The Teleology of War II

‘Die horribly on television and you will not have died in vain,

you will have entertained us’

-Kurt Vonnegut

Amongst several projects I’m currently working on is one exploring the depiction of conflict on television. Its a massive expansion of one I began while I was studying for my MA which explored the relationship between media depictions of war and weapons, and the actual effect of these weapons on human bodies. This is likely to form one ‘chapter’ within the larger body of work.

What I’m really interested in the idea that war is becoming ever more televisual in the way it is fought (cameras integrated into a growing number of weapons, carried by soldiers themselves legitimately and illicitly) and in the way it is viewed (closing distinction and time space between fact and fiction appearing on screens).  At the moment the project is a flurry of different ideas that are slowly coming to rest and finding their place in an order.

The Teleology of War

‘The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.’

– Videodrome

A few images from a project I’m working on at the moment about television and the way wars, both fictional and factual are depicted. I’m interested in several things, the history of wars on television, the visual language used and how these differ or are similar in news and entertainment, and ultimately the question of what purpose showing war on television serves. Is it informative or titillating, cautionary or callous? At the same time I’m interested in the potential of photographs of moving images on a screen to emulate the aesthetics of traditional war photography, and what it means for the veracity of that media if it is sometimes indistinguishable from photographs of a battle scene in an action movie.

Images shown here are from ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ and an episode of the documentary series ‘The World at War’ on the battle of the bulge.

Der Krieg

I was just at the Wellcome Institute’s new exhibition on death in art, review possibly coming soon. Most exciting was coming into a room and finding Dix’s entire ‘Der Krieg’ series of about fifty etchings on one wall. I think Dix’s work is amazing, this series executed several years after the wars end is like some sort of monstorous attempt at exorcising nightmares, more like outside art in many ways than something by an artist as talented and technically capable as Dix. It’s incredibly powerful, partly because it feels so frenzied and uncontrolled. I really, really recommend going to see the whole exhibition but these especially are worth seeing in the flesh.

NAM: Foregrounding Weapons

This is the last of several extracts from the introductory essay to my latest project, Vietnam Deprimed. It explores the notion  of horror, its representation in visual culture and media, and how weapons are frequently foregrounded while images of the destruction they cause to the human body are hidden in various ways.

As I have mentioned, news media have increasingly opted to show the hardware of war rather than the consequences, an effect described as ‘technofetishism’. This tendency also extends into entertainment media, particularly cinema, where movies have helped to reposition public loyalties to the military away from increasingly irrelevant cold war ideologies towards technology.

In Top Gun (1986) sleek American aircraft (and some notably less sleek Soviet ones) provide a technoerotic thrill as they fight without actually fighting. Similarly, games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare boast ‘more than 70 new and authentic weapons’ as a selling point. As well as serving to distract from the horror of war, media like this contribute to a discourse in which high– tech, ‘civilised’ nations have the right to dominate low– tech, ‘barbarous’ ones. [Stahl, p.28]

Another tendency in entertainment which is linked to technofetishism is the conflation of weapons with abstract moral principles. This is partly a consequence of America’s relationship with guns, their centrality in the constitution, and their position in the narrative of a ‘frontier spirit’. Problematically, however, this has led to the gun coming to embody ideas as diverse as justice and law-breaking, freedom and repression.

As examples of this conflicting moral message, in Destry Rides Again (1939) guns always represent criminality, as a frontier sheriff abandons them and brings armed lawbreakers to justice through non-violent means. By contrast in Dirty Harry (1971) the iconic Magnum revolver used by the protagonist comes to represent the idea of justice, albeit in the form of unsanctioned violence, rather than impotent legal system. Weapons clearly are not capable of embodying or defending positive ideals in themselves, and are just as capable of defeating them or representing negative principles, but contemporary cinema frequently suggests otherwise.

The effects of weapons are also often highly stylised. In the long running television series The A-Team, a group of heavily armed soldiers of fortune are depicted as never killing (with one exception) or badly injuring their antagonists. Likewise computer games encourage an unrealistic view of weapons in which being shot can be solved by simply reloading a saved game and starting again.

These phenomena are not consequences of the Vietnam War, rather they have origins deep in American history, and reflect the the main priority of the US entertainment industry to distract audiences rather than lecture them. However, because the trauma of defeat in Vietnam was one which Americans came to terms with largely through media like cinema, and because of America’s cultural hegemony, the resulting artifacts were exported and had a global influence.

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Short bibliography:

Roger Stahl, Millitainment inc.

NAM: Distancing War

This is the second of several extracts from the introductory essay to my latest project, Vietnam Deprimed. It explores the notion  of horror, its representation in visual culture and media, and how weapons are frequently foregrounded while images of the destruction they cause to the human body are hidden in various ways.

Vietnam was notable because of the way the media were able to bring the brutality of the war onto the front page, and into people’s homes. It was the first television war, and it was also the first largely uncensored (or to be more accurate ineffectively censored) war. There have been innumerable changes in the way the media function since 1975, but there are three changes that have emerged as a direct result of the Vietnam War and which have detrimentally affected the way the media represent horror.

First, far greater restrictions are now placed on journalists covering wars. The war in Vietnam was lost by the media, or at least that was the story the US military consoled itself with, and correspondents congratulated themselves with. True or not, the belief in this has subsequently led the armed forces to impose greater restrictions on correspondents. During the Falklands War of 1982, for example, the Ministry of Defence only allowed a limited number of correspondents to join the naval task force, dressed them in military garb and attached them to specific units. The media simply had to accept these conditions because the military ‘and only it controlled access to the warzone’. [Knightley, p.478]

Since the Falklands War this technique, known as ‘embedding’, has become standard practice because it enables the military to keep track of what journalists are able to see and report, and places them in such close proximity to soldiers that a degree of bonding is inevitable. The result is that the stories journalists are able to report, and the photographs that they are able to take can be directed by military priorities, and the negative elements of war, particularly death and injury, are more easily filtered by ‘censorship at source’. [Knightley, p.479]

A B-52 ‘Stratofortress’ strategic bomber dropping bombs on North Vietnam

The second development that has compromised the media’s ability to depict war’s horrors is the increasing use of remote and long range methods of killing. Again, Vietnam was the genesis of a practice which continues  to the modern day. The ground war in Vietnam was violent, visually spectacular and, as it turned out, unwinnable. Towards the end of the war the US  military turned instead to carpet bombing North Vietnam. Not only did this result in fewer American casualties, it was also impossible for journalists to report the effects, even when US bombers started illegally bombing neighboring Laos and Cambodia.

This approach has continued. A present day example is the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or ‘Drone’ attacks carried out in remote areas of Afghanistan and, again illegally, Pakistan. ‘Drone’ aircraft are remotely piloted by operators hundreds or thousands of miles away, and their attacks take place without warning and in areas journalists have difficulty reaching. For the military this is the best of both worlds, with no danger of dead American pilots, and little likelihood of journalists bringing back inconvenient photographs of any bystanders killed in attacks. For Taylor this is part of a process of ‘derealisation’, where war is depicted as being ‘acted out by machines rather than on the bodies of people’ [Taylor, p.158]

The third important development to emerge since Vietnam is the increasing tendency of the press to self-censor.  This can be understood partly as a backlash against the graphic coverage of the Vietnam War. Media self-censorship is related to a wide range of issues, commonly banded together under the term ‘propriety’. Press propriety is often construed as a moral matter, but as Taylor states, ‘the press is not dedicated to forcing its audience to view horrific imagery and has no use for it in a regular moral or improving agenda of its own’[Taylor, p.3], rather propriety is a matter of pragmatism or good  business.

An MQ-1 Predator drone firing a missile

The most obvious respect in which this is true is that self-censorship is often necessary in order to facilitate present or future co-operation with outside organisations. For example, advertisers are unlikely to want their advertisements for, say, skincare products opposite an image of someone immolated by napalm. Embedding is also a good example of this pragmatism, as a photographer may resist publishing controversial imagery of a war if it may damage their relations with the military and make future collaboration difficult. Don McCullin was repeatedly denied access to cover the Falkland’s War, almost certainly because ‘his type of war photography threatened the image of war that the military wanted to convey’. [Knightley, p.479]

The result of these changes has been to make it rare to see extreme or disturbing images of war in news media. Though, as Taylor states, ‘the bodies of allies and enemies are central to warfare’ [Taylor, p.157], they are consistently hidden or obscured. Stylisation of images, for example showing blood instead of actual injuries, and deflecting the attention of images to other subjects such as weapons and technology (what Stahl calls ‘technofetishism’ [Stahl, p.28]) are two ways this is achieved without appearing to scrimp on reporting events.

Ultimately, the machinery of war has become more important than human bodies, the logical result of long standing military rhetoric which connects war to ‘a basically empty, amoral space’ [Taylor, p.158] and which depersonalises soldiers into parts of a mechanism. Thus the tragedy for an audience of witnessing their own troops dying and the ethical problems of seeing enemies killed is lessened.

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Short bibliography:

John Taylor, Body horror

Roger Stahl, Millitainment Inc.

Phillip Knightley, The First Casaulty

NAM: Looking at Horror

This is the first of several extracts from the introductory essay to my latest project, Vietnam Deprimed. It explores the notion  of horror, its representation in visual culture and media, and how weapons are frequently foregrounded while images of the destruction they cause to the human body are hidden in various ways.

On encountering a sight like a vicious wound or mutilated corpse most people feel horror, a mixture of disgust and fear. Horror is a variable quantity, and what triggers this response is contingent on the make-up of the individual viewing it, their background history; their psychological state at the moment of encounter and myriad other factors. A doctor used to treating trauma wounds may be less appalled than someone who has never seen a gunshot wound. For some people this experience can trigger other emotional responses, perhaps embarrassment at viewing the suffering of another, or, inversely, a feeling of voyeurism at witnessing something that it is taboo to observe.

Horror is ‘always subject to historical change’ [Taylor p.2]. Only a few centuries ago, scenes of horror were more common in European societies than they are now and therefore more normal. Healthcare was less effective and disease rife, death a distinct possibility at many stages of life. Wars were fairly regular events, mutilation and violent death were so common as to be parts of the judicial process, and such punishments were often carried out as public spectacles for all to witness.

The last two centuries however have seen advances in healthcare which have radically reduced mortality and changes in justice that have led to ‘the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body … exposed alive or dead to public view’ at least in most of the developed world [Foucault, p.8]. At the same time, much of the developed world has experienced a relatively long period of uninterrupted peace. Apart from random accidents and freak violent acts, sights of horror have disappeared from our lives.

Execution of Charles I

The disappearance of these sights from view, combined with the simultaneous rise of mass media and global communication means that, for most people, our encounters with horrors like conflict will be predominantly through images. Sontag argues that, as a result, ‘the understanding of war among people who have not experienced [it] is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images’ [Sontag, p.19].

This is significant in many respects, not least the fact that our encounters with scenes of horror now pass through numerous layers of filtering,: from what the journalist in the field chooses to photograph or film, to what military or government handlers may allow to be filed, or to what an editor chooses to run. Equally, such dependence on images is problematic because however accurately they may depict a terrible scene, photographs are only ‘at most a trace and not the thing itself’ [Taylor, p.5].

Photographs can still generate a sense of horror, but they do so in a different way to encountering such sights in real life. Most obviously with a still photograph we are able to sit and study scenes that may have only been viewed for a fraction of a second by the photographer. This can variously heighten or undermine their shock value, depending on the image in question. Photographs also problematically exacerbate the voyeuristic tendency intrinsic in a witnessing horror because they ask ‘viewers to stare at the scenes with impunity’ [Taylor, p.14].

Execution of Saddam Hussein

Despite these flaws in the representational ability of photography to show terrible things, it is important that we use it to do so, and that we look at the images that result. The alternative of simply not knowing about horrific events, particularly a man made phenomenon like war – a phenomenon in which we are often to some extent complicit – is far more troubling. As Sontag writes ‘…war tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.’ [Sontag, p.4]

Not to know this, or only to know it in the abstract sense of knowing something one has been told but never seen (even in a photograph), is courting disaster. John Taylor aptly sums up the problem: ‘…the use of horror is a measure of civility. The absence of horror in the representation of real events indicates not propriety so much as a potentially dangerous poverty of knowledge’. [Taylor, p.11]

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Short bibliography:

John Taylor, Body horror

Susan Sontag, On the Suffering of Others

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

NAM: Vietnam Deprimed

For the last month I’ve been researching and writing a small book about the effects of war on human bodies. The finished book is available to download here, be warned that it contains very graphic images showing the effects of various weapons on people. As a more indepth explanation of what this book is about, here’s the introduction and some photographs of the hard copy of the book.

‘The horror, the horror.’ This ambiguous quote ends Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam film, Apocalypse Now, which, as in Conrad’s novella, implies that the real heart of darkness lies not in the orientalised inhabitants of the jungle, but in the Europeans who brutalise them. The horror of war, particularly of the kind perpetrated in Vietnam is a well known and explored fact. Or is it? We might know in an abstract sense that a rifle can maim and kill, but do we really know how violently?

Vietnam Deprimed is a visual experiment which aims to engage with two issues. First, the way mass media show, or rather don’t show, the graphic horror caused by war. Second, the way popular culture can normalise or even fetishise weapons, disconnecting them from the violent physical effects they have on human bodies.

The first half of the book will explore in essay form the notion of what horror is, how the consequences of the Vietnam War have affected the ability of the media to show it, and the ways that popular culture helps to normalise weapons and war while understating their violence. It will round off with a brief discussion of the approach used to create the second half of the book.

The second half of this book attempts to reconnect weapons and violence more directly by positioning images of Vietnam-era weapons opposite medical archive images of their effects on people. The intent is to visually deprime the viewer, to shock the readers out of their accepted way of viewing weapon and wound as isolated images, and persuade them to reconsider them as profoundly connected.

NAM: The Horror

Since my last post about the NAM Vietnam research project I’m working on I’ve made considerable progress. I’ve stuck with the idea of making a book that attempts to reconnect weapons and the harm they do to people, by juxtaposing images of the weapons and injuries. It’s preceded by an essay which talks about tropes in the media and military towards distancing the public from the impact of war, and deflecting attention on to the clean technology of conflict instead of the horror of dirty and damaged bodies (a concept which has the rather brilliant name ‘technofetishism’).

The project has involved trawling through some truly horrendous archive images of wounds, mostly taken in field hospitals and medical facilities during the war. Images of land mine victims, people who let go of grenades slightly too late, gunshot wounds, napalm victims. The list goes on. It’s had a surprising effect on me, I’ve slept badly during the making of this project, with images from the photographs I’ve handled penetrating my dreams. At least it’s somewhat dispelled the idea of compassion fatigue for me. These images are still appalling even seen for the hundredth time.

Despite this, and unlike many of my colleagues on the MA who seem a bit skeptical of the value of this research project, I’ve definitely got quite a bit from it. I was determined from the start that I didn’t just want to write another research paper that no one would want to read. I’m not an academic and the contributions I can make to that world are I think fairly limited. Instead I wanted to try and combine theory and practice, or praxis to make something that would be fairly intellectually rigorous, but which didn’t demand a high level of knowledge to look at and understand.

It’s still a vastly problematic book, with my use of the images raising all sorts of questions about the ethics of viewing suffering, recycling these images for a purpose far removed from the reason they were originally made, and so on. But it was an interesting test of an idea. Once I’ve finalized the essay and images I’ll be posting a digital version of the book, and some extracts from the essay up here in the coming weeks.

NAM: Ideas and Problems

Having completed my last, practice orientated project, I’m now moving on to a research piece about the Vietnam war. My interest in the Vietnam war, or any war is fairly limited. When I was younger I thought wars were the interesting part of history and the lulls in between were tedious build ups to the next big fight, now I find the quiet periods in history infinitely more interesting. Despite this the Vietnam project has triggered quite a few ideas, so many actually that I’ve found it difficult to focus in on just one.

I’ve started work on one idea I have but so far I’ve found it utterly grueling. I’m not sure if for the right reasons or not. The basic idea is to create a small book that attempts to connect several different types of weapon with the types of injuries they inflict on people. Partly this is about counter-acting the way weapons are normalised in popular culture and disconnected from their purpose. Partly it’s a response to the way the media and many armies are increasingly sanitizing and censoring what images we see of wars. Finally it’s also a comment on the long distance nature of modern war which means in some circumstances even the people doing the killing don’t see the consequences of what they’ve done in the same way they might have done in the past. UAV or Drone aircraft strikes being an example of this.

So far it’s involved identifying about ten types of weapon and then trawling through some truly horrendous images of related injuries. It’s difficult knowing where to go with this book. On the one hand it ought to be totally shocking, otherwise it misses the point, but I can’t decide whether I actually should be using this research project to make a political point, and even if this point is actually worth trying to make. I have a feeling that the end result will be a book so horrible that I won’t want to inflict it on anyone else. At the same time the ideas that are emerging are starting to form the basis for what might be quite an interesting essay, so perhaps the resulting writing from the exercise will be the artifact rather than the book, which I don’t think I have the stomach to see through to completion.

I have a few other ideas I can always fall back on, including an exploration of the portrayal of Vietnam veterans over a period of about forty years, and the way they transition through different stereotypes and degrees of acceptability, from the badly received home coming vets of early films to the hero type veterans of films like Rambo. Another idea is to look at the development of millitary euphemisms and slang. My final idea is a study of a branch of Vietnam reenactment that takes place in the UK. The problem with these is they don’t really feel worth doing for any reason but the sake of jumping through the hoops laid out by my course syllabus. However horrible the weapons book is at least it will represent something I feel strongly about.

MA: Adam Broomberg + Oliver Chanarin

We have weekly guest lectures as part of the photojournalism masters. Because the lectures are shared between about three or four different courses the specialisms of the speakers fit our interests to varying degrees. This week’s was from arts/photography duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Their work is pretty conceptual, often using recycled images or unconventional forms of photography. I found it all pretty exciting and refreshing to see how broad the possibilities are, and the enormous depth you can find in seemingly simple ideas. Just the idea of working so collaboratively is strange to many photographers and it’s exciting to see how well it can apparently work.

Broomberg and Chanarin’s projects offer plenty to think about in terms of what constitutes documentary photography. A relatively conventional and early work, Ghetto, looks at twelve modern ghettos, from Prisons to psychiatric hospitals. Given the potentially repressive role of the camera in such institutions (oh hai Focault) it’s interesting the way the artists attempt to get around this, asking psychiatric patients to choose how they want to be photographed and to trigger the camera themselves for example. At other times this legacy is inescapable, as they told us the camera gave them a strange air of authority in many of the places they worked in, with people assuming they were part of the institutional apparatus simply because they were taking photographs.

One project of theirs which we previously discussed on the MA and which generated lots of debate is ‘The Day Nobody Died’, made while embedded with British troops in Afghanistan. Rather than photograph the carefully choreographed photo calls that the media savvy army had laid on for them, the two artists instead exposed long strips of photographic paper each time an event occurred that they would have wanted to photograph but were prevented from doing so. It seemed to me a brilliantly subversive way of refusing to play the game that embedded photographers are often forced to.

Particularly interesting to me was their most recent project. War Primer is a collection of Bertolt Brecht’s Second World War newspaper cuttings displayed alongside four line poems, all rather cynically contained in a school textbook like volume. Brecht’s brilliant original works on two levels, as a condemnation of the phenomenon of war and as an analysis of mass media images and how they are encoded with messages and decoded (or not) by viewers.

Broomberg and Chanarin’s War Primer 2 adds images from the War on Terror over the top of Brecht’s originals. The images are carefully selected to match Brecht’s original poems, and many following the contours of the original images in a way slightly reminiscent of John Stezaker’s work. The results looked pretty staggering, not least because of how relevant the issues Brecht was raising still remain. The biggest frustration with the work is that at $560 and a limited print run I won’t be owning a copy anytime soon, and I’m not sure what Brecht would have made of his work being turned into such an unattainable art piece.