Revealing: Reticence and Exposure

At first sight it is tempting to see representations of violence as evolving in a straight line over the last two centuries from reticence to exposure. Early photography, like Ancient Greek drama, typically shows the after-effects of violence, rather than the actual moment of conflict and killing.

Photographers of the American Civil War (1861-5) demonstrate far less reticence. In July 1863 Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan took photographs of soldiers' corpses, sometimes moving them to picturesque sites and into more dramatic poses. Gardner, in his Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1865-6), may have gone so far as to use the same corpses in photographs representing both Union and Confederate dead. For Gardner these photographs underline ‘the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry.

Other media than photography, however, have been used to portray violence realistically. The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra, 1810-20), a series of eighty-two monochrome prints by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, is a good example. They reveal the consequences of war between the French and the Spanish for both civilians and soldiers. Some are disturbing and hard to look at, revealing acts of brutality, cruelty and violence: a man is about to bring down his axe and decapitate a soldier on the ground (plate 3), soldiers attempt to rape women (plates 9 and 10), dismembered and mutilated corpses are depicted impaled or hanging from trees (plates 37 and 39). Plate 60 shows a weeping woman, with three women's bodies at her feet. It is entitled: ‘There is no one to help them' (No hay quien los socorra). This cry of pain illustrates the potential of visual representation to expose the realities of violence on indivi­duals. ‘The uniqueness and power of much of Goya's imagery of war lie in the fact that he isolates individual vignettes, giving the paradigmatic “inhumanity of war” an all too human face. Often that face is transformed by the violence it imposes or suffers.'^[1040] Goya puts it well with the ironic title of one of his prints: ‘One cannot look at [this]' (No se puede mirar, plate 26).

Of course, one can be both drawn and repulsed by what is portrayed in these forms of realistic art and subsequent news photography. ‘Whereas earlier artists (and many of Goya's successors as well) were concerned with their ability to transform realities into a pleasing or instructive picture, Goya and the modern news photographer convey observations with uncompro­mising immediacy.' Several scholars have pointed to the parallels between these communicative practices. For Fred Licht, ‘Goya and news photogra­phers do not allow us time to enter their pictorial space gradually but aggressively arrest our attention with the incontrovertibility of a blow.'^[1041]

By contrast, even today creators of news will show reticence: there are many images that news editors will not publish or broadcast. Most stopped broadcasting live film of people jumping from the Twin Towers in Manhattan on 9/11 once they realised what was happenning. The extent of restraint varies from region to region: in Carnage and the Media Jean Seaton observes how a ‘chairman of an international television conference after the attacks of 11 September' remarked that ‘there had been a real “difference between the kind of pictures that were shown on the northern-European TV and the much greater detail of carnage that was shown in the south... I think you have to conclude that religion made a difference. The Catholic south was more comfortable with death on screen.”'^[1042]

While it is possible to describe the evolution of representing violence as a move from reticence to exposure, this would be too simple. Even in the earliest days of photographic reporting some sought to reveal through their work the human costs of violence. Modern photographers who reflect the effects of violence are part of a long tradition. Some images have an iconic quality, such as the shot of a 9-year-old girl running naked, screaming, away from a Napalm attack in Vietnam (1972). Nick Ut, who took this picture, said ‘The photo was as authentic as the Vietnam War itself.'^[1043] This act of exposure became a persuasive witness to the impact on fragile bodies of dropping Napalm, and, beyond that, symbolic of how civilians and children can all too easily be caught up in conflict. But as the example of Goya shows, this was not new.