Regarding the Pain of Others
Page 9
I was stimulated and moved by an article by Cornelia Brink, "Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps," in History & Memory vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2000), and by Barbie Zelizer's excellent Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (University of Chicago Press, 1998), where I found the Lippmann quote. For information about the Royal Air Force's punitive bombing war on Iraqi villages between 1920 and 1924, an article in Aerospace Power Journal (Winter 2000), by James S. Corum, who teaches at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, provides valuable information and analysis. Accounts of the restrictions placed on photojournalists during the Falklands War and the Gulf War are given in two important books: Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War, by John Taylor (Manchester University Press, 1998), and War and Photography, by Caroline Brothers (Routledge, 1997). Brothers sums up the case against the authenticity of the Capa photograph on pp. 178-84. of her book. For an opposing view: Richard Whelan's article "Robert Capa's Falling Soldier," in Aperture no. 166 (Spring 2002), adduces a set of morally ambiguous circumstances at the front in the course of which, he argues, Capa did inadvertently photograph a Republican soldier being killed.
For information about Roger Fenton, I am indebted to Natalie M. Houston, "Reading the Victorian Souvenir: Sonnets and Photographs of the Crimean Wrar," The Yale Journal of Criticism vol. 14, no. 2 (Fall 2001). I owe the information that there were two versions of Fenton's "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" to Mark Haworth-Booth of the Victoria and Albert Museum; both are reproduced in The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War, by Ulrich Keller (Routledge, 2001). The account of the British reaction to the photograph of unburied British dead at the Battle of Spion Kop comes from Early War Photographs, compiled by Pat Hodgson (New York Graphic Society, 1974). It was William Frassanito who established, in his Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (Scribner's, 1975), that Alexander Gardner must have changed the location of the body of a dead Confederate soldier for a photograph. The quote from Gustave Moynier comes from David Rieff, A Bed for the Mght: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2002).
I continue to learn, as I have for many years, from conversations with Ivan Nagel.
Notes
1.Her condemnation of war notwithstanding, Weil sought to participate in the defense of the Spanish Republic and in the fight against Hider's Germany. In 1936 she went to Spain as a noncombatant volunteer in an international brigade; in 1942 and early 1943, a refugee in London and already ill she worked at the office of the Free French and hoped to be sent on a mission in Occupied France. (She died in an English sanatorium in August 1943)
2. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July i, 1916, sixty thousand British soldiers were killed or gravely wounded—thirty thousand of these in the first half-hour. At the end of four and a half months of battle, 1,300,000 casualties had been sustained by both sides, and the British and French front line had advanced bv five miles.
3. Nothing in Franco's barbarous conduct of the war is as well remembered as these raids, mostly executed by the unit of the German air force sent by Hitler to aid Franco, the Condor Legion, and memorialized in Picasso's Guernica. But they were not without precedent. During the First World War, there had been some sporadic, relatively ineffective bombing; for example, the Germans conducted raids from Zeppelins, then from planes, on a num ber of cities, including London, Paris, and Antwerp. Far more lethally— starting with the attack by Italian fighter planes near Tripoli in October 1911—European nations had been bombing their colonies. So-called "air control operations" were favored as an economical alternative to the costly practice of maintaining large garrisons to police Britain's more restive possessions. One of these was Iraq, which (along with Palestine) had gone to Britain as part of the spoils of victory when the Ottoman Empire was dismembered after the First World War. Between 1920 and 1924, the recently formed Royal Air Force regularly targeted Iraqi villages, often remote settlements, where the rebellious natives might try to find shelter, with the raids "carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops, and cattle," according to the tactics outlined by one RAF wing commander.
What horrified public opinion in the 1930s was that the slaughter of civilians from the air was happening in Spain; these sorts of things were not supposed to happen here. As David Rieff has pointed out, a similar feeling drew attention to the atrocities committed by the Serbs in Bosnia in the 1990s, from the death camps such as Omarska early in the war to the massacre in Srebrenica, where most of the male inhabitants who had not been able to flee—more than eight thousand men and boys—were rounded up, gunned down, and pushed into mass graves once the town was abandoned by the Dutch battalion of the United Nations Protection Force and surrendered to General Ratko Mladic: these sorts of things are not supposed to happen here, in Europe, any more.
4. Capa's already much admired picture, taken (according to the photographer) on September 5, 1936, was originally published in Vu on September 23, 1936, above a second photograph, taken from the same angle and in the same light, of another Republican soldier collapsing, his rifle leaving his right hand, on the same spot on the hillside; that photograph was never reprinted. The first picture also appeared soon after in a newspaper, Paris-Soir.
5. The deflating realism of the photographs of slain soldiers lying about the battlefield is dramatized in The Red Badge of Courage, in which everything is seen through the bewildered, terrified consciousness of someone who could well have been one of those soldiers. Stephen Crane's piercingly visual, mono-voiced antiwar novel—which appeared in 1895, thirty years after the war ended (Crane was born in 1871)—is a long, simplifying emotional distance from Walt Whitman's contemporary, multiform treatment of war's "red business." In Drum-Taps, the poem cycle Whitman published in 1865 (and later folded into Leaves of Grass), many voices are summoned to speak. Though far from enthusiastic about this war, which he identified with fratricide, and for all his sorrow over the suffering on both sides, Whitman could not help but hear war's epic and heroic music. His ear kept him martial, albeit in his own generous, complex, amatory way.
6. Photographing political prisoners and alleged counter-revolutionaries just before their execution was also standard practice in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, as recent research into the NKVD files in the Baltic and Ukrainian archives, as well as the central Lubvanka archives, has disclosed.
7. Thus, thirteen years before the destruction of Guernica, Arthur Harris, later the chief of Bombing Command in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, then a young RAF squadron leader in Iraq, described the air campaign to crush the rebellious natives in this newly acquired British colony, complete with photographic proof of the success of the mission. "The Arab and the Kurd," he wrote in 1924, "now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village (vide attached photos of Kushan-Al-Ajaza) can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."
8. The photographs of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau taken in April and May 1945 by anonymous witnesses and military photographers seem more valid than the "better" professional images taken by two celebrated professionals, Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller. But the criticism of the professional look in war photography is not a recent view. Walker Evans, for example, detested the work of Bourke-White. But then Evans, who photographed poor American peasants for a book with the heavily ironic title lM Us Now Praise Famous Men, would never take a picture of anybody famous.
9. Tellingly, that connoisseur of death and high priest of the delights of apathy, Andy Warhol, was drawn to news reports of a variety of violent deaths (car and plane crashes, suicides, executions). But his silk-screened transcriptions excluded death in war. A news photo of an electric chair and a tabloid's screaming front
page, "129 Die in Jet," yes. "Hanoi Bombed," no. The only photograph Warhol silk-screened that refers to the violence of war is one that had become iconic; that is, a cliche: the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, repeated as on a sheet of postage stamps (like the faces of Marilyn, Jackie. Mao) to illustrate its opaqueness, its fascination, its banality.
10. The evolution of the museum itself has gone far toward expanding this ambience of distraction. Once a repository for conserving and displaying the fine arts of the past, the museum has become a vast educational institution-cum-emporium, one of whose functions is the exhibition of art. The primary function is entertainment and education in various mixes, and the marketing of experiences, tastes, and simulacra. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounts an exhibition of the clothes worn by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis during her White House years, and the Imperial War Museum in London, admired for its collections of military hardware and pictures, now offers two replicated environments to visitors: from the First World War, The Trench Experience (the Somme in 1916), a walk-through complete with taped sounds (exploding shells, cries) but odorless (no rotting corpses, no poison gas); and from the Second World War, The Blitz Experience, described as a presentation of conditions during the German bombing of London in 1940, including the simulation of an air raid as experienced in an underground shelter.