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framingthequestion

~ Reflections on memory, history, photography and culture

framingthequestion

Tag Archives: icon

Instameaning

24 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics, Photography and Visual Culture, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Brussels attacks, Holocaust, icon, images of terror, PrayForNidhi, representation, Zaventem

instameaning

The attacks in Belgium this week have brought with them a fresh set of images showing the immediate effects of the bombs, commemoration on the streets of major cities, of those responsible and of those killed and injured. At the same time, cartoonists and illustrators have responded to the challenge of summarising the day in a single graphic response.

One image singled out in a Guardian article was that of an Indian air stewardess, Nidhi Chaphekar, sitting stunned and bleeding in the departure hall of Zaventem airport in the immediate aftermath of the explosions. Taken by Ketevan Kardava, a Georgian journalist, the image made the front pages of several newspapers the following morning and the hashtag #PrayforNidhi started trending on Twitter. So far, so understandable: I hope she’s alright and wish her a speedy and full recovery.

What has struck me is the tone of some of the stories about the image and its subject. A Guardian article by Nadia Khomami described the image as ‘The photograph that has come to define the horrors of the Brussels attacks’. A piece by Olivier Laurent for TIME said that ‘In just a few hours, her portrait has come to define the March 22 terrorist attacks’: the title of the article described the image as ‘iconic’. Similar sentiments and phrasing ran through the tweets and many of the articles: a Times of India article drew a comparison with other ‘seminal photographs that define historic episodes’, comparing it with ‘the picture of a naked Vietnamese girl running away from a napalm explosion in 1968’ or the picture of Aylan Kurdi drowned on a Turkish beach in 2015 which (reportedly) ‘seared the conscience of the world and moved the West to finally act on Europe’s worst refugee crisis since the World War’.

Images are powerful. Photographs in particular have an immediacy and truth-value which derives from a core belief, unshaken by the ironies and post-ironies of postmodernism that they constitute something ‘stencilled off the real’, as Susan Sontag put it. At the same time, as arrested moments, they solidify into symbols terrifyingly quickly, as the overblown claims of the Times of India demonstrate. Working with Holocaust imagery, I am often struck by the way in which photographic images move between evidence and symbol, often in the same moment. The photograph below of the unloading of a transport of Jews from (what is now) Hungary is a case in point. Here is the original:

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USHMM 77241: ‘Jews from Subcarrpathian Rus undergo a selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau’, May 1944.

Just a short walk from where I sit writing this, the Holocaust gallery of the Jewish Museum London is organised principally around the life of Leon Greenman, born in the East End but raised in Rotterdam, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. His wife and son were murdered on arrival but he survived, living in London until his death in 2008, aged 97. The photograph is used here: this time, though, it is captioned as depicting ‘Guards separating new arrivals at Birkenau’. With a different caption the image moves a step away from its particular context into the general. In the moving video testimony by Greenman which is the central feature of the gallery, the image becomes a backdrop to his testimony of arrival and separation from his family. From evidence to symbol, in the blink of an eye: there are no photographs of the Judenrampe between Auschwitz and Birkenau where the Greenmans arrived. The siding the photograph depicts would not be built for another year. Else and Barney Greenman made their way to the gas chamber in a truck along with other women and children: as Leon’s memoir states, ‘Most of them were tired from the journey and a ride was very welcome.’ But this was not pictured, so the transport from 1944 must take its place, allowing us to picture an old man’s pain, narrated in front of us.

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The process by which Holocaust imagery has developed and changed is one which has taken seventy years – so far. The possible number of images is huge – browse the collections of the Imperial War Museum in London, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem – but very often we see the same images used again and again. Sometimes because they are powerful images; sometimes because they are the only images we have. Sometimes because, having been shown so often, they signify the event to such an extent that the event might be said to describe them. The gate of Birkenau – one site in the Holocaust, albeit a crucial one – overtakes its context.

But this is a process which happens over time. The coverage of the coverage of the Brussels attacks twenty-four hours later allows no space for reflection, absorption, sifting of the facts, knowledge of the story. Mistakes get made in the rush for an icon: Nick Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc screaming in the distress of her injuries was taken in 1972, not 1968. Did the photograph of Aylan Kurdi really move the West to finally act to end the refugee crisis? Or did it provoke a wave of public sympathy that was bought off by a few quick headlines? Time will tell, but a report by Philippe Fargues for the Migration Policy Centre is laconically titled ‘2015: the year we mistook refugees for invaders’ and suggests the continued ‘wars and conflicts that produce forced migration’ leave ‘little doubt that the refugee movements will continue in Europe’s neighbourhood.’ What is needed, says Fargues, is the political courage to address long-term problems rather than a continued search for a short term fix. There is, he says, little to be found.

At the beginning of researching this piece, I entered ‘Brussels attacks’ into a Google image search to test whether the image of Nidhi Chaphekar was a particularly prominent image. In fact it is one of many, some way down the page.

Brussels Capture 1

Sample of Google Images search: ‘Brussels attacks’, 24 March 2016

Other images included the grainy footage from airport security cameras of the three bombers, wheeling trolleys. Or of Pauline Graystone scrambling on the floor of the airport, ‘keeping small’ as advised by a Guardian article the previous day on how to survive a terror attack, as she told The World at One.

Reading the articles about Nidhi, I was reminded of the coverage of the July 2005 attacks in London. In particular, the image of John Tulloch, a Professor of Media Studies, bleeding and dazed after the bombs, anchored to a headline on the front page of the Sun: ‘TERROR LAWS: TELL TONY HE’S RIGHT’. As with Nidhi, his image ‘somehow seemed to capture the particular horror of a very banal everyday life interrupted in the most shocking way imaginable.’

But Tulloch’s opinion on the ‘terror laws’ the Sun made him the poster-boy for was the opposite. His brave and fascinating memoir, One Day in July: Surviving 7/7, makes clear his opposition to the process of othering and his commitment to understanding the attackers.

Perhaps Nidhi, once the shock and pain has passed, will embark on a similar journey and believe similar things. Perhaps she won’t: the question is, will we keep asking, once the initial shock is over and absorbed into memes that mix sentiment with a quick moral fix? For now, we have appropriated her image but not heard her voice.

And what questions will we ask of those who did this? Will we ask why they did this, what agenda they thought they pursued in this carnage? Or will we just add their images to the roll call of similar pictures from London, Paris, and New York?

‘Keeping small’, said Pauline Graystone, was the advice from the Guardian on how to get through an attack. Perhaps: but if we are to survive, we need to look for the biggest possible meaning, the most appropriate symbol as related to the fullest and most complex account of the facts we can find, not the instameaning – the portable and disposable short-term framing based on insufficient time and excess adrenaline. The depiction of events such as the Holocaust or World War 1 illustrates that symbolism does become fixed – I argue that it is an element of recovery to ritualise the trauma, locate it within unfolding meaning, turn it, in fact from endless process to limited event – but it must be allowed to do so at its own pace, not turned from breaking news to icon within a news cycle.

 

Heritage Politics

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics, Heritage Politics

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Barnes Wallis, Dambusters, Guy Gibson, icon, Lancaster, representation, Scampton, Spitfire, UKIP, World War 2

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Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2013.

Seventy years ago last night, nineteen Lancaster bombers left RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. 617 Squadron had been formed only a few weeks earlier, its mission a secret even from the pilots and crews. They had only been told of their objective – to break the dams of the Ruhr valley and thus disrupt German industry – earlier that day. The following morning, on 17 May, 1943, the surviving eleven crews returned – some all but crashing on the base perimeter – and a legend was born.

This is a story that will be told a lot today: the last few weeks have seen a wave of publications, supplements and television documentaries. BBC Radio 2 will spend the entire day commemorating the raid, its presenters broadcasting from Scampton and Biggin Hill before a concert in the evening. The trailers for this have been a regular feature on Radio 2, portraying the raid as a feat of courage and technical accomplishment: as Dan Snow puts it in an article for the BBC News website, a ‘combination of science, flying skill, grit and the obvious impact of the raids’. In short, the story as it has been told and retold since 1943, especially in the 1954 film starring Richard Todd (as Guy Gibson, the commander of the raid) and Michael Redgrave (as Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the bouncing bomb).

Like any operation by Bomber Command during World War 2, the Dambusters Raid has been the subject of intense debate, with no clear consensus on whether the raid achieved its short or long-term objectives. The authors of the official history of the Strategic Air Offensive, Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland (a veteran of Bomber Command and subsequently Director of the Imperial War Museum) dismissed the raid’s impact as overrated. And the civilian cost of the raid was huge: approximately 1650 people were killed in the towns and villages beneath the Möhne Dam. From their aircraft, the crews watched the impact of their breaching of the dam. Guy Gibson recounted:

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Guy Gibson (second from left) was 24 when he commanded the raid. He died in 1944 over Germany. IWM Photos.

It was the most amazing sight. The whole valley was beginning to fill with fog from the steam of the gushing water, and down in the foggy valley we saw cars speeding along the roads in front of this great wave of water, which was chasing them and going faster than they could ever hope to go. I saw their headlights burning and I saw water overtake them, wave by wave, and then the colour of the headlights underneath the water changing from light blue to green, from green to dark purple, until there was no longer anything except the water, bouncing down in great waves. The floods raced on, carrying with them as they went viaducts, railways, bridges and everything that stood in their path.

One survivor of the floods described what happened when the wave reached a labour camp where Ukrainian women were imprisoned.

Most were locked into their barracks and couldn’t get out. They were trapped inside the barracks as they were swept down until they came to the concrete bridge, where they were smashed to pieces. The terrible screams of the women trapped inside still rings in my ears.

Whatever the arguments about disruption of economic production – and Albert Speer made clear after the war that had the raid been exploited further it might have had serious consequences – the human cost was both immense and unavoidable. If the objective is to knock down a dam holding back millions of tons of water, the only way to do so without widespread and indiscriminate loss of life is to give a warning. Since the element of surprise was integral to the success of the operation, along with the necessity that water levels be at their highest, the civilian casualties have to be seen as at the very least an anticipated consequence of the mission. The moral questions about the raid mirror the broader questions around the Bomber Offensive, something which will certainly be revisited in the context of other forthcoming anniversaries, most notably (I suspect) that of the Dresden bombing in 1945. In that context, it is worth remembering as well that the Dams raid was codenamed Chastise.

In the meantime, though, a thought about the broader issues. In addition to the Dambusters and David Beckham, the news this week has focused on the progressive implosion of the Conservative Party over Europe, a process catalysed by the startling success of UKIP in the recent local elections. As entertaining as this is in terms of political theatre, I was struck by a tweet from Robert Eaglestone of Royal Holloway (@BobEaglestone if you’re on Twitter) who pointed out that ‘a problem with UKIP is that they believe the last thing to ‘happen’ in UK is WW2, so they create an odd ‘heritage’ politics.’ My response was this: surely the odd thing is that heritage politics are not perceived as strange?

The air war of World War Two has a particular and peculiar hold over us. The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight is a standard part of our pageantry: witness the role of the iconic aircraft as part of the 2012 Jubilee and the 2011 Royal Wedding. Perhaps for the Jubilee it was comprehensible – the Queen is after all the last surviving head of state to serve in uniform during the conflict. But for the wedding of two people born almost forty years after the war it is curious. We are in a Barthesian mythology, where the constraints of the metalanguage in which we speak make the contingent and strange appear natural. To illustrate the strangeness, look at the photo at the top of this post, taken last week in a pub in Guildford. And ask yourself what would be the reaction if there were a German beer called Messerschmitt?

Quotations from the crews and witnesses taken from Max Arthur, Dambusters: A Landmark Oral History, Virgin Books, London 2009. ‘Friday Night is Music Night presents The Dambusters 70 Years On’ is on Radio 2 at 8pm.

If you need a monument…

12 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics

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Tags

icon, legacy, Margaret Thatcher, reputation, symbol

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The death of Margaret Thatcher this week, aged 87, has predictably led to a re-opening of almost tribal divisions, in which a mawkish triumphalism has been equalled in unpleasantness only by the opposing frivolous vitriol. The irony of her famous pronouncement on entering Number 10 in 1979, promising that ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’ has been more in evidence in the last few days than in the almost twenty-three years since she left office. Even in death, it seems, she divides the country in two: either ‘one of us’ or not.

Personally, I am aware that the personalities and policies of the Thatcher years have shaped my life. The society we live in is defined by the confusion (so characteristic of the Thatcherite view) between individual interest and individual gain. Whether in the form of section 28 or the Poll Tax, energy privatisation or her failure to oppose Apartheid, the society she created (while denying there was any such thing) tended to be like her policies: nasty, brutish and short-sighted. And those who deplore the (admittedly unedifying) spectacle of jokes related to The Wizard of Oz ought to cast their minds back to 1982. How many of those asking the BBC to ban ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ this week complained at the Sun when it decided that ‘Gotcha’ was an appropriate summary of the deaths of Argentinean sailors?

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What has also struck me this week, however, has been the power of the symbol. The ingredients – a hairdo, a handbag, a particular shade of blue – are instantly recognisable: a true icon in that they continue to signify the meaning even (perhaps especially) in the absence of the content. There is particular irony in the resemblance of David Cameron (when kitted out as Thatcher) to Michael Heseltine.

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Christopher Wren’s epitaph (in St. Paul’s where Thatcher’s funeral will take place next week) ends with the words ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’ – if you need a monument, look around. In the few days before her funeral, let’s look at her monument – in the NHS, in privatised and ineffective ‘public’ transport, in companies that perpetuate the ‘trickledown recession’ by not paying enough tax, in the lack of social housing, in the growing gap between rich and poor, even in the coarseness of the rhetoric surrounding her passing – and ask if we really like what we see. But let’s make it a true monument, by consigning the selfish and aggressive bluster to the past. The lady wasn’t for turning, but the world and the times must.

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