Oldal 18 [18]
16
Dagnoslaw Demski, Liisi Laineste, Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska
devastation and suffering that "we" have to endure. Photography comes to stand
for much more than just ‘freezing our memories on film’. The attitudes visible
in photography start to resemble the premises of caricature—they exaggerate the
features of the people and events depicted in them, bring forth the unusual, the
alien and the abnormal, criticise and moralise etc. The seemingly objective manner
of the photograph starts to crumble and reveal the ideologically motivated nature
of (all) representations.
RK
Stuart Hall claims that our subjectivities are formed through a troubled but uncon¬
scious dialogue with the Other. We can never complete the process of constructing
our identity; there is no stable inner core to the Self. Moreover, “it is formed in
relation to something which completes us but which—since it lies outside us—we
in some way always lack” (Hall 1997: 238). The perception of the Other is always
connected with that of the Self, and the aggression and offensive stereotyping seen
in wartime images arises from ‘our’ refusal to recognise the enemy as a person in
the way that ‘we’ are and the country of the enemy as a place equal to where ‘we’
live (Bhabha 1986 cited in Hall 1997: 238).
Taking the representations of war that stand for different war experiences in
all of their subjectivity and particularity, the whole volume presents, analyses and
discusses these experiences in order to reach a comparative conclusion on how war
matters in relation to images—i.e. how it affects the construction of the Other in
a visual format. Documentary and representational practices functioned at that
time as an attempt to record and legitimise the changes, atrocities, and political
decisions. Both the photographic and comic images approved war and violence,
served the same goal, tried to mobilise people and shape their attitudes. In con¬
trast to caricatures, (documentary or propaganda) photography displays one more
aspect: as Barthes has stated, photography “reproduces a set of social relations that
made the taking of the photograph possible” (cited in Apel 2012: 6). In this way
we come back to the idea that constructing the Other is always relational.
Overview of the Chapters
The equation that we are studying in the present volume has three variables, the
interactions of which form the core of our interest: war as a general context, images
of war as the more specific focus within this context, and finally Others as a separate
category depicted in images of war. The first section of the volume, entitled Wartime
Images: Marking out the Battlefield, focuses on laying down a general backdrop
for the more specific studies that follow, providing a comparative, theoretical and
methodological grid that brings together the three variables that we see as central
to this volume.