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Living Images and Gestures in Wartime: The Other as an Iconoclastic Figure
an instance of non-verbal communication. I place stress on the iconoclastic gesture
as it involves moments of reality in which something is broken or overturned,
while it allows agency and authorship to be taken into account.
Some gestures have conventional meanings (emblems, for instance) and are
socially constructed. The meaning and reference point of a gesture depends on its
context. Gestures follow contemporary trends and iconographic habits. An image
or its creation may form a gesture, but a gesture may be also written into the image
itself. Drawing a Polish underground symbol on the street was considered as a ges¬
ture of resistance. There is a picture of people standing around a horse killed on
a street of Warsaw in September 1939 (Fig. 29). If you look beyond them, you can
see a poster on the building wall presenting an image of a soldier with the message:
“Keep in mind the soldiers and their families”. As Paul Bouissac puts it, it seems
to be difficult to say where a gesture starts or ends, either in time and space or in
the sender and the receiver, and what is and what is not a gesture (2006: 10). In
this sense images seem to be charged emotionally or intellectually. What was and
what was not shown in the picture seems equally relevant. Focusing on iconoclastic
gestures that relate to destruction and degradation can help us to explore the reason
for increased polarity, to see what it is and how the difference is enhanced.
Such an approach provides an opportunity to capture the ways in which war
damage was presented, focusing on the relationship between people and certain
emotionally charged images. It also demonstrates the dynamics of the events and
allows analysis of human experience and perception of those times. The material
comes from several sources. I have browsed the archives and photography collec¬
tions from the 1930s and the 1940s in the NAC‘, the National Museum, and
the Museum of Independence. I have chosen over a dozen images to illustrate the
issues under discussion.
The 1930s, 1940s and 1950s form a landmark in the history of Eastern Europe
and, consequently, a period when new topics and new objects of representation
appear, alongside the new ways of presenting them. Following the thought of Wil¬
liam Mitchell, Elizabeth Edwards and Dario Gamboni analyse the selected visual
representations of the Others during that period of time (the press, photography,
drawings). They point out that the most visible aspect is the polarisation of im¬
ages of the Other, increasingly perceived in diverging ways (in several dimensions):
a) as new objects (from territories previously unknown), b) through acquiring new
functions apart from commemoration, for example justifying the righteousness of
war, deprecation of the enemy, c) through their behaviour, with its visual represen¬
tations understood as iconoclastic gestures, and d) as blinded by images. In this
context, I intend to answer questions of what forms images of the Other taken in
wartime. Who is the Other, what is ‘otherness’ and under what circumstances can
the category of the Other be connected to alienation?
° Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (NAC): National Digital Archives.
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