Gardnerand Timothy O’Sullivan, although theiremployer was invariably credited withthem—showed conventional subjects,such as encampments populated by offi-cers and foot soldiers, towns in war’s way,ordnance, ships, and also,most famously,dead Union and Confederate soldierslying on the blasted ground of Gettys-

burg and Antietam. Though access tothe battlefield came as a privilege ex-tended to Brady and his team by Lincolnhimself, the photographers were not com-missioned, as Fenton had been. Theirstatus evolved in rather typical Americanfashion, with nominal governmentsponsorship giving way to the force ofentrepreneurial and freelance motives.

The first justification for the brutallylegible pictures of a field of dead soldierswas the simple duty to record. “Thecamera is the eye of history,” Brady issupposed to have said. And history, in-voked as truth beyond appeal, was alliedwith the rising prestige of a certain no-tion of subjects needing more attention,known as realism, which was soon tohave a host of defenders among novelistsas well as photographers. In the name ofrealism,one was permitted—required—to show unpleasant,hard facts.Such pic-tures also convey “a useful moral” byshowing “the blank horror and reality ofwar, in opposition to its pageantry,” asGardner wrote in a text accompanyingO’Sullivan’s picture of fallen Confeder-ate soldiers, their agonized faces clearlyvisible. “Here are the dreadful details!Let them aid in preventing another suchcalamity falling upon the nation.” Butthe frankness of the most memorablepictures in an album of photographs byGardner and other Brady photographers,which Gardner published after the war,did not mean that he and his colleagueshad necessarily photographed their sub-jects as they found them.To photographwas to compose (with living subjects, topose); the desire to arrange elements inthe picture did not vanish because thesubject was immobilized, or immobile.

Not surprisingly,many of the canon-ical images of early war photogra-

phy turn out to have been staged, or tohave had their subjects tampered with.Roger Fenton, after reaching the muchshelled valley near Sebastopol in hishorse-drawn darkroom,made two expo-sures from the same tripod position: inthe first version of the celebrated photo-graph he was to call “The Valley of theShadow of Death” (despite the title, itwas not across this landscape that theLight Brigade made its doomed charge),the cannonballs are thick on the groundto the left of the road; before taking thesecond picture—the one that is always


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reproduced—he oversaw the scatteringof cannonballs on the road itself. A pic-ture of a desolate site where a great dealof dying had indeed recently taken place,Beato’s “Ruins of Sikandarbagh Palace,”involved a more thorough theatricaliza-tion of its subject, and was one of thefirst attempts to suggest with a camerathe horrific in war. The attack occurredin November, 1857, after which the vic-torious British troops and loyal Indianunits searched the palace room by room,bayoneting the eighteen hundred sur-viving Sepoy defenders who were nowtheir prisoners and throwing their bodiesinto the courtyard; vultures and dogs did

the rest. For the photograph he took inMarch or April, 1858,Beato constructedthe courtyard as a deathscape, stationingsome natives by two pillars in the rearand distributing human bones about theforeground.

At least they were old bones. It’s nowknown that the Brady team rearrangedand displaced some of the recently deadat Gettysburg; the picture titled “TheHome of a Rebel Sharpshooter,Gettys-burg” in fact shows a dead Confederatesoldier who was moved from where hehad fallen on the field to a more photo-genic site, a cove formed by several boul-ders flanking a barricade of rocks, and

includes a prop rifle that Gardner leanedagainst the barricade beside the corpse.(It seems not to have been the specialrifle a sharpshooter would have used,buta common infantryman’s rifle; Gardnerdidn’t know this or didn’t care.)

Only starting with the Vietnam Warcan we be virtually certain that none ofthe best-known photographs were set-ups. And this is essential to the moralauthority of these images. The signa-ture Vietnam War horror photograph,from 1972, taken by Huynh Cong Ut,of children from a village that has justbeen doused with American napalmrunning down the highway, shrieking


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YIn “Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986),” which was made in

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with pain, belongs to the universe ofphotographs that cannot possibly beposed. The same is true of the well-known pictures from the most widelyphotographed wars since.

That there have been so few stagedwar photographs since the VietnamWar probably should not be attributedto higher standards of journalistic pro-bity. One part of the explanation is thatit was in Vietnam that television be-came the defining medium for showingimages of war, and the intrepid lonephotographer, Nikon or Leica in hand,operating out of sight much of the time,now had to compete with, and endure

the proximity of,TV crews.There are al-ways witnesses to a filming.Technically,the possibilities for doctoring or electron-ically manipulating pictures are greaterthan ever—almost unlimited. But thepractice of inventing dramatic news pic-tures, staging them for the camera,seems on its way to becoming a lost art.

IV

Central to modern expectations, andmodern ethical feeling, is the con-

viction that war is an aberration, if anunstoppable one.That peace is the norm,if an unattainable one. This, of course,

is not the way war has been regardedthroughout history. War has been thenorm and peace the exception.

Descriptions of the exact fashion in which bodies are injured and killed in combat is a recurring climax in thestories told in the Iliad. War is seen assomething men do, inveterately, unde-terred by the accumulation of suffering it inflicts; to represent war in words or in pictures requires a keen, unflinchingdetachment. When Leonardo da Vincigives instructions for a battle painting,his worry is that artists will lack the cour-age or the imagination to show war in all its ghastliness: “Make the conqueredand beaten pale, with brows raised andknit, and the skin above their brows fur-rowed with pain . . . and the teeth apartas with crying out in lamentation. . . .Make the dead partly or entirely coveredwith dust . . . and let the blood be seen by its color flowing in a sinuous streamfrom the corpse to the dust.Others in thedeath agony grinding their teeth, roll-ing their eyes, with their fists clenchedagainst their bodies, and the legs dis-torted.” The concern is that the imageswon’t be sufficiently upsetting: not con-crete, not detailed enough.

Pity can entail a moral judgment if,as Aristotle suggests, pity is consideredto be the emotion that we owe only tothose enduring undeserved misfortune.But pity, far from being the natural twinof fear in the dramas of catastrophic mis-fortune, seems diluted—distracted—byfear, while fear (dread, terror) usuallymanages to swamp pity.Leonardo is sug-gesting that the artist’s gaze be, liter-ally, pitiless. The image should appall,and in that terribilità lies a challengingkind of beauty.

That a gory battlescape could bebeautiful—in the sublime or awesomeor tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of warmade by artists. The idea does not sitwell when applied to images taken bycameras: to find beauty in war photo-graphs seems heartless. But the land-scape of devastation is still a landscape.There is beauty in ruins. To acknowl-edge the beauty of photographs ofthe World Trade Center ruins in themonths following the attack seemedfrivolous, sacrilegious.The most peopledared say was that the photographswere “surreal,” a hectic euphemism be-


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hind which the disgraced notion ofbeauty cowered. But they were beauti-ful, many of them—by veteran pho-tographers such as Gilles Peress, SusanMeiselas, and Joel Meyerowitz and by many little-known and nonprofes-sional photographers. The site itself,the mass graveyard that had receivedthe name Ground Zero, was, of course,anything but beautiful. Photographstend to transform, whatever their sub-ject; and as an image something may bebeautiful—or terrifying, or unbearable,or quite bearable—as it is not in reallife.

Transforming is what art does, butphotography that bears witness to thecalamitous and the reprehensible is muchcriticized if it seems “aesthetic”; that is,too much like art. The dual powers ofphotography—to generate documentsand to create works of visual art—haveproduced some remarkable exaggera-tions about what photographers ought orought not to do.These days, most exag-geration is of the puritanical kind. Pho-tographs that depict suffering shouldn’tbe beautiful, as captions shouldn’t mor-alize. In this view,a beautiful photographdrains attention from the sobering sub-ject and turns it toward the medium it-self, inviting the viewer to look “aes-thetically,” and thereby compromisingthe picture’s status as a document. Thephotograph gives mixed signals. Stopthis, it urges. But it also exclaims, Whata spectacle!

Take one of the most poignant im-ages from the First World War: a col-umn of English soldiers blinded by poison gas—each rests his hand on theshoulder of the man ahead of him—stumbling toward a dressing station. Itcould be an image from one of the sear-ing movies made about the war—KingVidor’s The Big Parade, of 1925, or G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918, LewisMilestone’s All Quiet on the WesternFront, and Howard Hawks’s Dawn Pa-trol, all from 1930. The way in which still photography finds its perfection inthe reconstruction of battle scenes in the great war movies has begun to back-fire on the photography of war. Whatassured the authenticity of Steven Spiel-berg’s much admired re-creation of theOmaha Beach landing on D Day inSaving Private Ryan (1998) was that itwas based on, among other sources, the

photographs taken with immense brav-ery by Robert Capa during the land-ing. But a war photograph seems in-authentic, even though there is nothingstaged about it, when it looks like a stillfrom a movie. Sebastião Salgado, a pho-tographer who specializes in world mis-ery (including but not restricted to theeffects of war), has been the principaltarget of the new campaign against theinauthenticity of the beautiful. Particu-larly with the seven-year project he calls“Migrations: Humanity in Transition,”Salgado has come under steady attackfor producing spectacular, beautifullycomposed big pictures that are said to be “cinematic.”

The sanctimonious Family of Man-style rhetoric that accompanies Salga-do’s exhibitions and books has worked to the detriment of the pictures,howeverunfair this may be. The pictures havealso been sourly treated in response tothe highly commercialized situations inwhich, typically, Salgado’s portraits ofmisery are seen. But the problem is inthe pictures themselves,not the way theyare exhibited: in their focus on the pow-erless, reduced to their powerlessness. Itis significant that the powerless are notnamed in the captions. A portrait thatdeclines to name its subject becomescomplicit, if inadvertently, in the cult of celebrity that has fuelled an insatiableappetite for the opposite sort of photo-graph: to grant only the famous theirnames demotes the rest to representa-tive instances of their occupations, theirethnicities, their plights.Taken in thirty-five countries, Salgado’s migration pic-tures group together, under this singleheading, a host of different causes andkinds of distress.Making suffering loomlarger, by globalizing it, may spur peo-ple to feel they ought to “care” more. Italso invites them to feel that the suffer-ings and misfortunes are too vast, too ir-revocable, too epic to be much changedby any local, political intervention.Witha subject conceived on this scale, com-passion can only flounder—and makeabstract. But all politics, like all history,is concrete.

It used to be thought, when candidimages were not common, that showingsomething that needed to be seen,bring-ing a painful reality closer, was bound togoad viewers to feel—feel more. In aworld in which photography is brilliantly

at the service of consumerist manipula-tions, this naïve relation to poignantscenes of suffering is much less plausible.Morally alert photographers and ideo-logues of photography are concernedwith the issues of exploitation of senti-ment (pity, compassion, indignation) inwar photography, and how to avoid roteways of arousing feeling.

Photographer-witnesses may try tomake the spectacular not spectacular.But their efforts can never cancel thetradition in which suffering has beenunderstood throughout most of West-ern history. To feel the pulse of Chris-tian iconography in certain wartime ordisaster-time photographs is not a sen-timental projection. It would be hardnot to discern the lineaments of thePietà in W. Eugene Smith’s picture ofa woman in Minamata cradling her deformed, blind, and deaf daughter,or the template of the Descent from the Cross in several of Don McCullin’spictures of dying American soldiers inVietnam.

The problem is not that people re-member through photographs but

that they remember only the photo-graphs. This remembering throughphotographs eclipses other forms of un-derstanding—and remembering. Theconcentration camps—that is, the pho-tographs taken when the camps wereliberated, in 1945—are most of whatpeople associate with Nazism and themiseries of the Second World War.Hideous deaths (by genocide, starva-tion, and epidemic) are most of whatpeople retain of the clutch of iniquitiesand failures that have taken place inpostcolonial Africa.

To remember is, more and more,not to recall a story but to be able to callup a picture. Even a writer as steeped innineteenth-century and early-modernliterary solemnities as W. G.Sebald wasmoved to seed his lamentation-narrativesof lost lives, lost nature, lost cityscapeswith photographs. Sebald was not justan elegist; he was a militant elegist. Re-membering, he wanted the reader to re-member, too.

Harrowing photographs do not inev-itably lose their power to shock.But theydon’t help us much to understand. Nar-ratives can make us understand. Photo-graphs do something else: they haunt



us. Consider one of the most unforget-table images of the war in Bosnia, a pho-tograph of which the New York Timesforeign correspondent John Kifner wrote,“The image is stark, one of the most en-during of the Balkan wars: a Serb mil-itiaman casually kicking a dying Muslimwoman in the head. It tells you every-thing you need to know.” But of course it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know.

From the identification supplied by the photographer, Ron Haviv, welearn that the photograph was taken in the town of Bijeljina in April, 1992,the first month of the Serb rampagethrough Bosnia. From behind, we see a uniformed Serb soldier, a youthful fig-ure with sunglasses perched on the topof his head, a cigarette between the sec-ond and third fingers of his raised lefthand, rifle dangling in his right hand,right leg poised to kick a woman lyingface down on the sidewalk between twoother bodies. The photograph doesn’ttell us that she is Muslim, but she is not likely to have been labelled in anyother way, or why would she and thetwo others be lying there, as if dead(why “dying”?), under the gaze of someSerb soldiers? In fact, the photographtells us very little—except that war ishell, and that graceful young men withguns are capable of kicking in the headoverweight older women lying helpless,or already killed.

The pictures of Bosnian atrocitieswere seen soon after they took place.Like pictures from the Vietnam War,such as Ron Haberle’s documents of themassacre by a company of Americansoldiers of some five hundred unarmedcivilians in the village of My Lai in

March, 1968, they became important inbolstering indignation at this war whichhad been far from inevitable, far from in-tractable; and could have been stoppedmuch sooner.Therefore one could feel anobligation to look at these pictures, grue-some as they were, because there wassomething to be done, right now, aboutwhat they depicted. Other issues areraised when the public is invited to re-spond to a dossier of hitherto unknownpictures of horrors long past.

An example: a trove of photographsof black victims of lynching in smalltowns in the United States between theeighteen-nineties and the nineteen-thirties, which provided a shattering,revelatory experience for the thousandswho saw them in a gallery in New Yorkin 2000. The lynching pictures tell usabout human wickedness. About inhu-manity. They force us to think aboutthe extent of the evil unleashed specifi-cally by racism. Intrinsic to the perpe-tration of this evil is the shameless-ness of photographing it. The pictureswere taken as souvenirs and made, someof them, into postcards; more than afew show grinning spectators, goodchurchgoing citizens, as most of themhad to be, posing for a camera with thebackdrop of a naked, charred, muti-lated body hanging from a tree.The dis-play of the pictures makes us specta-tors, too.

What is the point of exhibiting thesepictures? To awaken indignation? Tomake us feel “bad”; that is, to appall andsadden? To help us mourn? Is looking atsuch pictures really necessary, given thatthese horrors lie in a past remote enoughto be beyond punishment? Are we thebetter for seeing these images? Do they

actually teach us anything? Don’t theyrather just confirm what we alreadyknow (or want to know)?

All these questions were raised at the time of the exhibition and afterwardwhen a book of the photographs, With-out Sanctuary,was published.Some peo-ple, it was said, might dispute the needfor this grisly photographic display, lest itcater to voyeuristic appetites and per-petuate images of black victimization—or simply numb the mind.Nevertheless,it was argued, there is an obligation to“examine”—the more clinical “examine”is substituted for “look at”—the pictures.It was further argued that submitting tothe ordeal should help us understandsuch atrocities not as the acts of “barbar-ians” but as the reflection of a belief sys-tem, racism, that by defining one peopleas less human than another legitimatizestorture and murder. But maybe theywere barbarians. Maybe this is what bar-barians look like. (They look like every-body else.)

That being said, whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Na-gasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered andhanged from trees in small-town Amer-ica.More than a hundred thousand Ger-man civilians, three-fourths of themwomen, were incinerated in the R.A.F.fire bombing of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945; seventy-two thousand civilians were killed by theAmerican bomb dropped on Hiro-shima. The roll call could be muchlonger. Again, whom do we wish toblame? What atrocities from the incur-

“Well, I think you’re wonderful.”

able past do we think we are obliged to see?

Probably, if we are Americans, wethink that it would be “morbid” to go outof our way to look at pictures of burnedvictims of atomic bombing or the na-palmed flesh of the civilian victims ofthe American war on Vietnam but thatwe have some kind of duty to look atthe lynching pictures—if we belong tothe party of the right-thinking, whichon this issue is now large. A stepped-uprecognition of the monstrousness of theslave system that once existed, unques-tioned by most, in the United States is a national project of recent decades thatmany Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join.This ongoing proj-ect is a great achievement, a benchmarkof civic virtue. But acknowledgment of American use of disproportionatefirepower in war (in violation of one of the cardinal laws of war) is very much not a national project. A mu-seum devoted to the history of Amer-ica’s wars that included the vicious warthe United States fought against guer-rillas in the Philippines from 1899 to1902 (expertly excoriated by MarkTwain), and that fairly presented the arguments for and against using the

atomic bomb in 1945 on the Japanesecities, with photographic evidence thatshowed what those weapons did, wouldbe regarded—now more than ever—asan unpatriotic endeavor.

V

Consider two widespread ideas—now fast approaching the stature of

platitudes—on the impact of photogra-phy. Since I find these ideas formulatedin my own essays on photography, theearliest of which was written thirty yearsago, I feel an irresistible temptation toquarrel with them.

The first idea is that public atten-tion is steered by the attentions of themedia—which means images. Whenthere are photographs, a war becomes“real.”Thus, the protest against the Viet-nam War was mobilized by images.Thefeeling that something had to be doneabout the war in Bosnia was built fromthe attentions of journalists: “the CNNeffect,” it was sometimes called, whichbrought images of Sarajevo under siegeinto hundreds of millions of living roomsnight after night for more than threeyears. These examples illustrate the de-termining influence of photographs in

shaping what catastrophes and crises we pay attention to, what we care about,and ultimately what evaluations areplaced on these conflicts.

The second idea—it might seem theconverse of what has just been de-scribed—is that in a world saturated,even hypersaturated, with images, thosewhich should matter to us have a di-minishing effect: we become callous. Inthe end, such images make us a little less able to feel, to have our consciencepricked.

In the first of the six essays in OnPhotography, which was published in1977,I argued that while an event knownthrough photographs certainly becomesmore real than it would have been if onehad never seen the photographs, afterrepeated exposure it also becomes lessreal. As much as they create sympathy,I wrote, photographs shrivel sympathy.Is this true? I thought it was when Iwrote it. I’m not so sure now. What is the evidence that photographs have adiminishing impact, that our culture ofspectacle neutralizes the moral force ofphotographs of atrocities?

The question turns on a view of theprincipal medium of the news, televi-sion. An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and howoften it is seen. Images shown on televi-sion are, by definition, images of which,sooner or later, one tires. What lookslike callousness has its origin in the in-stability of attention that television isorganized to arouse and to satiate, by itssurfeit of images. Image-glut keeps at-tention light, mobile, relatively indiffer-ent to content. Image-flow precludes aprivileged image. The whole point oftelevision is that one can switch chan-nels, that it is normal to switch channels:to become restless, bored. Consumersdroop. They need to be restimulated,jump-started, again and again. Contentis no more than one of these stimulants.A more reflective engagement with con-tent would require a certain intensity ofawareness—just what is weakened bythe expectations brought to images dis-seminated by the media. The leachingout of content is what contributes mostto the deadening of feeling.

The argument that modern life con-sists of a menu of horrors by which weare corrupted and to which we grad-ually become habituated is a found-



“How about a little music to push the plot along.”

• •

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ing idea of the critique of modernity—a tradition almost as old as modernityitself. In 1800,Wordsworth, in the Pref-ace to Lyrical Ballads, denounced thecorruption of sensibility produced by“the great national events which are dailytaking place, and the increasing accu-mulation of men in cities,where the uni-formity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident,which the rapid communication of in-telligence hourly gratifies.”This processof overstimulation acts “to blunt the dis-criminating powers of the mind” and“reduce it to a state of almost savagetorpor.”

Wordsworth singled out the bluntingof mind produced by “daily” events and“hourly” news of “extraordinary inci-dent.” (In 1800!) Exactly what kind ofevents and incidents was discreetly left tothe reader’s imagination. Some sixtyyears later, another great poet and cul-tural diagnostician—French, and there-fore as licensed to be hyperbolic as theEnglish are prone to understate—of-fered a more heated version of the samecharge. Here is Baudelaire writing in his journal in the early eighteen-sixties:“It is impossible to glance through anynewspaper, no matter what the day, themonth or the year, without finding onevery line the most frightful traces ofhuman perversity. . . . Every newspaper,from the first line to the last, is nothingbut a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes,thefts, lecheries, tortures, the evil deedsof princes, of nations, of private indi-viduals; an orgy of universal atrocity.And it is with this loathsome appetizerthat civilized man daily washes down hismorning repast.”

Newspapers did not yet carry photo-graphs when Baudelaire wrote. But thisdoesn’t make his accusatory descriptionof the bourgeois sitting down with hismorning newspaper to breakfast with anarray of the world’s horrors any differentfrom the contemporary critique of howmuch desensitizing horror we take inevery day, via television as well as themorning paper. Newer technology pro-vides a non-stop feed: as many images ofdisaster and atrocity as we can maketime to look at.

Since On Photography was published,many critics have suggested that the ag-onies of war—thanks to television—have devolved into a nightly banality.

Flooded with images of the sort thatonce used to shock and arouse indigna-tion, we are losing our capacity to react.Compassion, stretched to its limits, isgoing numb. So runs the familiar diag-nosis. But what is really being asked forhere? That images of carnage be cut backto, say, once a week? More generally, thatwe work toward an “ecology of images,”as I suggested in On Photography? Butthere isn’t going to be an ecology of im-ages. No Committee of Guardians isgoing to ration horror, to keep fresh itsability to shock. And the horrors them-selves are not going to abate.

The view proposed in On Photogra-phy—that our capacity to respond

to our experiences with emotional fresh-ness and ethical pertinence is beingsapped by the relentless diffusion of vul-gar and appalling images—might becalled the conservative critique of thediffusion of such images. I call this argu-ment “conservative” because it is thesense of reality that is eroded. There isstill a reality that exists independent ofthe attempts to weaken its authority.The argument is in fact a defense of re-ality and the imperilled standards for re-sponding to it more fully. In the moreradical—cynical—spin on this critique,there is nothing to defend, for, paradox-ical as it may sound, there is no realityanymore. The vast maw of modernityhas chewed up reality and spat the wholemess out as images. According to ahighly influential analysis, we live in a“society of spectacle.” Each thing has tobe turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People them-selves become images: celebrities.Realityhas abdicated. There are only represen-tations: media.

Fancy rhetoric, this. And very per-suasive to many,because one of the char-acteristics of modernity is that peoplelike to feel they can anticipate their ownexperience. (This view is associated inparticular with the writings of the lateGuy Debord, who thought he was de-scribing an illusion, a hoax, and of Jean

Baudrillard, who claims to believe thatimages, simulated realities, are all thatexists now; it seems to be something of aFrench specialty.) It is common to saythat war, like everything else that seemsto be real, is médiatique.This was the di-agnosis of several distinguished Frenchday-trippers to Sarajevo during the siege,among them André Glucksmann: thatthe war would be won or lost not by any-thing that happened in Sarajevo,or Bos-nia generally, but by what happened inthe media. It is often asserted that “theWest” has increasingly come to see waritself as a spectacle.Reports of the deathof reality—like the death of reason, thedeath of the intellectual, the death of se-rious literature—seem to have been ac-cepted without much reflection by manywho are attempting to understand whatfeels wrong, or empty, or idiotically tri-umphant in contemporary politics andculture.

To speak of reality becoming a spec-tacle is a breathtaking provincialism.It universalizes the viewing habits of asmall, educated population living in therich part of the world, where news hasbeen converted into entertainment—amature style of viewing that is a primeacquisition of the “modern,” and a pre-requisite for dismantling traditionalforms of party-based politics that offerreal disagreement and debate. It assumesthat everyone is a spectator. It suggests,perversely, unseriously, that there is noreal suffering in the world. But it is ab-surd to identify “the world” with thosezones in the rich countries where peoplehave the dubious privilege of being spec-tators, or of declining to be spectators,of other people’s pain, just as it is absurdto generalize about the ability to respondto the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers ofnews who know nothing at first handabout war and terror. There are hun-dreds of millions of television watcherswho are far from inured to what they seeon television. They do not have the lux-ury of patronizing reality.

VI

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a

question a woman is more likely to posethan a man? (Probably yes.)

Could one be mobilized actively to


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oppose war by an image (or a group ofimages), as one might be enrolled amongthe opponents of capital punishment byreading, say,Dreiser’s An American Trag-edy or Turgenev’s “The Execution ofTroppmann,” an account of a nightspent with a notorious criminal who isabout to be guillotined? A narrativeseems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of thelength of time one is obliged to look,andto feel. No photograph, or portfolio ofphotographs, can unfold, go further, andfurther still, as does The Ascent (1977),bythe Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko,the most affecting film about the horrorof war I know.

Among single antiwar images, thehuge photograph that Jeff Wall made in1992 entitled “Dead Troops Talk (A vi-sion after an ambush of a Red ArmyPatrol,near Moqor,Afghanistan,winter1986)” seems to me exemplary in itsthoughtfulness, coherence, and passion.The antithesis of a document, the pic-ture, a Cibachrome transparency sevenand a half feet high and more than thir-teen feet wide and mounted on a lightbox, shows figures posed in a landscape,a blasted hillside, that was constructed in the artist’s studio. Wall, who is Ca-nadian, was never in Afghanistan. Theambush is a made-up event in a con-flict he had read about. His imaginationof war (he cites Goya as an inspiration)is in the tradition of nineteenth-centuryhistory painting and other forms ofhistory-as-spectacle that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies—just before the invention ofthe camera—such as tableaux vivants,wax displays, dioramas, and panoramas,which made the past, especially the im-mediate past, seem astonishingly, dis-turbingly real.

The figures in Wall’s visionary photo-work are “realistic,” but, of course, theimage is not. Dead soldiers don’t talk.Here they do.

Thirteen Russian soldiers in bulkywinter uniforms and high boots are scat-tered about a pocked, blood-splashedpit lined with loose rocks and the litterof war: shell casings, crumpled metal,a boot that holds the lower part of aleg.The soldiers, slaughtered in the So-viet Union’s own late folly of a colo-nial war, were never buried. A few stillhave their helmets on.The head of one

kneeling figure, talking animatedly,foams with his red brain matter. Theatmosphere is warm, convivial, frater-nal. Some slouch, leaning on an elbow,or sit, chatting, their opened skulls anddestroyed hands on view. One manbends over another, who lies on his side in a posture of heavy sleep, per-haps encouraging him to sit up. Threemen are horsing around: one with ahuge wound in his belly straddles an-other, who is lying prone, while thethird, kneeling, dangles what might be a watch before the laughing man on his stomach. One soldier, helmeted,legless, has turned to a comrade somedistance away, an alert smile on his face.Below him are two who don’t seemquite up to the resurrection and liesupine, their bloodied heads hangingdown the stony incline.

Engulfed by the image, which is so accusatory, one could fantasize thatthe soldiers might turn and talk to us.But no, no one is looking out of thepicture at the viewer. There’s no threatof protest. They’re not about to yell atus to bring a halt to that abominationwhich is war. They are not representedas terrifying to others, for among them(far left) sits a white-garbed Afghanscavenger, entirely absorbed in goingthrough somebody’s kit bag, of whomthey take no note, and entering the picture above them (top right), on thepath winding down the slope, are twoAfghans, perhaps soldiers themselves,who, it would seem from the Kalash-nikovs collected near their feet, have al-ready stripped the dead soldiers of theirweapons.These dead are supremely un-interested in the living: in those whotook their lives; in witnesses—or in us.Why should they seek our gaze? Whatwould they have to say to us? “We”—this “we” is everyone who has never ex-perienced anything like what they wentthrough—don’t understand. We don’tget it. We truly can’t imagine what itwas like. We can’t imagine how dread-ful, how terrifying war is—and hownormal it becomes. Can’t understand,can’t imagine. That’s what every sol-dier, and every journalist and aid workerand independent observer who has putin time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck downothers nearby, stubbornly feels. Andthey are right. ♦


candyland In Gerald Scarfe’s drawingswear cartoon gas masks and carry machine guns;

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for his redesign of “The Nutcracker,”Clara’s grandpa leaps over his walker to chase a purple-haired hottie named Ms. V. Aggra; the miceand snowflake ballerinas, dressed like speed skaters, shoot out of a giant fridge.The ballet (Scarfe’s first) has its London première this month.

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