Reflections on a photograph of a captive

There’s a haunting image that’s grabbed my attention like no other. It’s been circulated frantically and has appeared on countless newspapers and websites in the past weeks. Its’ focal point is unclear, the colours are faint and muddy, the lens has bloated the centre of the frame, distorting the portrait. The image undercuts our current habits as viewers, used to a form of direct unequivocal communication, to clear rhetorical symbolism: the protester high atop the vandalized police van, the politician admonishing, protected by a forest of microphones, the young hooded student, arm high and tense, throwing an object overhead; something in this photograph resonates beyond this imaginific regurgitation of 68, yet it is happening now, amidst the rest of the rhetorical scenarios.

The impenetrability and isolation of the man portrayed, his location and inaccessibility is what renders this portrait so obscure. What is left in the photographic frame is the result of the barrier between the back of the police van where the man is held, sealed with thick tinted glass, and the outside, where a savage pack of photographers has gathered, holding their heavy digital cameras high above their heads. Once contextualized the causes of this perplexing image become clear, and so does the particular dynamic that has existed in that moment between object and apparatus, breaking the classical photographer-portraitee paradigm.

The ‘sitter’ only perceives the flash, maybe an undulating shadow of the object aggressively pointed towards the interior of his prison-shell, the back of the police van. Whilst outside the apparatus, the camera, is propelled high above the photographers’ heads, embodying the Virilian nightmare, in effect a true technological prosthesis for an impaired or incapable vision [1] [1]. A possible metaphor for the malfunctioning of vision today? A vision occluded and circumscribed in it’s claim to a subject it first imprisons and then has no capability or will of fully portraying, of understanding, yet it manically fetishises and attacks whilst the subject is captive, whilst it is held under the floodlights of the media. The result of this scenario is a series of portraits of Julian Assange.

This dichotomy of spaces, so clearly defined and politically charged, the inside-outside relationship so clearly laid out. The dissident caught, the outsider rendered harmless by being locked inside, yet only superficially hidden, for the intent is not that of hiding, but of displaying captivity. 

Assange ultimately decides to use this opportunity to communicate and begins showing what the mainstream media will call ‘signs of defiance’; he begins by timidly waving a peace sign, then deploys a mocking military salute. Yes, this is a battlefield. The media require Assange to show signs of ‘defiance’ to maintain the paradoxical view there is both a debate (or rather a conflict) around, and a right to, free speech, all this under the pretence of a democracy which holds together by feeding off antagonisms regarding the right to knowledge of it’s citizens. If European democracy supposedly holds transparency of governance as one of it’s core values (see declaration nr.17, Maastricht treaty, 1990 [2] [2]), how can the conflicting assumption that to be governed one must be increasingly left in the dark, that one must be ignorant of the crude detail of certain deeds that may de-stabilize the very pretence of living within a democracy?

One has to be aware of certain dynamics that make the Warlogs case even more noteworthy, why are the journalists of the guardian so ecstatic at the prospect of having something to work with? Why do they rejoice triumphantly at the idea of being able to ‘show how the war is really going’? [3] [3] Because since 2003 each and every journalist working with the mainstream media has been forced to sign a contract with the military in order to pull a camera out. The contract states that the journalist can only operate if accompanied by the military forces, and whatever reported will effectively have to be ‘authorized’ (I would use a less flattering word, ‘censored’) by the military [4] [4]. Welcome to ‘embedded reporting’.

Wikileaks has caused a haemorrhage of crude vision and the only solution found by so-called ‘democratic states’ is denying what is deniable [5] [5], dabbing desperately at the open wound, but one cannot deny an image, not all of it anyway. In the war-logs Wikileaks has opened the flood-gates of a well-known and unfortunate truth that destabilizes, as it questions, the claims to democracy of a number of states by challenging the idea that a democracy, in it’s deplorable conservative undertone, upholds certain values as the ultimate home of ‘good’ against ‘evil’. Yet the widespread surprising and dangerous reaction may be acceptance, the banality (to hint at an overused quote by Arendt) with which we accept harm being done to others to protect our own comfort, however unconsciously. The acceptance that to do ‘good’, one must engage in a little ‘evil’, that waterboarding is ok, all considered, and that shooting at unarmed civilians is passable if I keep it well away from view [6] [6]; as long as I can change the channel, I will.

Notes

[1] Virilio, P., Open Sky, pgs. 89-95, (Verso, London, 2003)

[5] Jack Straw denies having agreed to free Megrahi as a result of an economic agreement with Libya, a Serbian minister denies selling arms illicitly to the Yemeni government, Pfizer denies under-the-table deals with Nigeria, and to end a list (that in effect continues) on a comical note, Berlusconi denies calling Medvedev an ‘apprentice’.