Abstract
As I am writing this text, the images of the shores of Utøya Island, where the attack against the youth camp of the Norwegian Labour Party took place, are broadcast repeatedly across international news channels. These blurred photographs of bodies scattered around, often accompanied by a red arrow pointing out the gunman aiming at prostrate youths, represent truly horrifying moments when human lives are about to end. This very slice of time is the main theme of Barbie Zelizer’s book About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Like Lessing’s ‘zeitpunkt’, Cartier Bresson’s ‘l’instant décisif’ and Burgin’s ‘pregnant moment’, Zelizer examines a range of photographs depicting individuals facing their impending death in natural disaster, crime, accident, execution, suicide, assassination, war, illness and acts of terrorism. According to the author, images capturing the moment before rather than after death (what she calls the ‘as if’ moment compared to the ‘as is’ image of actual death) are, from an ethical perspective, a less offensive and therefore better journalistic choice. Zelizer presents this instant as an endlessly renewed trope; its cultural familiarity and universality enable its travels across geopolitical contexts and imaging technologies. Her main argument is that the transformation of this type of image from an index denoting a particular historical situation into a symbol of death makes it a prism for the general impact of the news on global audiences.
Zelizer carefully tracks the journalistic discussions the trope has elicited. What is particularly innovative in this volume is its commentary on the growing contemporary public discomfort with graphic displays of carnage and its demonstration of how the muted graphicness of the about-to-die trope might become a negotiable, serviceable and politicized convention (mostly in the opening and closing chapters). The author pays attention to how the images of about-to-become-victims of political conflict, famine or substance abuse are taken up into processes of global capitalism and marketing competition. In a broader context of media and communication studies, the book is a valuable source of information and analysis.
Many examples are offered, all generated by US news coverage since the mid 1860s. Some images are still in many people’s heads generations after they were made: the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in Vietnam, the execution of a guerrilla suspect by Saigon’s chief of police, terrible pictures of the soon-to-be-slaughtered in My Lai, the Tiananmen Square Revolution, Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer winning picture of a starving African girl with a vulture in the background. They are joined by more recent ones: people jumping off the Twin Towers, the killing of 12-year-old Mohammad Aldura, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the death of Iranian student Neda Agha-Soltan, a decapitation video of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, the execution of Saddam Hussein and many more. In three consecutive chapters, Zelizer divides these into three groups: images of presumed death (often portraying inanimate objects and landscapes, asking the public to fill in a number of informational gaps); images of possible death (depicting events of which the scope, scale and magnitude are likely to kill multiple individuals); and images of certain death (which explicitly mark the individuals as having died after their picture was taken, as indicated by titles, captions and adjoining texts). The following two chapters examine the mix of presumption, possibility and certainty in news coverage, using examples of the Vietnam War, the 2004 tsunami and the United States’ self-proclaimed ‘war on terror’. There are sub-categories as well: natural, accidental, intentional death, death by famine, by body frailty, etc. Yet this categorization is somewhat muddled and raises questions: can death be categorized along those lines only, if it can be categorized at all? What about varying degrees of violence, the pointlessness of an act, the precariousness of the lives lost? What is the (un)spoken hierarchy of the value of life and death and their global coverage? And are race, gender, class and geopolitical positioning factors in this hierarchy? Judith Butler’s Frames Of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2010 [2009]) might be a complementary reading here.
Despite meticulous documenting of an enormous (too large?) amount of case studies, these questions remain. Zelizer points out that particular images signify a specific genocide, aggression or calculated political slaughter, but their force is presented as having the universal impact of iconic illustrations of human perish. Although contextualizing them and pointing out the dependencies they create, the book confirms over and over again the homogeneity of the trope through absorbing it into the general economy of shock and spectacle. Moreover, while documenting awaiting death seems an invariably democratic practice, mostly coextensive with US reporting, little attention is given to indigenous photographers, embedded reporting or participatory practices (though Chapter 8 does raise the issue of the accountability of non-journalistic visual practices such as beheading videos).
Although Zelizer is sensitive to questions of enunciation, context and politics, I would have liked to have read more on how viewers’ involvement with this specific kind of image is structured. We usually approach photographs of violence with a high degree of self-censorship, and the complex temporality of the about-to-happen event negotiates our proximity and distance even more. While scholars in the humanities (Ahmed, Berlant, Bennett, Cvetkovich, Sedgwick) have explored the public workings of emotion and feeling, such as empathy, pity, repulsion, scopophilia or terror, the subtitle of the book, How News Images Move the Public, remains largely unanswered as far as images’ emotive work is concerned. What characterizes the medium of photography – moving, affective visceral touching, transitioning between the personal and the collective – is reduced here to Barthes’ punctum. While the ‘public’ remains largely faceless and disembodied, without really defining who is included and excluded, Zelizer focuses on specific sort of recipients of news photographs, namely editors, journalists and politicians, testifying to another stream of interest in photographic processes and applications. Reading About to Die one realizes what a wide, all-encompassing array of performances and landscapes contemporary studies of photographs have become in a rapidly changing mediascape.
To return to the Norwegian tragedy unfolding at the time of writing: the about-to-die images from Utøya are accompanied by the photographs of relatives, officials and survivors mourning the dead. It is something that the volume hints at but does not spell out: the about-to-die images have a performative mourning function. How can that function be made productive rather than pathological, active rather than reactive? Photography’s indexical power has been associated with death and loss since long before Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Photographs, along with mourning rituals, fix and shape the memory of the deceased, documenting the tangibility of the subject that happened to be or was purposefully captured in front of a lens. Showing the soon-to-happen loss of life and simultaneously the void created by that loss, these images are progressively integrated into an affective economy or symbolic order. Zelizer’s book makes one aware that, like mourning, photographs of about-to-die victims cannot be framed in a stable and foreclosing manner, nor can they be restricted to specific and prescribed functions; the inherent instability of war, crime and violence dictates the need to constantly reoccupy them.