Benjamin Friedlander

Philosophers, historians, and art historians have long questioned photography’s representational capabilities on the grounds of adequacy, especially in response to the unphotographable scale of “man-made mass death”—Edith Wyschogrod’s phrase for bureaucratically managed genocide. Outside the circle of academic debate, however, the images have gone on doing their cultural work of representation. For those of us who rely on these images for what we know of the world, the problem of adequacy, while important, remains secondary; the more pertinent issue is believability. To assert that a photograph has failed to depict an event or situation fully is to accept nonetheless that the event or situation actually occurred. When we withhold this acceptance, a photograph fails more fundamentally.

Seen in this light, the so-called “crisis of representation” presupposes an experience of the real against which the photographic image could be measured. But what if we lack this experience? What if our knowledge of the “real” comes by way of the image? The status of such knowledge is obviously precarious, threatened by dangers that go far beyond propaganda. With new imaging technologies and new forms of social and economic control put in their service, images grow ever more potent even as their connection to the real weakens. The ultimate effect is paradoxical: we become increasingly dependent upon the image and yet increasingly numb to what it shows. Forced by a lack of alternatives to rely upon sources of information whose motives we mistrust and whose veracity we cannot test, we find ourselves in a crisis of belief: belief in the truth of what particular photographs depict and in the possibility of connecting with the world that photography in general would reveal.

In Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture, 2003), David Levi Strauss writes eloquently about this crisis, documenting its progression from the post-Vietnam Cold War conflicts of Central America through the first Gulf War and Rwandan genocide to 9/11 and the bombing of Kabul. A key essay in this progression is “Photography and Propaganda,” which interrogates one of the principal surviving media myths from Vietnam: that powerful images can break free from their ideological frame and help to mobilize public action. The essay takes as its example the work of two photojournalists killed in Central America, Richard Cross and John Hoagland. These men, notes Strauss, “were idealists in the tradition of earlier press photographers, who believed that by . . . ‘photographing the truth,’ they could influence public opinion and public policy, and change the world.”

At the same time, they were dependent professionally on news organizations with different and even antithetical aims. Looking at their photographs in situ, Strauss concludes, “Hoagland and Cross were cultural workers in the factories of the Consciousness Industry. They did not own the pictures they made any more than a worker in a munitions factory owns the weapons he makes while employed.” Yet out of this skepticism, Strauss develops a method of reading photographs, and with it a reimagination of photography’s public function. For Strauss, what matters most in an image—what a photograph materializes—is a social relationship, and to see this requires an active engagement with context. Looking is insufficient; when we concentrate on a photograph’s formal and thematic elements we are always “in danger of becoming spectators,” that is, of imagining ourselves as standing outside the photograph’s field of action. Consequently, “The first question must always be: Who is using this photograph, and to what end?”

Like any political analysis, the examination of a photograph’s use in specific contexts can only be effective when linked to concrete forms of action. Between the Eyes proposes two such forms: resistance and the “reassertion of individual initiative.” Strauss explores the option of resistance most powerfully in his essay on Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda projects, “A Sea of Griefs Is Not a Proscenium.” The essay begins by indicting the western powers for their failure to act when the genocide began in 1994, a failure made more grotesque by the extensive press coverage the violence received even as it was occurring. “The world’s inaction,” notes Strauss, “was not due to ignorance of the facts, but a prejudice against them.” Jaar, with assistance from the UN, traveled to Rwanda while the bodies still littered the ground, “to see with his own eyes what had happened there.” He visited killing sites and refugee camps, interviewing numerous survivors and assembling a large collection of documentary photographs. Yet after his return from Africa, Jaar showed exceptional reticence in using this material for art, especially the photographs. Indeed, his mourning for the dead is difficult to distinguish at times from a mourning for the image.

Part of this reticence is owing to the structural limitations of the medium. Having seen so much with his own eyes, Jaar felt keenly the inadequacies of his assembled images. “I have always been concerned,” he told an interviewer, “with the disjunction between experience and what can be recorded photographically. In the case of Rwanda, the disjunction was enormous and the tragedy unrepresentable.” However, this reticence is also a reaction to the ineffectiveness of the images that did circulate while the genocide was occurring. Thus, in one piece, Jaar replaces his images with the single word “Rwanda,” which Strauss calls “a simple sign, in the form of an insistent cry.” In another, he replaces the images with narrative descriptions, then buries the prints “in sepulchral cubes that stand like a rebuke to representation itself.” Later projects readmit the use of photographs, but discreetly. In one piece, we see gestures of tenderness between survivors that exclude us from their company. In another, blocks of text flash in a light box, telling the story of Gutete Emerita, a survivor whose eyes we briefly glimpse in extreme closeup. “The effect,” writes Strauss, “is almost neurological. Eye-to-eye, we are involved. If the world turned a blind eye to the killings in Rwanda, Gutete Emerita did not. Her eyes saw it clearly. Looking into her eyes, perhaps we too will see it. It is a risky, some will say foolhardy attempt, but it works.”

Strauss’ second solution, the reassertion of individual initiative, is implicit in Jaar’s later works, described by Strauss as “a concentrated attempt to recover the power of the image.” But Between the Eyes is rich with other examples as well, most notably the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, whose beautiful, indelible images of Third World lives transform the poor and exploited into figures of the sacred. His images are frequently criticized for aestheticizing the poor, but Strauss has nothing but scorn for this response. Photography, he asserts, is properly engaged in representing visually the artist’s stance toward reality. In Salgado’s case, the stance is one of devotion, an “epiphany of the other” irreducible to objective conditions or material affliction. Thus, while Salgado’s photographs record the fact of poverty, they permit recognition of something more.

For Strauss, the aesthetic is a means of demystifying the camera’s “special relation to the real,” a relation that invests the photograph with its “aura of believability” but does not absolve the photographer of responsibility for making legible what the image would accomplish. Nor is this responsibility limited to photographers. Between the Eyes includes an interview with the painter Leon Golub, an “image-scavenger” persistently engaged in using photographs “to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world. To make some sort of contact.” One might well say the same of Strauss, whose essays often share in the representational burdens of the photographs that move him.

Thirty-six years ago, during the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong briefly occupied the American embassy in Saigon. Live TV coverage of this event is widely credited with transforming American opinion about the government’s conduct of the war. Never mind that the war continued for several more bloody years, and that American troop commitments actually increased over this time. The Tet Offensive remains for many Americans a signal example of the role images can play in the development of public policy.

Thirty-six years is a long time. The children born in 1968 were entering college in 1986, the year of the earliest essay in Strauss’ book. This fall, the incoming class will be filled with children born in 1986. Two generations have passed since the magic year of 1968, making Vietnam a kind of prehistory for today’s students. For this newest generation, a more pertinent example is the bombing of Kabul. Of this event, Strauss writes:

Just before launching the airstrikes, the US Defense Department purchased exclusive rights to all available satellite images . . ., enter[ing] into an exclusive contract with the private company Spacing Imaging Inc. to purchase images from their Ikonos satellite. . . . The agreement . . . produced an effective white-out of the operation, preventing Western media from seeing the effects of the bombing and eliminating the possibility of independent verification or refutation of government claims. News organizations in the United States and Europe were reduced to using archive images to accompany their reports.

How did we get to this point? And how do we move beyond it? In Between the Eyes, David Levi Strauss offers persuasive answers to both questions.

Benjamin Friedlander's most recent books are Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (University of Alabama Press, 2004) and A Knot Is Not a Tangle (Krupskaya Press, 2000), a collection of poems. He teaches at the University of Maine.