Page 55 [55]
OCR
Living Images and Gestures in Wartime: The Other as an Iconoclastic Figure All these elements can be found in visual representations: in pictures and caricatures. 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 become 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 iconoclasm 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 metaphorical 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/overturning/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 iconoclastic 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 53
