Discuss the main problems in translating experience into knowledge, with particular reference to the relationship between researcher and researched subject.

How can we access lived experience? Can words, drawings, photographs capture lived experience? What are the translations that take place between the subject, the media, the translator (photographer, journalist, academic, etc) and the audience (general public, students, policy makers, etc)?

KEY TEXTS: Sylvester, Christine (2012) War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 40(3):483-503 Campbell, David. (2003) Representing Contemporary War, Ethics and International Affairs. 17(2): 99-108. Gibbon, Jill (2010) Dilemmas of Drawing War, in Sylvester, Christine, ed. (2010) Experiencing War. Abingdon: Routledge (PP. 103-117). Kynsilehto, Anitta & Puumala, Eeva (2012). The Ontological Gap between War as Experience and War as Knowledge, ISA paper presented at the ISA Annual Convention in San Diego, April 1, 2012. Povrzanovic Frykman, Maja (2002) Violence and the Rediscovery of Place Ethnologia: Journal of European Ethnology 32(2): 69-88

Main problems: ontological gap between researcher and researched subject in asylum process.Media view of the Other. Can take on the journalistic quality Leads to compassion fatigue ultimately. Researcher and researched subject media is our translation. We want the knowledge. Creation of an other. media just wants us to consume their shit. We see the distant other and leads to compassion fatigue.

Dilemmas of Drawing war Jill Gibbon, in Experiencing War C. Sylvester (2010)http://pmt-eu.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?fn=search&ct=search&initialSearch=1&mode=Basic&tab=default_tab&indx=1&dum=1&srt=rank&vid=44KEN_VU1&frbg=&vl%28freeText0%29=Sylvester+war&scp.scps=scope%3A%2844KEN_Voyager%29%2Cscope%3A%2844KEN_SFX_DS%29%2Cscope%3A%2844KEN_CALM_DS%29%2Cscope%3A%2844KEN_MODES_DS%29%2Cscope%3A%2844KEN_EPR_DS%29%2Cscope%3A%2844MDH_MW%29%2Cprimo_central_multiple_fe

The tradition of sending artists into war zones has an ideological function p103 The artists presence in the war zone has become the defining feature of official war art. Artists have been commissioned to visit and document all of the recent wars in which British troops have been involved. P104 Artists are dispatched to war zones to make art. The rationale is that they should be eyewitnesses of war. P104 The emphasis on witnessing in official war art contrasts sharply with the need to keep artists safe, sometimes with ludicrous consequences. The artist, Steve McQueen, was sent to Iraq in 2003 just as the conflict escalated and was virtually confined to army barracks. P104 . ^^ Ironically he would have seen more of the war on the news had he stayed in the UK. It seems likely that the practice of sending artists into war zones continues, in spite of the inevitable logistical difficulties, because it has an important ideological function. P104 Official war art initially had an overt propaganda purpose as it is clear from the title of the institution that established it the War Propaganda Bureau. However, according to the Imperial War Museum it subsequently took on a loftier aim. P104 In this section I will argue that official war art continues to work as propaganda, though in a more subtle way than when it was first commissioned, largely through the emphasis it places on the war zone, and the claim that it aspires to something higher. While the emphasis on the war zone restricts the content of the official war art, the idea that it evokes something higher imbues that context with transcendent value. P104-105 The word witness derives from the Old English witan, to know. In the thirteenth century witness was used to describe various types of knowledge including inner knowledge or conviction, knowledge based on observation, and a quality of wisdom or a skill. It was used as a verb to describe the act of giving testimony to such knowledge, and as a noun to describe an observer or a piece of testimony or evidence (Lewise, 2000). Although most of these meanings remain in use, they have separated into distinct dominant and marginal strands. Whereas a witness of conviction has become marginal, a witness based on observation has become dominant, particularly as a noun to refer to an observer. It is this meaning of witness that structures official war art. P105 The gulf between contemporary meanings of witness can perhaps be explained by the rise of empiricism and positivism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Empiricism advocates methodical observation as a reliable source of knowledge. Positivism, a nineteenth-century school of philosophy, goes further than this, advocating direct experience as the only genuine source of knowledge. In some versions, observation is presented as giving direct access to reality. This idea has been widely criticised in twentieth-century philosophy for ignoring the many ways we interpret what we see, and the social influences on meaning (Barbanell and Garrett, 1997; Craig, 1998). Nevertheless, the idea that observation is the only valid source of knowledge continues to have resonance. It runs through official war art. P105 the Artistic Records Committee of the Imperial War Museum insists on eye-witness accounts from its commissioned artists (Gough, 1994). P105 The importance of this rule is evident in the response given to artists who seem to have strayed from it. Peter Howsons painting of a rape in the Bosnian War, Croatian and Muslim (1994), was excluded from the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum because it was based on a victims accounts, rather than anything that Howson had actually seen. P105 The artist who is confined to acting as witness is powerless to reveal those things hidden from the video: high-tech atrocities committed against civilians and conscript troops, soldiers buried alive in their dugouts, the cultivation of starvation and disease by the bowing of sewage and irrigation systems (Stallabrass, 2004, p106). P106 In addition to restricting its content, the insistence that official war art is based on observation has often been used to guarantee the authenticity of the work. This 1918 review likens the war artist C.R.W. Nevison to a court witness: He is content to appear not as a judge or advocate but simply as an uncorrupted witness. He states without rhetoric what the eye sees (Flitch, 1918, in Malvern, 2004, p48). P106 The first official war artist, Muirhead Bone, trained as an architect and specialised in observational drawing. . Marks are made to represent what is seen rather than to express a feeling or opinion about a subject. P106 As causalities soared observational drawing became inadequate to the task of representing the war. The war clearly involved more than smoke on a distant horizon. Muirhead Bone seemed to acknowledge this when he described his war drawings as limited and prosaic (in Malvern, 2004, p24). P106 From 1917 the emphasis in official war art shifted from apparently objective reportage, to art. This is what the Imperial War Museum meant when it said that the scheme eventually aimed much higher. P107 Artists had no restriction on what they could draw I am afraid I connot give you any directions as to what you should draw I am quite content that you should go drawing whatever you think best (Masterman, 1917, in Malvern, 2004, p49). P107 As part of this change of emphasis, expressive approaches were encouraged. Expressive methods derive from a debate running through twentieth-century art about the meaning of realism. Does a realistic representation depict outward surfaces, or reveal unseen political aspects or psychological responses to a situation? In contrast to the emphasis on visual accuracy in observational drawing, expressive techniques use exaggeration, metaphor, idealisation and distortion to highlight artists subjective interpretations. P107 These images were clearly subjective however they continues to be presented as offering truths of war. This is evident in the title of one of the earliest publications of Paul Nashs war art Strange but True. An introduction by the propaganda bureau began with the warning, some fault will be found with what Lieut. Paul Nash has done here. It will be said that no barbed wire ever twirled on this earth in the forms which are taken by his (GHQ, in Nevinson et al., 1918, p87). P107 instead of depicting external surfaces, Nashs work revealed a deeper reality. He has got, at his best, to the essence of many things he has seen (GHQ, in Nevinson et al., 1918, p85). P107 It was the least literal, and for that very reason the most truthful (Konody, 1917, in Malvern 2004, p44). P107 The use of expressive techniques allowed artists to convey personal interpretations of the things they saw. However, these reviews claim more than this. They suggest that the artists reveal essential truths. Similar claims are made in relation to contemporary war art. These claims require more than a positivist idea of witness. They draw on a romantic idea of art as a source of essential, authentic values. This is a complex idea, deriving from the emergence of romanticism in the nineteenth century, and its impact on meanings of art and aesthetic value. As it is so fundamental to the ideological workings of official war art, it is worth tracing its historical sources. P107-108 The term romanticism emerged in the early nineteenth century to describe an emphasis on deep feeling, extreme experience and self-expression. . An emphasis on feeling was already evident in the term aesthetic that came into use in the eighteenth century. Although in contemporary usage aesthetic refers to qualities of art, in the eighteenth century it had a much more general meaning. The philosophers Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant used aesthetic to refer to the perception and communication of feelings through the senses (Harris, 2006, p10, Williams, 1976, p32). By stressing sensation and feeling as a source of understanding, these discourses represented a significant departure from the emphasis on reason in the Enlightenment. P108 In the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deep feeling was expressed as an impetus for self-determination and given a collective form. Conversely, however, the aesthetic emphasis on sensuous felling also underpinned bourgeois ideology, emerging at the same time as the modern state. Whereas a barbarous state maintains its authority through blatant repression, a democracy is held in place by an apparent consensus of fellow feeling. [problem].. it demanded both that aesthetic feeling was both subjective and universal. .[solved] by a dramatic restriction in the meaning of the term. By the end of the nineteenth century, aesthetic was used almost exclusively in relation to internal characteristics and qualities of art (Eagleton, 1990, Harris, 2006, Williams, 1976). p108 Until the seventeenth century, art was used to describe any skill. However, by the nineteenth century the term had specialised to refer to the fine arts painting, drawing and sculpture. Alongside this change, the romantic emphasis on emotion focused on artists who came to be regarded as specialists in feeling. . With this development, art was conceived as separate from society, and the term aesthetic came to represent higher qualities associated with art p108 This puts a new perspective on the claim made by the Imperial War Museum that, after an initial function as propaganda, official war art aimed much higher. Official war art literally transforms war into art, and , in doing so, links war to supposedly universal values widely associated within art. Far from marking a break from the propagandist function of official war art, the evocation of higher values refines that function. P108-109 In 2004 Langlands and Bell were shortlisted for the Turner Prize for their official art about the Afghanistan war. This is an extract from the Tate catalogue for the exhibition: Langlands and Bell present elegant and lasting work in and intelligent, but ultimately impartial, style The poignant ambiguity of these works ultimately reflects the stark realities of the aftermath of war (Tate Britain, 2004, p9). The repetition of ultimately and description of the work as lasting evokes a romantic idea of higher, timeless values, apparently achieved through the artists contact with the stark realities of war. P109 Nash: My war experiences have developed me certainly on the technical side. I think I have almost discovered my sense of colour which was very weak before the war. I have gained a greater freedom of handling, due largely to the fact that I had to make the rapidest sketches in dangerous positions, and a greater sense of rhythm. I have been jolted. (Imperial War Museum, 1988). P109 Nash: When Langlands and Bell, for example were commissioned to visit Afghanistan as war artists, the social and political reality they observed transformed their practice, producing an important series of works (Nash, 2006, p49). P109 Tony Blair after the invasion of Iraq: Ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit (Blair, 2003). P110 Terry Eagleton (1990) argues that the very idea of universal values is ideological, because it allows the state to dress up its own interests as being for the ultimate good. The romantic myth of art reinforces this idea by setting up a realm of value apparently above society and politics. And official war art provides a link between this realm of supposedly universal value, and the violence enforcement of partisan interests in war. P110 A positivist idea of witness restricts the content official war art to things seen in the war zone, a romantic idea of art suggests that the extreme experiences encountered there will inspire great art, achieving higher values invoked by politicians as a justification of war. P110

Witnessing War: Economies of Regulation in Reporting War and Conflict L. Chouliaraki (2009)http://www.tandfonline.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1080/10714420903124077

There have been two versions of the assault on Gaza played out over the past 3 weeks. One is the moderated account aired in the West; the other is the unexpurgated account of civilian deaths filmed in vivid close-up inside Gaza. (Jon Snow, The Independent, January 2009) p215 This is a snapshot of the controversy around the footage of the 2009 Gaza War over positions of showing and ways of seeing. P215 John Snows commentary refers specifically to the Israeli stationing of foreign media on the hill of shame, a hill beyond the conflict territory, where all that could be seen was columns of smoke in the horizonin his words, you could hear the crumph but you can see nothing of value p215-216 Indeed, the contrast between the Western networks moderated footage and the Arab channels shots of dead civilians throws into relief the work of war imagery in providing distinct ways of seeing that, in turn, construe distinct political and ethical communities of viewers (Silverstone, 2007). P216 The symbolic power of war reporting, in this sense, can be conceptualized as the power of the image to render spectacles of war and conflict a cause of engagement for media publics and thereby to constitute these publics as imagined communitiesas deep horizontal comradeships sharing dispositions to emotion and action (Anderson, 1989, pp. 67). P216 At the same time, they both capitalize on a significant similarity: they rely on a set of visual strategies, what we may call strategies of sublimation (the phantasmagoria of cityscape in flames or the human body fatally wounded) in order to orient viewers towards particular imaginations of community. In Iraq War reporting, this is the transnational community of Western spectators that contemplating a war without noteworthy victims, whereas in the Cyprus killing, this is the national community of Western citizens that glorify the death of a hero. P216

PITY AND THE ECONOMY OF WITNESSING The analysis of war and conflict reporting can be productively approached through the concept of a politics of pity (Boltanski, 1999, pp. 67). In line with historical norms that regulate the mediation of suffering in Western culture, the politics of pity refers to those choices of image and word that manage the emotional potential of viewers vis-a-vis the spectacles of suffering in ways that motivate particular orientations to a response, as if these viewers were present in the scene of action yet without overexposing them to the horror of the scene. P217 Operating within the cultural field of Western journalism, these ethical discourses are routinely produced through, what Campbell calls, a number of key economies of regulation: an economy of taste and decency, which bans the imagery of suffering from the screen, thereby responding to the publics aversion to atrocity, and an economy of display, whereby images of death are domesticated by the use of language and montage that frame the meaning of atrocity (Campbell, 2004, p. 70). Even though these economies of regulation can be seen as particular manifestations of the requirement of pity to avoid shocking viewers with spectacles of suffering, a consequence of their intersection is that the imagery of death is excluded from Western media. In so doing, Campbell claims, they come to restrict the possibility for an ethical politics exercising responsibility in the face of crimes against humanity (2004, p. 5). P217-218 Witnessing functions as an economy of regulation by drawing on strong religious and cultural traditions of the West, and thereby, investing the imagery of war and conflict with a force of authentic testimony. P218

THE PATHOS FORMULA OF THE GREEK-CYPRIOT CONFLICT This case study refers to footage on the 22nd anniversary of the Turkish invasion in Cyprus (August 1996), where protests took place in the green zone that separates the southern from the northern occupied part of Cyprus (August 1415). During these demonstrations, which turned into riots, two Greek-Cypriot were killed. The footage under study, referring to the second death, follows the victims, Solomon Solomou, last movements as he broke away from a protesting crowd and ran into the green zone of the island, starting to climb up the Turkish flag post. P218 Filmed in medium-range and broadcast in slow motion, the footage captures some of the background of the scene with the figure of a gunman standing in the balcony of a nearby building. As the victim is hit by bullets on the flag post, his body jerks back, the cigarette in his mouth falls off and his grip of the flagpole is loosened; he slides down, turns to the side, and falls on the ground. P219 historically, the pathos formula refers to a specific artistic tradition, whereby visual representation depicts the dying body as something willingly alienated by the victim for the sake of pleasure and aggrandizement of the oppressor (Eisenman 2007, p. 16), today the pathos formula reappears in the repertoire of war photojournalism as evidence of contemporary forms of martyrdom. P219 it seeks to remove suffering from the order of lived experience, thereby protecting the spectator from the horror of death, and presents it as beautiful suffering, allowing us to indulge in its aesthetic value from a position of safety (Reinhardt, et al. 2007) p219MORAL AGENCY The pathos formula, the denunciatory language, and the displacement of moral evaluation into external sources show the way in which the economy of witnessing endows Solomons killing with a strong claim to authenticity. It does so by appealing to two different but simultaneously enacted journalistic modes of seeing: being an eyewitness of the killing and bearing witness to the killing (Oliver, 2004 pp. 7988; Peters, 2001, pp. 707727; Zelizer, 2004, pp. 115135). Being an eyewitness to the killing entails watching the event as it happens and engages with the objective depiction of historical truth; bearing witness entails watching the event as a universal truth which transcends the fact of killing and engages with a traumatic moment that borders the unrepresentable. P220 Bearing witness as a mode of seeing is reflected in the slow motion, the frontal view, and the focus on detail, in short in the pathos formula that recognizes death and suffering to be, at once, the beautification of death as martyrdom and the authentic manifestation of the national psyche. The regulative economy of witnessing here relies on the capacity of the pathos formula to use a traumatic spectacle so as to produce collective imaginations of the nation as a source of heroic action. It is precisely this productive capacity of the pathos formula to celebrate the national body politic as heroic that overrules the norms of taste and decency and renders the footage of actually occurring death not only legitimate but, in fact, strategic in the context of conflict reporting. P220 Unlike bearing witness, the eyewitness involves a mode of seeing that approaches the scene of dying as actually existing reality that requires an urgent response. The regulative economy of witnessing here relies on this testimonial dimension of journalism: providing objective evidence in the service of a just cause. If the moral claim of a nation traumatized by the death of a martyr is the prototypical claim of journalism as bearing witness, the eyewitness proposes an explicitly political form of national imagination driven by the desire to restore justice in the name of international law.

THE TABLEAU VIVANT OF THE IRAQ WAR FOOTAGE The shock and awe bombardments of Bagdad (BBC World, MarchApril 2003), one of the most visually arresting spectacles of warfare, were broadcast live on BBC World and they were, subsequently, inserted as regular updates in the channels 247 live footage flowthe examples described here focusing on the updates common patterns throughout their 3-week broadcast span. P221AESTHETIC QUALITY The imagery of Iraq warfare is the exact opposite of the Greek-Cypriot footage: devoid of human presence, the point of view is from afar and above capturing the Baghdad cityscape in its visual plenitude. Bombing action animates this imagery through camera tracks and zooms that capture the hectic movement of weapon fire. P221 In terms of language, both the bomber and the Iraqi sufferer are represented in nonhuman terms. This happens through choices such as the plane and the strikes, for the bomber, and the compound, the city or Baghdad for the sufferer. These collective wordings parallel the visual effect of the long shot: they diffuse the figures of pity away from a politics of justice or care and invite us to indulge in the spectacle of warfare as a game to be studied. P221-222MORAL AGENCY As in the piece on Solomons death, these choices invite us both to experience reality as it is, in the position of the eyewitness, and to take a moral stance vis--vis this reality, in the position of bearing witness to this horrific warfare. P222 The this-is-what-happened function of description uses language in the first person to put words onto visual action and invite us to experience the spectacle as-if we were there. This is obvious in expressions such as . . . we saw this building take a direct hit. . . .; this is what shock and awe looked like . . .; then we heard . . . we looked up . . . a combination that both authenticates the report as objective reality and invites viewers to study the war as spectacle. P222 This language of eyewitnessing simultaneously allows for sporadic elements of evaluation to be dispersed across the reports: a terrible deafening sound as though the earth was being ripped open . . . . . . anti-missile flare spewing out of its wing . . ., let loose a ferocious barrage. Such quasi-literary use of adjectives and metaphors (spewing, let loose and as though the earth) frames the sight of bombing action with a sense of the horrific and the extraordinary, moving beyond description to introduce a bearing witness position towards the warthe proliferation of sound effects further magnifying the shock and awe experience this spectacle seek to evoke. P222 the updates construe the war primarily as a cinematic spectacle to be appreciated rather than a humanitarian catastrophe to be denounced. P222 Unlike Solomons report, however, which quickly passes from the aestheticization of death to the denunciation of the killing, thereby providing the resources for the collective imagination of a national community, this one insists on presenting the war as a spectacle to be studied rather than as a political fact that requires a response. Consequently, whereas the Greek news relies on politics of justice which enables an action-oriented disposition vis--vis Solomons death, witnessing warfare as a work of art is founded upon the condition of inaction. P223 This is because the tableau vivant excludes the presence of civilian victims from this instance of war imagery. Whereas this elimination of human suffering, euphemistically called collateral damage, fully resonates with the Western economy of taste and decency, it simultaneously construes the Iraqi sufferer as the Wests other, a figure undeserving of Western pity. P223

WITNESSING AND THE IMAGINATION OF COMMUNITY The comparative value of the Iraq war and Cyprus examples in the context of Gaza lies, therefore, in demonstrating how exactly war and conflict reporting strategically capitalizes on variations of particular positions of showing. Such positions of showing, the comparison shows, are embedded in deeper structures of Western ways of seeing (witnessing) and public morality (pity) that systematically operate to similar effects: they sublimate the mediation of human suffering and seek to reaffirm distinctly Western bonds of belonging along the lines of West and the others. The moderated accounts of the Gaza war in Western media, in this sense, are undoubtedly the outcome of positions of seeing, regulated by Israeli war propaganda, but they also reflect a Western legacy of aesthetic and ethical dispositions that, embedded as they are in the global power relations of mediation, privilege a communitarian sense of feeling for our own victims, while excluding (unexpurgated) spectacles of the death of others. P224 Western economies for the regulation of war and conflict reporting are responsible for the creation of such hierarchies of place and human life. The economy of taste and decency, as I argued in this article, regulates the public display of human death so that its imagery becomes legitimate only on the condition that it is elevated to beautiful suffering. P224 Whereas the Baghdad footage may have promoted a view of the war as fictional, by turning the bombing of civilians to a cinematic spectacle, in the Greek-Cypriot footage, the contemplative position of the death of the hero quickly gives way to politics of justice, introducing the perspective of denunciation in the name of human rights, and so imagining a community of action. The crucial difference here seems to be no longer one between fact and fiction but between a purely aesthetic politic of pity leading to inaction and one that makes an explicitly political demand for action in the name of international law. P224 In the light of such differences in witnessing, we need to critically revisit the criticism that reporting on war one-sidedly excludes the spectacle of suffering from Western media, thereby fictionalizing suffering or blocking an ethical politic of responsibility (e.g., Boltanski, 1999; Campbell, 2005). We should argue instead that war and conflict reporting strategically selects and hierarchies certain instances of suffering and death as causes for Western action while annihilating others. P225 The pathos formula, let us recall, is strategically used to sideline taste and decency offenses and to broadcast the moment of actually occurring death, in order to reimagine an already existing national community as a community of political actionof protesters against the killing of a fellow citizen. The tableau vivant, in contrast, conveniently stages a controversial war as a spectacle without victims, at the service of a political agenda which imagines (a deeply torn) transnational community as united in its silent contemplation of inevitable evilrather than denouncing this war as illegal in line with UN Security Council resolutions. P225 In the Gaza footage a similar politics is at play, reflecting and perpetuating dominant hierarchies of place and human life. Western media broadcast from positions of showing that exclude the witnessing of human death and render the reporting of this war an exercise in military actionthereby reproducing a Western orientation vis--vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict characterized by contemplative passivity and inaction. Arab broadcasters, in contrast, report on-location, placing suffering at the heart of their footagethereby turning their new spectacles into pleas for humanitarian aid and political protest, but also, somewhat hypocritically, into objects of critique and discomfort across Western media. P225

War Mis-reporting H. Stanhop (1970)http://search.proquest.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/docview/1305566124/flash?accountid=7408

Reporting a war is difficult. The job of war correspondent is one of the most demanding duties, if not the most demanding of all, that a reporter might be called on to perform. P91 It is difficult because the war correspondent is, almost by definition, at odds with his environment. P91 The country in which he is based is reluctant to communicate unless it is winning even then it generally only wants to communicate only part of the truth. P91 As Mr Knightly neatly puts it, correspondents seek to tell us as much as possible as soon as possible; the military seeks to tell us as little as possible as late as possible. P91 In the Abyssinian war, which is admittedly to take an extreme example, correspondents were forced by high costs of cables, to invent all manner of bizarre abbreviations. These were then telegraphed by an Abyssinian whose knowledge even of orthodox English was limited, with the result that offices in London may as well have been sent messages in Swahili. P91 the reporters on finding the fiction more in demand than the facts played along with it. But it is doubtful if the public would have accepted the truth anyway. P92

The Hateful Self: Substitution and the Ethics of Representing War A. Bartly (2008)http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v054/54.1bartley.pdf

Representing Contemporary War D. Campbell (2003)http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=34d26a2d-5b96-46e4-84cd-8c1e4ef60214%40sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=106

Despite living in an age commonly understood as being awash with images of atrocity, there are few writers who theorize the relationship between political conflict and its pictorial representation. This relative absence means that various assertions about the power of pictures have come to dominate popular understanding. P99 Foremost among these are two fundamentally contradictory claims, which, Susan Sontag observes, are fast approaching the stature of platitudes.1 One, the CNN effect, is that the power of news imagery is such that it can alter the course of state policy simply by virtue of being broadcast. The other, the compassion fatiguethesis, argues that the abundant supply of imagery has dulled our senses and created a new syndrome of communal inaction. P99 Although it may seem like an anachronistic practice in the contemporary pictorial economy of international news, photography remains an important portal through which the politics of images generally can be considered. While television, with its stream of video imagery, may be the premier source of news and information from distant places, its very preponderance may limit its staying power in the minds of the viewer. . As Sontag argues, photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. P99 Being a site for contemplation does not necessarily make the photograph an instrument for political change. According to Sontag, the image itself cannot create a possibility that otherwise does not exist: a photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude. The image can, however, help develop an attitude. While a photograph cannot create a moral position it can reinforce oneand can help build a nascent one. p100 As a result, the event or issue has to be identified and named as an event or issue before photography can make its contribution. This means the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is [determined by] the existence of a relevant political consciousness. Without a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will most likely be experienced as, simply, unreal or as a demoralizing emotional blow. P100 As Sontag writes: Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objectsunpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. P101 This structural undecidability inherent in photography means that a number ofindeed, almost any number ofresponses to a particular image is possible. Given the time for contemplation allowed by the fixing of the image, the construction of meaning arises from the complex interplay of the photographic representation, its location, accompanying text, moment of reading, as well as the frames of reference brought to it by the reader/viewer. P101 whatever the response, it is not media saturation that leads to political inaction: People dont become inured to what they are shownif that is the right way to describe what happensbecause of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. P101 With this observation, Sontag not only challenges the compassion fatigue thesis; she questions the notion of the CNN effect. With regard to inaction in Bosnia despite the steady stream of images of ethnic cleansing that made their way out of Sarajevo, Sontag argues that people didnt turn off because they were either overwhelmed by their quantity or anaesthetized by their quality. Rather, they switched off because American and European leaders proclaimed it was an intractable and irresolvable situation. The political context into which the pictures were being inserted was already set, with military intervention not an option, and no amount of horrific photographs was going to change that. P101 Up until the Vietnam War, photographs of combat and its consequencesor, at least those photographs of combat and its consequences that were released for usewere often positive in both their intent and effects. In large part, that is because these images were produced by offi- cial cameramen who were either commissioned by the military for this particular purpose (as in the case of Roger Fenton and the Crimea War) or at least had their presence sanctioned by the authorities (as with Matthew Brady during the American Civil War). P101-102 The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images. P102 photographs can buttress and expand a previously established moral disposition, but they cannot create that disposition themselves out of nothing. This is particularly true in the context of conflict. When a war is unpopular and that feeling has come to be prior to the taking of photographs p102 The photographers intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it. P102 Although the details of the arrangements and their effectiveness have changed over timefrom the combination of accreditation and daily briefings in Vietnam, the restrictions on access that resulted from the dependence for transport in the Falklands, to the selected pools and video briefings in the Persian Gulf War of 199091, and the embedding of Iraq 2003at no stage in the postWorld War II period has the U.S. or U.K. military operated without detailed media management procedures designed to influence the information (specifically the pictorial) outcomes. P102 While recognizing that many of the now iconic combat images of the pre-Vietnam period were staged, she sees Vietnam as a watershed such that the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art.13 Insofar as Sontag is referring to the likelihood of individual photographers seeking 102 David Campbell 11 Ibid., p. 21. 12 Ibid., pp. 3839. 13 Ibid., p. 58.to deceive, she may be right. There was, however, at least one notable instance in Iraq of digital manipulation. This resulted in the Los Angeles Times sacking award-winning staff photographer Brian Walski, whose altered image of a British soldier in Basra (he had combined two photos into one to improve marginally composition) was used on the papers front page. P102-103 First, even in the age of the digital image, where there is no negative to secure an understanding of the original photograph, Walskis case shows there remains a strong sense of the shutter freezing a moment of reality, such that this moment is privileged as the original that cannot ethically be altered. Second, and even more important, the Walski case demonstrates that the larger and more significant ways in which pictures structure reality through exclusions are themselves excluded from the discussion about manipulation so long as the professional responsibility not to alter what the shutter secures is maintained. P103 Taking this wider view, Sontags belief that the age of inventing and staging war images is behind us seems seriously misplaced. That is because in the contemporary period the issue of inventing and staging dramatic news pictures has escalated from the actions of a few individuals seeking to deceive to the whole purpose and structure of the militarys media management operation. P103 Lynchs release was made public through the Coalition Media Center (CMC) at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar. This $1.5 million briefing operation, with a futuristic, Hollywood-inspired set replete with plasma TV screens, is housed in a remote warehouse hundreds of miles from the battlefield, but offering the military overview desired by its U.S., U.K., and Australian media minders. The CMC was integral to the strategy of embedding reporters with military units, for those on the front line provided images and stories from an unavoidably narrow perspective, while the journalists at the CMC were given what was said to be the broad overview but in effect only amplified the narrow perspective desired by the Pentagon and its partners. As one media critic observed, the five hundred or more embeds (with one hundred cameras) were close up at the front while the representing contemporary war six hundred CMC journalists were tied up in the rear.This meant the military could be confidant journalists would produce maximum imagery with minimum insight. P103-104 While the basic coordinates of the Lynch story were not invented (she was injured, captured, then recovered), the account was staged, insofar as the particular narrative that was attached to and derived from the military footage of her release was constructed by the Pentagons media operation to convey a heroic and redemptive meaning. P104-5 As New York Times staff photographer Vincent Laforetwho spent twenty-seven days aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulfwrote afterward,My main concern was that I was producing images that were glorifying war too much. These machines of war are awesome and make for stunning images. I was afraid that I was being drawn into producing a public-relations essay. P105 Large numbers of Iraqi soldiers have been killed, according to the Pentagon, and more than 2,000 Iraqi civilians, the government of Saddam Hussein said, many of them in the last week. But when James Kelly, the managing editor of Time, lays out the 20 pages of photos intended to anchor the magazines coverage of the war, there were pictures of soldiers, battles and rubble, but no corpses. P106 The relatively bloodless coverage of conflict (and not just that in Iraq) derives from the media outlets invocation of the criteria of taste and decency. This is most often expressed as a concern for the anticipated reaction of readers and viewers, now readily available to newspapers through the offices of ombudsmen and readers editors. Often this concern is so strong that some U.S. newspapers have the presumptive principle that intrusive images containing bodies or blood will not be run, or, at the very least, only after extensive editorial discussion.25 Their British counterparts demonstrated similar self-imposed restraints. P106 Television broadcasters are even more bound because of regulations, so that while their cameramen record the complete picture of death and destruction in war, and their reporters lament their inability to convey the full truth, the vast majority of that footage is simply deemed too gory to be shown. P106 While the International Committee of the Red Cross says any image that makes a prisoner of war individually recognizable is a violation of Article 13 of the third Geneva Convention of 1949, this issue was complicated by a number of factors.31 First and foremost, al-Jazeera was broadcasting Iraqi TV footage rather than producing the images. Moreover, it was doing so at the same time as numerous U.S. and European networks were broadcasting images of Iraqi POWs, some of which were provided by Pentagon and Ministry of Defence film crews in Iraq. That made Iraq and the allies (rather than the broadcasters) equally culpable, because only states are subject to the convention. P107 The fact that al-Jazeeras images were, in the words of John MacArthur, too honest, had the paradoxical effect of making al-Jazeera the story rather than the images and what they represented. P107 The extensive management of the media coverage of waras a conjunction of official restrictions and self-imposed standards has for the most part diminished the verisimilitude of the resulting images. Constrained by the confines of the Coalition Media Center, reporters seeking an overview were (in the words of Michael Wolff) in danger of becoming little more than a series of Jayson Blairs, constructing colorful accounts of scenes they had never witnessed. P107 The media was weaponized and the imagery was a force-multiplier exercising pressure on the Iraqi leadership. P108 Images may only be an invitation to pay attention. But the questions photographs of war and atrocity pose should be required of our leaders and us: Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? p108