Tragedy, Death, and Emotion in Photography

"Photography is the most nostalgic of arts. Implicit in the act of photographing is a recognition of the passage of time, of transience and the inevitability of change. To look at photographs of people is to engage in a kind of mourning for past innocence, their poignancy sharpened in the knowledge of what was to come. In war photography these responses are magnified. Danger hovers at the edges of all such images; the passions they record are always the most extreme. The possibility of dying that is their subtext, for their subjects as much as the photographer, means they make urgent claims on our attention, allowing us both to feel a sense of our own mortality and to hold that sense at bay. The forcefulness of their messages makes them unlike any other genre of image, the power of their desire to communicate, impelling them towards representations that touch us more deeply and directly."

-Caroline Brothers, War and Photography

            The photographing of tragedy brings to the fore two of the most central aims of photography, photography as evidence and photography as art. Evidentiary claims are important in tragic photography on the basis of pursuing justice and the rectification of atrocity and wrongdoing. For these reasons, photography as evidence relatively few difficult ethical questions. The same cannot be said of the other half of war or tragic photography. Despite the powerful evidentiary capacity of tragic photographs, there is a very real aesthetic attraction that one feels to photographs depicting immensely horrible things. Art has a much more complex raison d'être, but it certainly lies on a much more dubious ethical foundation within the framework of art as spectacle and object of interest. The combination of these two conflicting ideas through the medium of tragic photographs raises some murky ethical questions.

So just what it is it about tragic photographs that attract us so strongly? The ghastly sight of corpses and dismemberment is generally repulsive for beings with the capacity to empathize and relate to one another, and yet people will visit art galleries and subscribe to magazines that emphasize, and in some sense fetishize, human tragedy. Professional war photographers like James Nachtwey will make the claim that to chronicle human tragedy is akin to inciting social change and that his ultimate goal is to deliver real justice to the people that have been deprived of it in an egregious way. While I would certainly agree that this is a beautiful idea and a very agreeable mission statement, I don’t think that we can truly absolve Nachtwey and his colleagues of any ethical scrutiny on the basis of such an emotionally rhetorical argument. Yes war photographers perform a very essential evidentiary duty, but they also willfully pick and choose which atrocities deserve public attention, and their choices seem to reflect an emphasis that lies more on aestheticism and beauty than objectivity and justice. This is a very difficult truth to face up to because it implies a certain level of sadistic voyeurism ingrained within our cultural psyche, people continually pay to see these tragic photographs, but I believe that it is important to analyze our attraction to tragic photographs from a less culturally or emotionally tainted perspective in order to ensure that we aren’t propagating falsehoods about the people who are depicted in these photographs and the emotions that these photographs illicit.

Let’s analyze a series of images that depict emotionally intense, physically frightening, or explicitly macabre scenes for the purposes of exploring attraction and reaction in war or tragic photography. Tragic photographs need to be recognized not only as vehicles for change, but also for their hypnotic and aesthetic qualities, qualities which are generally neglected in the wake of a social taboo that frowns upon the idea of extracting aesthetic value from scenes of depravity or human suffering.

These are two photographs that I find extremely interesting because of their sequentiality. The fact that war photographer Larry Burrows took two pictures of the same person in different phases of agony, gives a ready-made vehicle for comparison of two things that physically or temporally never shared the same space, and yet are deeply related to one another. Like Smithson's Monuments of Passaic, a collage-like arrangement of railroad bridges and other architectural structures, the vehicle of photography allows us to evoke an otherworldly degree of contrast and analysis. Burrows has given us a sort of before-and-after of human suffering, wherein both the moment of panic and the moment of grief are depicted. And through this comparison, through this sequential analysis, the suffering of Lance-Corporal James Farley has become the fodder of aesthetic and semiological scrutiny. And this is a very explicit encounter with the idea of human suffering as spectacle, for both academia and amusement, as we find photographs that depict horrible situations both strangely attractive and aesthetically pleasing.

            Looking at the first photograph, the flash of emotion on Lance-Corporal Farley's face is what strikes me, not the dead body. I'm drawn to the face of the gunner who was photographically crystallized in the midst of immense distress and panic. He is the only living person in this scene expect for the photographer who, through the medium of photography, has brought us there along with him. A war photographer has immortalized this moment, and it seems to beg the simple question: why? What social intentions could he possibly incite through this photograph? What were his intentions? The number of questions becomes numerous when you begin to consider the humanity behind every photograph, the person who was making the shutter click; it also becomes quite difficult to accept the notion that this was taken devoid of aesthetic or at the very least philosophical forethought.

The photograph to the right is also of Lance-Corporal Farley, except now he has just returned to base, where the weight of what just took place has fully hit him. His friends were dying in his arms and in the midst of chaos he had no time to grieve. We are outsiders who have never met this man before, and probably never will, and yet by viewing this photograph we are present for one of his darkest and most emotional moments of his life. That is an extremely powerful idea, and one which weaves its way through almost through almost all war photographs, and assuredly plays a part in explaining the magnetic quality of this eternalized suffering.

In this photograph we have a Soviet machine gunner, Anton Bliznyak, who was photographed during the Russian Civil War. He has not only lost an eye but he has been seriously wounded many times, as the stripes on his left sleeve are meant to indicate. For his heroism and selflessness, Trotsky awarded him the cigar that he is holding in his right hand.

This photograph is an interesting departure from what would traditionally be considered tragic photography because its initial intentions seem to lie in the pronouncement of heroism and triumph. Yet it is still a tragic photograph, because instead of capturing the act of suffering and tragedy as it is occurring spatio-temporally, this photographer has captured the product, the manifestation of years of abuse and horror in the indifferent and cold stare of a young Soviet man. This is the tragedy that is more readily palatable for the lay-men, a tragedy which is spoken through the face of someone who has suffered a great deal, and not experienced first-hand. These types of tragic photographs are captivating in that they tell a story about the human condition, and the spectrum between inhumanity and humanity. Here is a man who has suffered a great deal, he has suffered willingly for a cause that he believes is just and righteous, and yet, we start to wonder whether his belief is misplaced. One cannot help but feel that the cigar in his right hand seems to represent the ephemeral nature of the victory that he has earned for himself and his country. His tumultuous prize, bought with blood and exertion, will soon burn away to nothing.

"This Vietnamese woman's husband has been killed by US soldiers a few minutes earlier, together with other male villagers, because they were found hiding in tunnel, seen by the Americans as standard Vietcong practice. After blowing up all tunnels and bunkers that might offer shelter, the soldier will withdraw and then call down an artillery barrage on the village, which will the woman, the child and everyone else there"

I am attracted to this image in a very Barthesian sense. Wherein the incidental contrast between the young American soldier and the Vietnamese women serves as my punctum. I sense a subtle and yet futile concern on the face of the soldier as well as a deeply saddening acceptance and numbness on the part of the Vietnamese women. We are confronted with a peculiar pre-death moment as the caption informs us that the village will soon be obliterated by American artillery. The young American understands this, and the women most likely suspects it, but she is immobilized by the grief resulting from the slaughter of almost everyone in her village. Grief, acceptance, futility, sadness, and death: all of these things are expressed within the body of this single image, an image that transmits these ideas in an evocative and powerful way. This particular photograph seems to carry both ends of the war photography idealization, wherein the photograph is both evidence and art. It is a beautiful and yet tragic testament to not only the human aspect of war, but its forced depravity and heady consequences.

This photograph is depicting Cuban rebels who were captured by the Spanish during the Spanish-American War, they are about to be killed by a firing squad.

Photography again allows us to glimpse the moment immediately preceding death, the point where mortal cessation has become an incontrovertible inevitability. We are playing an odd temporal game where death is implied but not explicit, and everyone, both the viewer and the subject is aware of this. This solemn idea is attractive in its rarity, as the taboo of discussing death forces us to be surprised by its occurrence and actualization. Everyone will die, every photograph will eventually depict someone who is no longer living, but there is a very eerie quality to the human recognition of the end of life, and these Cuban rebels seem oddly ready to face their end, undaunted by even the grisly prospect of death by firing squad.

This picture is somewhat of a departure from the images that we have seen up to this point, in the extent and explicit nature of the death that it depicts.  This is a photograph of the Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation.

The thing that strikes the viewer most readily is the massive number of deceased within the body of the image. The dead are casually strewn about with a sickening nonchalance that makes it easy to imagine that they are all just sleeping. Pictures such as this one were pivotal in bringing the atrocities committed by the Nazis during WWII to light. The evidentiary nature of photography forces us to accept that events whose depravity is actually difficult to even fathom, have actually taken place. Look as one the few living people within the image peers over at the bodies mid-stride, the rest of them not even managing a glance. The words “casual” and “nonchalance” can continually be used to describe this image of human suffering pushed to a blistering extreme in way that has nothing to do with our role as outsider. In this case, the emotional reactions are seemingly reversed and we are more perturbed by the scene than the people who are experiencing it first hand. Tragic photography is again giving us a unique and subtle look into the extremes of human emotion.

 This final image depicts the decomposing body of an Iraqi soldier still in the vehicle that he died in. A rocket on Highway 8, which is the road out of Kuwait back to Basra, hit his vehicle. This photograph was deemed unsuitable for publication by the United States government, and was instead published in English newspapers.

The strong emotional response elicited by this photograph is because of the weird meta-photograph of a dead human being in a lifelike position (Knightley 255). The man was already still before the photograph was taken, and he is frozen in the frantic moment of his death. You can see him trying to escape from the vehicle as the flames are engulfing him, and the disturbingly ready-made image causes a serious philosophical reflection on the part of the viewer. This stinking organic mass used to be a sentient, feeling, and breathing human being, and his life was snuffed out in a sudden and vicious manner. Again we see the evidentiary nature of photography and its ability to alter the cultural psyche.  

Through these tragic photographs we have discussed the question of ethical responsibility and social justice in the context of sharing human tragedy. The irreverence of this type of photography, and really photography in general, manifests itself in the notion of photography as an observer's medium. By taking a photograph you are removing yourself from the current situation and seemingly shifting your intentions from those of honest care and human emotion, to that of removed interest and curiosity. In the depth of personal grief and suffering, how frequent is the urge to photograph and catalogue your present circumstances? Such idle musings are reserved for the quasi-indifferent outsider, the photographer who generally has no stake in the suffering of those he photographs other than that of personal gain. In the same sense that the hidden realities revealed by photography through the imaging of the very small or very fast are deeply captivating, we find photographs of human tragedy and suffering equally attractive. Here is a reality that is just as hidden to many individuals as the microcosm of bacteria and cellular interactions: extreme human suffering. Human emotion is tumultuous and fickle, and yet photography can bottle the hurricane, and freeze it at will. We see Leland Stanford’s galloping horse in all its glory.

A moment of suffering is a moment hidden away from the rest of the world by not only space and time, but also cultural and social taboo. A photographer’s “license to photograph” is a special exception to what is generally seen as irreverent and appalling. And yet, despite this wicked depiction, we demand that our wars be photographed! We force human agents to enable our misguided fantasies of objective reality. There is only one truth, and we think that we can prove that through the evidentiary medium of photography. But human beings are not the cool and indifferent chroniclers that we so readily enlist them to be. War photographers feel emotion and empathy, and are sometimes sickened at the thought of their own humanity, at the notion that they are behaving an in immoral or ethically dubious manner. Consider for instance this quote by Taylor Burrows, the war photographer who took the series of images with Lance-Corporal Farley, who had this to say when questioned about the ethics of his photographs, "I was torn between being a photographer and the normal human feelings. It is not easy to photograph a pilot dying in a friend's arms and later to photograph the breakdown of the friend... Was I simply capitalizing on someone else's grief?" (Knightley 191). The question of ethics in photographing tragedy is incredibly convoluted and it is irresponsible to claim that all photographers are behaving ethically or unethically due to some sort of rhetorical or logical analysis on the part of an outsider. These are extreme situations and many things that would not naturally take place, things that no one even believed possible, are happening every single day. Photographing tragedy is an important part of developing our broader human identity, and ultimately, is the most poignant expression that we can make about the greater human condition and our part in a vast web of sentient experience. Tragedy, emotion, and death should not be exploited for monetary gains, but they can be shared for their philosophical, social, and cultural value. And I believe that this is well within the bounds of reasonable morality.