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Living Images and Gestures in Wartime: The Other as an Iconoclastic Figure
Irreversibility Versus Creation of a Mythical Continuity
It appears that irreversibility of events is a characteristic feature of times of war. To
this end, photographs may have documentary character—to provide a proof of the
triumph, to save events from oblivion, but also to document crimes so that in the
future they do not go unnoticed. Irreversibility is linked to the passage of time;
however, wartime is period of destruction, breaking of the old ties and deprivation
of security.
Wartime photographs can also be treated as representations of the rituals of
power during the war, when hierarchy is contested in the shifting of mutual rela¬
tions between the conquerors and the conquered, in the manner of perceiving the
Other, and in the different ways of documenting a moment in time. Elizabeth
Edwards writes that “some photographic practices emerged from an intense belief
in the photographs ability to perform a sense of the dynamic presence of the past
within the contemporary in ways that would inspire those both in the present and
in the future” (2009: 132). What interests us is both “representational content’,
and “analysis moving beyond ‘representation’ to focus instead on the exchange
of values” (Edwards & Hart 2004: 5). The representational content takes a sharp
expression, and beyond them emerge destruction and death. However, from the
point of view of the authors of the photographs that I am presenting here, the situ¬
ation looked different. In what Edwards describes, photographers document what
is disappearing, while during wartime the authors of photographs did not attempt
to perpetuate something that was disappearing; rather, they witnessed and gave
testimony to their own acts of destruction in order to establish something new. We
are dealing here with a shift of emphasis, and the main focus of attention is not
something that disappears, but instead the active agent, the agent of the changes,
or the very act of change depicted through destruction.
The present is perceived by the victors as accurate; as a transitory state that will
lead to a favourable future. The war is seen as a state of crisis, but this crisis is, how¬
ever, understood as necessary or even positive, because it denotes a moment when
actions relevant for building a better future will take place. The future depends
on the level of our engagement, sacrifice and actions. The attitude to reality is not
made visible through a critique of the present, as in the case of nostalgia. What is
more characteristic here is the awareness of acting within a mythical time of an in
statu nascendi, seeing ‘us’ as the participants in the creation of a great myth. This is
not a time for longing for something absent and long gone; instead, the war images
point out the unique moment of changes which constitutes a mythical turning
point in history. The history speaks through various actions.
At the same time, the defeated are aware of participating in a collective disas¬
ter. There is a prevailing longing for what is gone, what is absent, what is, due to
intensive changes, already distant, what belongs to other times. It is a longing for
an order and a country that has disappeared, and for one’s childhood which has
irretrievably ended.
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