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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 relations 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 situation 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, however, 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 disaster. 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. 65
