Review: Linfield, Susie (2010). The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago University Press. Ch 1 & 2

From the copyright page (iv):  SUSIE LINFIELD is director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, the Boston Review, Dissent, and other publications. She was formerly an editor at American Film, the Washington Post, and the Village Voice.”

Chapter 1:  A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?

There is much in the chapter to be reviewed and of the writers she discusses I have read only bits of Sontag and Barthes, two seminal writers in photographic theory who have an unfortunate disregard for the reader.  Linfield asserts that while these two have done much to shape a negative opinion of photos and photography, their suspicion and distrust can be traced back to Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, who she holds primarily responsible for having first articulated a mistrust of the the photograph based on mistrust of emotions.  She argues that modern critics fail to particularize, to take account of Brecht’s situation and concerns in interwar Germany.

“Brecht’s genius was to understand the role of unexamined emotion in this fatal process, and to create works of art that subverted it. Brecht saw—correctly—that his compatriots were drowning in a bath of toxic emotions: of rage over their defeat in World War I; of resentiment against Jews, intellectuals, and leftists; of self- pity, bathos, fear, and loathing. Brecht saw—correctly—that this poisonous mix of increasingly exaggerated feelings, and the voodoo conspiracy theories to which it lent itself, was the perfect incubator for fascism. (p23)”

The problem Linfield identifies is not Brecht himself, but those who came afterwards and elevated his ideas to a kind of universal truth.  What is required to reclaim to photography criticism is emotional honesty, the ability to recognize and work with the emotions elicited by photographs, not to simply dismiss them as sentiment or their makers as manipulators.

“I suspect that the postmoderns are motivated by an additional, indeed opposite, anxiety: they fear not just the obedient, automatic reactions of the viewer but her disobedient, politically incorrect ones. They worry that our unfiltered gaze—our intuitive reactions—will reveal things about us that may not be good, and that our pesky, potentially uncontrollable emotions will burst out of the armor of ideology they have tried to construct around us. (p25)”

Linfield offers her own reaction as example.  Regarding an Iraqi scene of anguished mourning, which might be expected to evoke feelings of sympathy, she finds instead exasperation, the veiled women wailing around a casket a pathetic display of victimhood.  The photo has not succeeded in unraveling or explaining the war, or even of eliciting empathy.    She calls for a new way of seeing, of responding genuinely, honestly.

“In approaching photographs with relentless suspicion, critics have made it easy for us to deconstruct images but almost impossible to see them; they have crippled our capacity to grasp what John Berger called “the thereness of the world.” And it is just that—the texture, the fullness of the world outside ourselves—into which we need to delve. Photographs can help us do that. (p30)”

Chapter 2: Photojournalism and Human Rights:  The Calamity of the Kodak

This chapter builds an argument against the oft repeated claim that repeated exposure to images of suffering and cruelty desensitizes the viewer, and that photographers who engage in making such images are producers of a kind of poronography.  She notes first that photography excels in depicting cruelty far more than painting or writing.

“The very thing that critics have assailed photographs for not doing—explaining causation, process, relationships—is connected to the very thing they do so well: present us, to ourselves and each other, as bodily creatures. Photographs reveal how the human body is “the original site of reality,” in Elaine Scarry’s words.  [snip]  Photographs show how easily we are reduced to the merely physical, which is to say how easily the body can be maimed, starved, splintered, beaten, burnt, torn, and crushed. Photographs present us, in short, with physical cruelty and our vulnerability to it. The vulnerability is something that every human being shares; the cruelty is something that shatters our very sense of what it means to be human. (p39)”

Carrying on from the idea that photography excels in eliciting emotion, and that of the emotions elicited by documentary photography many are uncomfortable, Linfield suggests critics are displacing their discomfort by blaming the messenger and seeking the impossible.

“These critics seek something that does not exist: an uncorrupted, unblemished photographic gaze that will result in images flawlessly poised between hope and despair, resistance and defeat, intimacy and distance. They demand photographs that embody an absolute reciprocity between photographer and subject, though absolute reciprocity is a hard thing to find even in the best of circumstances. They want the worst things on earth—the most agonizing, unjust things on earth—to be represented in ways that are not incomplete, imperfect, or discomfiting. Is there an unproblematic way to show the degradation of a person? Is there an untroubling way to portray the death of a nation? Is there an inoffensive way to document unforgivable violence? Is there a right way to look at any of this? Ultimately, pious denouncements of the “pornographic” photograph reveal something that is, I think, fairly simple: a desire to not look at the world’s cruelest moments and to remain, therefore, unsullied. (p45)”

Regarding desensitization, she wonders where and when we might find perfectly compassionate people.

“Yet this claim remains entirely unproven—and lacks basic logic. It implies that a golden age existed in which people throughout the world responded with empathy, generosity, and saving action when confronted with the suffering of others. But when, I wonder, did this utopia exist? The early twentieth century? The nineteenth century, the eighteenth, or perhaps the twelfth or ninth? Where and when can we find it—and the good Samaritans who presumably used to populate our globe? In fact, the desensitization argument is exactly wrong. For most of history most people have known little, and cared less, about the suffering of those who are unknown or alien. (p46)”

She goes on to argue that it was in fact photography that opened our collective eyes and conscience to suffering, robbing us of “the alibi of ignorance.”  She cites Mark Twain’s short story satirizing King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo, from whence the chapter derives its subhead.  The king laments that in the past he could dismiss charges of cruelty as rumors of enemies, but this is no longer possible as a result of the Kodak, which has so ably and horrifically documented his misdeeds.  It is in fact this globalization of suffering that has been instrumental in the formation of such groups as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and MSF.

But photography has been used as well by the tormentors, from Stalin to Pol Pot.  The cover of Cruel Radiance is a photo made by the Khmer Rouge of one of their child victims. The point Linfield wants to make here is that looking at such photos does not make us voyeurs, does not make us complicit in atrocity.

“To confuse the torturer with his prey—much less believe that you have somehow become one or the other—is not an expression of solidarity. It is, instead, an evasion of the immense, insurmountable difficulties—the inability to understand, the inability to grieve, the inability to act—that these photographs present. We cannot become the prisoners of S- 21 any more than we can save them; it would be inexcusable to imagine that we can or did. (p59)”

Ultimately, photography itself is not responsible for causing or solving problems.

“The real issue is how we use images of cruelty. Can they help us to make meaning of the present and the past? If so, what meanings do we make, and how do we act upon them? The ultimate answers to such questions reside not in the pictures but in ourselves. Photojournalists are responsible for the ethics of showing, but we are responsible for the ethics of seeing. (p60)”