The Erotics of War Photography
The ever-thought-provoking Jim Johnson has an interesting analysis of some of the rhetoric surrounding war photography, which does a good job at getting at some of what makes me uncomfortable around the way journalism and media discourse frames and discusses the war and the folks wrapped up in it.
Jim asks: “If we can decry the way politicians and the print media consistently trade in (verbal) euphemisms (as I have done here repeatedly) isn’t it possible to see the ‘human interest’ approach to war photography as a form of visual euphemism?”
So much war photography serves to suck us up in the human drama, the pathos of real people in intense situations, that we lose sight of the bigger picture. We forget about the policies and the greed and the politics and the land-mine manufacturer executives and the babies buried in the rubble.
He uses the phrase “visual euphemism,” to link war images with the way we understand war journalism - as something with a fundamental underlying dishonesty, as something built up out of deliberate obfuscation and the parroting of lies - with the end result that we walk away from each piece understanding the conflict a little less.
I see an unmistakable eroticism to the way soldiers are depicted in war photography. Young, strong, brutal men, occupying a weird moral space where the normal rules do not apply. The exhibit under discussion in this post includes a series of photos of “Soldiers Sleeping,” their shirtless tattooed bodies and open guileless mouths bespeaking simultaneous innocence and heroism. This follows a long tradition in representational art, going back to The Dying Gaul and beyond (at the time of that sculpture’s creation, nudity connoted heroism, and his representation in the nude in a Roman sculpture was an uncharacteristic “memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries”).
We respond to stories. Stories help us understand otherwise unimaginable things - the unthinkable suffering of war, for example, becomes real to us through our relationship to Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. And we respond to sex, to desire. To fear. To quote a poem I quote way too often:
The boot in the face, the brute
My theory is that we are socialized to respond to these images, to men who exemplify strength and violence and brutality. That we fetishize these men who are, depending on where you stand, heroes or hooligans or cannon fodder. That we start from fear and eventually reach a sort of Stockholm Syndrome thrall to these men whose sacrifice and slaughter help keep the game going, the wealth and the poverty and the profit and loss.
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