their remains can help others explain and, to some extent, cope with these deaths – bones are “the most reliable witnesses to atrocity” (Danchev 2009: 41). Forensic photography may not be capable of providing closure (Sánchez 2012:[41] 192). In contrast to other forms of photography,7 however, it may provide assurance.
The post-factum witness depicts “the space in which [the trauma] occurred” after it occurred (Lowe 2014: 228). Aftermath photographs and photographers, thus, are post-factum witnesses. This photography and these photographers focus either on people experiencing and suffering from trauma even when the event that caused the trauma in the first place seems to be over (e.g. Torgovnik 2009) or on landscapes, built environment and ruins within which trauma-causing events occurred and which testify to such events (Lisle 2011). Aftermath artists may engage with an event that occurred before they were born – in which case they may be referred to as secondary witnesses (Apel 2002) or post-witnesses (Popescu and Schult 2015), a term derived from Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory8 – or they may recreate an event they witnessed personally but did not artistically engage with at the time it happened.
A photographer can be a convincing witness if he or she uses “lenses that approximate the breadth and magnification of average human vision” so as to “neutralize our skepticism” (Adams 1994: 147) and thwart allegations of manipulation which are omnipresent in the digital age. However, photography can also appear to be convincing if it operates fundamentally differently. Referring to the satellite images then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell used in his testimony before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, Jane Blocker introduces the invisible witness. According to Blocker, such a witness is a core character in current cultural configurations because “the godlike invisibility of this witness lends it a legitimacy and authority that allow it to control in alarming ways what we understand ‘the real’ to be” (Blocker 2009: xvi). Powell, however, seems to have been more sceptical about the power of this witness. In connection with selected images, he explicitly referred to “a human source” corroborating the visual evidence seemingly provided by the images: “So it’s not just the photo, and it’s not an individual seeing the photo. It’s the photo and then the knowledge of an individual being brought together to make the case”.9 One might ask: what case? Indeed, by combining image and eye-witness, Powell combined two notoriously unreliable sources. It is arguable that he did so in order to illustrate the US administration’s pre-existing beliefs[42] on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a country in possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Artists engage in the politics of witnessing by utilizing all of the above – and many other – understandings of and approaches to being a witness. They are not the only ones. For example, “the role of the photographer as witness” is regularly referenced in the literature, especially in connection with photo-journalistic representations of wars and violent conflicts (Kennedy 2014: 46). Louie Palu’s contribution to this volume (chapter 2) shows why it is appropriate to refer to photojournalists as witnesses. Such photojournalists as Palu himself are eyewitnesses; they exemplify contemporaneity by being on location when something happens; and they take risks. Their work also follows strict ethical standards. They do not normally belong to the group of people originally targeted by the regime; however, as Palu’s contribution shows, they become targets in their capacity as photographers, testifying visually to gruesome events for some future use. In his chapter, Palu also raises the important question of image control. Witnessing through art and visual culture reflects practices of control and selection. Palu asks: “Who controls what you see?” Who controls what you bear witness to? That witnessing through images is not always possible does not imply impossibility of witnessing through art, as several contributions to this volume show.
It is more intriguing, perhaps, that even soldiers are referred to as witnesses documenting, by means of smart phones, their own involvement in the politics of violence (Allan 2014: 187; see also Kennedy 2009 and Struck 2011). These witnesses document, perhaps, their own suffering but they also document the suffering they inflict on others. Can perpetrators be witnesses?
The Artist as Witness
Why does this book specifically engage with artists? After all, in many cases artists represent other people’s experiences without having been invited or asked to do so; their work is not commissioned by those who it is meant to reference. Why, then, should artists be expected to be capable of representing other people’s experiences adequately? Often they tell the story of things not “seen at close hand” (Levi) but from afar – temporally and spatially, lacking “knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering” (Margalit). Why, then, do artists believe that they have the right to represent other people’s experiences in the first place? And who can judge the appropriateness of artistic representations beyond aesthetic judgments? Some commentators insist that what matters is not the truth of the artist but, rather, “the truth of the ‘victim’” (Roberts 2014: 150)[43] but is there any guarantee that artists are capable of grasping the victim’s truth? If not, do they exert violence upon the victims by disregarding their, the victims’, truth? Aesthetic judgments would ultimately be of only secondary importance in the context of art as a political witness where judgments have to be political, not aesthetic, ones.
For example, a purely aesthetic judgment of the photographs Dorothea Lange and other photographers produced while on assignment with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) would be misleading. As Jay Prosser notes, underlying their photographic work was a political mission, disguised to some extent by the seemingly documentary character of the photographs. While appearing to be a documentary “mode of witnessing”, this photography “did not portray victims …; it created them” so as to help gain support for the US administration’s resettlement policy (Prosser 2005: 90; italics added). The photographer’s “non-neutrality” (ibid.) may explain the success of their photographs but their work cannot adequately be grasped with exclusive reference to being a witness.
This photography can also be referenced to illustrate the occasionally rather problematic relationship between artists and subjects, much discussed in the existing literature. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites report that one of the subjects of one of the most famous photographs produced in connection with the work of the FSA, Florence Thompson, later complained about the “commodification of her image that completely divorced the woman in the photograph from the living Thompson” (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 62) and her reduction in public perception to a Migrant Mother. We note the publisher’s striking insensitivity when reproducing this very photograph on the cover of the book, thus contributing to the very same commodification and exploitation Hariman and Lucaites so eloquently describe in their book.
If we follow Walter Benjamin’s notion in discussing the complexity of artistic representations, we would notify that beauty, thus the aesthetic value per se, is included in the secrecy (Geheimnis) of the work, but not necessarily in its presentation. Beauty includes the possibility that it be recovered in the moment of critique (Benjamin 1991 [1922]: 196). In the moment at which the illusion that the aura represents is becoming transparent the work might also appear differently in its perception. Benjamin positions himself in relation to the Platonic idea of art as illumination and Heidegger’s idea of beauty that is connected to being and truth.10 In his Work of Art essay, originally from the year 1936, Benjamin plays with the double meaning of illumination, as it is formed from the illusion towards presentation. Here, Benjamin also emphasises the[44] aesthetic polarity of the concepts of play and illumination (Spiel und Schein) in which the idea of the origin as truth has already disappeared.
For Benjamin, play and illumination are both included in the concept of mimesis (Benjamin 1991 [1936]: 668). The decay of the ancient idea of creation is to be found in the mimesis itself, which is understood as the original phenomenon of all artistic creation. What the imitation (the work of art) does to the subject imitated occurs only in an illusory way, like in a play (ibid.: 368). Benjamin suggests that the definition of art should find a balance between these two extreme ways of interpretation; Schiller stresses
