Abstract
The faces of the missing are held aloft on placards in demonstrations or posted on walls in the aftermath of disappearances. They appear massed on the pages of newspapers and in the displays of genocide museums. Often nothing more than family snapshots given a public place, such images can be compelling. Although photographs of atrocity and war have frequently been discussed, little attention has been paid to these other images: images that do not show suffering but still seem, at least potentially, to be politically effective. How do these photographs work? What form of personhood do they instantiate and what politics do they point to? How are they different from other photographs? This article examines what might be special about a photograph, especially a photograph of a face, and how its political impact might be understood. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of trauma and subjectivity, the article suggests that a photograph embodies in its very temporal structure a personhood that is inimical to contemporary structures of sovereign power. The destabilizing political potential of a photograph, like that of certain forms of literary text, could be understood as arising from its potential as an encounter with the trauma that inhabits sovereign power and sovereign subjectivity but that is generally concealed. The account presented offers an alternative approach to the analysis of the politics of a photograph and gestures toward other manifestations of personhood and politics.
Introduction
After the collapse of the twin towers in Manhattan, posters appealing for information about those missing remained on walls and shop fronts for months and years afterward. Their immediate poignancy arose from the way the smiling faces “were traces of another time—a vacation on the beach or on a boat, a barbeque on the patio, a wedding, a moment of familial intimacy … images of people looking toward a future they were never to have.” 1 The moment the picture was taken and the moment we were looking at it were disconnected yet superimposed. Posted at first in desperation, however, they were in the end an enduring protest, a collective scream: protesting the way those killed were disappeared, rubbed out, by attackers who did not care who they were, and then incorporated en masse as heroes by authorities determined to justify attacks of their own. 2 In both cases, they were objectified, produced as bare life: life that could be killed without recriminations, life with no political voice to contest their cooption into the politics of a war on terror. 3 But the faces in the posters were neither victims nor heroes: they were ordinary people, each one with their own unique lives, people who went to work as usual one fine September morning and did not return. We only had to look at the pictures to see that. 4
The missing posters in New York echoed practices of people elsewhere faced with the disappearance without trace of relatives and friends: “We have grown strangely used to them over the last twenty-five years, the women with the small photo of a man pinned to their dark dresses, the extended tribe of those whose loved ones, from Chile to Kurdistan, from Argentina to Ethiopia, from Guatemala to Guinea, have been abducted in the night and never heard of again.” 5 Ariel Dorfman noted how people in Manhattan “spontaneously recurred to the same methods of memory and defiance” that he traces to the June 1977 hunger strike of a group of Chilean women. By showing a photograph, relatives were making “present and material and lifelike what had been phantasmagorically removed from their hands, they were calling attention to a moment that had existed in the past when that loved one had been alive and a finger had clicked on a camera, they were demanding a moment in the future when that loved one could once again stand in front of them, could step out of the photo and into life, could climb out of their memory and into life.” 6
Photographs of the missing or the disappeared “fiercely expressed the core of [these women’s] tragedy,” as Dorfman puts it. 7 But I shall argue here that there is more to it than that. The wager of this article is that the strangeness of the portrait photograph, its uncanny quality, is related to how it shares in or reflects the strangeness of the “person”—any person—it portrays and the social order in which that person is embedded. It draws attention to the trauma at the heart of the subject, and of what we call social reality, a trauma that we would rather forget. 8 For Roland Barthes, “the Photograph … is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real.” 9 And for both Ulrich Baer and Jay Prosser, in different ways, there seems to be a link between the temporality of trauma and the time of the photograph. 10 In this article, I examine how this connection might help us think about the political effect of the photograph, as an image of the face that discloses the inevitable absent presence of the person, or, to put it differently, the lack at the root of subjectivity. It is not just the missing or the disappeared who are neither fully present nor fully absent—but, in some sense, all of us. 11
Many people have thought about how atrocity photographs—photographs of what we might call traumatic events—are used or read. 12 Although this article does not examine such images directly, its analysis shares something with those discussions. According to Peggy Phelan, “more than other genres of photography, atrocity photographs ask us to consider: what do photographs do? What actions do they prompt?” 13 These questions are similar to those I address here, though in many discussions of atrocity photographs they tend to be situated differently. In general, these debates wrestle with questions of the responsibility of the producer, distributer, and viewer of atrocity images within the context of existing social and political frameworks. What I want to explore here is the potential, arguably inherent in the photograph as form, to disrupt these frameworks. I am interested in the unsettling potential that arises from how a photograph itself, as a medium, like the subject and the social, is structured around a trauma, lack, or wound. Any photograph can be like this, according to Barthes, irrespective of its subject, though images of people, particularly those where the gaze is to the camera, do this most. Barthes has “nothing to say about these photographs in which I see … bodies lying on the ground, broken glass, etc.” but only wishes that “someone in the photographs were … looking me straight in the eye.” 14
In order to tease out how a photograph can work, I explore writings that give an account of different people’s encounters with photographic images. Again, I am not interested here in analyzing the photographs myself, either to examine my own response or what a proper response might be, nor am I interested in questions of art photography more broadly. My focus is the effect that looking at images sometimes seems to have, and how we might understand the politics and the notions of personhood involved.
I begin by looking at a writer whose work has been central to discussions of what the photograph might be and how it might work: Susan Sontag. Sontag’s On Photography has long been a classic. Here I focus on the account of her response to photographs that she gives in her more recent Regarding the Pain of Others—which as its title indicates focuses on atrocity images—and a review of that book by David Campbell. I put forward an analysis of Sontag’s response from a Lacanian perspective, and show how this relates to the work of Jay Prosser and Ulrich Baer, each of whom has made similar arguments concerning the close relation between photography and loss or trauma. 15 The connection draws on the temporality of the photograph—the way, as Barthes reminds us, the photograph never represents something that exists but only provides a trace of something that was, at some point in the past, in front of the camera. In the case of a photograph of a person, the photograph is of someone who will, inevitably, at some point in the future, no longer exist.
The intimate connection of the photograph with death, and the significance of the portrait photograph in particular, is something that becomes important in the reception of Suzanne Opton’s work Soldier. Again, I am not interested in the usual ways that art critics approach the photograph, but rather in what the photograph does for a broader audience, or, rather, to a more disparate group of individuals. For Soldier, unusually, we have commentaries available from both passersby who saw the huge images displayed on advertising billboards or on walls in the metro and academics writing in an international relations journal. Opton’s images seem in general to prompt two responses: a concern that the people portrayed might be dead and a desire to read in their faces their prior experience as soldiers. However, they also provoke a different response in some viewers, one that I read as an encounter with the real, or in Slavoj Zizek’s words, a tarrying with the negative.
Usually, a photograph comes with a context. Often this is a caption: words that frame the location, name the individual: signifying signs. The image does not often stand alone. The caption pins the photograph down, limiting, or coloring our interpretation of its meaning, taming it. 16 It inserts the image into a textual milieu and demands it be understood in those terms. For Deleuze and Guattari, the face itself is “the Icon proper to the signifying regime.” 17 In his portraits of people implicated in some way in the Rwandan genocide, Robert Lyons deliberately avoids captions. Frank Möller argues that Lyons’ work “displays an approach … appreciative of the approximate.” 18 He points out that, for Walter Benjamin, without language, pictures get caught in the approximate, which is seen as a liability. 19 For Susan Sontag too, pictures need captions—caption and picture are mutually supportive. 20 However, for Möller “captions and other forms of accompanying text violate the surplus of meaning that pictures inevitably carry with them.” 21 There is something in the image itself that in any case exceeds the caption, some way in which the image speaks to us not through text but directly, through the surplus or excess that it reveals.
The photographic portrait or mug shot—necessarily captioned—opened the door to new practices of political control: control of what were seen by then not only as collections of individuals but as populations. 22 Various categories of people were produced and recorded by the police, social reformers, and colonial administrators: criminals or delinquents, the poor, the exotic, and the primitive. 23 Government had become not politics, but biopolitics. 24 Mechanical reproduction has now become digital manipulation: images of the face can be made to morph into each other, many images superimposed to produce a generic face, and facial features erased to make people appear faceless. 25 Automatic face recognition or “face-processing” is the new technique of political rule, alongside biometric passports and ID cards. 26 But although images can be part of regimes of governmentality and objectification, they can nevertheless, as Michael Shapiro remarks, “open up forms of questions about power and authority which are closed or silenced within the most frequently circulated and authoritative discursive practices.” 27
There are many other questions that could be asked about the politics of a photograph, or of photography—questions to do with the circulation of images, their ownership and exploitation, questions to do with how photographs are taken, stored, cropped, displayed, duplicated, and discarded, how and why some become iconic, and whether photography is art. 28 But these are not the questions I engage with here. I examine what a photograph—or rather what we see when we look at a photograph, because “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see” 29 —does politically, and what it is about a photograph and our interaction with it that makes it do what it does. 30 Sometimes it appears that a photograph does something other than make sense or surrender to an interpretation: it escapes recapture; it remains mad, not tamed. 31
Disrupting Time, Suspending Death
Sontag begins her book Regarding the Pain of Others by suggesting that pictures of what she calls “other people’s pain”—horrific events in war, in this case—are “a means of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’)” what war does, for those at a safe remove from it. 32 But she is worried by people who, like Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas, assume that there is only one response to atrocity photographs: to call for an end to war. This, according to Sontag, is “to dismiss politics.” 33 In the end, atrocity photographs are neutral on the question of renouncing war. They can give rise to opposing responses, according to Sontag: a call for peace or a cry for revenge. Here, seduced by a neat opposition, she forgets a third response that she has discussed: denial. It is possible to contest the reality of the photograph, to argue that the events shown were either staged or were perpetrated in a perverse attempt to garner sympathy and claim victimhood. Nonetheless, her conclusion appears sound, and not one most would disagree with: “there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people’s pain.” 34
What she says next is especially interesting. She describes in some detail a set of photographs so horrific that they “could make you cry,” but claims that this should not distract you from asking questions. 35 The way this is formulated leads me to suspect that maybe the reverse is what is at stake here. Maybe the function of the questions is precisely that they can and do distract her from the response the photographs evoke. They let her sidestep the encounter with the real that such pictures might otherwise provoke. The questions, in other words, are a way of avoiding looking. I think this is dangerous. I think that it is very important that we do not turn away or adopt a too easy cynicism, even if in the end questions do need to be asked. Sontag claims that Woolf’s response dismisses politics; Sontag wants to dismiss the visceral response, the pity and disgust, the feeling of connection. She seems overwhelmed, as many are, by “each misery [that] heaves into view” on our news screens. 36
Sontag remains a clear and honest observer of her own response to particular photographs. One thing that fascinates her is any photograph that records the moment of death. She writes: “To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do.” This is an interesting comment and leads one to wonder what sort of view of the photograph and of death is entailed here: what precisely is the moment of death or “death actually happening”? Sontag herself refers to it ambiguously as “the moment of (or just before) death.”
37
And why would the camera be the only way of catching this moment? She enters a discussion of Eddie Adam’s famous photograph of the shooting of a Vietcong suspect on a street in Saigon.
38
But her account is interrupted almost as soon as it begins—something, an encounter with the real perhaps, takes place between the words. There is a pause, a gap, almost a stuttering. She says:
Adam’s picture shows the moment the bullet has been fired; the dead man, grimacing, has not yet started to fall. As for the viewer, this viewer, even many years after the picture was taken … well, one can gaze at these faces for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery …
“ … and the indecency,” she adds, returning to firmer ground, “of such co-spectatorship.” 39 There is another strangeness here, aside from Sontag’s stuttering response. Time itself stutters in the description of the event the photograph supposedly captures. The bullet has been fired. The dead man has not yet started to fall. Where is the moment or the event in all this? When was the shutter release of the camera pressed? Does death take place, as we are often, comfortingly, told, instantaneously? Does the opening of the camera’s shutter have no duration? What concepts of time, the present, the moment, are at play here? Does not the missing moment of death, like the missing moment of the photograph, demonstrate the absence of any possible present, and throw notions of a linear homogeneous time against the background of which events take place into disarray? Is this perhaps what is so special and mysterious about the photograph? Can the scene in the photograph exist, actually?
Immediately afterward, Sontag begins to talk about the Khmer Rouge photographs at Tuol Sleng, where prisoners about to be shot were photographed first. What mesmerizes her and captures her entire attention again is how photography apparently freezes time:
These Cambodian men and women of all ages, including many children, photographed from a few feet away, usually in half figure, are—as in Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, where Apollo’s knife is eternally about to descend—forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged.
40
The images clearly have a hypnotic effect on her, perhaps because in some sense we are all “forever looking at death.” 41 When time is suspended like Apollo’s knife, we can glimpse this. What she talks about is not this, though, but the anger and guilt she feels at her own interpellation in “the same position as the lackey behind the camera.” 42
It seems that in the end Sontag’s analysis of photographs of horror ties itself in knots because it misses the specificity of the photograph, though her own visceral response does not. For her, intellectually, a photograph needs a narrative context before it can have a political impact: the photograph itself is neutral. 43 However, I think what we may find is perhaps once more the reverse. Photographs have a political impact because of the sort of object they are: they are, precisely, objects that resist an easy narrativization. The traumatic moment is not something outside normal narrative time but something that inhabits it and destabilizes it at its core. Once captioned, the political impact of a photograph is lost. Once we have “Execution of a Viet Cong Guerrilla 1968,” we can break away from the mystery revealed by the photograph. It becomes just one more piece of evidence. The way it appears to disrupt time and suspend death can be forgotten. We can return to what Jacques Rancière calls a police order—a distribution of the sensible with no excess or remainder—away from politics or politicization. 44
In his review of Regarding the Pain of Others, David Campbell draws our attention to the distinction Sontag identifies between photographs as “clouds of fantasy” and “pellets of information.”
45
He quotes her 1977 book On Photography:
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 objects—unpremeditated 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.
46
However, the distinction between reality and fantasy is not as clear as it might seem in Sontag’s discussion. There are many situations where one might find it difficult to draw the line. It is not a question of the photograph being at one time a work of art and at another a documentary record. The photograph is neither work of art nor documentary record. The photograph, Campbell argues, is an undecidable, which, as neither one nor the other, resists and disorganizes the opposition between art and the real. 47 A Zizekian reading would endorse this argument but take it further. In Lacanian terms, it is social reality that is a fantasy—a fantasy designed to conceal the real, the traumatic lack or excess around which both the social or symbolic order and the personhood are structured, and which has to be concealed for sovereign power and sovereign subjectivity to persist.
Part of the power that photographs have is precisely because they represent an encounter with the real and the imaginary in one. 48 To look at a photograph is to encounter something that appears to still time: it captures a moment and presents it to us for inspection. Note that I say “appears” here not because the photograph does not “really” still time, but because time is not “really” moving in the first place. Time is not “really” anything. An encounter with the way in which the photograph appears to still time is similar to what Jacques Lacan talks about when he discusses the gaze into the mirror—it represents an imaginary wholeness. According to Lacan’s account of what he calls the mirror stage—not necessarily a stage in some developmental process—what happens when a child, or an adult for that matter, sees its image in the mirror and recognizes it for the first time is that the child sees an image of what seems to be a whole, complete, independent entity. 49 It recognizes that image as itself. However, according to Lacan, this is a misrecognition. Not that the image in the mirror—or reflected in the face of the caregiver, for it does not need to be a real mirror—is not that of the child. But rather that the wholeness that the mirror seems to show is imaginary. We are not and never can be whole, complete beings. There will always be a lack or an excess, a gap between what we think we are and what we are (if there is even such a thing). The image in the mirror produces a misrecognition of an imaginary wholeness, and, most importantly, what follows is a continual striving for the achievement of that impossible wholeness—or what we call security and certainty.
The photograph, then, has a function similar to the mirror: it shows us ourselves as whole. It presents us with this imaginary wholeness, a wholeness or essence that can only exist against a background of a linear homogeneous time consisting of a succession of moments. The portrait exemplifies this. 50 And at the same time, perhaps particularly in the case of photographs of atrocity or death, it confronts the real—as a traumatic reminder that that imaginary wholeness is unattainable. In Lacan’s thinking, the real is that which is beyond symbolization—we cannot talk about it, because it is not something that exists within our symbolic universe. It is also that which is produced by symbolization: when we name an object or a person, there are always ways in which the person themselves or the object itself does not fit the description we have just given it. The thing is not quite what it seems, or, it is more than it seems. There is a lack or an excess. Different cultural systems will have different things that are outside their social reality—or what Zizek terms social fantasy—in the same way as different languages have different things they cannot say. The real is traumatic in the sense that it breaks into, disrupts, and tears apart the social or symbolic universe, the fantasy that has been so painstakingly constructed. It demonstrates the incompleteness—the lack of wholeness, the impossibility—of that universe.
So the photograph of the instant of someone being shot, for example, both presents to us the imaginary wholeness of the human being and destroys that fantasy of wholeness by affording an encounter with the traumatic real. The pellets of information disappear into clouds of fantasy. What Sontag calls the real (her pellets of information) is what in psychoanalytic terms would be called social reality, what we think of as real (whole, complete, etc.—objects, individuals, social systems, integral entities separate from each other). For Zizek, what we call social reality is a fantasy—it is made up or constructed in language and the symbolic. 51 Campbell sees the photographic moment as a freezing of reality that produces an original that cannot be altered, and thus a closing off of potentiality. What if, on the contrary, the freezing of time traverses the fantasy—the fantasy of linear time? What if the photograph, even an ordinary portrait photograph or family snapshot, represents at least potentially an encounter with the real, or is the real, as Barthes remarks?
Photographs of people are, it seems, special in this way. Sontag recognizes this too. For her, as for Barthes, “photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.” In the context of a film, for example, the use of still photographs amidst the moving images is shocking, “transmuting, in an instant, present into past, life into death.” 52
We arrange photographs of people we love in our rooms “often because they cannot be with us there—often (and eventually) because they are dead.” As Jay Prosser puts it:
Herein lies photography’s hidden truth. Photographs are not signs of presence but evidence of absence. Or rather the presence of a photograph indicates its subject’s absence. Photographs contain a realisation of loss … in the fundamental sense that every photograph represents a past moment that actually happened but is no longer. It is a myth that photographs bring back memories. Photographs show not the presence of the past but the pastness of the present. They show the irreversible passing of time.
53
Prosser demonstrates photography’s mystical quality, its relation with loss, and how “offering insight into the inexorable loss that is life, photography captures a reality that we would not otherwise see, that we would choose not to see,” an encounter with the real that we would choose to avoid. 54 However, loss is something more than the distinction between presence and absence; it is rather the way in which these categories break down, a hauntology rather than an ontology. 55
Barthes’ account of his discovery of the Winter Garden photograph—the image of his mother as a child that made him exclaim in the face of its “unendurable plenitude” or excess—reads as another attempt to describe an encounter with the real. There is a punctum, a detail that pricks or wounds him: a traumatic “shock … the passage of a void,” which overwhelms him.
56
But as well as the punctum as detail, there is “another punctum”:
This new punctum, which is no longer of form but intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation … I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder … over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
57
This second punctum, Barthes tells us, has become “blurred underneath the abundance and disparity of contemporary photographs.” 58 Opton’s images, to which I now turn, seem to succeed in bringing it to light.
Scrutinizing the Face, Encountering the Real
A series of five short articles reflecting on photographer Suzanne Opton’s Soldier photographs were published in 2009 in the Review of International Studies. 59 The pieces, part of a special section entitled “Art and War,” were written by retired Major General Tim Cross, photographer Angus Boulton, and three International Relations scholars: Nick Vaughan-Williams, Cynthia Weber, and Chris Brown. We are not told exactly what instructions the writers were given, but the editors tell us that they were not so much interested in academic framings as in “the emotional impact these images had on their viewers—and the way the images continue to haunt and disturb us long after our initial exposure to them”; they ask, “what do these feelings mean, and how can we make sense of them in our own terms?” 60
Opton’s portraits of soldiers between tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan present the faces of young men and women close up and in detail. The first images in the catalogue of the exhibition held in New York in 2006 show head and shoulders in a fairly conventional manner, though the eyes of the subjects are in general turned away from the camera: they appear lost in thought. 61 Another set show the soldier’s head held in the hands of their wife, their girlfriend, or another soldier. 62 The partner’s hands, and sometimes a part of their face, are visible. Sometimes the head appears strangely disconnected from the body, entirely framed in the hands that hold it. But it is the final series of portraits that is particularly striking, and this is the one that forms the subject of the Review articles: images of the young soldiers with their heads laid sideways on a flat surface. It is as if the artist was struggling to locate a means of capturing what she sought and suddenly, shockingly, found it. This series generated the most critical attention, and formed the basis for a public display not in only the gallery but in the street and on the metro, on huge advertising billboards. 63
We know quite a lot about how people responded to Opton’s images. As well as having comments from the artist as to what she was trying to do, 64 the company who was originally contracted to display the images on billboards, CBS Outdoor have given an account of why they cancelled. 65 We also have collections of observations from passersby who saw the advertising hoardings or the images displayed on the Washington metro. 66 Many of the comments in the academic articles echo those of the passersby in Washington, which seemed on the whole to be, first, a concern that the images were disrespectful in that they showed dead or defeated soldiers, and, second, a compulsion to try to read the soldier’s thoughts and feelings in the face—or the viewer’s own thoughts and feelings if they had served in the military themselves.
Tim Cross admits that his first reaction, like those of so many passersby, was that they might have been images of the dead. 67 Like others with experience of military life, he sees in the faces “an acknowledgement that they couldn’t take any more” and points to the way those who sent soldiers to war can abandon them afterward. 68 There is again, as in the reactions of passersby, an attempt to read the faces to get at the feelings thought to be beneath the expressions, together with a recognition of an inevitable ambiguity. Nick Vaughan-Williams notes the corpse-like expression of one soldier, but emphasizes how the expressions do not tell a single story but rather raise questions: “What have they seen? How have they been affected? Is Soldier Morris staring down because she is ashamed, remorseful, or simply bored? Are Soldier Pry’s eyes closed because he is at peace or playing dead? Does Soldier Jefferson’s gaze reflect vengefulness or sadness or both?” 69 For Cynthia Weber, “what they illuminate is the private pain of individual soldiers,” something that is more usually hidden in representations of their public role, though “viewers are left to wonder” what exactly they are being shown. Weber reads certain racial and gender stereotypes into the photographer’s selection of images: to her, black male Soldier Jefferson appears “ever so slightly” aggressive, white female Soldier Morris “averts her eyes downwards.” 70 I have shown how Sontag lets questions blunt the impact that a photograph might have; something similar seems to be happening here: there is a search for meaning, for making sense of what is seen, for words to describe it.
Photographer Angus Boulton finds the images “disarming” and their ambiguity compelling: “we are encouraged to ask ourselves, ‘what could they be thinking?’ Are they recalling the recent past, perhaps lying in a similar position under fire? Having been asked to adopt this pose in more peaceful surroundings, did it remind them of the recent past? Did it reaffirm their survival?” But he points out that there is a larger question the viewer is asked to address: can we read past experiences from a portrait? 71 His answer is that we can, “a face does tell us a story,” but it is never the whole story, and our interpretations are guided by the captions and by the whole tradition of portraiture. Once the face is identified as that of a soldier, we immediately see someone who in one way or another is a casualty of war and thus has suffered “difficult, traumatic or uncomfortable experiences” and we read this into the face before us. 72
In the tradition of portraiture in which, as Boulton points out, these images are read, the face is presented vertically. Indeed, the very term portrait as opposed to landscape is used these days to imply verticality. What does the presentation of the face sideways or horizontally in Opton’s images do? Is there a temptation to turn the photograph the right way up, so that we can see the expression more clearly and make sense of what we see more easily? Opton tells us that we do not see anybody in that position except a child or a lover, 73 but when we see a lover in that position our head is down on the pillow with them; we are “horizontal” too, so that in effect we see them “vertically.” Does the sideways face do something more than invoke a lover or a child? Does it perhaps in some sense disable the search for emotion or past experiences in the face and instead expose a certain vulnerability, a vulnerability rather than an intimacy? For one passerby in Washington, reading thoughts or experiences into the faces was somehow superseded by the sideways, recumbent face. When asked what her first response to the image would be, this woman replied: “Sympathy is the first. Because of course, anybody down, obviously, means something has gone wrong. Everybody else is above you. So sympathy would be my first emotion.” 74 This was sympathy not for the soldier as soldier, but for “anybody down,” and it was sympathy not in the sense of pity, but of understanding, and compassion.
The photograph, as I have argued, presents us to ourselves as if we were whole, complete, and autonomous. We see ourselves as separate beings, detached from, and independent of, our surroundings. This gives us a certain precariousness: when seen as separate, our existence can then be threatened by whatever is “outside” us. We are no longer part of the world but distinct from it, and the world can be seen as a threatening place. We have to work to maintain our wholeness, to maintain the fantasy of our imagined autonomy and independence. We are susceptible to narratives of insecurity and threat, and tempted by promises of security. The photograph of the face, in the way it appears to freeze time and still movement, presents the person to us as a separate, distinct being, abstracted from time and place. It appeals to what we imagine as our wholeness, but lays us open to the idea that this wholeness can be threatened, lost. The photograph of the face simultaneously appeals to and traps us in a particular view of the world and personhood.
The final piece in the Review of International Studies special section—the piece by Chris Brown—is different from the other four. He refuses to read current feelings or past experiences into the images. He finds the photographs “strangely compelling” but admits that “it is difficult to put into words why they have the effect they undoubtedly do.” 75 For him, they bring to mind a poem by A. E. Housman, part of his cycle The Shropshire Lad. The poem describes a fleeting moment when a soldier on parade through a Shropshire village in the nineteenth century caught the eye of the writer. They exchange a look that speaks of the transience of the moment in the vastness of time and space—“we are like to meet no more,” says Housman—and the utter mutual impenetrability of each other’s hearts and thoughts. But despite, or, perhaps, I would suggest, because of this, the poem ends: “But dead or living, drunk or dry, / Soldier, I wish you well.” 76
Brown points out that in the end all we see in Opton’s photographs is “a set of human faces.” And he dismisses attempts to read their experience or their thoughts: “there is no way you could read any kind of context from these faces, any more than you can see war etched on them, whatever that means.” We have only Opton’s word that these are soldiers not actors, in any case. But for Brown:
It really does not matter. These are people we have not met before and “we are like to meet no more;” we do not know what is in their hearts and they do not know what is in ours—but, for some reason that it is still difficult to put into words, we can, and I do, wish them well.
77
It does not matter who these people are. What matters, to read my own thoughts into Brown’s words, is how a certain wordless encounter prompts a reaction of what we might call sympathy. 78 The vulnerability Opton was trying to express is not, perhaps, then, the life “in harm’s way,” which might be specific to the life of a soldier, but rather the life lost in a vastness of an unfathomable world in which, in Housman’s words, “from sky to sky’s so far” that encounters are fleeting and “what thoughts at heart have you and I / We cannot stop to tell.” Is this what the photograph of the face, or the face itself, opens for us, this vulnerability? 79 Not the vulnerability of our imagined wholeness but the vulnerability of an encounter with the impossibility of wholeness: an encounter with the real.
But although these people might be any people, not just soldiers, maybe the fact that we are told they are soldiers does highlight the vulnerability in the image in some way. Maybe the soldier face points up what any face might show? When we look at what we are told is a soldier’s face, what we see all too clearly, before we even look, is that we cannot know what they know, cannot think what they think; and we know all too well that we are looking into the face of someone whose life might come to an end at any moment. But are not both these things the case with anyone that we might look at? Is not the idea that we can or should read into the exterior face something beneath the surface that the expression gives a clue to, an interior person, nothing but a fantasy? Could that be what makes looking at these faces so poignant? Perhaps, as Opton says at one point, “it’s really about faces,” not about soldiers. 80 Or, as Barthes notes, it is a particular punctum, that “arouses great sympathy … almost a kind of tenderness.” 81
In his account, Brown supposes that his inability to put into words a response to the images may be because of his lack of involvement with the visual arts. But it seems to me, rather, that in seeing through, or without, the apparatus of art history and interpretation to which we are accustomed, his view can be direct and unencumbered. 82 He is able to remain with the dangerous sense of paradox he encounters in the face of the image, the sense of “knowledge and not knowledge;” he does not feel “dissatisfied [and] want not to let things lie, want to know more, want to represent … in a more intelligible way what the image … still seemed to hide within it.” 83 To borrow Slavoj Zizek’s phrase, he is able to tarry with the negative. 84
Conclusion: Politics and the Portrait Photograph
We are surrounded by images, many of them images of the face, or what I have called here portrait photographs. Whether in magazines, in family albums, in photographic exhibitions, or on advertising hoardings, faces are prominent. They catch our eye. They evoke a response. But some of the responses I have discussed show that, as Linfield argues, “what we have lost is the capacity to respond to photographs … and connect to other people through them.” 85 We are more inclined to sidestep into questions that seek to get below the surface of the image. As Barthes reminds us, the photograph has by and large been tamed. 86
This is a political process: our response to these images is conditioned, even disabled, by what Jacques Rancière calls a certain “system of visibility.” 87 There are “experts and journalists who comment on the images, who tell us what they show and what we should make of them.” 88 There is a politics that tells us that we are not capable of seeing for ourselves, but that we need someone to tell us what and how to see. We are told that we are separate beings, that there is something beneath our faces that we can access by reading the face, that what is felt internally leads the external expression, and so on. We have a particular view of how there is something behind the appearance of things, somewhere where a deeper meaning is concealed. This system of visibility can constrain our visceral response to the face in the photograph and lead us to “read” or “make sense of” it instead: looking for what is beneath rather than remaining on the surface or at the interface. But, as Rancière reminds us, the eyes in the photograph are “endowed with the same power as those who view them … that of speaking or remaining silent, of showing one’s feelings or hiding them.” 89 Whether we are in the image looking out or outside looking in, we are not merely passive spectators, but intimately involved, not separate beings but inevitably interconnected.
We may have all become streetwise cynics with regard to what photographs do, but despite our cynicism, and our reluctance to admit to or analyze their political potential, it remains. In Sontag’s case, it is between the lines of her writings; in the case of readers of Opton’s photographs, it persists despite their attempts to read experience and feelings into the faces they see. That persistence, I have argued here, can be understood through a Lacanian account of time, trauma, and personhood.
Thinking of “the reality caught in a photograph” as a “slice of time” or a “frozen moment”—as Sontag, Prosser, and Barthes appear to do—entails a particular understanding of time. As Ulrich Baer notes, it is one where photographs “only artificially halt the flux of time that, in reality, carries us forward from event to event in an unstoppable stream.” 90 This notion of time goes with an idea of history as a continuous narrative; Baer relates it to the Heraclitean image of time as a river. There is another model of time, a Democritean conception that sees “the world as occurring in bursts or explosions,” consisting of nothing but atoms in a void or “a vast rainfall, with events occurring when individual drops accidently touch one another.” 91 Baer argues that for people who experience trauma, a Democritean model is more apt—and that photography makes more sense from such a perspective, whereas for a Heraclitean view the ability of the photograph to produce slices of time is disturbing. He concludes that a photograph can capture traumatic experiences “without integrating them into a mitigating context and thus denying their force.” Photographs give “an access to another kind of experience that is explosive, instantaneous, distinct—a chance to see in a photograph not narrative, not history, but possibly trauma.” 92 Such a view escapes the melancholic orientation of Barthes and Sontag, and the link with death, for example, the instant of the photograph does not determine what happens next, unless one reverts to a narrative history of cause and effect.
The congruence of the photograph and trauma also comes from the way the camera can record an instant that was not necessarily experienced consciously by the subject. Eddie Adams, the photographer who took the image of the Vietcong being shot, tells us that he had no idea when he pressed the shutter what he was about to have recorded. This is the future anterior of trauma itself, its belatedness: the traumatic event “is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly.”
93
It is also the future anterior of the Lacanian subject, the subject who “only ever will have been”:
In order to be recognised by the other, I utter what was only in view of what will be … . What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.
94
And despite the way Barthes sees the photograph as a moment cut from a narrative continuous time, it is the same “anterior future” that he speaks of. 95
Barthes notes that “society is concerned to tame the Photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it,” and it does this by either making it into art or making it banal. 96 Why is the potential madness of the photograph a threat to the social order, a threat that needs taming, gentrifying, depoliticizing? Because the contemporary social or symbolic order, a sovereign order, relies on a linear narrative temporality—for its notions of origin, history, nation, and progress—and an objectified, docile personhood: a bare life that has no political voice, that does not return the gaze, that elicits no compassion. 97 A disruption of that story of time threatens to prize apart the structure of the sovereign political order itself, revealing its incompleteness and impossibility. The photograph has the potential to disrupt the linear temporality on which sovereign power depends.
The personhood embodied in the photograph—neither absent nor present, and with a gaze that is unmoored in time and space—is inimical to sovereign power. It is the bare life that appears in the fliers in New York City in 2001, the bare life produced by sovereign power and yet the very form of life that escapes its grasp. 98 The photograph threatens to reveal the lack or excess around which the symbolic or social order is structured, and which must be concealed for that order to hold. When survivors of traumatic events such as wars refuse to narrate those events in terms of heroism and sacrifice for the nation state but insist on encircling the trauma, the order of sovereign power is challenged. 99 Like traumatic memory, the photograph, or the face in the photograph, has the potential to destabilize the police order, to reveal the excess that is not supposed to be there, and to expose bare life as the form of life that sovereign power cannot tolerate. 100
The Madres of the Plaza de Mayo, walking silently around the square with the photographs of the disappeared held high, the fliers that remained pasted on the walls and shop fronts of Manhattan long after the collapse of the World Trade Center, the photographs of the Jews of Eishyshok displayed in the US Holocaust Museum, and the posters bearing the likenesses of the missing after any disaster or conflict all encircle the trauma. They do not demand reparations, or healing, or closure. Nor do they seek to take over the state. They insist on a different politics, a different distribution of the sensible, one based on the equality of speaking beings—or, rather, on the visibility of beings that look one another straight in the eye. They insist that we look at the photographs, that we do not look away, and that we return the gaze.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.