Jordan Crandall Under Fire

Images of war arrest us. They aim to offer the truth of violence. It is difficult to argue with them, difficult to deny their authenticity. Witness to death and devastation, they seem to cut right through the play of signification. We read them viscerally -- as if, with a rush of adrenaline, the body were instinctually reacting to the possibility of its own violation. What do we mean when we deem such an image accurate? What does it mean to believe such an image? Images of the truth of violence have always been intertwined with maneuvers of deception. The first full-scale attempt to document a war through photography, by the Mathew Brady team at Gettysburg, often involved the relocation of munitions and the repositioning of the dead. The history of war photography is a history of realism and stealth. The image reveals, but it also hides.

Even though reality and representation can never be reconciled, technologies of vision and representation are driven by the false sense that they could be. We are compelled to locate veracity within the technologized image, yet this line of endeavor is fundamentally a dead end. Like the lead character in Antonioni's Blow Up, who repeatedly enlarges his photographs of a suspected crime scene in order to uncover their hidden truths, we are faced with an existential crisis when we are unable to overcome the referential gap. Reality and representation can never be reconciled. Could one, then, posit the eventual elimination of the need for the image altogether? Since images are only offered up for the benefit of humans, machine-assisted or automated seeing renders imaging superfluous. Perhaps these images are no longer representational in the traditional sense. Rather, they are awkward constructs that attempt to bridge this contradiction.

There is a gap between what one does and what one performs. We "play for the camera," constituting ourselves within media of self-identification. We often need to shape the act of being observed to our own advantage, especially during times of conflict. Choosing one's (potential) image can be an act of combat. This maneuvering is not limited to those who are represented. It applies to those who orchestrate the framing of the image. Consider an aerial video, shot by the Israeli Defense Forces, of a funeral that occurred during the 2002 siege of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. The IDF claims that this videotape documents a fake ceremony, staged in order to multiply the number of casualties in Jenin. At which level does this possible deception occur -- at the level of institution or camera subject? Each agency plays not to the camera per se, but to their respective audiences and authorities. Each plays to the Law: the juridical paradigms that shape culture and conflict.

To a large extent, the degree to which we assign truth to an image is dependent upon the degree of our alignment with the ideological system that supports it. However, war representation, like warfare itself, is by its very nature embedded in strategic maneuvering. It is as if the image itself were a tensile surface, embedded within a dynamic of detection and deception. The embeddedness of representation was seldom acknowledged during the embedded reporting of the Iraq war. News teams with cameras deployed on the battlefield were meant to give us a sense of unfiltered immediacy. However, they ended up obscuring more than they revealed. They were embedded in an ideological construct that overrode any sense of authentic onsite content. They became munitions in another kind of war.

Accuracy seems to automatically emerge out of technological development. The logic goes something like this: Since technologies of vision give us the ability to see increasingly precise details, they therefore give us a more correct representation of something. Accuracy is to be located in the high-precision technology of visualization, not in our own perceptual faculties. Visualization is not about seeing, but about tracking: detecting an object with unprecedented accuracy, pinpointing it precisely in time and space, understanding how it moves, and predicting its future position. One could say that we are witnessing the relocation of the site of accuracy away from the space of perception and into the technologized image itself. It is as if the image network could harbor cognition and authentication within its own confines. One sees this at work not only in high-tech systems but also in commercial news television. The newscast offers a form of automated deliberation. Combining managed combat information and entertainment, it does the thinking for its viewers.

A resurgent form of witnessing, preoccupied with the vicissitudes of the fallible human and the logistics of the handheld, leads to a new quality of accuracy. With its sense of unfiltered credibility, streamed video serves as a form of semiotic compensation for a landscape that has been colonized by standardized media formats. One might call it transmission verite, where the hidden substrata of the technology are reintroduced as part of the content of the image, and a raw immediacy appears to open up a direct access to the real. The reality of representation is substituted for the representation of reality. That is, "authenticity" arises less from the authentic representation of reality per se, and more from the authenticity of the means by which reality is portrayed. Whether "unmanned" or "embedded," we could say that we are witnessing the relocation of vision to a space outside of the body -- whether into a network or a networked "smart image," or into a simulation of newly embodied presence through the scrim of the media construct.

Battle simulations, news, and interactive games exist within an increasingly unified space. With military-news-entertainment systems, simulations jostle with realities to become the foundation for war. They help combine media spectatorship and combat, viewing and fighting. They have a role in producing the situations that they seem only to anticipate. They deliver images of the very system of conflicts that they help to maintain. Forming a loop between perception, technology, and the pacings of the body (eye, viewfinder, trigger), they help to produce new forms of engagement and subjectivity, attention and differentiation. We locate ourselves to "this side" of the image, to the safe side, against the enemy from which it protects us. We draw lines in the sand; we say, "I stand here against you," defining ourselves by that which we oppose. Internal solidarities cohere against external threats. Identity is formed through the conduit of a feared and necessary enemy.

Some images, by their nature, arouse conflicts as to their very existence. These images should not be seen by anyone, one says. This existent image should not exist. Such images fill us with dread. Yet, they enrapture us with a morbid fascination. Squaring these two impulses is more troubling to us than we realize. Like the aftermath of a violent car crash, we have to look, yet we don't want to see.

We are accustomed to being on the winning side of the image. After all, representation arose out of a need to protect us. Photography was driven by the need to remove the human from direct physical contact with the site of experience, placing us on the "other side" of representation as a shield from reality. It protected us from the vicissitudes and dangers of physical presence and in the process allowed us a form of disembodied presence. An image comes full circle when it reveals the vulnerability of its own bodily and machinic underpinnings. The final video images of the Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana in Baghdad are a case in point. Watching the video, we see a US Army tank approaching Dana and we feel the camera-body tumble to the ground as he is shot by a US soldier, who mistook his camera for a weapon. Both machine and human collapse, the camera resting on an extreme close-up of the pavement, upon which Dana's now inert body lays. The death of the cameraman-as-stand-in reveals the mortality that hovers around the act of representation.

When we see a violent image, we can be compelled to think, Who took this? Someone was there; someone witnessed this act. Yet, they did nothing to stop it. We are compelled to acknowledge the ethical codes of journalism: the pact that allows the camera to slip into the battlefield as a neutral agent, its negotiated resolve of non-intervention precisely the source of its efficacy and power. Yet perhaps, even by its very presence on the scene, the camera is somehow responsible for the violence that it documents. Somehow, through its introduction, it helps to enact violence. The camera helps to ensure that a violent act will stand for something. It enacts meaning, endowing significance to the isolated incident. The camera transforms life into mise-en-scene, and scripts an awareness of a future audience of witnesses.

Under Fire is a year-long project by Jordan Crandall
Original source of images is unknown, all stem from diverse media and games and are recycled within the Under Fire project.
Texts by Jordan Crandall, January 2004