In 2002 the critic and cultural theorist Susan Sontag wrote that: "Photographs of the victims of war are… a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus." Taken from an essay for The New Yorker, published under the title "Looking at War", her words are typically incisive and elegant. They are also deeply ironic. More than any other cultural form, criticism of photographic reportage has become mired in self-perpetuating orthodoxy. Unlike music, film or literature, its specialists have tended to navigate its tangle of ethics and aesthetics not from a position of love but one of scepticism, suspicion and fear.
With The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, Susie Linfield, the director of cultural reporting and criticism at New York University, overturns many of these critical prejudices and makes a fresh case for the social value of photojournalism. Split into three sections - "Polemics", "Places" and "People" - her stall is set out from the very first chapter. "A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography" grapples with the nature of the viewer's relationship with extreme images and the prevailing theory that repeated exposure dulls the gaze, lessening the collective capacity for shock and understanding.
In her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Sontag stated that: "In these last decades, 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it." Linfield naturally disagrees, but she is careful to place Sontag as merely the most frequently quoted voice in a chorus of similar misgivings. Throughout his life, Roland Barthes remained unconvinced by the idea that photography could be used to effect meaningful social change. John Berger, whose "hopes for revolutionary change" appear to inspire sympathy in this author, has expressed related views. Walter Benjamin believed that the simple reflection of a given visual reality could never adequately explain the reasons for its existence. Meanwhile, in 1931, Bertholt Brecht wrote in the German magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung that "the tremendous development of photojournalism has contributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about the conditions of this world. On the contrary, photography, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, has become a terrible weapon against the truth."
As it happens, Linfield's main preoccupation is with the concept of truth, both as it relates to printed images and their evaluation. She fairly presents Benjamin and Brecht's ideas as products of their time, formulated in 1930s Germany - a point in history where the power of the photographic image was harnessed for anything but good. As for Sontag, Barthes and Berger, she concedes that their concerns are valid, but insists that healthy questioning should not stray into kneejerk cynicism; that the value of concerned reportage should not, as has frequently been the case, be trumped by rote accusations of voyeurism and abuse.
In her demolition of postmodernist approaches, Linfield reserves particular ire for figures such as Martha Rosler and Alan Sekula, the first of whom condemned the end result of photojournalism as a parade of "victims-turned-freaks", the second attacking the discipline itself as "the enemy". "The postmoderns declared war on the formalism of high-modernist critics like John Swarkowski who, they charged, isolated photography from its social and political context," she writes. "But they were equally hostile to documentary photography that rooted itself in the social and political. Sneering at liberal, socially conscious photojournalists… became common, if not mandatory."
Put like that, such sweeping denunciations certainly appear simplistic. Linfield is correct to insist that photojournalism is an inherently dialectical discipline; one defined by the subjective visions of its creators and the objective realities of the external world. To fail to take account of this tension is to fall at the first hurdle. And yet, as Linfield notes, such critical missteps have become the rule rather than the exception. In an unstable world where thousands of iconic images of past conflicts are already seared onto millions of minds, the question of how best to depict harsh realities appears to have been replaced with the question of whether we should bother at all.
This debate has received a great deal of attention in both academic circles and the mainstream media over the last 18 months. In September 2009, the Associated Press (AP) released a photograph of a 21-year-old US Marine who had lost a leg during a Taliban ambush in the Afghan province of Baghlan. Taken by the photographer Julie Jacobson, the picture showed Lance Corporal Joshua M Bernard collapsed by a roadside gully, his wounds clearly visible as two of his comrades rushed to his aid. He later died during surgery at a military compound. Against the wishes of Bernard's parents, AP stood by its decision to offer the image for publication, stating that its value "was to show the complexity, the sacrifice and the brutality of the war". A number of news outlets across America ran it, to public outcry.
In January 2010 many recoiled at the images captured in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquake. Several commentators claimed that the gruesome scenes had crossed the line from reportage to "disaster porn". Then again, in September last year the annual World Press Photo awards gave the second prize for general news stories to Farah Abdi Warsameh, for a sequence of photographs depicting the stoning to death of a man convicted of adultery in a village near Mogadishu, Somalia. Such images continue to throw the moral and ethical contours of photojournalism into sharp relief.
So, how much information is too much? When does the individual's right (or the right of the individual's family) to privacy outweigh the public's right to know? In order to tease out the answers to these questions, Linfield considers photographs of the Holocaust, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the civil war in Sierra Leone, and conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and the broader Middle East. The latter locations provide by far the most provocative and troubling moment in the evolution of the violent image. While other conflicts have produced galleries of atrocity, these images have had to be sought out and captured by professional journalists. The torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib, on the other hand, marked a moment where violent scenes were created and photographed specifically for the amusement of their perpetrators. Yet even these leaked pictures are seen to serve a purpose. Referring to the worldwide revulsion they inspired, Linfield remarks: "The Abu Ghraib images - digital images taken by amateurs - have strengthened, not undermined the status of photographs as documents of the real. No written account of the tortures could have made such an impact."
Linfield appears convinced that photography is a force for good and that, regardless of their troubling nature, extreme images are vital tools in the reporting of conflict and upheaval. This is largely difficult to dispute. However, her examinations of the Middle East are unsettling. Before lauding the heroic images of Robert Capa, the brutal honesty of James Nachtwey and the multi-layered ambiguities of Gilles Peress, she launches into a diatribe about the Arab press. Attacking the iconography of martyrdom and the explicit nature of Middle Eastern television ("Documentary footage of war - heads exploding, eyes blowing out, corpses disintegrating - runs in endless loops on popular Arabic TV stations such as Qatar's Al Jazeera, Dubai's Al Arabiya, Hamas's Al Aqsa and Hezbollah's Al Manar"), she goes so far as to quote the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's descriptions of visual carnage as the "Muzak of the Arab world". Why these images should be more distasteful than others is never fully explained. It is an uncomfortable and compromising moment in an otherwise rigorous and persuasive argument.
But, in both literal and figurative terms, this is a book that asks the reader to look at the bigger picture. For Linfield, the important thing is that photographs open windows to historic events that would otherwise remain unseen; that, given more than a passing glance, they form part of a "connective tissue of concern". Her assertion that impassive deconstruction is often the least appropriate response to them is both intellectually astute and emotionally honest. "I believe that we need to respond to and learn from photographs, rather than simply disassemble them," she writes. "I believe that we need to look at, and look into, what James Agee called 'the cruel radiance of what is.'" While images of violence and human degradation should never be easy to consume, this book contends that their wordless stories demand the kind of imagination, interpretation and thought that brings the wider world closer to our doors. As such it offers a timely analysis that is itself challenging, unflinching and, for the most part, generous in its aims.
Dave Stelfox works on The Review. His work has been published in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Village Voice.