Image Control

by Patrick Nathan

  Photographs of children in pain or poverty or their death throes, as discussed above, are exclusively political, particularly for viewers in nations we call developed. Kimmelman highlights this when discussing those four similar Syrian photographs by including a fifth: “a cherubic boy in a pink sweater, perched on the edge of a sofa, reaching toward a bright pink flower.” The boy is Jad Allah Jumaa, and his picture, Kimmelman writes, is one “that loving parents all over the world take every day,” but without its tragedy: “Maybe we need to stare at a simple, everyday family snapshot to remember what binds us. Like that one of Jad Allah Jumaa. He was 1-1/2 years old when he died on Feb. 21 in an air strike on eastern Ghouta. He was wearing his pink sweater.” In this photo, we see the boy as we ought to see him—the socially conjured state in which one expects to encounter children: smiling, happy, camera-conscious, cared-for, alive.

  It is not only photographs that color the opioid epidemic’s sociological anxieties. As Jennifer Egan writes of Soth’s photos: “I struck up a conversation with Elizabeth (her middle name), who was 26, petite and fair, with long straight hair, blonde at the ends from grown-out highlights, and an air of apologetic sweetness. She looked impossibly young for someone with her history . . . Her baby girl was due in June.”

  Juxtaposed against the images of children from the Khan Shaykhun attack, Kimmelman’s use of Jumaa’s portrait acquires rhetoric: What kind of global politics allows children like these to die, and so terribly? How could we let this happen? It’s this same “we” one belongs to when looking at Soth’s photographs, at videos of Black men murdered by police, at the photograph of a woman with two children fleeing a cloud of tear gas just outside the U.S. border, and even in circulated images of the president’s most minor actions—walking in front of his wife rather than beside her, for example, or leaving an umbrella on the ground for someone else to pick up. It’s the “we” placed in front of all these images—the implication of shared responsibility—that gives each its politics, which in its very etymology predicates our mutual involvement. A politics is nothing without its polis, the assemblage of human beings it governs.

  An implication of shared experience and responsibility, however, is not a plea for sympathy: it wants neither wishes nor apologies. What these photographs placed in these contexts ask of their viewers is not compassion but action. As Sontag observes, compassion can impede action:

  So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.

  Similar to how photographs of dead or injured children in Syria “confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place,” a sympathy with these children and their families reinforces the separation imagined between this place and that place, or more importantly, the distance between us and them. Sympathy impedes action when the “we” implied in a photograph becomes “they.” Politics is overlooked when an image’s subjects are excluded—consciously or otherwise—from the viewer’s “we.” But the politics remains no matter who chooses to see it or ignore it. To see the “we” in every image is indeed to understand its politics, and therefore place oneself in a capacity for action—the “initial spark” that Sontag mentions. While fueled by aesthetic skill, the ignition of that spark is, ultimately, outside the capability of the photographer, videographer, uploader, publisher, or any other image-maker or -sharer. If all images are political, not all viewers see or choose to see their politics; and there is nothing the image or image-maker can do within the image to demand that the viewer see its politics. This remains the province of language, which the viewer or spectator must bring to the image. If a divisive and isolating way of seeing enables a harmful politics—if erasing the “we” in an image is an act of the fascist imagination—to bring one’s compassion to an image and situate it within the world is the foundation of the anti-fascist imagination.

  One sees this same grammar of sympathy in charity, which is not only a way of deflecting political responsibility, but of actively reinforcing the inequality and suffering politics can create. Charity is a powerful way to ensure “they” never become part of the giver’s “we.”

  An aesthetics that isolates or erases politics is doomed to reinvent itself, to disguise itself, as cleverly and artfully as possible; remembering atrocity is reduced to form, to play. Just as it’s a reader’s duty to understand a text, it is our duty as witnesses—not the photographer’s or the photograph’s—to work through what we are seeing. It is unethical to expect photographs, or memorials, or images of any kind to do our prescriptive work. Instead, we must bring that work to the image, or watch it as a shared moment from our living present—something we can respond to, even change.

  But so too can we pay closer attention, and even reward, those images that invite action. In 2017, Santiago’s Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos curated “Secrets of State: The Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship,” an exhibit that offered a selection from more than twenty-three thousand American intelligence documents pertaining to Chile, including phone transcripts between Nixon and Kissinger regarding the “threat” of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, dossiers on how to destabilize the country, and reports from the Chilean military requesting U.S. assistance with a coup. This exhibit was on display in the same building as the faces of those 3,197 Chileans extrajudicially murdered by Pinochet’s government, and offers a clear link between the two. Unlike most memorials, the exhibit shows its tragedy in full context—that is, in time among other events, alongside other persons.

  Back in Montgomery, a few blocks from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the newly built Legacy Museum offers another form of context. Progress is not the narrative here, as the Times’s Cotter points out, but an attempt “to document and dramatize a continuing condition of race-based oppression, one that has changed form over time, but not substance.” The pain remembered in the Legacy Museum is openly political, placing whiteness in context and inviting white visitors not to empathize, exactly—not to see themselves in the victim—but to recognize their own actions, their fears, in the historic oppressor. After all, it’s not the victims of political violence who get to decide “never again”; it’s those who have the power to oppress. When a memorial aestheticizes the pain of victims while eclipsing or othering the role of oppressors, viewers are unlikely to recognize their own complicity in ongoing systemic violence. Instead, we have only a finished picture, however gruesome, hung in the gallery of the past.

  This is why challenging the narrative of an atrocity is so upsetting to those who deeply connect with its tragedy. This is why I began this book with a photograph that means something to me: tragedy can change, and we along with it.

  Stephen Jimenez, a journalist initially hired by The New York Times, spent thirteen years investigating the complicated circumstances surrounding Matthew Shepard’s murder, most of them without institutional support. One of his many claims was that Shepard not only knew one of his murderers, but had had sex with him several times before accepting that ride out of town. In addition, Jimenez asserts, both were part of Laramie’s supply chain of crystal meth. These details, published in The Book of Matt in 2013, make the murder more complicated than Liss’s and other journalists’ evocation of an angelic martyr. Since the book’s publication, Jimenez, who is gay, has been boycotted and labeled a homophobe by gay rights organizations. Meanwhile, his research has done little to alter the cultural image of Shepard as a “crucified” angel, targeted and killed by strangers
solely because he was gay.

  While Jimenez carelessly overlooks the likelihood that drugs and homophobia led to Shepard’s murder—McKinney, after all, refused to acknowledge his sexuality publicly, and acted aggressively to those who threatened to out him—the book is a useful document in contesting the canonical narratives of tragedies, however we choose to memorialize them. It’s not, in the end, very instructive to say “Never Again” to some abstracted and senseless hate crime when, in fact, Shepard was a human being who suffered from depression, who self-medicated with drugs, who struggled with self-harm, and whose community failed him as a gay man, as an addict, as a mentally ill individual. So too did this same community fail Aaron McKinney, whose circumstances were very similar to Shepard’s. Sadly, work like Jimenez’s opens Shepard up to hate all over again, as exemplified by Dennis Prager’s review of the book in the National Review, where he uses its premise to surmise that “truth is subordinated to whatever it is the Left most cares about,” and discredits advances in gay rights, including a claim that “the media fabricated the heterosexual [AIDS] epidemic in order to remove stigma from gay males and in order to garner support for more AIDS-research money.” This is the kind of hateful response gay rights organizations knew would come if journalists looked too closely at the complications of Shepard’s life and death, and why the memory of Shepard’s murder hangs in the hall of hate crimes—even though it was never prosecuted as one.

  To flatten these events into an unfathomable hate crime erases a more granular reality, in which drug addiction, homophobia, mental illness, rural poverty, HIV status, and the Laramie Police Department’s admitted lack of attention to an ongoing meth problem all converged upon a young, vulnerable man. So too are responses like Prager’s part of this reality, in which we try to protect ourselves with a legislative category of crimes that immediately others its perpetrators rather than understand them as belonging to our systemically bigoted society. Targeting hate through slogans and foundations and beautiful photographs does not promise “Never Again”; it promises only not to recognize that “again” when it returns.

  In what is now called the Holocaust, more than six million Jews were bureaucratically murdered by an elected government. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” lives lost to slavery. By refusing to acknowledge the AIDS crisis, America closed its eyes to tens of thousands of gay men who died in excruciating pain, often alone. In the single greatest act of terror in human history, the United States incinerated and irradiated two hundred thousand Japanese civilians. On October 6, 1998, a young gay man suffering from depression and drug addiction was tied to a fence and beaten with a .357 magnum until his brain was so damaged it could no longer keep him alive.

  I was thirteen when this happened, and I laughed when other boys in my grade, the boys whose attention and esteem I craved, called Shepard a faggot who got what was coming to him. This is a shame I’ve carried since. For years, I couldn’t see myself in Matthew Shepard because he was innocently “out” and I was criminally “in,” and so deeply that I too called him a faggot, that I said casually, in front of an adult gay couple the following summer, that fags should be more careful about who they try to flirt with. It wasn’t until I read Jimenez’s book—a book I too was furious to learn existed—that I recognized myself not only in Shepard’s self-destruction but in McKinney’s closeted violence, his willingness to destroy that part of himself he didn’t like because our culture saw it (and still sees it) as a sickness.

  Remembering the dead, damaged, discarded, tortured, and targeted is more than an aesthetic act. Their lives are not sacredly apolitical. Just as human beings have our overlapping diversities, so too are our atrocities intersectional. It is ethical to see and understand the context of their pain, to recognize ourselves not only in the victims but in the perpetrators. Every atrocity, like every photograph, asks that we recognize an “us”—never a “them.” To recognize ourselves, our actions, and above all our capabilities in atrocity is an anti-fascist act that brings us closer to “Never Again” than any aesthetics ever can, no matter how many people pay for the privilege to dutifully weep without any understanding of what they’ve lost, and will again. To see “them” means only more weeping.

  Here’s another innocence lost: On the morning of November 9, 2016, the world felt politicized beyond any recognizable capacity. But that world and its politics were always there. Jameson Fitzpatrick articulates this strange alienation and guilt in “I Woke Up”:

  Who I thought was handsome was political.

  I went to work at the university and everything was

  very obviously political, the department and the institution.

  All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political,

  where I threw them when I was through.

  I was blond and it was political.

  So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.”

  Coffee too is political. What is worn is political. These are statements meant to sound absurd but whose absurdity is only possible in a world filled with people who intentionally politicize—through what is called debate, through what are called conversations—the ability of individual human beings to live their lives. It becomes political, after all, “when America killed another person, / who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation.” Calling for gun control after another mass shooting is political, and deriding this as politicizing tragedy is equally political. “An issue can be encrusted with so many layers of ‘politicization,’” as Jennifer Szalai puts it, “that an appeal to an apolitical high ground ends up looking like mere posturing.” What is not political about the possibility for a human being to murder another human being, not to mention the patterns of these murders?—the similarity in weapons (assault rifle), the similarity in the murderers’ socioeconomic backgrounds (white males with documented histories of aggression toward women or minorities)?

  “To ‘become politicized,’” Szalai writes, “is to become politically aware; to ‘politicize an issue’ is to make it a matter of public concern and to demand change . . . For those who benefit from the way things are, a raised consciousness is a threat.” The very idea of a high ground—that mythical space of moral untouchability—is a political fabrication. It’s an assumption that abstaining from what is “debatable” is somehow truer to life, more genuine, as though people don’t lose their lives every day to politicized concepts like race, gender, climate change, reproduction, gun ownership, healthcare, and so on. It’s this high ground where the context that reveals politics is erased, where someone who is white can hide from how whiteness works in a racist society, where someone who is male can hide from how “friendliness” or “jokes” can seem threatening to someone who identifies otherwise.

  “Someone called me faggot and it was political. / I called myself a faggot and it was political”: Fitzpatrick’s poem toys with the vulnerability of isolated words, and the folly in thinking that who says them and when is irrelevant to their meaning. This is precisely what the term “just politics” tries to do to politics itself—to isolate it as a concept, to say it belongs only to its theater of elections, campaigns, speeches, and televised debates—its industry—when in fact it belongs to everyone and in every part of everyone’s life. “Just politics” is the aestheticization of politics itself. “A politicized issue is one that’s still a matter of public debate,” Szalai writes, but to insist otherwise—“to strip an issue of its political dimensions” and place it in the past—is “blithe dismissal or brute force.” This is why, for me, the morning of November 9 felt so politicized: I had believed white supremacy to be indefensibly beyond debate. I could believe this, like millions of others, because I am white, because white supremacy “didn’t affect me.” It’s the same thinking that led an acquaintance of mine to say, in 2015, that gay men were no longer an oppressed minority, not after it became legal for us to get married. How could a country that elected a Black president stil
l be so vulnerable to white supremacy?

  It’s for this same reason, presumably, that a world could witness the murder of six million Jews, the faces of burned and murdered villagers in Vietnam, the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and Palestine, only to stand by and look at newer and newer photographs of murdered Syrian children—these rigid little corpses in the arms of their parents—and say, How terrible, something should be done, knowing nothing will be done. This is just the sort of thing that happens in such a place. More importantly, this is the sort of thing that happens to such people—to people who aren’t white. To erase this politics from every image of suffering is to pronounce a sentence of ongoing suffering, of endless images that aestheticize a decontextualized pain.

  The failure to act, in looking at images, is a failure of ethics. Viewers deny themselves the context of these images: we see that these children and their families are not with us. We see that these images are not with other images. One word, even, is not with another. And just as images without other images or words without other words have no politics, the idea of “just politics”—an intellectual game of candidates and rhetoric—is possible only in isolation. A politics is predicated on being alongside other people and seeing them, understanding them, as people there with you; and we, more than any time in history, are unquestionably here together. Our actions and lack thereof affect one another more deeply than ever. Like images and like language, persons do not exist in isolation. We are all each other’s context, situating one another on axes of place and of time, and it is our ethical responsibility not only to look but to watch each other, to offer our sincerest understandings, and to see what we truly are: us.