Abounaddara and the global visual politics of the ‘right to the image’

Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich

The anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara has posted a new short video on Vimeo and distributed it via social media every Friday since April 2011, the beginning of the Syrian popular uprising. Working with limited equipment, no regular funding, and under very dangerous conditions, Abounaddara has termed its work 'emergency cinema', recalling one of the group's vital influences, Walter Benjamin, who envisioned artistic collectives as potentially effective responses to political violence. This article demonstrates how Abounaddara's work subverts international and national media coverage of the Syrian conflict by consciously employing what Benjamin described as an artisanal form of storytelling. The author illustrates how and why Abounaddara's concept of 'the right to the image' is politically vital and ethically complex, arguing for its relevance within the broader context of global digital images of state and police violence rousing debates about representation, media ethics, and the circulation of graphic images.

903578 VCU0010.1177/1470412920903578Journal of Visual Culture 19.1 correction2020 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE Erratum Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich (2019) Abounaddara and the global visual politics of the ‘right to the image’. Journal of Visual Culture 18(3): 378-411. The article was published online and in print with an incorrect figure caption on p.379. The caption for Figure 1 should read ‘still from We Who Are Here’. The author would also like to correct the spelling of the word studium which should appear on p. 388, first full paragraph, line 11. journal of visual culture [journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu] SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne) Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920903578 Vol 19.1: 1 DOI 10.1177/1470412920903578 18.3 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE Abounaddara and the global visual politics of the ‘right to the image’ Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich Abstract. The anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara has posted a new short video on Vimeo and distributed it via social media every Friday since April 2011, the beginning of the Syrian popular uprising. Working with limited equipment, no regular funding, and under very dangerous conditions, Abounaddara has termed its work ‘emergency cinema’, recalling one of the group’s vital influences, Walter Benjamin, who envisioned artistic collectives as potentially effective responses to political violence. This article demonstrates how Abounaddara’s work subverts international and national media coverage of the Syrian conflict by consciously employing what Benjamin described as an artisanal form of storytelling. The author illustrates how and why Abounaddara’s concept of ‘the right to the image’ is politically vital and ethically complex, arguing for its relevance within the broader context of global digital images of state and police violence rousing debates about representation, media ethics, and the circulation of graphic images. Keywords. documentary film • human rights • media ethics • Syrian conflict • violence • visual culture Introduction: states of emergency To write at this particular moment in time that a global state of emergency not only exists but persists may seem obvious, if not even banal. The idea for this article started developing during the summer of 2016, when, during the first week of July, African-American Philando Castile was shot to death by Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez, his final moments of life livestreamed on Facebook by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds; just a day earlier, on 5 July, the police murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was filmed by two passers-by. Both videos went almost instantly viral on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and, a few weeks later, African-American Korryn Gaines was killed by the police and her son was wounded near Baltimore, Maryland; Gaines posted a video of the stand-off before she was shot and killed.1 The Syrian conflict is now in its eighth year, with an estimated 500,000 journal of visual culture [journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu] SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne) Copyright © The Author(s), 2019. Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions Vol 18(3): 378–411https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412919886602 DOI 10.1177/1470412919886602 Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ dead.2 Since 2011, it has also been the deadliest place to be a journalist; the number of journalists killed in Syria each year has declined numerically only because so few journalists and media workers, such as fixers, are able to work there.3 In the months leading up to the January 2017 conference at the American University of Beirut for which this article was originally prepared, mainstream media outlets including The New York Times, Time, CNN and the BBC started curating and broadcasting the video ‘goodbye messages’ (a variation on what Barbie Zelizer, 2010, described as ‘about to die’ images) that some Eastern Aleppo residents were recording and posting on Twitter, believing those videos would likely be their last living testament.4 And yet, to normalize these and other persisting and emerging emergencies as rules rather than as exceptions is exactly what the anonymous film collective Abounaddara has been actively working against since the group’s founding in Damascus in 2010. Bullet films as a critique of violence Osama al-Habali’s expressive face completely fills the screen in Abounaddara’s We Who Are Here ( ) (see Figure 1) posted in August 2016 and just over a minute in length. His right hand is bandaged and, as he speaks, he looks directly into the eyes of the viewer. ‘Lots of people protest saying: “We are on the ground, so we know best.” But no, it’s not because we are on the ground that we’re right.’ His comments continue from that statement to reflections that build upon one another: ‘Seeing things unfolding is different from hearing about them’, he says calmly. ‘And living things yourself is again different. It’s easier to hear about getting hit by a shell, but I actually took a hit. But that doesn’t mean I ask everyone else to, too. I wouldn’t wish a shell on anybody’, he says, smiling. ‘[I would wish] that you listen to us, we who are on the receiving end of shells.’ The screen then flashes text reading: ‘Oussama al-Habali has been arbitrarily detained by the Syrian security forces since 18 August 2012’, a sort of grim punctuation mark. Figure 1. ‘Tell us who did this to you’, still from We Who Are Here. © Abounaddara collective. Reproduced with permission. 379 380 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 Figure 2. Still from The Walk to School: © Abounaddara Collective. Reproduced with Permission. Figure 3. Still from The Walk to School: © ), also just over a minute long, blaring In The Walk to School ( rings of a school bell and honking horns are the backdrop to children running in every direction, holding hands, clutching their books and backpacks. Their walk to school is instead a panicked flight and the images of children running and street noise take the place of any dialogue (see Figure 2). From the chaotic street scene, the camera leads the viewer to the school from which the children have been fleeing and finally up the front stairs, where one dusty shoe lies on blood-splattered stairs (see Figure 3). The last scene brings the viewer up the stairs to bloodied footprints and then to a pool of blood on the floor of the school’s lobby where the camera does not dwell but quickly fades to black. But it is perhaps The News ( ) that most directly embodies the collective’s media critique. The film is comprised of several short news bulletins that flash across the screen as the anchor describes each subject in the tersest of summaries, each of which is separated by the network’s tension-filled theme music. It opens with the newscaster announcing, ‘President Assad underlines the army’s ability to defeat the enemy’, and then cuts to President Bashar al-Assad in an interview, calmly stating ‘We have weapons from all over the world, including Israel.’ Then an immediate cut to the next newsflash: ‘The Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ Figure 4. ‘Tell us who did this to you’. Still from The News. © Abounaddara Collective. Reproduced with permission. airforce hits terrorist targets and destroys their stockpiles’, the news anchor states, as the viewer watches incongruous images of families fleeing down a street, some carrying wounded children and women and a man weeping, and wailing, ‘My daughter is dead, she’s gone.’ The next bulletin is perhaps the closest to what the collective has called the media’s ‘generalized state of abjection’: an ‘exclusive interview with a victim of terrorist gangs’ shows a news reporter thrusting a microphone in the face of a wounded woman lying on what look to be broken gravestones. ‘Tell us who did this to you’, the journalist insists (Figure 4: see Abounaddara, 2017b). These three films exemplify aspects of the collective’s work that can be seen throughout their oeuvre: an intense focus on the face of the subject and his or her story, one that often does not conform to what the viewer might expect from the storyteller; violence represented through sounds and motion rather than through the graphic depiction of dead or wounded bodies; the selective use of actual media footage to stand alone as its own media critique, almost in the tradition of a Situationist détournement.5 ‘Whatever we know will soon cease to exist becomes an image’: Emergency cinema Posted on Vimeo every Friday since 2010 and regularly shared by the collective on Facebook and Twitter, Abounaddara’s films have created a consistently expanding alternative archive of the ongoing and sustained state of emergency of the Syrian conflict.6 Ranging from 40 seconds to just over 5 minutes in length, the collective has called them ‘bullet films’, following Walter Benjamin’s idea that the cinematic cut is a tactile force that can assault the actual physiognomy of the eye like a bullet, so that the very form of the film can produce a shock or even violent effect, even if the image itself does not. For Abounaddara, film possesses a rousing potentiality that is both physiological and psychological. In the context of the humanitarian and human rights emergency that is the Syrian conflict, their work seeks to 381 382 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 transgress and transform any trace of sentimentality or pity in its viewers and refuses to elicit these affective responses, following Benjamin’s call to ‘destroy illusion’ and ‘paralyze the audience’s readiness for empathy’. ‘We want the viewer to be disturbed’, the collective’s co-founder and spokesperson Charif Kiwan said in a 2014 interview: We chose short format [films] because we wanted to punch people. When the revolution began, we tried to find a way to translate this breakdown or explosion of energy. We wanted to translate this event formally. We wanted to create films like bullets. We wanted to make something beautiful and violent. We wanted to surprise the viewer. Maybe he [sic] is looking for information about Syria, or looking for stereotypical images of militants or people. (Mejcher-Atassi, 2014, 8 July) As of this writing in 2019, the collective has made 450 ‘bullet films’ and has released one feature film, ‘Syria: Snapshots of History in the Making’ (2014), a commission by the French–German network Arte and one over which the collective had complete artistic control (according to Kiwan, this was a prerequisite for the collective to accept the commission).7 Another feature film, ‘On Revolution’ (2017), directed by Maya al-Khoury, is currently in progress. The collective’s films are subtitled in French and English, and their participation in major film festivals such as the Venice International Film Festival and the Human Rights Watch film festival, their exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, Documenta and at New York City’s New Museum in addition to their screenings at universities in the Middle East, Europe and the US have made their work highly accessible to international audiences, although they have stated that their intended audience has always been primarily Syrian (see Bayoumi, 2015).8 As internet penetration within Syria is 30 percent, one would assume that they now consider their Syrian audience to be among the approximately 13 million Syrians living in the diaspora. The collective’s name (meaning ‘the man with glasses’) follows the Arabic tradition of people being nicknamed according to their professions and the everyday objects associated with them. It also pays homage to the 19th-century satirical magazine of the same name, edited by Egyptian playwright and journalist Yacoub Sanu who was forced into exile in France after being banished from Egypt for publishing the revolutionary articles of the satirical journal Abou Naddara Zarqa (‘the man in blue glasses’, metaphorically meaning ‘one who sees what others cannot’) and is also a reference to Dziga Vertov and his documentary The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) (see Seggerman, 2019). Abounaddara’s films constitute a new genre that the collective has named ‘emergency cinema’, a form that surprises and subverts the expectations of Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ what an ‘emergency’ form might look like and sound like, and what type of images and ideas it might contain.9 Abounaddara’s films are the antithesis of the amateur footage from the Syrian conflict which often has shaky camera work, poor or not fully audible sound and the depiction of a moment of intense violence or emotional release. As self-proclaimed ‘artisans’ of cinema, the collective is very consciously practicing and advocating a type of careful, considered narrative that privileges storytelling over information, what Benjamin (1968a: 89) called ‘an artisan form of communication’ in which ‘narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks’. In accordance with Benjamin, ‘emergency’ for the collective is about being constantly attentive to the concerns of the present. Rather than recognizing a historical past for ‘the way it really was’, articulating the past ‘means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (1968a: 255). These rising flashes of danger are for Benjamin ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’ (1968a: 259) that are manifested in what he called dialectical images, a complete disruption of a historicist ‘the way it really was’ and a rejection of a fixed ‘the way things are’. It is apposite, then, that emergency comes from emergere, to rise up or out. As Abounaddara’s stated task is to ‘mix a present and a past, images from the past and sound from the present’, their ‘emergency cinema’ then could not be more intentionally or accurately named (see Mejcher-Atassi, 2014, 8 July).10 Like the Canadian film collective Épopée, a group with which Abounaddara feels affinity and has been in dialogue, the collective started discussions in 2009 during the height of the digital media explosion and ever increasing (and de-regulated) global media conglomerates and film distributors. Kiwan has explained that emergency is both limiting and liberating: while ‘access to film sites, safety of those filmed, social developments or the state of the Internet connection’ are constant concerns, at the same time, emergency is liberation of artistic form and boundaries of genre, described by him as an ‘unprecedented sense of freedom’ (see Boëx, 2012). Equally liberating is the group’s anonymity. Beyond the fact that online anonymity is considered a part of freedom of expression as stipulated by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression,11 Abounaddara values what Gabriella Coleman has described as anonymity’s ‘power and promise’ that emphasizes message over its messenger or messengers (Coleman, 2014). ‘[We] took up the position of a sniper, lying in ambush behind apparently harmless short films distributed anonymously on the Internet in 2010’, Kiwan explained in a 2012 interview. ‘We were hoping to reach our public right under the censors’ nose’ (Boëx, 2012). Their choice to be an anonymous collective points not only to the obvious potential security risks of being named, but 383 384 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 also to larger ideological reasons for resisting and displacing the myth of the heroic individual artist, journalist, documentarian and the cult of celebrity and genius that has historically been associated with an (often historically male) individual. Abounaddara describes itself as pacifist and is largely comprised of selftaught and volunteer female filmmakers and a variety of contributors, including citizen journalists who have contributed footage to Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. They choose to reveal very little about their filmmaking methods (see Bayoumi, 2015; Creswell, 2016; and ‘The Right to the Image’ conference held at the New School for Social Research, New York City, 22–24 October 2015). Kiwan is one of two named members of the collective and is based in Paris; the other named member, filmmaker and activist Osama al-Habali featured in the bullet film We Who Are Here (2016), was arrested in 2012 and was missing until May 2017 when it was reported that he had died after being tortured to death by the Assad regime in Saydnaya prison (see Rifai, 2017, and Syrian Network for Human Rights, 2017). Although they do not explicitly advocate socialist or communist revolution, the collective (that refers to its members as ‘comrades’) explicitly advocates the seizure of the means of production of media making: the banners of their social media pages on Facebook and Twitter state, ‘The people want a right to the image based on dignity not property!’ At the same time, the collective writes that their struggle is one they want to carry out ‘side-by-side with the world’s image makers’, following their ‘anti-fascist predecessor’ Walter Benjamin and his 1934 talk at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, ‘The Author as Producer’.12 Sekula (1978: 883) describes the essence of the collective’s approach: I’m arguing, then, for an art that documents monopoly capitalism’s inability to deliver the conditions of a fully human life, for an art that recalls Benjamin’s remark in the Theses on the Philosophy of History that ‘there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Against violence directed at the human body, at the environment, at working people’s ability to control their own lives, we need to counterpose an active resistance simultaneously political and symbolic, to monopoly capitalism’s increasing power and arrogance. While, for Sekula, this resistance is ‘ultimately aimed as socialist transformation’, for Abounaddara, the transformation of media representation is connected to the transformation of the mainstream media as dependent upon advertising as revenue and images of violence as its central currency. Their critique is not only of the mainstream media as a culture industry that economically exploits images of violence and death, however, but of an international legal system that does not extend or interpret the right to the image as a right to Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ self-determination for all people, whether citizens, non-citizens, refugees, the injured or the dead. Yet whether or not Abounaddara extends its media critique to its own practice of how the collective uses the international mainstream media and social media is unclear. It could be seen as complicating, for example, that the collective circulates its work not only on ad-free Vimeo but also on social media platforms such as Facebook that one could argue epitomizes ‘capitalism’s increasing power and arrogance’, one of the world’s most profitable exploiters and capitalizers of both images and information and one that thrives upon the relationships it creates between subjects and consumer capitalism (Dean, 2010: 30).13 ‘La mort c’est une grande question . . . que hante surtout les personnes que cette realité les touche’ In a 2007 interview with the late Syrian film director Omar Amiralay, one of Abounaddara’s vital influences (see Meicher-Atassi, 2014), Amiralay made a prescient observation: As potential victims . . . death encircles us . . . each of us in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Palestine, maybe tomorrow in Syria – one never knows, because things are getting worse [in Syria] . . . one has this feeling that we are all subjects of death . . . an anonymous corpse to be filmed by CNN or al-Jazeera . . . Death is a big question that cannot but haunt us, and above all haunts the people that this reality touches. Documentary filmmakers, Amiralay explained, could transform what he called ‘the banalization of atrocity’, would reject stereotypical images of life in the Arab world and of the ‘standardization of death and individuals . . . images of cadavers on the television every day.’ It would be the younger generation of documentarians, he said, who would try ‘to inject life into the corpse’ of the seemingly anonymous victims of war and conflict broadcast on television, rejecting the stereotypical images that proliferate. ‘’Who are these people who die every day?’ It’s completely natural that [these documentarians] search to give them a name, to take an interest in their individuality’, Amiralay said. ‘They have names, they have dreams, they have stories, they have everyday worries.’ To find and tell the stories of these people is the documentarians’ ‘reaction against the banalization of the human . . . as a corpse’. Dignity (karameh): ‘The Syrian people cannot be humiliated’ In a recent article, Nathalie Khankan (2017) astutely contextualized Abounaddara’s work in the context of a larger movement for visual karameh in Syrian cinema, a movement that rejects the banalization that Amiralay 385 386 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 describes.14 In their articles and editorials in Newsweek, Le Monde, Libération, on the Documenta website as in Kiwan’s public appearances and most recently in their edited collection, The Question of the Right to the Image (2019), the collective has similarly argued against representations of bodily violence and the international culture industry’s profiting from those representations.15 One of the Syrian uprising’s main demands was for dignity (karameh), along with freedom, equity and equality.16 Since 2015, the collective has emphasized ‘the right to the image’, putting forth a manifesto-like call for dignity in images shown from the Syrian conflict, echoed by Syrian filmmakers such as Mohammad Ali Atassi, director of Our Terrible Country (2014) and Liwaa Yazji, director of Haunted (Maskoon, 2014) (see Bello, 2015; Joerck, 2015). Yazji’s documentary film Haunted (2015) about the experience of Syrians who had to flee their homes consciously avoids graphic bodily violence done to humans and instead focuses on how individuals relate to the physical destruction of their homes and their country. ‘[The film] has the desire within to show different images of Syrian people who are not being numbers in statistics, dead, injured, or just wailing in front of screens’, said Yazji. ‘They are not masses but rather individuals who could be in any country in any time, any era.’ In an interview about Mohammad Ali Atassi’s film, Our Terrible Country (2014) about the return of writer and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh to Syria and his journey with filmmaker, photographer and soldier in the Free Syrian Army, Ziad Homsi, from Douma to Raqqa and then to Istanbul, Atassi spoke similarly: ‘We are Syrian people. We are a people who suffered a lot due to the war in the last three or four years’, he said. ‘And the images that were presented about Syria and the Syrians themselves in the mass media, it didn’t look or sound good to us. It was very violent. We deserve a different kind of image’ (Bellow, 2015). Like Abounaddara, both of these filmmakers emphasize the desire to represent the Syrian conflict as part of a larger shared human experience and shared humanity. The filmmaker Orwa Al Mokdad, director of 300 Miles (2016), a poetic documentary in the form of video letters sent between Orwa (in Aleppo) and his 6-year-old niece, Nour (in Daraa) reiterated similar sentiments about narrative, graphic images and affective karameh: ‘I wanted to touch the audience and confuse the audience without inserting direct bloody scenes. It has more effect’, he explained in a 2017 interview (see Bucher, 2017). Other contemporary films about the Syrian war take a similarly intimate approach to storytelling: On the Edge of Life (2017), a documentary about the flight of filmmaker Yaser Kassab and his partner Rima from Syria to Lebanon, and a limbo period they spent in Turkey and Ziad Kalthoum’s Taste of Cement (2017) about Syrian construction workers in Lebanon. Kalthoum’s statement resounds with Abounaddara’s ‘artisan’ form of storytelling and the privileging of a different type of information than news reporting conventionally conveys: Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ We have a million YouTube videos about what’s going on in Syria … my job as an artist is to explain our situation in a different way and in a different language. (Kalthoum, 2017) ‘Never more brutal than reality itself’: complicating karameh and the violent image A complicating and complementary narrative form that takes news reporting in the form of photojournalism as its artistic source is embodied in the 2014 project ‘The Untitled Images’ by Syrian visual artist Khaled Barakeh. In his 2018 article, ‘The Untitled Images’, Barakeh describes his series, five small c-print photographs of 21 x 30 cm each. The sources of the photographs are unnamed; they are not the artist’s own but are taken by either professional or citizen photojournalists. In each photograph, a man carries the body of a wounded or dead person – and all but one of the dead or wounded are children, whose bodies have been removed from the photographs, scratched out to reveal blank, jagged silhouettes. ‘I peeled off the silhouettes as we peel dead skin off our bodies’, he writes in the essay, ‘getting rid of the unwanted, the unpleasant, the inconvenient to see.’ Removing the bodies, he writes, makes ‘the photos acceptable for the media, showing only the desired amount of pain, or a lack thereof’ (Barakeh, 2018: 143) (see Figures 5 and 6). He identifies three different layers of violence done to the image, describing it as a palimpsest of violence: the horror of the regime that creates the violence photographed; the ‘media . . . cynically deciding whose pain should be displayed on the pedestal of our TV screens’; and his own layer ‘when . . . very carefully, almost surgically, [I] erased the skin – and therefore the people who once were individuals.’ This surgical removal Barakeh describes as ‘an act of erasure’ that is as ‘protective’ as it is violent; the blank silhouettes fill the space with an absence that in turn makes the bodies more present and makes the singular into the universalizable, what Derrida (2000: 41) described as the testimonial condition. The silhouettes, he writes, become ‘a universal symbol of any victim, anywhere in the world, at a given time. Viewers are allowed to identify themselves with a universal feeling of loss and pain, not this specific one that they believe themselves to be far away from’ (Barakeh, 2018: 143). The title of his series, ‘The Untitled Images’, also seems part of this quest for universality and identification, and rejection of specificity. This protective act of erasure of the injured or dead in the photographs is also a critique of the Western media’s ‘repetitive images of Middle Eastern misery’, one that viewers, he feels, approach with ‘numbness, even a cruel boredom’ (p. 142). Like Abounaddara, he is critical of a media ecology and economy that creates ‘a ‘cruel’ competition of violent images’ that seeks and rewards with international attention ‘only those who post the most horrific and intense 387 388 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 visual materials’ (p. 143). At the same time, he writes that violent images ‘are never more brutal than the reality itself’. In his text about his series and in the series itself, he is both critical of what Sontag (1977, 2003) described as the anaesthetizing potential of repeated exposure to both photographs and television images, and seems to advocate looking at and watching violent images rather than protection from them. In his project, he writes that he protects the images themselves as a commentary on and refusal of what he sees as the destructive type of protection photo and news that editors exercise when they do not publish images of violent realities. ‘The Untitled Images’ and his essay bring together existent but contradictory contexts: there is both an exploitation of violent images and also a selective censorship of them in the international media. This twinning of underexposure and overexposure of violence creates an unstable atmosphere where the circulation of photographs of atrocity, loss and pain is sometimes determined by the assumed tolerance of the viewing public, sometimes by the need to penetrate the media noise and capture the attention of the same [imagined] public (Grønstad, 2019: 112). The removal of the bodies also makes these into images of mourning – the pain and loss are removed from the dead or injured body and onto the body of the person carrying them and grieving them themselves are painful to observe. The absent dead and injured body, marked by the artist’s ragged carving out, makes it differently present, not ‘invisible’ or ‘erased’. Barakeh makes these news photographs into wounds (Barthes, 1981: 41) and Barthes’ description of the punctum: ‘this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument’ is directly reminiscent of Barakeh’s artistic process of surgically slicing away the photographic images of the dead and injured bodies. In effect, he has transformed (or, in Barthes’ words, ‘broken’) the photograph as stadium – a news photograph, a body of information – perhaps numbing – of a war photograph – into a punctum – a photograph that has been wounded and represents bodily and psychic wounding. The transformation of the news image into a punctum also seems to be an act of agency that Barakeh as a Syrian artist is taking over as the image of a war in his own country. His work could be considered as the type of artisanal narrative shifting that Abounaddara describes as being at the center of its work: his process of scratching out the figures and creating the prints, and their intimate size seems to embody an artisanal practice. Potentially monumental news images are diminished by the removal of their conventionally graphic shock; images that likely would rapidly circulate on social media are slowed down by their transformation into photographic prints; images that could be read as informational narratives of war are changed into images that shock because of what is absent, and because the mourning and pain of the living subsume the graphic pain of dead and injured bodies (see, also, Barakeh’s essay ‘Regarding the Pain of Others and Damascus 15 February 2012 19:47:31’ (Barakeh, 2014)). Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ Figure 5. © Photograph: Baraa al Halabi. Artwork courtesy of Khaled Barakeh. Figure 6. © Photograph: Bassam al Hakeem. Artwork courtesy of Khaled Barakeh. As Barakeh writes in the opening of ‘The Untitled Images’ (2018: 142), ‘Modern artists are facing constant challenges in terms of defining their roles – artists are no longer just themselves; they often become an artist–activist, artist– journalist, artist–storyteller and so on.’ Barakeh himself is the founder of coculture.de that has as some of its projects the Syrian cultural index, an online database of the Syrian creative community and an upcoming Syria Biennale, and has described himself as part of a ‘virtual parallel republic’ of secret Facebook groups that prepare events in response to action on the ground 389 390 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 (Barakeh, 2014: 158). Like Abounaddara, his work is a form of artisanal media criticism in the form of visual art and one whose artistic process transforms the evidentiary into the felt, into the imaginative.17 The right to the image: who counts as human? At a 2015 presentation of the collective’s feature-length film, Syria: Snapshots of History in the Making, at Manhattanville College in New York City, Kiwan showed the image Le Monde (21 October 2015) chosen to accompany Abounaddara’s editorial, ‘Montrons l’horreur en Syrie pour sortir de l’ignominie’ as an example of the mainstream media’s often questionable use of violent images.18 Although their piece argues that media portrayals of graphically violent images from the Syrian war contribute to a banalization of evil, the publication chose to run a photograph published by ISIS that shows a mass grave of recently executed men, their hands tied behind their backs and their bodies lined up head to toe in a sand pit; in the foreground, the viewer can see the blood pouring out of their heads and onto the sand, and several men in fatigues pointing rifles at the freshly killed bodies. There is no caption, but if one scrolls over the image, text appears, informing the reader that the photograph was published in 2014 by ISIS after an attack on Iraqi government forces during which 1,700 Shiite soldiers were executed. The photograph Le Monde chose to accompany Abounaddara’s editorial (presumably with the intention of problematizing it) is an example of what the collective was vehemently arguing against in the very same editorial: The media industry has contributed to the banalization of evil instead of rendering it unbearable. It has ensured that the sight of death shocks us no more today than its smell might have shocked us yesterday . . . This is why we call for a politics of the image to counter the laissez-faire attitude towards visual representation that benefits the killers, the Assad regime and ISIS, whose images are broadcast on the screens of the world to the delight of advertisers selling household appliances.19 Moreover, charges of censorship are not equally applied, they have stated in interviews, in their own articles, and in their social media posts, raising the examples of 9/11 and the beheading of James Foley, arguing, not completely accurately, that accusations of censorship were not widely invoked in these cases.20 Image rights for Abounaddara are not representational or aesthetic abstractions or solely artistic practices but concrete ethical concerns and legal realities. They argue that the right to the image is not a single right, such as the right to privacy, but rather ‘a bundle of rights’, including the right to self-determination, the right to privacy and the right to freedom Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ of opinion and expression. Derived from ‘a holistic reading’ of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights (ICESCR), the collective argues for the necessity of the dignified representation of individuals and groups in wars and human rights atrocities. One of the central questions implied in their critique of the international legal system and the international mainstream media is indeed the central one Butler (2004: 20) poses in Precarious Life: ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?’ By extension, the collective is asking ‘Whose deaths count as deaths? Whose dead and injured bodies count as being worthy of a dignified representation? What groups of people are excluded from ethical and legal recognition?’ The respect for the ‘rights of others’ (Benhabib, 2004), argued to be central to cosmopolitanism is not extended to those individuals injured and killed in the Syrian war, they argue; rather, the international media is fully engaged and invested in a necropolitical use of images (Sai, 2015: 110). The same digital unstoppability that Susan Sontag praised as a potentially fierce counter to political power in her (2004) essay on the Abu Ghraib photographs, ‘Regarding the torture of others’, embodies an uncontrollable, almost anarchic unstoppability that is also infused with nefarious potential, they argue. The ‘unstoppability’ of ISIS images of violence as well as those from the Syrian war taken by partisan combatant journalists who have concrete stakes in the images produced for political and often monetary gain is what Abounaddara has been protesting against in the collective’s public events. The majority of these have been film screenings and discussions with Kiwan at universities in the US, Europe and at the American University of Beirut, major film festivals in Europe and the US, their 2015 conference, ‘The Right to the Image’ at the New School for Social Research, New York City, part of their Vera List Center for Art and Politics’ Biennial prize, a presentation at the UN in June, 2015, ‘Syria, Freedom of Speech and Responsibility of Representation: The Films of Abounaddara as Tools to Enact the Right to the Image’, and a 2017 discussion about documentary film, war and dignity at the Sweden-based cultural project Noncitizen.21 Since 2016, the collective has also brought these ideas into conversation as a postgraduate course, Critical Images, at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. The course is based on their right to the image framework and team taught by Kiwan and other artists, writers, academics, activists, and human rights lawyers. At ‘The Right to the Image’ conference, Kiwan clearly stated the collective’s intention: ‘We wanted to represent our people accurately without the interference of religion, geopolitics, or the media’, he said. ‘When you suppress the humanity of people you profess their death.’ Their films have taken this up in two central ways: some of their early bullet films, such as Ramadan Kareem, Firewood, The Butcher of Aleppo and The Smiters of Damascus portray people doing everyday tasks with the careful attention to materiality and intimacy of ethnographic films. Although they are very short films, their pacing and felt 391 392 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 temporality are extended by their focus on the images and sounds of one action or one quotidian event. Their interview series of bullet films, some of which show individuals in shadow to protect their identities, focus intense attention upon one individual’s story, a story that compels the viewer to listen even if there is only a shadowed figure filling the screen. In The Witness – The Alawite, the narrator, a Shiite, tells the story of how and why he helped his Alawite neighbor out of detention. In No Exit, (its French title is the same as Sartre’s 1944 play, Huis Clos and the film recalls the famous line from that play ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’), a young man, ostensibly an activist–intellectual, expressively describes how being imprisoned with criminals as well as activists like himself made him understand that ‘the mixture brought about by the revolution was not necessarily a good thing . . . not everyone associated with the revolution was necessarily all that great.’ Both the ethnographic and interview forms invite what Ariella Azoulay (2008) described as an ‘ethical watching’ – a slow, sustained and fixed gaze, one that may become politically and civically generative, and distinct from spectatorship and spectacle. At the same ‘Right to the Image’ conference, Kiwan also emphasized the importance of the face for the collective’s films. ‘We invite you to look at [the subjects’] face . . . if we want to resist, we need to show the faces of people’, recalling Levinas’ (1994) conceptualization of the face as ‘the extreme precariousness of the other’ and the facial encounter as a communicative act of listening and of speech. One could also argue that the collective is actually advocating for the intimacy, spontaneity and social and ethical responsibility of the face-to-face encounter that Levinas describes by extending their work beyond the screen and into discussions that accompany their public screenings and their educational projects. Abounaddara envisions its alternative representation as opposing what they have written about as the ‘unprecedented . . . spectacle of indignity streamed almost live from Syria since 2011’. Writing in The Nation, they argued: Never before in history has a crime against humanity been filmed day by day, turned into a spectacle with the cooperation of both victims and executioners, broadcast by the big television networks and streamed on social media, intercut with ad breaks, consumed by the general public, and commodified by the art market. If the spectacle is a form of commodity fetishism that constitutes a social relationship between people and is ‘mediated by images’ (Debord, 1983: 10), what are the consequences of that spectacle, the collective asks, when it is constituted of graphic violence and dead and injured Syrian bodies? And if the spectacle, as Debord writes, is a social relationship mediated by images, what type and types of social relationships are being formed by individuals viewing these violent images, whether in the international media or in the rapid-fire and unfiltered cascade of still and video images on social media? Debord’s characterization of the spectacle as predatory, exploitative and ‘a new stage in the accumulation of capital [in which] more and more facets of human Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ activity and elements of daily life were being under control of the market’ (Debord, cited in Evans and Giroux, 2015: 23) takes on new significance in the context of what might be characterized as the triple spectacle to which Abounaddara is reacting: the spectacle of Bashar al-Assad that one might argue is a variation of what Lisa Wedeen (1999) described as the twinned spectacle of discipline and desire as in her study of Hafez al-Assad; the spectacle of ISIS violence, often masterfully produced; and the spectacle of the international and national reporting on the Syrian conflict. Underlying the collective’s conceptualization of the right to the image is the right to an alternative socio-economic system whose mainstream media does not depend on economic profit. It advocates a media that does not view, by economic or ideological necessity, some lives and bodies as more representable as injured or dead so as to maximize their currency as sensationalism and as sensation, while those in power, such as President Bashar al-Assad, easily retain tight control of their public image, as exemplified in the collective’s film My Name is Bashar, posted alongside an article about the collective in The New York Times in 2015. The visual economy of social relationships, inequality and power (Poole, 1997: 8, cited in Andén-Papadopulos, 2013: 755) of graphic images in the context of the Syrian conflict is inextricably connected to the visual culture that Abounaddara is critiquing. Abounaddara’s central critiques of representation and voyeuristic spectatorship echo many who have pointed to the mainstream media’s biases of framing, race, representation and geopolitics, including Said (1978), Hall (1997), Taylor (1998), Moeller (1999), Mutua (1999), Butler (2004), Campbell (2004) Rentschler (2004) and Chouliaraki (2006) and their warnings about the way in which the international media infrastructure privileges has resonance with the work of media scholars such as Gürsel’s (2016) recent ethnography on contemporary photojournalism and its digital circulation.22 The collective’s critique most clearly resonates with Taylor’s (1998: 128) argument in Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War that: Death is rarely seen in ragged human remains unless they are foreign. Reports of horrors overseas concentrate on the essential strangeness of victims, whether they invoke revulsion or invite compassion . . . [such images] strengthen prejudices that the ‘nature’ of very different cultures is, at worst, primitive and barbaric. Campbell (2004: 64) argues similarly that ‘When dead bodies do feature in media, they are more often than not the bodies of dead foreigners . . . little more than a vehicle for the inscription of domestic spaces as superior.’ What Timothy Mitchell (1998: 495) described as the three defining aspects of Orientalism: essentialism, otherness, and fundamental absence of values such as reason and meaning are those that Abounaddara argues the 393 394 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 global capitalist media is inscribing and perpetuating, culminating in what Chouliaraki (2006) has argued is the global distribution of power that frames atrocities geopolitically.23 Chouliaraki’s conclusion is that news of suffering ‘reserves the spectators’ capacity to connect for those who are like ‘us’ while blocking the same capacity for the majority of the world’s sufferings – those experienced by distant “others”’ (Chouliaraki, 2006: 181, cited in Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti, 2013: 204). This is antithetical to the creation of a ‘cosmopolitan empathy’ (Beck, 2006: 7) only possible when one can imagine others’ suffering and death, what Georges Didi-Huberman (2003: 3) described as the ‘oppressive imaginable’ that all humans are obliged to contemplate and attempt to understand. Cell-phone reporting and visual truth seeking: dumbing down the truth? Beyond representation, Abounaddara’s media critique of international and local journalistic practice is highly relevant in the context of recent scholarship on user-generated content (UGC) from Syria and the use of graphic images in the mainstream international media. While the democratizing and human rights reporting potential of citizen and non-professional journalism has been analyzed in the context of the Arab uprisings (Gregory, 2015; Lynch, 2010; Shirky, 2009, 2011), in the context of the Syrian conflict, the situation is especially complex and fraught for these multitudinous and continuously multiplying ‘poor images’ (Steyerl, 2009). The internet infrastructure in Syria is fractured, and only a third of the country’s population has internet access. Mobile phones have been important for video production and replay due to the very limited access to the internet in rebel-controlled areas of the country. The mobile phone allows for the documentation of atrocities by those who commit them and those who witness them, and allows for both with a rapid and unprecedented immediacy. These videos are used for a range of purposes that are often interconnected: political, evidentiary and documentary, and their authenticity is sometimes unknown or at the very least questionable (Rohde et al., 2016).24 This video production creates a particularly precarious situation as the access for local and foreign journalists is extremely limited and dangerous. Foreign journalists who are able to work in Syria are often dependent upon local fixers who work within networks connected to different rebel groups and factions within the war. They are dependent upon professional communication staff working for particular movements involved in the conflict themselves to most easily be connected with Syrian citizens to interview as sources (Vandevoordt, 2016: 318). The temporality of contemporary image capture and circulation is also relevant in this context, what Virilio (1999) described as ‘the tyranny of real time’, the automatism that he argues will result as a conditioned reflex from technological instantaneity, a reflex that is antithetical to democratic behavior. Gowing (2009: 30) Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ extended this concept to journalistic practice, arguing that journalism professionals may face a difficult choice in deciding ‘when to take on the tyranny of the time and intervene with real-time information, even if it is incomplete, possibly flaky and probably cannot be verified with 100 per cent accuracy’. In the case of Syria, this temporal tyranny may be felt by editors more so than journalists, as reporting access is so limited. Because professional journalists have restricted direct access to reporting the conflict, they have had to rely and continue to rely upon UGC provided by activists on the ground and in exile accessed through social media and through the news organizations’ own intake platforms (Harkin et al., cited in Pantti, 2013: 2). In their study of UGC from Syria used by the BBC and Al-Jazeera, Harkin et al. (2012) found that verification was less rigorous than the outlets’ usual verification practices. The reporting that results from the cooperation between citizen journalists’ footage (often emotionally charged) and professional news organizations has been described and analyzed as a ‘collaborative news clip’ in Wall and El Zahed’s (2014) study of The New York Times’, the Lede’s use of citizen video, arguing that this cooperation had created a new journalistic genre. Lynch et al.’s (2014) research of the Syrian conflict and social media further detailed the reliance of foreign journalists and news outlets upon activists for video and visual content (p. 4) and identified two central problems for journalists covering Syria: verification of video footage becomes harder and harder, and both pro- and anti-regime activists become even more skilled at editing videos so that they appear anti-sectarian, and the media’s historical bias toward violence and conflict could serve as motivation for the production of videos highlighting this content, rather than, for example, footage of peaceful protests (p. 12). In his comparative study of the visual representation of the Syrian conflict, Pantti (2013: 12) found that in the publications examined, 7 percent of the images depicted death or bodily harm though 37 percent of the videos used included graphic imagery (p. 14).25 The right to the image and the violence of the law Jacques Rancière’s (2010[1999]) essay, ‘One image right can sweep away another’, both contains and complicates the central arguments of the collective’s ‘Right to the Image’ campaign. The article was inspired by two proposed bills in France’s Ministry of Justice: one prohibiting the publication of people wearing handcuffs and the second prohibiting publication of ‘photos of crime victims in situations that undermine their dignity’ (p. 49).26 Both of the bills, he writes, are part of the same project: ‘developing the rights of persons: protection of private life, of the image and of the dignity of persons, the presumption of innocence of all persons as long as they have not been recognized as guilty’. 395 396 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 It seems that Abounaddara’s project, then, starts from many of the issues that Rancière’s essay raises. ‘What genocides and ethnic cleansings deny is in fact a primary “right to the image,” prior to any individuals’ ownership of his/her image’, he writes, emphasizing the totalizing denial of rights that genocides and ethnic cleansings entail. Yet, the same laws that will apply to French accused criminals will not be extended beyond France; such rights do not apply to those civilians actually affected by intense violence conflict or ethnic cleansing who may need them at least as much or more so. ‘It is hardly hoped’, he states, writing at the height of the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by Serbian forces, ‘that Kosovar victims will front up for indemnities for the publishing of their pictures in the French press’ (p. 51). At the same time, dignity cannot be represented when situations themselves are undignified, he writes, and images can be foremost the evidence and testament of brutality. To be sure, the appearance of victims does not conform to the ideal of human dignity. Simple good sense responds that it is the situation that is essentially undignified and this is precisely what the image aims to testify to. (p. 50) The photographic evidence that Sontag (2003) described as ‘the very notion of atrocity, of war crime’ does not and should not have any expectation of dignity. And the calculated absence of such evidentiary images is the primary strategy of lethal regimes, Rancière (1999: 51) argues: Ethnic cleansing or extermination finds its logical accomplishment in the getting rid of traces and in negationist discourse. What genocides and ethnic cleansings deny is in fact a primary ‘right to the image’, prior to any individuals’ ownership of his/her image: the right to be included in the image of common humanity. Rancière then poses another question in this essay that is useful for understanding and potentially critiquing Abounaddara’s project: Does evoking . . . the harmed dignity of victims not replace the first denied right – the right to bear an image of common humanity – with a right that these victims don’t need: the right of ownership of one’s image that is exercised only by those who have the means to exploit it? (p. 51) What if, this statement asks, the Kosovar Albanians and other victims of warfare were able to stand against the publication of their photographs in foreign and local publications? What information might have been lost to the public, if the public indeed even cared to view these images? And what would it mean for the human image if the human being were actually in practice (not only in legal theory) hors commerce? Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ Rancière’s argument also extends to artistic representation, and he concludes his essay by warning against ‘a world divided into owners of images and owners of dignity’ (p. 52). Such a divided world, he implies, perpetuates a type of normative possession of images and of dignity similar to that found in the types of regimes that seek full control over images and their usage. To define a ‘dignified image’ endangers not only the ‘freedom of the image’, but assumes fixed definitions, another central critique of Abounaddara’s project. For any image to be judged as ‘undignified’, several questions immediately arise: Who or what group is making the judgement? How is dignity being defined? What is being potentially revealed, silenced or erased in this judgment? And, in the case of images from international conflict, war, genocide or ethnic cleansing, how does one wrestle with the potential loss of the news and evidentiary value of ‘undignified’ images? One might think of the post-mortem photograph of Egyptian Khaled Said, taken by his brother after Said was tortured to death in 2010 by two police officers and circulated on social media by Said’s family. Or one might think of images over which the immediate family had much less control but which had immense international impact, at least momentarily: the 2015 Dogan News Agency photograph of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy of Kurdish background who died fleeing Syria with his family and whose body washed up on the shore near the Turkish resort of Bodrum; the 2011 Reuters photograph of the ‘blue bra girl’, a female Egyptian protester, so-called because her top hiked up to reveal her blue bra as she was being beaten and dragged through the streets near Tahrir Square; the 1995 AP photograph of Bosniak Ferida Osmanović hanging from a tree outside of Tuzla, who committed suicide after learning her husband Selman had been among the approximately 8,000 killed in the Srebrenica genocide. And one might also think of those images and stories that the BBC chose not to report during the Bosnian war because they violated the news agency’s standards of ‘good taste’ (see Campbell, 2004).27 And, at the same time, as Sohrab Mohebbi (2016) has written, ‘the suffering and the most vulnerable are also the most immediate candidates to represent humanity as an abstraction, while the better off have more power over their representation.’ The photograph of Alan Kurdi, he argues, is not a contribution to humanity’s image but one example out of thousands that must be prevented. The collective itself has acknowledged these complexities in ‘Politics of the Image to Rise from Dehumanization’, posted on their Facebook page in 2015: Today . . . a politics of the image seems indefensible. First, because an intervention by public authorities generates criticism that raises the specters of censorship and of the flattening of aesthetic standards. Second, because our creed as independent filmmakers prescribes absolute defiance of power – whether it emanates from politics or the media. But the disenfranchisement of the Syrian public from national and international media systems, they continue, prompts their ‘call for a politics of 397 398 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 the image to counter the laissez-faire attitude towards visual representation that benefits the killers, the Assad regime, and ISIS, whose images are broadcast on the screens of the world to the delight of advertisers selling household appliances’. In a 2018 interview, Kiwan explained that when the collective began in 2010, they were suspicious of the ‘engaged filmmaker’ and favored ‘a filmmaking practice that could inspire people with the minimum discourse necessary’. But a regime of representation, ‘that drapes itself in the cloak of the universal’ must be opposed with a higher principle . . . invoked spontaneously by Syrians themselves, and recognized as such in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . . . dignity defined as the condition of possibility for the enjoyment of our human rights . . . we’ve been driven to defending a cause – the right to a dignified image – because the current regime of representation undermines the possibility for us to accomplish our task as image makers and to enjoy our fundamental rights as humans. (Fox, 2018) Yet, if also contextualized within Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), Abounaddara’s call may take on an even more complicated resonance. Benjamin’s characterization of violence is as inherent to the institution of the law and its preservation. Domination is the law’s final end, he writes: ‘Violence . . . is either lawmaking or law-preserving . . . [Violence] is implicated in the problematic nature of the law itself . . . Law-making is power-making, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence’ (Benjamin, 1921: 68). Against the violence that reinforces law and state power, he envisions a ‘different kind of violence’ (variably called ‘divine’, ‘pure’ or ‘revolutionary’) that at once reveals the violence-ridden nature of existing laws and enacts a possibility of transcending the system of law (p. 69). The collective’s right to the image calls into question and names as violent those laws that, in the case of France, protect suspected criminals but not the victims of war. It also identifies the absence of legal protection for individuals and groups whose images (often depicting graphic violence or death) are photographed and filmed in conflict, and then broadcast without their approval or even their knowledge as violent and as a form of violence. In the absence of such legal protection, Abounaddara is proposing that the right to the image for all individuals as a type of ‘justice cascade’ (Sikkink, 2011); it is an attempt, alongside their own artistic work, to ‘shift the legitimacy of the norm’ of image rights and by extension, human rights. While one might argue that Abounaddara’s bullet films are a type of ‘revolutionary violence’, the ‘right to the image’, however, advocates a legal, rights-based framework far from the transcendent ‘different’ or ‘revolutionary’ type of violence that Benjamin advocates. It is also one that prompts the question of to what degree a codification of rights and a framing of dignity Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ and dignified images in juridical terms would be productive for the groups these rights ostensibly would protect, particularly as such cases, whether for public or private figures, are decided on a case by case basis. At least in the US context, the majority of such cases do not take hold because the reasonable expectation of privacy is not strong enough and/or the newsworthiness defense takes precedence, although there have been increasing proposals to address digital media image artefacts (see Heverly, 2012; Kreimer, 2011). In Europe, one of the most recent related cases was the publication of the photograph of Cedric Gomet, a 30-year-old man killed in the November 2015 Paris attacks in the Bataclan concert hall. After his photograph was published in VSD, a weekly glossy focusing on celebrity, fashion and news, his family brought a criminal case against the photographer, Maya Vidon-White charging the violation of his dignity in an image taken without permission. The story of the sale and circulation of Vidon-White’s photograph is part of the media ecosystem that the collective is critiquing: she sold her photograph of Godet to United Press International, which then, without her knowledge, sold it to VSD, which incorrectly described Godet as a survivor (Godet was dead when the photograph was taken) (see Toor, 2016). The case against Vidon-White has been dismissed, though at the time of writing it is unclear whether the family will pursue the case in a civil court (see Rubin, 2016).28 Accompanying their recent work at documenta 14 held in Athens in the spring and summer of 2017 was a statement presented at the documenta conference entitled, ‘We are not artists’, a reiteration of their call of the right to the image.29 ‘We are not artists . . . We are artisans working on the image of a society fighting for dignity’, the statement begins, referencing their identification with Benjamin’s idea that: The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work – the rural, the maritime, and the urban – is itself an artisan form of communication . . . It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. (Benjamin, 1968b) While the documenta statement reiterates many of their reasons for advocating the right to the image found in their newspaper editorials and other public statements, it is revealing in its self-reflexivity: Victims are reduced to undignified or dangerous bodies while the criminal wears the garb of a gentleman. As for viewers – they barely have a choice between indifference and compassionate voyeurism. This is the failure of our world that made dignity the pillar of human rights after the exit from the long night of Nazism. This is the failure of artisan image-makers like us who could not repair the image of our fellow citizens. Our place within our own society is today called into question because we have not managed to prove our usefulness. We are neither artists, nor engaged. We 399 400 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 are artisans who failed to repair the image of our society and who now must find new tools for this task. We are artisans who must prove our usefulness while the world watches the indignity assaulting us as if it were a pixelated artwork. The last part of their statement, a reference to Lebanese theater artist Rabih Mroué’s ‘The Pixelated Revolution’ (2012), a performance artwork about the use of digital imagery by Syrian citizens and citizen journalists, would suggest that the collective has expanded its critique to the aestheticization, not just banalization, of the violence of the Syrian conflict (see Mroué et al., 2012).30 Yet, what they are arguing against seems not to be a work such as Mroué’s but the spectatorship of violence from the Syrian conflict as if it were a work of art, what Benjamin described as the ‘aestheticization of political life’, the very nature of fascism. Police violence against African-Americans and spectacle consumption Similar to Abounaddara’s statements about what they argue has become a banal spectacle of injured and dead Syrians in an international media ecosystem that thrives upon ‘the horror of the banal’ (Foucault, 1974), Debord’s spectacle has special relevance for what Elizabeth Alexander (1994: 79) describes as the normalization and mundanity of the ‘enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against’ (see Dork, 2018). As the evidence of police killings of African-Americans is increasingly streamed on video and often live streamed (as in the cases of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling), posted and rapidly circulated on social media where it can have instant play, Abounaddara’s call for the right to a dignified image and their critique of traditional and social media in perpetuating dominant ideologies and collective trauma resounds. Studies documenting that African-Americans are more likely to experience police brutality are well documented and, at the time of writing, police killings are increasing in the US (see Helm, 2016; Williams, 2017). After the murders of Castile, Sterling and Gaines within the span of about a month in the summer of 2016, there was a proliferation of reactions in the media and in public discourse in the US about what Alexander (1994: 78–79) described more than 10 years earlier in ‘Can You Be Black and Look at This: Reading the Rodney King Video(s)’ as ‘Black bodies in pain for public consumption [that] have been an American spectacle for centuries’ and social media’s role in increasing the consumption of ‘death of Blackness bodies’. During the summer of 2016, protests against the killings organized by Black Lives Matter and allied groups took place across the country. Articles abounded on the topic of white consumption of Black death and Black grief, the Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ circulation and ownership of the images (and also, as Courtney Baker writes in her essay ‘The E-Snuff of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile’, the sounds of the violence, particularly the screams of Diamond Reynolds and her 4-year-old daughter, who also witnessed Castile’s murder) and how news outlets did and should have responded to the images of both men, including the screenshot of Castile lying dead on the ground, his hands empty and his chest punctured and bloodied after being shot three times by police at close range that the New York Daily News chose to publish (see, for example, Baker, 2016; Blay, 2016; Cobb, 2016; Gay, 2016; Hobbs, 2016; Warren, 2016; S Williams, 2016): What does it do to black people to constantly watch these videos that are like installments in a horrible series with the recurring themes of black death, white supremacy and injustice? In a media landscape that already circulates countless portrayals that devalue black existence, what kind of impact do these images of brutality have on black people?’ Sherri Williams (2016) asked, questions also raised by Zeba Blay (2016), who details the ‘long history in [the US] of black lives and black death being used for economic gain’. The central paradox, she writes, is that the images of death must be seen to spark the debate and conversation and protests that we always hope will effect change. But then change doesn’t come, and another black person is killed, and we share the shocking images of their deaths, and we plead for people to see and believe, and we pray for justice, which rarely, if ever, comes. We repeat the process. These and many of the articles about Castile and Sterling referenced the postmortem photograph of Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till’s decision to publish it in Jet magazine as an example of an image that needed to be shown and seen. It was also one over which Till’s mother took essential control over its circulatory power. Linked to Till’s instrumental role in controlling the postmortem image of her son was the controversy in spring 2017 about the white American artist Dana Schutz’s painting based on that photograph of Emmett Till, ‘Open Casket’ (2016) and exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Schutz described the painting as being prompted in large part by the murders of Castile, Sterling and Korryn Gaines during the summer of 2016, a summer she described as being ‘like a state of emergency’ (see Boucher, 2017; Frank, 2017). ‘The photograph of Emmett Till felt analogous to the time’, she said. ‘What was hidden was now revealed.’ Protests against the painting’s exhibition, calling for its removal from the Whitney and also its destruction came in the form of an open letter written by artist Hannah Black, signed by other artists, curators and art critics (Greenberger, 2015). At the Whitney Museum, individuals 401 402 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 protested and tried to block the painting; on the opening day of the exhibition, African-American artist Parker Bright stood in front of the painting wearing a t-shirt with ‘Black Death Spectacle’ written on its back. Christina Sharpe, a signatory on Black’s open letter, characterized Schutz’s painting as at least partly exploiting ‘black spectacle’ and contrasted Schutz’s decision to make the painting with Mamie Till’s decision to release the photograph of her son and publish it in Jet magazine: She insists that the violence that he has been subject to be seen, unobscured. It seems . . . that what Dana Schutz has done is to take that unobscured violence and make it abstract. Mamie Till wanted to make violence real . . . And those images had nothing to do with white consciousness . . .They weren’t meant to create empathy or shame or awareness from white viewers. They were meant to speak to and to move a Black audience. (Mitter, 2017) Emergency alternatives As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994: 183) write, the sensitivity to representation exists ‘on a continuum with other representations and with everyday life, where the “burden” [of representation] can indeed become almost unbearable’. The potentially unbearable burden of lived reality is closer to debates over its representation than it might initially seem. Embodied in Abounaddara’s call for a ‘right to the image’ and their ‘emergency cinema’ is not only a call to blast open existing legal, media, political and their related predominant socio-economic systems. Also present is what Azoulay (2008) calls an ‘emergency claim’. For Azoulay, the claim is one that a photograph of politically and state-produced violence can elicit from the viewer if the photograph is watched ‘ethically’ and then made to speak its claim by the viewer, who has experienced an affective embodiment of its horror. Abounaddara seems to rightly suspect that the ethical watching of images may likely not occur and the emergency claim thus may never even be made, particularly in the media environment and current political–technological–economic field that Hagi Kenaan (2013) has characterized as one of constantly multiplying calls for visual attention and rapidly surfing eyes where ‘everything (simply) shows itself, everything is legible, which means everything is marketable, speedy, streamlined’ and in which the ‘screen compatibility’ of everyday life works to prevent encounter and the ability to witness (p. xiv). Therefore, both the images themselves and those who create them need to work particularly consistently and creatively to rouse the viewer to see the present for what it is or may very well become: a state of emergency. While in his book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017), Santiago Zabala writes that it is likely too early to declare an ‘emergency turn’ (p. 132) in contemporary art, the work of Abounaddara and Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ other artists and artistic collectives indicates that the turn is in the making, if not already made. In the US, related examples of emergency cinema and visual art could include recent works such as ‘Whose Streets?’ (2017) – a documentary focused on the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the Black Lives Matter activism and activist media that took place during the four days Ferguson was under a state of emergency – whose narrative style and approach to representation of emergency has resonance with the collective’s work. Artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa’s video installation, ‘Love is the Message, the Message is Death’ (2017) is another related example, a rapid, rousing montage of images and sounds of African-Americans from popular culture, sports, news footage, citizen journalism, the artist’s own films and home videos set to Kanye West’s gospel-inspired ‘Ultralight Beam’. Jafa has described some of the central themes of the piece as similar to ones intrinsic to Abounaddara’s work: dehumanization, humanity and the political, the psychological and ethical necessity of complex representation. Although ultimately it may well be Abounaddara’s films themselves that most deeply embody ‘the right to the image’, and do so with the most nuance and the most provocation, the very claim to that right still provokes a new examination of the multiple moments of danger existent in this contemporary world. And that these claims to citizenship and human recognition are consistently articulated by Abounaddara and others through the creation of alternative images is significant. ‘The human status is claimed, as it must always be, and seeks a response’, Thomas Keenan (2013) wrote in his afterward to a collection of essays about the relationship between images and rights (see Keenan and Zolghadr, 2013). ‘It is an act of speech and of image, of imagination.’ Whether or not the claim becomes a right, the claim itself may give rise to another type of image, of imagination. And it may give rise to a new politics that, like an image, is potentially dialectical and lightning. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the astute readers and editors of the Journal of Visual Culture for their valuable feedback, Professor May Farrah of the American University of Beirut and all her colleagues involved in organizing the 2017 conference, ‘Rethinking Media Through the Middle East’ held at the American University of Beirut on 16 and 17 January, 2017, for which this article was originally prepared as a talk, Columbia University Professors Muhsin al-Musawi and Andrea Tucher who offered constructive comments on earlier versions of this article, and Joseph Halabi for his helpful consultation on a few key Arabic terms. ORCID iD Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7174-5075 Notes 1. On 21 September 2016, it was decided that police would not be charged for the shooting of Gaines. On 3 May 2017, the Department of Justice ruled that it would not charge officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II who shot and killed Alton Sterling; the officer who shot 403 404 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. and killed Castile was found not guilty on all counts on 16 June 2017. Castile’s family reached a $3 million settlement with the city of St Anthony, Minnesota on 26 June 2017 and Sterling’s children filed a wrongful death suit against the city of New Orleans on 28 June 2017. As of 2015 and according to the study ‘Confronting Fragmentation’ by the Syrian Center for Policy Research (11 February 2016). The United Nations Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura stated in April 2016 that the conflict has claimed 400,000. See United Nations Radio (22 April, 2016), Syria envoy claims 400,000 have died in Syria conflict. See Beiser and Witchel (2016), Committee to Protect Journalists Special Report. Journalist killings ease from record highs as murders down, combat deaths up, 19 December, and Committee to Protect Journalists (2019), 129 journalists killed in Syria between 1992 and 2019/Motive Confirmed. Available at: https://cpj.org/mideast/syria/ (accessed 19 October 2019). Zelizer (2010: 24) defines ‘about to die’ images and those in which individuals confront ‘their impending death . . . focusing on intense human anguish, [they offer] a simplified version of death-in-process in events such as wide-ranging as natural disaster, crime, accidents, torture, assassination, war, illness and acts of terrorism.’ Kiwan emphasized the importance of the face for the collective’s work in their 2015 ‘Right to the Image’ conference at the New School for Social Research, New York City. ‘We invite you to look at [the subjects’] face . . . if we want to resist, we need to show the faces of people.’ Certainly, this emphasis recalls Levinas’ posing of the face as ‘the extreme precariousness of the other’. At the time of writing in July 2019, the collective has not posted new bullet films on its Vimeo page or social media since 2017. Whether or not Abounaddara extends its media critique to its own practice of how the collective uses the international mainstream and social media is unclear. It could be seen as complicating, for example, that it circulates its work on social media platforms such as Facebook that one could argue epitomize ‘capitalism’s increasing power and arrogance’ (Sekula, 1978: 883) and sometimes publishes its statements in the international mainstream media. Discussion with the author, March 2015. In 2015, the collective withdrew their work from the Venice Biennale on the grounds that their films were not being screened in the agreed-upon format (see Muñoz-Alonso, 2015). In Arabic, ‘emergency cinema’ is translated as ‘ ’. In the interview, Kiwan reiterates the collective’s ties to Benjamin: The power of images I'm talking about has nothing to do with any attempt at domination. Rather, it has to do with defending the power to represent the world without freezing it in its current temporality. In other words, it is about ensuring that images remain dialectical and lightning, in the words of Walter Benjamin, to avoid any form of propaganda or idolatry. 11. 12. Freedom of Expression, Privacy and Anonymity on the Internet, Comments Submitted to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, January 2011. ‘The revolutionary writer/artist must feel solidarity with the proletariat as a producer, not only in sympathetic attitude’ (Benjamin, 2008[1936]: 84). At the end of the essay, Benjamin strengthens this call, writing that ‘The mind, the spirit that makes itself heard in the name of fascism must disappear.’ Belief in the strength of the mind without understanding the vital force of production will not suffice Benjamin’s example in that essay is of a writer whose ‘mission is not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively’ (2008[1936]: 81) and who refuses to replicate the world ‘as it is’ (p. 87). The revolutionary artist must transcend ‘the specialization in the process of intellectual production . . . that, in the bourgeois view, constitutes its order’. As the author as producer forms solidarity with the proletariat, other solidarities with ‘producers who earlier seemed scarcely to concern him’ are now formed and valued. Because the newspaper ‘still belongs to capital’, the writer ‘has to grapple with the most enormous difficulties’ (p. 83). Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich. Abounaddara and the ‘right to the image’ 13. The work of American Artist, self-described as ‘an interdisciplinary artist whose work extends dialectics formalized in Black radicalism and organized labor into a context of networked virtual life’ is interestingly relevant here. They describe a ‘dignity image’ in their 2016 ‘A Declaration of the Dignity Image’ as being ‘an image that is not shared publicly on social media platforms, a dignity image provides the means by which Internet users may gain some measure of control over their increasingly mediated identities online’ (American Artist, 2016). 14. This could also be seen as a larger movement among individuals and artist collectives in the Middle East. The photographic collective, Activestills, for example, chooses not to publish images of graphic violence. The collective is made up of Israeli, Palestinian and international photographers and works in Palestine and Israel. Abounaddara’s collected volume is available for free download; as of this writing, it is available in Arabic only: see http://www. abounaddara.com/THE_RIGHT_TO_THE_IMAGE.pdf?f bclid=IwAR2mMqt3Dzy6iSTYyPCz T9gp7jadH9jKhTFyYPYR_AgQRifs1ADwvKK5zyw 15. Defined by the collective as ‘the media, producers, and curators, the strict sense of the term, as well as the nebulous NGOs, foundations, and activists who work as de facto subcontractors’ (see Abounaddara, 2017a). 16. In their chapter, ‘Activism in Syria: Between nonviolence and armed resistance’, Wael Sawah and Salam Kawakibi (2014) outline four primary activist demands of the uprising: overthrowing the regime; unity among the Syrian people; justice, equality, dignity and an end to humiliation; an end to arbitrary detention, release of prisoners and justice for those who tortured. 17. In his recent chapter on Barakeh’s project, Asbjørn Grønstad (2019) raises the possibility that Barakeh’s images also engender ‘a sense of ethical uncertainty’ (p. 113). While asserting that Barakeh’s images do not produce ‘aesthetic pleasure’, he questions the artist’s erasure of the victims and the ‘additional act of violence’ done to them in doing so. 18. The author co-organized and moderated this screening and discussion. 19. English translation provided by Charif Kiwan via email, 1 October 2015. 20. The photograph of the ‘falling man’ taken by AP photographer Richard Drew and written about in Esquire journalist Tom Junod’s article of the same name – as well as other photojournalists’ photographs of people jumping from the twin towers – did stir debate on the ethics of their publication (see Kratzer et al., 2003; Pozorski, 2018). On James Foley, see Anonymous (2014) and Massie (2014). As an example of the collective’s social media critique, see their 19 May Facebook post on Susie Linfield’s article about the Caesar photographs, ‘Syria’s torture photos: Witness to atrocity’, New York Review of Books, 9 February 2019. The New York Review of Books article includes several very graphic post-mortem photographs of torture victims. 21. This talk by Charif Kiwan and panel discussion with Human Rights Watch Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson and photography critic Susie Linfield was organized by the Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations. 22. Mutua’s (1999: 157) comments on emergency are particularly relevant, calling for a more inclusive doctrine for human dignity. The world is literally in a state of emergency. Ruthless, hedonistic, and relentlessly individualistic and deeply exploitative beliefs and systems have in the last decade been given ‘universal legitimacy’ by economic and cultural globalization . . . Constructed primarily as the moral guardian of global capitalism and liberal internationalism, the human rights corpus is simply unable to confront structurally and in a meaningful way the deep-seated imbalances of power and privilege which bedevil our world . . . the new corpus must address in a fundamental way not only the political dimensions . . . of human societies but the economic prerequisites for an ethical society. 23. To better understand different types of ethical spectatorship, Chouliaraki argues for a categorization of three different types of ‘disaster’ news (Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti, 2013: 405 406 JOURNAL OF VISUAL CULTURE 18.3 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 203): ‘adventure’, ‘emergency’ and ‘ecstatic’ news. Adventure news is ‘news of suffering without pity’; ‘emergency’ news is ‘news of suffering with pity’ that shows victims as individuals capable and worthy of help; and ‘ecstatic’ news allows identification between proximate suffering that allows for identification between spectator and sufferer. Rohde et al.’s (2016) ethnographic study includes interviews with Syrian activists and refugees that raise skepticism about the authenticity of some user-generated videos broadcast on Al-Jazeera. Also see Allan (2013) on the topic of verification of user generated visual content. Pantti’s study focuses on the visual coverage of the Syrian conflict in the print and online editions of seven national newspapers: El País, Helsingin Sanomat, La Repubblica, Romania Libera, The Guardian, Kommersant and Hürriyet. The recent film, City of Ghosts (2017) about the Syrian citizen journalism collective Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, gives some insight into the type of graphic UGC footage that major international outlets have broadcast. These bills passed in 2000; French law has ‘some of the earliest cases [about the right to the image] dating back to the 18th century. By the 1870s, France had developed a right to one’s image (le droit à l’image) and the right to one’s image was an important aspect of ‘the right to privacy’ in France. It was originally mobilized by aristocrats and other people of high status to keep family and personal affairs from public view (see Barbas, 2012; Logeais and Schroeder, 1998: 511–542). A large-scale print of the photograph of Osmanović now hangs in the Potočari Memorial Center in Srebrenica. Another related case is of the images of the victims of the Boston marathon bombing on 13 April 2013. 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In: Farago C, Zwijnenberg R (eds) Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art In and Out of History. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Vignal L (2014) Destruction-in-progress: Revolution, repression and war planning in Syria (2011 onwards). Built Environment 40(3): 326–341. White H (1980) The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry 7(1): 5–27. Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich is a writer and a PhD candidate in Communications at Columbia University. Her writing on photography has regularly appeared in Afterimage and her research interests are in visual culture, photography, critical human rights theory and the intersections of political and artistic theory and praxis. She previously worked as a journalist, editor and media trainer in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Egypt and the USA, and in 2017-2018 was a CELSASorbonne Fellow at Sorbonne-Paris IV. Address: Communications Department, Columbia Journalism School, Columbia University, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA. [email: jsj10@columbia.edu] 411

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Abounaddara and the global visual politics of the 'right to the image'

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