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Living Images and Gestures in Wartime: The Other as an Iconoclastic Figure
A photo may distort, but we always assume that what we see in it exists or used to
exist (Sontag 2010: 12).
What do these unpleasant and controversial images show if we look at them
as iconoclastic gestures? As an interpretative idea, such an approach prompts us to
wonder whether the described efforts could, in principle, be ascribed to different
well-known notions: exoticisation, creation of borders, ridicule etc. I showed
examples of material that showed what was broken and how it was broken. Images
reflect what is significant of the time of destruction, and ‘living’ means that they
are neither neutral nor indifferent, but, on the contrary, they evoke reactions of
various degree of intensity. They are compelling because they form a true record
and its representation.
In addition, they all map human experience in wartime, starting from the initial
polarisation and the signs of a new phase of power play. This transformation operates
at a much wider range—changes are bigger, structures are damaged, borders shift,
the imagination is disturbed and hopes are lost. The old has been replaced by the
new, the better, at least richer for all who survived for the experience.
On the representational level an iconoclastic blow or attack targets what seems
to be at the top of the opposing hierarchy. The process of demonisation—exposing
negative features—goes along with the process of idealisation that includes hiding
the negative features of ‘us’. It thus reveals what was idealised based on the hidden,
the closed, the concealed and the masked, and as a result, it depicts the reshuffled
new power relations, at least temporarily.
On the other hand, an iconoclastic stroke in its dirty form targeted what was
weak in the sense of local power relations. Stripping of dignity, humiliating and
exterminating—all used as weapons by the oppressors—often deepens, changes
and strengthens the split, and increase the diversification of society.
What lies at the foundation of the polarisation is ‘not giving recognition to
the other’ (Hall 1997). If photography of devastation and of destructive gestures
improves our understanding of the past, it might be a way of using documen¬
tary practices in order to overpower competing representations of the same event.
What was broken or what had to be broken was not a piece of art or a religious
object, however ideological or based on the idealised representation. In this sense,
the iconoclastic Other as an assaulted representation reminds us not so much of
what could ‘not be given recognition’ as of what could be demolished, literally or
metaphorically, to allow the construction of the new that is no longer false, that is
‘real’. Pictures of devastation and degradation in wartime were used to attack the
iconoclastic Other.
References
Attwood E, Campbell V., Hunter LQ. & Lockyer S. (eds) 2013. Controversial Images. Media Representa¬
tions on the Edge. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan.
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