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Representations of the Other in the Time of War: Does War Matter?
a particular Other? This will add to the on-going discussions about the functionality
of humour in general (see Davies; Kozintsev, this volume).
As we have established, one of the goals of photography and caricature is identi¬
cal, that of constructing the Other. However, they operate in different ways. Susan
Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) talks about the history of
documenting war and suffering, and of our experiences around this documenta¬
tion. She argues that shocking images are a means of making alarming matters
‘real’ for those privileged and safe people who deliberately ignore the atrocities and
live in their own closed world. She also discusses how instead of documenting the
suffering that is here and now, we sometimes choose to document the suffering
that is further away from us. War, in a way, is generic, and the victims are also ge¬
neric and anonymous. But it is so only when viewed form a safe distance, because
those “who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other,
and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by
whom” (Sontag 2003: 10). Using photographs and caricatures usually fulfils dif¬
ferent purposes and derives from different traditions of representations, although
both may show the atrocities and devastation of the times. Documentary photog¬
raphy often plays on emotions and thus its force of persuasion is higher. In the case
of more symbolical representation—as in caricature—the artist targets what seems
to be highly valuable by the Other, educates through humour, but does not shock
the viewer in a way a photographer might.
The period of WWII and the post-war decade is marked by the rapid spread of
new media, such as television, cinema etc. This affected the ways in which Others
were represented, exemplifying the close-knit relationship between what is being
shown with how it is shown. The media introduced and familiarised people with
new ways of representing the Other by giving voice to certain agents (for example
caricaturists, photographers, war correspondents), institutions (for example de¬
partments of propaganda) and discourses, and dictated the conditions for inclu¬
sion and exclusion. The process was also affected by the rapidly changing situation
created by victories and losses in the war. During this decade, the traditional field
of visual representations of alterity started to extend. Otherness was depicted in
various ways in the so-called new media (mainly film, cinema, television). As al¬
ready mentioned, much of the suffering that people witnessed in pictures during
the global war was faraway and thus alien to them (cf. Sontag 2003), although they
could sympathise to some degree, based on their own (or their nation’s) experi¬
ence. Nevertheless, the category of the Other grew, changed content/targets, was
borrowed, discovered, forgotten and denied—all within a short period of time
during and after WWII. This is a key to our discussion: how relational wartime
images were and what actually shapes the viewers’ perception of the familiar and
the strange. Following Sontag’s line of reasoning we can say that familiarity and
otherness become manifest in the opposition between the Other (and the wartime
horror, devastation and suffering the Other causes and represents) and the horror,
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