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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 The old has been replaced by the new, the better, at least richer for all who survived for the experience.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 documentary 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 Representations on the Edge. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. 67
