Francois Debrix

Department of International Relations
Florida International University
debrixf@fiu.edu

 

Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia. New York: Scalo, 1994; and The Silence. New York: Scalo, 1995.

 

Gilles Peress and Eric Stover, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar. New York: Scalo, 1998.

 

You’re like a living tentacle that’s lifting, reaching around all this death, trying to pull it out.

 

–William Haglund, forensic anthropologist (1998)

 

The postmortem condition describes a situation where even the uncivilized productions of unscheduled catastrophe become perversely elaborated objects of spectatorship.

 

–Gregory Whitehead (1993)

 

Photojournalism has traditionally thrived on the representation of human destruction and death. Since 1855 when Roger Fenton was dispatched to the Crimean War by the British government to “take photographs that would reassure the public,” documentary photography has been a booming industry (Price 1963). Throughout the 20th century, governments, research institutes, and print and/or visual media have perfected this visual practice with the hope that it would not simply “reassure the public,” but also, and more importantly, provide both authentic knowledge and an endless source of spectacularity. Through the years, photojournalistic displays have owed their success to visual curiosity as a mode of inquiry or, simply, as a form of voyeuristic enjoyment.

 

Photographic journalist Gilles Peress has situated his work in this long tradition of visual representation of war and death. His early works on Iran and Northern Ireland were fairly typical photo-journalistic renditions of social life, human struggle, and political conflict in not-so-far-removed lands. Like most documentary photography, Peress’s work (his early reports and his more recent ones) is intended to awaken the curiosity of the Western viewer. For the Western viewer who consumes documentary photography in the safe confines of his/her late-twentieth century domestic comfort, the snapshots of war, drama, and human survival are always about “strangers,” some nameless or otherwise all-too famous “others,” whose reality can be perceived only through the photograph. Not unlike the work of his photojournalistic colleagues in other parts of the world, Peress’s early visions of Iran and Northern Ireland easily found their way to the pages of popular news periodicals such as Time, Newsweek, or Paris-Match where they were treated by the general public as common household items, shocking and yet familiar.

 

Peress’s recent work in Bosnia and Rwanda marks a crucial change both in his aesthetic approach to photojournalism and in the meaning of this visual medium. Starting with Farewell to Bosnia, a visual travel-log of war and its effects in the early years of the Bosnian conflict, and continuing with his latest photographic narratives of death and forensic archeology in both Rwanda and Bosnia, Peress adds to the realism of his images a moral message and a political positioning on the issue of brutal violence, gratuitous death, and genocide. Peress does not simply bombard the viewer with arresting photos. He now embeds his snapshots in written texts: letters he wrote to friends while in Bosnia; a chronology of events and specific UN documents about Rwanda; a text by human rights scholar Eric Stover in the last volume, The Graves. These texts are not intended to offer a deciphering key to the photos displayed in these three volumes. Rather, the texts and the images can be taken as a whole. The aesthetic product is different from typical photojournalistic collections as we now have a dialogue between two modes of communication, a combination of verbal and visual signification which seeks to exacerbate the feeling of moral outrage and intensifies the power of the political message: namely, something must be done to stop genocide. Peress’s new approach to photography seeks to open up the photo-journalistic medium by rendering it less realistically superficial (a moment frozen in time with no story to tell) and making it more emotionally engaged and humanly engaging. For Peress, photography is not an exercise of visual production and/or consumption anymore. It is not simply a technology that potentially gives rise to sensationalistic visions. It is also an instrument which facilitates the deployment of ethico-political positions for the artist involved with this technical medium. As such, photo-journali sm becomes an invitation to share, partake, empathize. By making documentary photography into a more ethically and emotionally involved technique, Peress also seeks to direct the perception of the viewer. In an attempt to contain casual, prurient, or voyeuristic uses of his images of death, Peress’s new photographic genre–his embedding of documentary photos with strategically chosen texts–conditions and constrains the reading that one might perform from his visual records alone. But as I’ll discuss below, his use of text has an ironic effect; it gets no closer to representing death in its horrible finality; it simply installs death in a more complex set of representations equally open to refusal and misrepresentation. The documents that result from this pairing of text with image are no more adequate than classic photojournalism to the task of representing that which defies representation.

 

One may speculate at length on the strategic reasons for this change of aesthetic perspective.¹ It seems more interesting, however, to examine and question the choice of this new photojournalistic method and assess the effects that it seeks to produce on the part of potential viewers/readers. Again, the photography of death is not a new enterprise, but Peress has certainly turned it into a different artistic practice. Peress’s novel approach to war photojournalism (or post-war as the case may be) has important consequences for visual curiosity as both a method of knowledge and a mode of spectacularity. I believe that the signification of this photographic practice is intricately related to what can be called a “visual taxonomy of death.” As literary critic and poet Susan Stewart has explained, taxonomy can be seen as “an antidote to emotion and surplus meaning” (37). The taxonomy of death is what Peress’s post-mortem photography is all about: the carefully staged re-organization of death and its image in a system of meaning that can attempt to account for, if not precisely to comprehend, the forms of dying that most defy comprehension. As a form of taxonomic organization, the photography of death and war (and death in war) is not only reassuring for the general public, but, more revealingly, comforting for the photographer/artist himself and those for whom he operates (governments, research institutes, art galleries and museums, print and visual media).

 

Farewell to Bosnia is a collection of photos to which texts and letters have been added toward the end. Before being turned into a book, Farewell to Bosnia was a touring visual exhibit which was displayed in museums and galleries in Europe and North America.² The photos were taken during the first years of the conflict in Bosnia and they represent scenes of “daily life” under war conditions. As Peress travels inside Bosnia from Tuzla to Sarajevo, he takes devastating, shocking, and heart-rending pictures of what he witnesses: mutilated bodies; endless lines of displaced people; mothers, sisters, and wives crying over the inanimate bodies of their loved ones; urban destruction beyond repair…. Again, these photos, as visual testimonies of destruction and death as it takes place, need to be “read” in conjunction with the written texts that accompany them. In one of these texts, a letter to a friend back home, Peress writes: “I remembered my father, his amputated arm and his pain, his descriptions of addiction to morphine, of World War II, the German occupation and the concentration camps” (161). For Peress, the scenes of death and destruction that he captured with his camera are not proper to Bosnia. They do not tell the story of Bosnia. They are the product of another, larger narrative of death and destruction of which Bosnia is no doubt part. The visions of Bosnia’s human suffering and anguish remind him of the universality of war and death. The images of Bosnia are thus repackaged, reinterpreted. The work of photojournalism is no longer, can no longer be a matter of “objective reality.”³ Bosnia’s visions of death are part of Peress’s memory (that of his father with his World War II stories) and of everyone’s memories too. In fact, Peress suggests, in all its gruesomeness, there is nothing unique about death as it occurs in Bosnia. What Bosnia evokes, rather, is the sound of “distant echoes of a recent past” (161).

 

Peress’s Farewell to Bosnia opens up a narrative of death and destruction to which his subsequent books, The Silence and The Graves, try to bring closure. Yet, taken together, the three produce what I’m calling a taxonomy of death, a taxonomy in which Farewell to Bosnia occupies a central place. Death is introduced, yet disavowed. It is visually depicted, yet reduced to an exercise of memorization, of historical recollection (it is all about the memories of the past, the memories of a past that always returns). Death, as Peress would have it, cannot be recognized as a fateful/fatal natural phenomenon (even when and if it is caused by man-made forces). It has to be tied to and explained by human practices, social struggles, and war. Without these, the anxiety of death would not exist. This work of disavowal, the beginning of the process of visual taxonomy, is what Susan Stewart refers to as a “work of mourning.” Using Freud’s seminal work on the psychological responses to death, Stewart explains that the natural inevitability of death is replaced by a series of mental, rational, or scientific operations that deny death, and thus seek to reactivate life by situating death in a larger historico-temporal process, such as the universality of the human species, the continuity of scientific research which seeks to reduce the causes of death, the eternity of life on another metaphysical plane of existence, and so on. In her reading of early American painter Charles Willson Peale’s life and art, Stewart explains that Peale’s anxiety over death and its occurrence was covered by a visual support (namely painting) which he used as a way of expressing animation, motion, that which survives and endures. As an anecdote, she recounts the fact that the only time Peale painted death (a painting titled “Rachel Weeping” which shows a mother crying over the bed of her dead child), he could never show the painting in the open. He always kept it hidden behind a curtain (37-40). Peress’s photojournalistic exploration of Bosnia is similarly a work of disavowal. While Peress seizes the visions of individuals in distress or actually dying in front of his eyes, there is a sense in which he never actually sees them. What he sees, rather, and hopes to show to the world through his work as a photojournalist, is a story of war and destruction, despair and dramatization larger than any of the individual scenes he depicts. In a sense, Peress replaces the brutal realist rendition of death with a melancholic representation of the violence of human history. At this level of collective abstraction and historical categorization, death becomes paradoxically more palatable. The ironic effect of his new approach to photojournalism is that Peress seems to return to the original intent of documentary photography: to “reassure the public,” to comfort and buffer the media and the public that will consume his work.

 

Peress’s The Silence, the second of the three works I address in this review, takes him to Rwanda where he travelled in the immediate aftermath of the April-May 1994 ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis. There, Peress follows the succession of events that saw the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in April, and the subsequent counter-offensive of Tutsis that pushed the Hutus into the refugee camps of eastern Zaire in the summer of 1994. Peress, with a touch of cruel irony combined with hope, presents the events in a threefold sequence. He titles the three successive moments “the sin,” “purgatory,” and “the judgment.” “The sin” is loaded with some of the most ghastly photos that Peress has probably ever taken. The shock value is evident. Photos of young children’s faces maimed and deformed by the repeated blows of machetes, a shirt and a pair of mud-covered trousers out of which broken bones with remnants of decaying flesh protrude, an agonizing child thrown next to a slaughtered cow in a pool of blood. Similar photos were shown in the Western media in the summer of 1994, but none of them were as lurid as Peress’s. Peress conveys his overt disgust admirably well and powerfully, with a sense of unbearable density as he multiplies the shots of brutal death and torture page after page. The subsequent sections, “purgatory” and the “judgment,” which cover the escape of the Hutus into Zaire and their battle with epidemics and death in the refugee camps, are just as visually nauseating as the early section.

 

If these disturbing images invoke classical photojournalism at its spectacular best (or worst), the book’s section titles suggest that Peress is after something more here. With titles such as “sin,” “purgatory,” and “judgment,” Peress seeks to install these photographs in a religious narrative of redemption. Yet, precisely because of the multivalence that inheres in the pairing of image and text, this redemption narrative is powerfully multivalent. On the one hand, Peress’s camera seems to make sense of senseless violence by bringing the truthful power of vision to scenes of useless death. In this sense, the photographer himself operates as a messiah in this God-forsaken place, saving death from meaninglessness by installing it in a Judeo-Christian narrative of human sin, of the eternal struggle between Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell. As evil, death is, at least, meaningful. Thus death, even here in its most graphic and violent form, takes its place in a larger system of meaning; it no longer seems quite so ugly and final. A sentence, attached by Peress to the opening and the closing of this volume, seems to speak of the desire to ward off the naturalness of death by bringing it to another, supernatural plane of existence. The sentence reads: “A prisoner, a killer is presented to us, it is a moment of confusion, of fear, of prepared stories. He has a moment to himself… As I look at him he looks at me.” The final shot s hows the “killer” looking up at the camera, as if facing his supreme Judge. It appears, for a moment, that there is some possibility of redemption in Rwanda; that there is a hope, captured by Peress’s camera, that the torturers will be apprehended and that they will repent. Yet, on the other hand, the images themselves, in their speechless, unspeakable horror, resist the very taxonomy the section titles would impose and thus call into question not only whether anything like justice can ever be achieved in Rwanda, but also whether divine justice, the Judeo-Christian concept of redemption itself, is adequate to the scale of human horror and death the book so abundantly registers. To return to the book’s final image: it is a picture of a man not otherwise recognizable as a killer except in the accompanying text that identifies him: a man, not a monster; a man, meeting eye to eye, another man, and through that man, the eye of all who look on. What is pictured then–quite apart from what is written–is, finally, not a moment of judgment, but of silent, inscrutable recognition.

 

In Farewell to Bosnia, Peress combines stark images of death with more accessible narratives of personal memory. In The Silence, he pairs images of mass brutality in Rwanda with multivalent narratives of religious redemption. Finally, in The Graves, Peress turns to science and forensic medicine to find a text to parallel the violence he has encountered and captured as a photojournalist. Ralph Rugoff once wrote about forensic photography that in such a visual/clinical practice “the dead come alive” (183). The theme of re-animation is no doubt predominant throughout this photo-report co-authored by Gilles Peress and Eric Stover. The Graves narrates Peress and Stover’s coverage of the forensic efforts of anthropologists after the war in Bosnia. Specifically, Peress and Stover follow the work of two forensic anthropologists, William Haglund and Andrew Thomson, as they are in charge, in 1996, of excavating mass graves in Vukovar and Srebrenica. Mandated by the UN, and supported by the Boston-based organization Physicians for Human Rights, Haglund and Thomson are to gather scientific evidence for an international war crimes tribunal.

 

While Stover’s essay is a textual diary of the forensic technicians’ activities and discoveries, Peress’s photos serve as a documentary supplement. Stover uses the forensic discoveries to re-imagine and re-create the idiosyncratic stories of each of the bones and pieces of flesh and clothing found in the graves. Here, forensic science is used as hard evidence, proof of a human drama that can be reconstructed piece by piece after the fact. Stover describes the meticulous task of the forensic researchers:

 

During autopsies the forensic experts had removed teeth and sections of bone from the Srebrenica bodies and had sent them to the laboratories of Mary-Claire King, a molecular geneticist at the University of Washington. Michelle Harvey, a geneticist with Physicians for Human Rights, extracts DNA from these samples to compare it with DNA in blood samples taken from relatives. It remained to see whether DNA testing would be able to identify many of the Srebrenica men. The large number of teeth and bone samples, collected under less than optimum conditions, could easily have been contaminated by mishandling or the presence of bacterial DNA on the specimens. (174)

 

The language here is descriptive, technical, rigorous, an exposition on forensic research and its inherent difficulties. But Stover’s account does not stop here. Forensic science has a story to tell. Forensic anthropology only matters to the extent that it makes the dead speak, that it re-evokes life. Stover partakes of this re-animation through forensic science by repeatedly recalling the specific stories of Bosnians during the war, such as the the women of Srebrenica, Drazen Erdemovic, the Croat soldier who joined the Bosnian-Muslim army, and the survivors of the Kravica massacre. This is also where Peress’s photos gather their meaning within this volume. Peress’s pictures of the “make-shift morgue” in Kalesija are no longer showing the victims or what’s left of them. The visual focus is now clearly on the uncovered fragments of life: personal items, old torn-up photos of family members, children’s drawings found with the clothes, et cetera. Life and death are juxtaposed.

 

According to writer and audio artist Gregory Whitehead, the post-mortem condition has its origin in “the corresponding looking place of the forensic theater, built–at least in p rinciple–to pick up the pieces” (230). The forensic theater, as displayed by Stover and Peress, is a spectacle. It is a spectacular event in which death is turned into life, re-animated. Only under this condition, when it re-creates life, can death be accepted, justified. The (very literal) taxonomy of death generated by forensic photography is, to use Stewart’s vocabulary, a spectacle of “de-realization.” This suggests that the forensic theater is a deceptive practice. Forensic photography fools the eye of the viewer and is used “as a means of defense, keeping the irreducible fact of a boundary between life and death at bay” (Stewart 44). Scientifically and clinically re-organized, the naturalness of death is once again fetishized. While the forensic theater replays its scenes of excavation of bones and flesh, death is not seen. Forensic photography covers death by showing the spectacle of a meticulously and scientifically reconstructed life. As Stover intimates,

 

[r]econstructing human behavior from physical evidence is like piecing together a multidimensional puzzle. Pieces may be missing, damaged, or even camouflaged, but each piece has its place. The challenge is to find the fragments, reconstruct them, and chart their placement in an accurate manner. (158; my emphasis)

 

In his essay “The Gift of Death,” Jacques Derrida writes that “[m]ost often we neither know what is coming upon us nor see its origin; it therefore remains a secret. We are afraid of the fear, we anguish over the anguish, we tremble” (54). This statement seems to speak directly to Peress’s treatment of death in these three works. Peress’s overt visual fixation on death is a manner of keeping the myth of death intact, of maintaining death as a forever inscrutable secret. We must fear death because we do not know what it is, or when it arrives, because we cannot come to grips with it. The accounts of death offered by Peress in his photographic essays do not, cannot, represent death in its materiality. Rather, they provide substitute discourses in which death is superseded, ignored, disavowed. The reality of death is replaced by narratives of life that nonetheless keep us anxiously guessing as to what death may be. The discourses of history (past memories), divine salvation (the final judgment), and science (the forensic theater) keep the suspense of death intact as they deflect the attention of the photographer and his public toward other preoccupations. Instead of “realizing” death, it has become much more important to “organize” it. Death is no longer a fatality. It has become a taxonomy.

 

Peress offers an ironic reversal of the initial principle and intent of photojournalism to reassure viewers even while disturbing them. In abandoning a realist approach, Peress’s photos “de-realize” the world captured by his camera, and may well have contributed to the creation of a new aesthetic genre: de-realist documentary photography. This de-realist photojournalism–discovered in his close encounters with death and its post-mortem sublimations–is no longer comfortable with the early photojournalistic requirement of visual curiosity. Yet, it seems clear that no modality of presentation can fully rescue photojournalistic reports from unintended, voyeuristic uses. By grafting layers of signification, organization, and taxonomy onto visual reports, de-realist photography installs images of unfathomable modes of dying within fathomable structures of human meaning. Thus even here, in Peress’s powerful and critical innovation, we are finally reassured; we remain saved from death.

 

Notes

 

1. This change may be explained by the fact that other popular visual media (television, video, Internet) have now supplanted classical documentary photography in the art of producing shock value images (Kirby).

 

2. This photo-exhibit tour stopped in Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery, the Photomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, P.S. 1, Queens, New York, the Rhode Island College Art Center, and New Langton Arts in San Francisco. Farewell to Bosnia has also been made available by the “Picture Projects” group (a showcase for documentary photography) on the Internet. Picture Projects’ curators Alison Cornyn, Sue Johnson, and Chris Vail have embedded the photos into the texts contained in the volume, a technique of immediate materialization of both image and text that Internet technology makes possible.

 

3. A claim often associated with documentary photography. Yet, as Derrick Price rightly observes, the documentary camera provides “not the objective facts that [are] craved by positivism, but accounts of the world in which ‘truth’ [is] achieved through the power of the image-maker” (66).

Works Cited

 

• Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• Freud, Sigmund. “On Transience.” Freud, Character, and Culture. Ed. Philip Rief. New York: Collier, 1963. 148-151.
• —. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1955-74. 237-258.
• Kirby, Lynne. “Death and the Photographic Body.” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 72-84.
• Peress, Gilles. Telex Iran. Publisher unknown, 1984. Later reprinted as Telex: Iran, In the Name of Revolution. New York: Scalo, 1998.
• Price, Derrick. “Surveyors and Surveyed: Photography out and about.” Photography: A Critical Introduction. Ed. Liz Wells, New York: Routledge, 1997. 57-102.
• Rugoff, Ralph. Circus Americanus. New York: Verso, 1995.
• Stewart, Susan. “Death and Life, in that Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale.” Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances. Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 10. Eds. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. 31-53.
• Whitehead, Gregory. “The Forensic Theater: Memory Plays for the Postmortem Condition.” The Politics of Everyday Fear. Ed. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 229-241.