The Violence of the Image

Photography and International Conflict

Liam Kennedy, Caitlin Patrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Photography has visualized international relations and conflicts from the midnineteenth century onwards and continues to be an important medium in framing the worlds of distant, suffering others. Although photojournalism has been challenged in recent decades, claims that it is dead are premature. The Violence of the Image examines the roles of image producers and the functions of photographic imagery in the documentation of wars, violent conflicts and human rights issues; tackling controversial ideas such as 'witnessing', the making of appeals based on displays of human suffering and the much-cited concept of 'compassion fatigue'. In the twenty-first century, the advent of digital photography, camera phones and socialmedia platforms has altered the relationship between photographers, the medium and the audience- as well as contributing to an ongoing blurring of the boundaries between news and entertainment and professional and amateur journalism. The Violence of the Image explores how new vernacular and artistic modes of photographic production articulate international friction.This innovative, timely book makes a major contribution to discussions about the power of the image in conflict.

Part I
Framing Civil and (Post-) Colonial Conflict

1 The Incorruptible Kodak

Photography, Human Rights and the Congo Campaign

Christina Twomey¹

Alice Seeley was unmarried, in her late twenties, and working at a post office in London when Kodak advertised its Bulls-Eye camera in 1897.² Quoting a special correspondent, who claimed that he was able to change the roll of film in his camera 'in the full glare of the tropical sun during assignment in Africa, Kodak declared that its 'cartridge system' had created 'a perfect revolution in photography'. Having dispensed with the need of a dark room, the art of photography was 'within universal reach'.³ Photography was now within the purview of 'Ladies, Cyclists, Tourists and Holiday-Makers'.⁴ Alice Seeley was a lady with dreams of travelling abroad, to a place with tropical sun, but not to cycle or enjoy a holiday. She had just trained as a missionary and was about to marry John Hobbis Harris, a man who shared her vocation and with whom she would set sail for Africa in 1898.⁵ The suffering that Alice Seeley Harris witnessed in the Belgian king Leopold's Congo Free State, captured on film with her camera, helped the organised campaign for reform in Congo to become the first humanitarian crusade of the twentieth century.⁶ Among Alice Seeley Harris's most famous images were men, women and children who had been mutilated – by having their hands or feet severed – or murdered by soldiers licensed to maim and kill in rapacious pursuit of rubber and profit.

Just over a decade later, in 1910, Marguerite Roby, another intrepid British woman, set off to journey through the Congo with her camera. Roby was no earnest missionary Kitted out in a man's hunting outfit, carrying a gun and riding a bicycle, Roby 'intended to be patient and keep my eyes open, for I meant to take photographs of any mutilations or other evidences of tyranny which I might come across during my travels'.⁷ She didn't find any, and instead illustrated her travel memoir with photographs of scenes and sights, including her healthy, well-fed 'boys', dancers, mission compounds and a smiling 'Chief who said he had nothing to smile at'. As one reviewer said at the time, 'It is hard to rid oneself of the impression that Mrs Roby "had her suspicions" beforehand.'⁸ In her account, written in a 'jolly hockey sticks' tone, in which the natives are there to serve, amuse or invoke derision as lazy good-for-nothings, Roby derided Congo reformers and pilloried their well-known phrase about the 'incorruptible evidence of the Kodak'.⁹ A picture of mutilation was not enough - information was needed on where and when the image was taken – otherwise 'mistakes and misunderstandings'would arise, which was a very unsatisfactory state of affairs 'in a case where a nation's honour is concerned'.¹⁰

By the time Marguerite Roby toured the Congo, it had been annexed by Belgium, after a most controversial period as the Congo Free State (1885-1908), a name that belied its status as the personal fiefdom of the Belgian king, Leopold II. Ostensibly a philanthropist committed to preventing slavery in Central Africa, King Leopold II had promised to allow free trade and missionaries into his domain. He thereby became a beneficiary of the Berlin Conference of 1884—5, which granted him authority over the Congo. The Berlin Act of 1885, an effort to regulate European imperialist ambitions in Africa, in effect delivered large swathes of territory to a monarch accountable to no one. Leopold's rule over the Congo, a region rich in rubber resources, coincided almost exactly with increased global demand for rubber products, especially bicycle and car tyres. Within a decade, Leopold had assumed proprietorship over virtually all land in the territory, monopolised the trade in ivory and rubber, and set exorbitant rubber-collection targets for its inhabitants. In order to enforce production quotas, men recruited into Leopold s Force Publique routinely used brutal tactics of hostage taking, murder, massacre, sexual violence and mutilation to terrorise and intimidate their subjects.¹¹

One of the most notorious tactics was cutting off the hands of victims, either to intimidate them or as macabre proof to authorities that a bullet had not been wasted. The removed hand was meant to suggest that each bullet expended had achieved its purpose and claimed a life. There were European and American missionaries resident in the Congo who had complained of these practices since the 1890s, but some of the largest missionary organisations, concerned to keep their toehold in Central Africa, were reluctant to attract the displeasure of Leopold.¹² Furthermore, Leopold employed agents in England and the United States to undermine, counteract and refute the claims of abuses, by suggesting that they were the work of disgruntled missionaries or frustrated traders keen to get their hands on the Congo's riches.¹³ It is unclear whether Marguerite Roby was in Leopold's purse, but her efforts resembled many who were.

The significance of photographs for the humanitarian campaign to end atrocities in the Congo, which gathered strength from 1903, was not lost on contemporaries, as Roby's attempt to undermine them makes clear. The alliteration of Kodak, Congo (sometimes spelt as Kongo) and camera proved an irresistible combination. A pamphlet entitled The Camera and the Congo Crime and 'The Kodak on the Congo', a photo-essay of Alice Harris's images, featured in the reform campaign.¹⁴ It was after seeing photographic images of the mutilations and suffering in the Congo, sent to him by English reformers aware of his reputation as an anti-imperialist, that Samuel Clemens (publishing as Mark Twain) decided to pick up his pen in support of the cause. Although its literary merit was debatable, Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy, in which the Belgian King rages insanely against his critics, proved a memorable intervention on the side of the Congo reformers. The book also included photographs, at Twain's insistence.¹⁵ Twain made the most famous link between the Kodak and the Congo, one repeated by other prominent supporters of the campaign such as Arthur Conan Doyle and quoted many times since. Twain has Leopold declare, after studying 'some photographs of mutilated negroes':

The kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us, indeed. In the early years we had no trouble in getting the press to 'expose' the tales of the mutilations as slanders, lies, inventions [...] I was looked up to as the benefactor of the downtrodden and friendless people. Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible kodak - and all the harmony went to hell! The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn't bribe. Every Yankee missionary and every interrupted trader sent home and got one; and now - oh well, the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them.¹⁶

One review of the Soliloquy even claimed that it showed ' The Kodak as Emancipator'.¹⁷ Indeed, the visual record of the brutality of Leopold's regime, particularly as it was captured and deployed by missionaries in the form of photographs and lantern-slide lectures which utilised photographic images, is often seen as the turning point in the Congo campaign.¹⁸

There are scholars who even suggest that the use of photographic images by Congo reformers was an important moment in the evolution of human rights. Arguing for the importance of the aesthetic realm, visual cultures and spectatorship to the articulation of rights discourses (as opposed to the textual emphasis inherent in a focus on political and juridical spheres), Sharon Sliwinski argues that 'the very recognition of what we call human rights is inextricably bound to aesthetic experience.' 'The conception of rights did not emerge from the abstract articulation of an inalienable human dignity,' she writes, 'but rather from a particular visual encounter with atrocity.' In this reckoning, the Congo atrocities were a key moment in that evolution. The idea of universal human rights, Sliwinski concludes, 'were conceived by spectators who with the aid of the photographic apparatus were compelled to judge that crimes against humanity were occurring to others'.¹⁹ Susie Linfield has also pointed to the Congo campaign as evidence of the 'intimate connection between an international human-rights consciousness and the photograph'.²⁰

This chapter takes issue with the argument that photographic images of atrocities in the Congo represent an important moment in the way that 'spectators' and 'audiences' thought about and came to understand 'human rights'. Apart from the fact that the 'spectators' are never defined, nor even quoted, beside the loose assumption that they were horrified audiences in Britain and the United States, these approaches employ a teleological understanding of 'human rights' which assumes that this was a shared narrative of common understanding in the early twentieth century. There is now a vein of critical scholarship that dates talk of 'human rights' to the 1940s onwards, which is at the same time careful to warn against pedantry around terminology when criticising others for looking back and seeing the emergence of'human rights' at every turn.²¹ Clearly'rights'-variously conceived - were a critical element of discussion in Europe for several centuries, but 'human rights' and 'crimes against humanity' are particular articulations that are largely a post-World War II construction and, as a mobilising language in humanitarian politics, more accurately dated to the 1970s.²²

The fact that one of the earliest missionary critics of Leopolds role, African-American George Washington Williams, referred to the regimes 'crimes against humanity' in a letter to the US Secretary of State in 1890 does not mean that this became a defining discourse of Congo reform.²³ It takes more than one swallow to make a summer. Sliwinski marvels at the mention of the phrase 'some fifty years before Auschwitz'.²⁴ Similarly, Adam Hochschild describes it 'as a phrase that seems plucked from the Nuremberg trials of more than half a century later'.²⁵ In practice, very few Congo reformers mentioned 'human rights' or 'crimes against humanity' at all. Mining the archive for mentions of 'crimes against humanity', one or two references to which have been found, does not prove a relationship between photography and 'human rights consciousness', at least not in this early twentieth-century period.²⁶

One of the noticeable features of the language used in the congo reform campaign is the difficulty that activists, journalists and others faced in finding just the right words to describe what it was they had witnessed and sought to overcome. Certainly, as others have suggested, the photographs were an important element in this campaign, but it is incumbent on the historian to ask why it was in relation to this issue that the photographic images of harm done to other human beings became so important. If there truly was a relationship between a nascent appreciation of 'human rights' and photography, one might expect greater evidence of it. For there were plenty of other horrible things that could have been photographed and publicised around the turn of the century - the appalling emaciation and suffering of the reconcentrados, Cuban civilians who had been 'concentrated' and effectively starved during the Spanish-Cuban war, the Boer women and children who had wasted in British conc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction: The Violence of the Image
• Part I: Framing Civil and (Post-)Colonial Conflict
• Part II: Politics and Photographic Ethics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• Part III: The 'Unstable' Image: Photography as Evidence and Ambivalence
• Select Bibliography
• Index