A war and its images: as photographs and films dealing with the Iraq War become the subject of partisan debate, the author considers their ethical and historical context

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

In 2001, a controversy that still continues erupted in France over a set of tour photographs taken by an anonymous member of the Sonderkommando, squads of interned Jews charged by the Nazis to fill and empty the gas chambers in Auschwitz. (3) Shot from a distance, apparently looking out from an open gas chamber, they show us something none of the liberators could produce--images of the death camp in operation. In these blurry, images, barely discernible naked women walk to the gas chamber, and other members of the Sonderkommando sort through gassed bodies prior to cremation. Unlike, say, a Bourke-White photograph, their interest lies solely in their content and the fact that they were taken at all. When presented in a Paris exhibition of photographs from the Nazi camps (including shots by Bourke-White and Miller), they, along with a catalogue essay about them by art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, ignited a furious debate over whether the presentation of these images should be seen in an art context and, indeed, whether they should be seen at all. Critics argued that they violated the silence that should surround the horror of the Holocaust, that they reduce the visually unimaginable to a concrete representation. This argument, invoking as it does notions of the image as an essentially untruthful screen or fetish, seems particularly French. From an American perspective, it begs the question: How does the undisputed reality of these photographs diminish our imaginative understanding of this event?

The presentation of horrific photographs in exhibitions often entails controversy. Recall, for instance, the traveling show of American lynching photographs a few years ago [see A.i.A., Oct. '02]. At that time, there were questions about whether museum displays of these representations of mangled and brutalized lynching victims simply compounded the violation enacted when the images were circulated as postcards the first time around. It has taken the Abu Ghraib photographs a much shorter time to appear in an art-museum context. This fall, selections of. images of prisoner abase from Aim Ghraib are appearing simultaneously at the International Center of Photography in New York and the Andy Warbol Museum in Pitts burgh. Will this recontextualization change the way the images affect us? Will this presentation diminish or enhance their ability to shock us?

Another issue raised by the kinds of images we are seeing, or not seeing, has to do with ethics. The Bush administration's argument for suppressing images of coffins and corpses because their public display would be upsetting to the families is politically expedient, but it also touches on a larger cultural taboo against the publication and exhibition of images of actual dead bodies. This taboo surfaced after Sept. 11 in the emergence of an unspoken agreement among the major U.S. news media to avoid images of bodies or body parts, an agreement flint extended to a tacit ban on images of victims jumping kern the burning towers.