Cultural critic Susie Linfield discusses 'The ethics of seeing'
As a little girl Susie Linfield was captivated by a book she
discovered on her parents' bookshelf entitled The Black Book of Polish Jewry.
Published in the early 1940s, it included photos of starving Jews in the
ghettos. “I was grieved by them. I was shamed by them. But I was also sort of
compelled by them,” says Linfield, the director of the Cultural Reporting and
Criticism Program at New York University. Decades later, she reflected again on
the way photographs informed her view of war and atrocities as she examined the
photos emerging from the Balkans, Rwanda, and other trouble spots. In her new book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University
of Chicago Press), Linfield returns to this theme. She recently gave a talk at
Stanford as part of the Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011), sponsored in part by the Center
for International Security and Cooperation, and she spoke with CISAC about
changes in photojournalism, the political context behind warfare, and what she
calls “the ethics of seeing.” Excerpts:
CISAC: In your book you look at two different approaches to war
photography—that of Robert Capa, the Hungarian war photographer of the 1930s
and 1940s, and the modern war photographer James Nachtwey, who has chronicled
more recent conflict. How are world events reflected in their photography?
Linfield: One of the observations in my book is that war and its related
atrocities are photographed in a much more graphic way than they used to be.
The level of atrocity and bodily disfigurement that we are now used to seeing
in photographs is something very different than the kind of photojournalism
that was done in the 1920s through the 1950s. That connects in some ways to the
lessening of political certainty. In other words, the kind of political and
ideological factors that used to determine war are much less prevalent in a lot
of the wars that are being fought now. If you look at the war in the Congo,
it’s just a horrific, horrific situation with millions of people killed. But
it’s very hard to understand that war in any sort of traditional political
paradigm, certainly not the paradigm of something like the Spanish civil war.
There, one could understand the political dynamics and certainly feel
solidarity with one side or another. With a lot of the wars we're presented
with now, I think that kind of solidarity and political clarity is very, very
hard to come by. So I think what we’re presented with visually is the bodily
disfigurement, the tortured bodies, but without any kind of political context
in which to understand it.
CISAC: How are today’s photos perceived by viewers,
as opposed to back in Capa’s time?
L: I think there’s much more resistance to seeing photographs now than there
was in Capa’s time. And again I think that’s connected to the lack of political
clarity. People aren’t really sure why they’re seeing them or what to think
when they do, and I think that has turned into a resentment against photography
and against photojournalism in particular—that we’re just being assaulted by
these meaningless images. These images aren’t meaningless. But they do take a
lot of work to try to understand.
CISAC: How is this tied to ethics?
L: I think there is something I would call the ethics of seeing. To me that’s
not an instantaneous thing. It would be very connected to the idea of really
trying to delve into the histories that these photographs suggest and really
trying to understand them and understand the causes of the violence. And in
terms of the ethics of showing, I am much less critical of photojournalists
than I think a lot of other critics are, especially with someone like James Nachtwey.
He’s accused of being a pornographer, exploiting—his stuff is disgusting,
unbearable, unwatchable. And it is disgusting and unbearable in certain ways,
but I don’t think he’s a pornographer. And I don’t think he’s a nihilist. I
think he’s showing us images that are very, very difficult to look at. And
they’re very, very difficult to look at for two reasons. One, the explicitness
of them is very, very painful. To see bodies that tormented is extraordinarily
painful. And I think they’re also difficult to look at because it’s very hard
to have a political context in which to understand these images. In a certain
sense we’re sort of left with our troubled emotions, but not really knowing what
to do with them.
