Oldal 55 [55]
Living Images and Gestures in Wartime: The Other as an Iconoclastic Figure
All these elements can be found in visual representations: in pictures and cari¬
catures. The moment when people sense that war is necessary and, consequently,
engage in it, is crucial for my study. Can we grasp this moment in the pictures from
the past? I propose to take a glimpse at the process of polarisation that takes place
in wartime. We can observe it in the visual material representing iconoclastic acts
and gestures from the times of armed conflicts.
Why do people destroy what seems valuable to others (examples in Figs
13 and 14)? And why do people photograph/depict acts of destruction (Figs 15,
16, 17, 26, 27, 28 and 29)? Such questions have special significance in the context
of war, when the previously neutral or friendly relations with others gradually be¬
come estranged or hostile. Are these acts to be treated as accidental or, conversely,
as deliberate blows, or rather as iconoclastic gestures? And, consequently, does war
bring about new forms of iconoclasm? In this chapter, I treat iconoclasm as an
interpretative tool. As criticism and protest it presents a vast phenomenon that is
more complex than simply being anti-modernist. The traditional victims of icono¬
clasm were art and religion (Gamboni 1997: 13). Iconoclastic acts appeared in
the French and October revolutions, they were present during the collapse of the
communist regimes, they were used by the Nazis. I see iconoclasm as a physical
attack on what represents the opponent's view. It can denote literal and metaphori¬
cal destruction. Precisely speaking, the kind of iconoclasm that I have in mind
here is related to idols and the exposure of their falsehood (Latour 1998; Zaremba
2013). The presence of war-related destruction and degradation in photography
can be seen as a kind of iconoclastic gesture reflecting the particular moments of
the underlying dynamics of the dispute. Therefore a gesture of breaking/overturn¬
ing/offending reproduces a set of relations that enable the taking of a picture. Let
us try to observe what can be seen through the methodological prism of iconoclas¬
tic gestures.
The process of the destruction of existing communities and polarisation of the
views (defined here as othering) operates on a deeper collective level and influences
how things are viewed, the limits of what can be tolerated, or imagined, or even
of what can be perceived, what is acceptable and what is excluded. On the level of
representations it takes the form of specific images of destruction, and all of these
will in a way embody the otherised fellow citizen.
When we focus on the images and gestures frozen in photography we can
find an insight into what war images signify and why they were taken. This focus
also shows how agency, as a capability to be the initiator and the designer of acts
(Rapport & Overing 2000: 1), can be applied. As agency is derived from, and
resided in, collective representations, we can explore the frames imposed on an
individual to act within structural constraints.
This is the way in which I explore the photographing practices that can be seen
as collective representations of ‘crucial moments during wartime’. In contrast to
the iconoclastic view—using a term coined by Elizabeth Edwards (2012)—“the
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