06 A REWIND HYDERABAD, Sunday, December 24, 2023 Telangana Today EXPRESSIONS OF EVIL IMAGES BEAMED FROM THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE ON EARTH TODAY SHOW GRIM-FACED AND SUFFERING PERSONS, BUT ALSO TOUGH AND RUTHLESS FACES OF THOSE WHO INFLICT THE SUFFERING — PRAMOD K NAYAR A s we scroll through the mass media coverage from the most dangerous place on earth now, we encounter something familiar: faces of suffering as victims rush fellow-victims to hospitals, screaming for help, seeking shelter or simply shell shocked at a world come apart. Victim photography is one of the oldest genres in the medium, and has received much attention. But how do we face the faces of, say, convicted killers, brutal assassins and soldiers? The Not-Dead Lalage Snow in 2010 undertook a strange project. She took pictures of enlisted men of the 1st Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland at three ‘moments’. First, she took the ‘before’ portraits the day before they were deployed. The ‘during’ portraits were taken three months into their deployment in Afghanistan, and the ‘after’ was taken the week they returned four months later. ABC carried the series in 2011. Snow titled the series ‘We Are The Not Dead’ (it later became a book, Full Deployment). She writes: As the body count of British servicemen killed or wounded rose and the political ramifications of the British army’s presence in Afghanistan became increasingly convoluted, more and more soldiers felt like they didn’t have a voice, or at least, weren’t being listened to. ‘We Are The Not Dead’ is an attempt at giving the brave young men and women the chance to explain how it really is. The soldiers’ photographs were arranged as a triptych: before, during and after, with their individual comments below. PERPETRATOR PORTRAITS CAPTURE THE DILEMMAS AND UNCERTAINTIES OF SOME, BUT ARROGANCE AND PLEASURE AT THEIR CRIMES IN OTHERS In the ‘Before’ portraits and accompanying text, many soldiers expressed their anxieties at going, the inconveniences they were bound to face and the hostility they would encounter from the Afghan people. Some like David McLean said: ‘I’m not really bothered about going. I’m a soldier and it’s my job. We’ve been training for so long it will be good to finally get out there’ Others like Becky Hitchcock and Fraiser Pairman admitted to being afraid — of being injured or of dying: My civvie [civilian] friends think I am brave but I don’t see it like that at all. It looks so bad on the news but its alright really. I was scared just before leaving the UK — I didn’t know what to expect. I haven’t been scared here but I know there will be times when I will be… In the ‘During’ series, they admitted to the horrible conditions, and of missing home. The ‘After’ series had the soldiers expressing gratitude that they were back alive and safe. Some spoke of the experiences they encountered and others of the conditions the Afghanis lived (and died) in: A day after that IED it came over the radio that the Afghan soldier was in intensive care but stable. That was the best feeling ever. A few months later I treated a little boy with burns to his whole body. He was dead tiny, a lovely looking lad. We made him stable .... But two days later his body went into shock and he died. They had to return the body for us to hand back to the family. Carrying him dead having carried him alive two days previous… it was a weird feeling. But it’s part of the job. I think I have grown up a bit, and see the light a bit more. I don’t think I take things for granted as much as I used to. It makes you appreciate what you’ve got and how little others have but still get by. The triptychs set out the uncertainty, the grimness and the relief of the three moments respectively in many cases. In some, the ‘During’ expressions are of indifference — perhaps even numbness — to the sights and experiences in the kill zone. Commentators have noted that their eyes are dilated during and after the experience. (Charges of having used darker light effects in the ‘After’ portraits to heighten the dramatic effect of tired faces have followed Snow, it must be said). In an interview, Snow spoke of the portraits of one officer: Adam Petzsch — seeing the difference in his eyes — he looks like a different person in the middle picture, and he was. He’d just seen something horrific. He was an officer in charge of this operation and had to suddenly do his job, do it quickly and do it well; so that’s what was going on in that picture. It was not only to ‘honour their bravery’ but also to capture how the ‘young men return as shadows of their former selves and, in many cases, with deep, psychological scars’, Snow stated. Today too, we see images of grim, forbidding expressions as the soldiers line up at the border, carry out searches, beat or arrest someone for the crime of being a ‘settler’ in a supposedly contested zone. Soldiers in Action The actual act of the making of victims has been captured before on film. Perhaps the most famous story is of Max Täubner who took photographs of an execution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine although taking pictures of executions was prohibited by law. Täubner’s pictures were so graphic that he was court-martialled in 1943, dismissed from service and imprisoned. He had captured both victim and perpetrator in the most unequal social setup in the world then: Nazi Germany. With Abu Ghraib, of course, the images of Lynndie England, Charles Graner and others became world famous. England with the prisoner on a leash, a smiling Sabrina Harman with her thumbs-up sign when kneeling next to the body of an Iraqi prisoner who had been tortured to death, gave us the face of the perpetrators. But there is a crucial difference between Snow’s portraits that were shot for the public and the images from Abu Ghraib: the latter photographs were meant to be for private consumption and circulation among friends as souvenirs. These were trophy pictures. That these private images became aligned with a history of atrocity photographs was unexpected. That the photographs were taken not by professional photographers but other, more or less equally culpable, perpetrators is what strikes us about the England, Harman and Graner pictures. In the words of the critic Susan Sontag: For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. The other crucial difference is that unlike Snow’s images (or the images of famous war photographers like Don McCullin and Larry Burrows) that were composed, these images capturing perpetrator expressions are amateur efforts. As Janine Struk writes in Private Pictures: Soldiers’ Inside View of War, her study of soldier photographs: The skilled photographer makes war seem tragic and dramatic but inevitable, rational and palatable. War photographs must have drama as well as pathos, meet high technical standards and have eye-catching and aesthetically pleasing compositions… The carefully composed moment should shock and fascinate while giving the impression of the event being controlled. PORTRAITS OF SOLDIER-PERPETRATORS GO A LONG WAY TOWARDS HUMANISING DESTRUCTION, CHAOS AND EVIL With soldier-photographs — photographs of soldiers by fellow soldiers — there is a slice-of-life rawness, of something being experienced rather than being staged. There is no composition or authority in such soldierphotographs and hence generate what for many viewers is a certain degree of authenticity. They are unsanitised, since they were never meant for public consumption. They do not fit the aesthetic or commercial norms of ‘standard’ war photography, but communicate war’s horror. Viewing Horror In many cases, the events of war are inexplicable, and propaganda and commercial images even more so. But given that the military and entertainment complexes now work so closely together, the employment of the camera to capture and sell (in more ways than one) the horror has become more or less unavoidable. UNEXPECTED AND UNSTAGED PICTURES OF WAR ARE MEANT FOR PRIVATE VIEWING AND AS SUCH HAVE AN AMATEURISH FEEL OF AUTHENTICITY TO THEM The history of perpetrator portraits from Nazi Germany to the present most dangerous place in the world has the effect of transforming horror, destruction and evil — if we want to employ that term — into a human process. Where war and its attendant horrors of arrests, incarceration and torture perpetuated by invading forces have a certain massified, and therefore abstract, quality for the viewer, the photograph, especially close-ups, of the individual soldiers bring home to us: there are humans who do these heinous acts. That is, the perpetrator account and photograph humanise the evil and the destruction. We begin to look for motives, a moral pathology, in the expressions of those we now know have killed and maimed, when we look at the soldier pics. But we also recognise that, unlike say serial killers, these soldier-perps are part of a system. In other words, we look, when viewing soldier-perp pics, for both the external social forces in which they are embedded and the internal moral/psychological elements such as ambition, ruthlessness, complicity and desire for power. Thus we see Harman, Graner and England’s expressions of joy at having acquired power over their tortured and humiliated prisoners. WE HAVE TO LEARN BETTER THE CONTEXTS IN WHICH PERPS ARE PRODUCED IN ORDER TO MITIGATE THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH ANY OF US COULD BECOME PERPS Although, in the images we see now of soldier-perps, we cannot find an answer to the ‘why’ of their acts, we also do not see a passive participant. We see individuals who have found a way to justify their actions (‘I was a cog in the wheel’, ‘I was ordered’, ‘They deserved it’). There is, in some cases, a conflicted expression in some of the Snow photographs where the ‘moral neutralisation’ — as the internal justification for whatever heinous acts one commits is called — has not worked its full effect. But above all, what we see when looking at the soldier ready to shoot, or the torturers England and Graner, is their very ordinariness in circumstances that are very far from ordinary. They are not the essence of evil, but ordinary persons conducting themselves in ways that are unimaginable in everyday life. MAX TÄUBNER’S PICTURES WERE SO GRAPHIC THAT HE WAS COURT-MARTIALLED IN 1943, DISMISSED FROM SERVICE AND IMPRISONED. HE HAD CAPTURED BOTH VICTIM AND PERPETRATOR IN THE MOST UNEQUAL SOCIAL SETUP IN THE WORLD THEN: NAZI GERMANY This leads to four frames for viewing perpetrator portraits. First, there is a ‘little Nazi’ as perpetrator studies scholar Susanne Knittel puts it, in all of us. England, Graner and the soldier firing at civilians or hospitals in the world’s most dangerous place are not demons. Second, given the circumstances of impunity and immunity, the ‘little Nazi’ undertakes acts that would be unthinkable otherwise. Third, given that these men and women are not monsters, they are reliable historical witnesses to acts whose other witnesses are their victims. And finally, we learn to distinguish, when we become aware of the contexts, between different kinds of portraits: as Raya Morag the film studies scholar, says, victims write testimonies, perpetrators write confessions. In the extremely difficult task of seeing and reading perp accounts/pics so as to not empathise with them, not glorify or justify them, we may have to learn better the contexts in which perps are produced in order to mitigate the circumstances in which any of us could become perps. The widespread hate-mongering, targeting of specific communities, the immunity bestowed upon perps because of identity politics are contemporary contexts in which it becomes possible for any of us to provide moral justification for a variety of heinous acts. Although individual complicity is a factor, it is the context in which, say members of a majoritarian community have full freedom to indulge in this complicity that creates perps. Maybe when we look into a mirror crafted in the current climate, what stares out is a ‘little Nazi’. What, in short, are our contexts in which the ‘little Nazi’ in us emerges? (The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK) Printed and Published by Damodar Rao Divakonda, on behalf of Telangana Publications Pvt. 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