In/visible War

Jon Simons, John Louis Lucaites

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813585390
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans.
 
Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.  
 

Part I

Seeing War

1

How Photojournalism Has Framed the War in Afghanistan

David Campbell

Images are central to contemporary geopolitics. We encounter other people and places in a “field of perceptible reality” that is enacted by visual representations, making some things visible while rendering others invisible.1 Photographs, paintings, video, film, computer games—each and every pictorial artifact—helps establish what can be represented and how it can be shown. In turn, those images are made possible by a series of historical, cultural, and political frames or infrastructures.2

In this essay I consider how one set of pictorial artifacts—the contemporary war images of photojournalism—were produced in Afghanistan during U.S. military operations there. In particular, I explore how the discourse of photojournalism has become one of those frames that makes aspects of the war in Afghanistan in/visible. This means that, in addition to reading specific war photographs, I consider how the discourse of photojournalism—that is, the way photojournalists speak about and justify the practice of photojournalism—has been complicit in the production of the field of perceptible reality.

The modern discourse of photojournalism, which dates from the 1930s onward and is usually grounded in claims about how Robert Capa and his associates operated, is based on the premise that power is held accountable by making visible a different picture of war than that offered by the state. The claims of this discourse are grounded in terms of objectivity understood as immediacy, indexicality, and impartiality, and it reached its apogee in the Vietnam War, where an allegedly uncensored visual account supposedly hastened the end of the U.S. involvement.

However, as I argue in the later stages of this essay, these claims fail to appreciate both how Capa practiced his craft, and how visual media functioned in the Vietnam War. My thesis is that the modern discourse of photojournalism has never been able to grasp the problematic of in/visibility in terms of the state frame and its alternatives. Indeed, I propose that the modern discourse of photojournalism has become exhausted, bogged down by the reiteration of familiar concepts—especially aesthetics and a particular notion of objectivity—that no longer have critical purchase when it comes to understanding the late modern and digital production, circulation, and consumption of photographic images. I examine this through a point of contention in the practice of photojournalism during the war in Afghanistan, namely the status of pictures produced with applications (apps) on mobile devices. My claim is that the problems with the modern discourse of photojournalism mean we are unable to properly consider the function and effect of images and how they establish what is in/visible in the field of perceptible reality. These familiar concepts have produced the mystical foundations of authority, driven by certain desires to overcome particular anxieties.

We need to understand the intersection of anxiety and desire in order to fathom why photojournalism does not contribute to a critical rendering of our fields of perceptible reality as often as it could. A critical rendering would expose and contest the geographic imaginary enabled by photography’s geopolitical function. If we understand geopolitics in the sense articulated within critical geopolitics—that is, as a writing of political space—then the affordance of photography as a technology of visualization involves a spacing and writing of the political, in which sight enacts site, thereby structuring our encounters with others. More often than not both the discourse and practice of modern photojournalism has helped sustain an “imagined geography” in which the dichotomies of West/East, civilized/barbaric, North/South, and developed/underdeveloped have been prominent.3 The hope is that a critical reading of the kind offered here will open the way to a better consideration of how contemporary photographs of war function.

Embedded in Afghanistan

The field of perceptible reality that is the war in Afghanistan has been enacted in large part through news imagery and photojournalism.4 We have seen a steady stream of familiar pictures made up of allied forces, Afghan civilians, Taliban casualties, and American military families. Photojournalism on the front line has focused on the military struggles of international forces as they combat an “elusive” opponent, with soldiers and their weaponry front and center. There is also an inevitable regularity to the style of these images. As Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder notes, the work of photojournalists in Afghanistan “sometimes looks very uniform.”5

“Embedded journalism” has been a frame commonly focused upon to explain the nature and limits of what we do and do not see. That analysis sometimes proceeds on the assumption that there was once a time when photography’s contribution to the field of perceptible reality was free from government controls. As Judith Butler claims in her assessment of the ethics of photography:

Recent war photography departs significantly from the conventions of war photojournalism that were at work thirty or forty years ago, where the photographer or camera person would attempt to enter the action through angles and modes of access that sought to expose the war in ways that no government had planned. Now, the state works on the field of perception and, more generally, the field of representability, in order to control affect.6

But the frames through which the visualization of Afghanistan is enacted have a longer and deeper history than is suggested by this view. The conventions of war photojournalism have been frequently aligned with the state, thereby making the production of an alternative picture a more difficult task. The embedding of journalists during operations in Afghanistan—which grew out of the media’s experience in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—is simply the latest in a long line of regulations governing relations between the military and the media.

Embedding involves journalists linking up with military units so they can report from the front lines, and it began formally with the invasion of Iraq. After agreeing to follow the U.S. Public Affairs Guidance or the Ministry of Defense’s “Green Book,” more than 700 journalists embedded with American forces and nearly 130 with British forces (although they were outnumbered by the more than 1,400 “unilateral” journalists who were in the war zone). Embedding involves a tradeoff between “generous access and narrow-aperture coverage.” In Iraq, being able to witness war close-up and live was new, but being on a “slack leash” without the ability to set things in context constrained coverage. With only two dozen personnel “dis-embedded” by the U.S. military, the majority of journalists lived happily on the leash. Indeed, when U.S. officials reviewed the system, embedded reporters “were always spoken of as homogeneously supportive of the Pentagon effort.”7

Coverage of the invasion of Iraq demonstrated in part the value to government of the embedding process. A survey of U.S. newsmagazine photographs showed “a highly restricted pattern of depiction limited largely to a discourse of military technological power and response.”8 The number of combat photographs from Iraq increased from those published in the 1991 Gulf War, but still only made up 10 percent of published pictures. This was less than expected from front-line reportage, and demonstrates that news pictures are less concerned with the firsthand recording of events and more with the repetition of familiar subjects and themes. Although individual photographers believed they operated with freedom within the system of embedding, and sometimes even broke the rules, the way their pictures were used in publications did not challenge the official war narrative.9

Embedding has played a role in the visualization of Afghanistan, though not from the beginning. When Operation Enduring Freedom began in October 2001, the Pentagon had not yet conceived the specific system of embedding. Moreover, given that the first military operations in Afghanistan were covert actions by Special Forces against a non-state actor, embedding was from the military’s viewpoint untenable. As a result, the U.S.–led strikes in Afghanistan proceeded with minimal media access, but there were few if any serious protests about this lack.

The early photographic coverage of Afghanistan was, therefore, part of the overall coverage of the “War on Terror” arising from the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. That series of events was shaped through its immediate visual representation and saw an expanded realm of the visible. Photography is deployed to mark globally significant events, and some U.S. newspapers underwent a “sea change” in their use of news pictures, doubling the number prior to 9/11. Part of this proliferation of images was the use of pictures that, although showing something from the general area, did not depict the specific events being reported. This symbolic function, where the repetition of icons associated with 9/11 provided cues and prompts for viewers, meant photographs became a means of moving the public through its trauma, enabling support for the military action in Afghanistan.10

When combat began in Afghanistan, the media’s absence from the front lines meant that the pictures came after the event, showing newly pacified landscapes, families in flight, and women enjoying new freedoms. As Barbie Zelizer argues, “Images were used in a way that showed less of the war itself and more of the assumptions about the war held by the forces responsible for its prosecution. U.S. journalism was thus complicit, if not consciously so, in using images in ways that upheld larger strategic aims.”11 This is the problematic of a particular in/visibility at work.

Embedding first came to Afghanistan in March 2002 when eight journalists accompanied units engaged in Operation Anaconda. The first combat operation involving conventional units as opposed to Special Forces, the Anaconda coverage produced pictures that would become a template for later reportage: combat troops hunkered down in wild terrain, helicopters kicking up dust as they ferried in men and material, and the bodies of Taliban fighters strewn among the rocks, all seen from an allied perspective.12

The narrow range of visual subjects in the coverage of Afghanistan is evident in two of the most prominent images of the conflict, one celebrated and the other controversial. In May 2009 Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder was in the Korengal Valley and captured a moment of combat. It showed three soldiers peering into a remote valley, rifles at the ready, the enemy seemingly elusive (fig. 1.1). It evokes a war machine looking for a reason, certain a threat is out there, but unsure of its form. There’s even a moment of pathos, with the man on the left in his red shirt, pink boxers, and exposed legs lining up with his comrades. Army Specialist Zachary Boyd was the casually dressed soldier, and after this photograph was widely reproduced in the American press, the secretary of defense declared his fondness for it: “Any soldier who goes into battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special kind of courage. . . . I can only wonder about the impact on the Taliban. Just imagine seeing that: a guy in pink boxers and flip-flops has you in his cross-hairs. What an incredible innovation in psychological warfare.”13

Figure 1.1.

Three months later, another Associated Press photographer, Julie Jacobsen, drew the secretary of defense’s ire for her combat photograph. Jacobsen was on patrol with a Marine unit near Dahaneh in southern Afghanistan when the Taliban ambushed them. She photographed the scene, including images of a badly wounded Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard, who later died in the Camp Leatherneck medical unit. The blurred photograph of Bernard shows him slumped in a gully, a bloody leg wound visible, being hurriedly tended by two colleagues. Taken from a distance such that neither the faces nor the uniforms of Bernard and his helpers were identifiable, Jacobsen doubted the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Paradox of War’s In/visibility
• Part I: Seeing War
• Transition
• Part II: Not Seeing War
• Part III: Theorizing the In/visibility of War
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Photo Credits
• Index