Euphemism and American Violence

I’ve been meaning to post this is excellent article by Yale proffessor David Bromwich for a while. I consulted it a few months ago whilst working on a series of photomontages about millitary euphemisms and what they hide or suggest. It’s somewhat dated but still worth a read.

“In Tacitus’ Agricola, a Caledonian rebel named Calgacus, addressing “a close-packed multitude” preparing to fight, declares that Rome has overrun so much of the world that “there are no more nations beyond us; nothing is there but waves and rocks, and the Romans, more deadly still than these—for in them is an arrogance which no submission or good behavior can escape.” Certain habits of speech, he adds, abet the ferocity and arrogance of the empire by infecting even the enemies of Rome with Roman self-deception:

A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them…. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of “government”; they create a desolation and call it peace.

The frightening thing about such acts of renaming or euphemism, Tacitus implies, is their power to efface the memory of actual cruelties. Behind the façade of a history falsified by language, the painful particulars of war are lost. Maybe the most disturbing implication of the famous sentence “They create a desolation and call it peace” is that apologists for violence, by means of euphemism, come to believe what they hear themselves say.”

As the article makes clear this is nothing new, nor unique to America, but in the current context of an increasingly stale war on terror the historical precidents are quite eye opening. It’s also interesting to think that the effect of using these euphemisms is more complicated than simply hiding an unpleasant truth from people, but that they play a function in actually changing our attitudes towards the things that they are intended to hide.

Review: Don McCullin @ Tate Britain

It says something about the reputation of veteran war photographer Don McCullin that not only does he have an enormous retrospective currently in progress at the Imperial War Museum, but he has a second one within a stone’s throw along the river at Tate Britain. Although you might imagine the two exhibitions would be in competition with each other they are in fact very different affairs. The Tate Britain largely shies away from McCullin’s photographs of war, and focuses instead on some of the work he might prefer to be remembered for. Prominent amongst these are two projects begun in the nineteen sixties when his photographic career was still relatively young.

In one McCullin returns to the North of England where he was an evacuee during the war (a traumatic experience he has occasionally compared to his later experiences in war) to produce a series of photographs of the industrial heartlands of England. Factories and pits loom large in these images, dwarfing the people who work and live around them and darkening the skies with seemingly all pervasive black smoke. This is not a particularly sympathetic rendering of the north, probably reflecting McCullin’s early experiences there, and even the more light hearted images (a woman pushing a pram past a bleak pit complex for example) are tinged with threat.

A very different series follows, about homelessness in London’s east end. The subjects, the people themselves, loom very large in these stark images. They are strange mix, some obviously taken without the subject’s knowledge, the quintessential shot of the dehumanised, faceless homeless person in a doorway that I have to say I hate so much. Some of the other images are however the opposite, there is clearly interaction between photographer and subject. Some of these are quite wide shots, but a couple are portrait like and starkly beautiful. One of a man crouching by a fire with his hands over his face is almost religious. Still this is a problematic collection of images, particularly treated as they are in this setting, as works of art with little context.

Closest to the photographs of war McCullin is best known for are a series he took in Berlin as the wall was going up in the early sixties. While this doesn’t show actual conflict it shows the mounting tension on both sides as two armies face off for a possible conflict between east and west. This is amusingly contrasted though against West Germans going about their lives, shopping on the busy street of capitalist West Berlin. The interaction between army and civilians is nicely captured. One excellent picture is dominated by a soldier’s boot and a machinegun filling almost the entire frame, while in the background another soldier checks out a passing woman. In another East German guards peer over the border cautiously but curiously. It gives the event the feel not of two superpowers preparing to annihilate each other but of two small tribes meeting for the first time across a river, unsure of each other’s intentions.

McCullin’s recent landscape work also makes an appearance. In the IWM retrospective I felt these images were dwarfed to insignificance when displayed alongside pictures of starving children and napalmed babies. It felt impossible to perform the mental acrobatics of going from one subject to another and as a result I just felt the landscapes were a bit dull. In the rather different context of the Tate retrospective it’s much easier to appreciate them for what they are. Brooding, dark and threatening landscapes.

In short this is a very different exhibition to the Imperial War Museum retrospective, but definitely complimentary to it, and if you plan on going to one you might as well take a bus along the river and visit the other. This exhibition offers an altogether different take on McCullin’s photography, and one I think he might rather prefer considering his frequent attempts to distance himself from the title of war photographer. Here you can see quite how much more complicated his photography is, and also get a sense of the different directions his photographic career might have evolved in if he hadn’t gone to war.

Don McCullin is on at the Tate Britain until 4th March 2012

Review: Don McCullin @ IWM

A major retrospective now on at the Imperial War Museum charts the career of veteran war photographer Don McCullin. Born in Finsbury, a deprived area of North London, McCullin spent his national service as a darkroom assistant in Africa and the Middle East. Failing to qualify as an RAF photographer he returned home and fell in with a notorious local gang, The Guv’nors who he occasionally photographed. After one of the gang’s members was jailed for murder some of these photographs were published by the Observer, initiating McCullin’s career as a photojournalist.

From then on McCullin’s CV reads like a list of twentieth century humanitarian disasters. Initially he focused on conflict, covering wars and insurgencies in Cyprus, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, El Salvador and Vietnam. Arriving in Vietnam shortly after the start of the Tet Offensive McCullin spent two weeks in Hue as American troops fought street to street with the Vietcong to retake the city. During this time he produced some of his best known and most devastating photographs of war, images often credited with helping to turn public opinion against the conflict.

While many of McCullin’s images depict the actual act of war, the shooting and grenade throwing action, some of his best tackle what some might regarded more as sideshows to the main event. In one an elderly Vietnamese man stares accusingly at the camera, presumably believing McCullin (dressed in borrowed American military garb) to be a US soldier. The man’s look is pure hatred, and it instantly makes you realise that whatever the wider political intentions behind American involvement in Indochina, ordinary people utterly hated them for being there. The psychological toll of war is another reoccurring sub-theme. In one famous image a shell shocked soldier stares vacantly past the camera to somewhere beyond the viewers head. Shell shocked is an apt term, the soldier looks like an empty shell.

Coverage of such a devastating conflict took also took its toll on the photographer, and viewing this exhibition it isn’t hard to see why. The level of suffering on show is overwhelming, even in photographic form. The exhibition space, a series of strangely shaped and rather claustrophobic rooms has a disorientating effect which amplifies the collective impact of the photographs on show. In a thirty minute video interview that accompanies the exhibition McCullin describes returning from Hue knowing he had some of the best photographs of his career, but also feeling he had become slightly insane.

McCullin’s relationship with his work is complicated, and there is a reoccurring suggestion that he was more than just an observer to the events he photographed. When he describes his time in Hue he talks as if he were actually one of the soldiers he photographed, commenting for example that ‘we were fighting hand to hand’. There are also examples of McCullin putting down his camera to help people, for example carrying an elderly Cypriot woman to safety. From this comes a sense throughout the exhibition of McCullin trying to redeem himself, to justify, and to present himself not like most journalists as an opportunist or a parasite feeding on other people’s misfortune, but as a participant or even a victim himself.

As if tying into this desire for redemption his later photographs seem to show a shift away from armies, the perpetrators of violence and a move instead towards the victims. His photographs of the victims of the Biafra famine for example. These images are overwhelming, perhaps more so than the war photographs. A portrait of a starving albino child, shunned by his own people is especially difficult to forget. McCullin covered other similar humanitarian disasters, including the impact of HIV in Africa. Attempts to return to the battlefield were met with mixed success. While his coverage of the Lebanese civil war was highly regarded, he was met with official hostility when he tried to cover the Falkland conflict and 2003 Iraq War, with governments presumably mindful of the role his photographs had played in turning public opinion against past conflicts.

Today McCullin focuses primarily on landscapes and private commissions, some of which are included (somewhat awkwardly) towards the end of the exhibition. He has stated that he doesn’t wish to be remembered as a war photographer. However although some of his non-conflict photography is arguably more interesting (for example his photographs of Travellers and Romanies and discrimination they faced in 1960’s Britain) it seems inevitable he’ll be remembered for pictures of dead, dying and grieving people, destroyed countries and lives, the worst parts of humanity. There is a cult of the photojournalist, particularly the war photographer, that McCullin’s career seems to fit rather too conveniently in to, and which at least partially this exhibition feels like a celebration of. It’s quite a lesson that even for a living photographer, one’s work can define you in ways you might not particularly like or be able to control. Unlike most war photographers however there is a lot more than opportunistic exploitation in McCullin and his work, interrogate his photographs and you’ll be suprised at the complexity of messages you find.

Don McCullin: Shaped by War is on at the Imperial War Museum London until 15th April 2012

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War, Death and Journalism

About a week ago two photojournalists, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, were killed covering the fighting between rebels and Gadaffi regime loyalists in the Libyan city ofMisrata. Though tragic, this news was in itself not overly surprising. Journalism is a dangerous profession. The Committee to Protect Journalists claims that in 2010 alone, 44 journalists were killed as a direct result of their work, perhaps more surprisingly only a quarter of these were war correspondents.

Since 1992 the CPJ estimates 861 journalists have been killed as a result of their work. A worrying figure for anyone interested in working the profession, but made even more revealing by the fact that a relatively small proportion of these were killed covering violent events. Many were killed for investigative work or publishing unfavourable stories, arguably an even more tragic loss. The vast majority of these deaths are met with a handful of column inches, often in the publications the deceased journalist was associated with, and rarely any airtime. Lucas Dolega, Mohammed al-Nabbous or Le Hoang Hung, all recently murdered journalists. Their deaths appeared in few papers, most people have never heard of them.

Yet for several days the news of Hondros and Hetherington’s deaths seemed to saturate the air waves. The news appeared in every national paper, and received extensive coverage on radio and TV. The thought that I couldn’t stifle was why? These two men were both experienced conflict photographers, who knew what type of environment they were entering, and knew that there was a strong risk of being killed or injured, but did it anyway. Admirable or stupid, depending on your perspective, but why focus so heavily on people who had put themselves in harms way, when so many people were in the same position with no choice.

Without sounding too cynical, it may be partly that we look after our own, and to the editors commissioning articles and the journalists producing copy the death of a colleague must have seemed more significant than the many other deaths they could equally have decided to write about. Certainly it had a resonance to me, a mere aspiring journalist. But this explanation doesn’t seem overly convincing, returning to my opening paragraph journalists are being killed on an all too frequent basis, with relatively little coverage.

It may have helped that Hetherington was an Oscar nominee and Hondoros a Pulitzer prize winner, but again this explanation seems rather unconvincing. For example when a few months ago João Silva, one the founder members of the Bang-Bang club, and one of the most acclaimed conflict photographers of the last few decades, lost both legs after stepping on a land mine in Afghanistan, the story barely registered with most news media. Likewise for a string of other relatively high profile journalists and photographers, who’s death in the line of work has gone virtually unnoticed by most people.

To pour on a little more cynicism it may also have helped that both photographers very much fitted the stereotype of the dashing young war correspondent, killed in their prime. Both white and western, to a degree their deaths might have been more easily emphasized with than the countless anonymous Libyans sharing the same fate, but with none of the choice that Hetherington and Hondros had to just pack up and leave. This post isn’t meant to draw any clear conclusions, or to criticise, but just to bring up a few things I’ve been thinking about over the last few days. If you’re interested in seeing some work by these two photographers, both of whom were incredibly talented, the BBC currently have slideshows of work by Hetherington and Hondros on their website.