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framingthequestion

~ Reflections on memory, history, photography and culture

framingthequestion

Tag Archives: icon

Where were you when…?

10 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

9/11, Anniversaries, Ground Zero, icon, Trauma, World Trade Center

A plane flies over Tate Modern, Bankside, London. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, June 2020.

The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is a significant milestone, in the paradoxical way that the ordinary turning of the calendar somehow is both mundane and mysterious. Many of us will be asking “Where were you when…?” this week and next week, in an effort to locate ourselves and each other in relation to the event itself and the “normal” world that we left behind without knowing it on the night of 10 September, 2001. It is an attempt to find the rhythm of life without the assumption that such things could happen.

Telling the stories of ruptures is problematic. As Alan Mintz has written, “a destructive event becomes a catastrophe when it convulses or vitiates shared assumption”, so we can no longer trust either the tale or the teller. The tale is not yet formed, and the teller does not yet know what to say. We lose what Barthes called our mythology – the language in which we speak – just as another is being tragically born. I remember hearing the sentence “A plane has hit the World Trade Centre” that afternoon (I was living in Krakow at the time) and thought: how terrible, what an awful accident. In the days before smartphones, it was not until I returned home to find the footage on television that I understood. Like many others, I had thought it was an accident: the tram home in the coolness of a Polish autumn had been quiet: the world seemed on its rails.

As the reality sank in, however, the trauma started to complicate things further. We often say “I was traumatised” or even “I am traumatised” but neither construction does it justice – it is truer to say “I am being traumatised” but there is never time to form that thought. The moment of impact is, by definition, not described, even when it is replayed endlessly, over and over again, making the viewer beg for the pause button or, better yet, rewind. “It’s like something from a movie” was something I heard a lot in the following days and weeks.

The interrupted quality of the most valuable kinds of witnessing means that even in investigating, there is trauma, as we know the witness may have said more, thought more: but we cannot know. Instead the screen crashes to black, the tape clicks off, the diary ends. First-person witnessing always promises an ending which, if not happy, at least holds some promise of continuity. We know, picking up a published memoir, that the witness survives. This is what makes films like The Pianist watchable – we know, though the artefact’s very existence, that the story did not end on the last page – it is equally why the most shocking part of the diary of Anne Frank is the insertion of the editors: “ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE”. The tragedy is that she could not finish her story, a symbol for many others whose stories had barely started.

Alongside this, the witnesses have to begin incorporating the previously impossible into their awareness, redrawing the frontiers of possibility and probability. Primo Levi, in a quote I often refer to, described how the liberators of Auschwitz struggled to recognise what had happened as something that could happen, that belonged in “the world of things that exist”. In trauma, we are confronted with things that just moments earlier were unthinkable, precisely when our minds lose the ability to do more than record because the routines and operating assumptions of our world are upside-down. We see people throwing themselves from a burning building and numbly watch, trying to make sense of what will not make sense. Things of which, to be honest, there is no sense to make. It is happening, live and on-camera, and we have no choice but to sit on the sofa, strapped into history as it carries us who knows where. And yet our understanding may far outstrip those on the scene.

A couple of weeks ago, we watched the fall of Kabul, completing an arc which began its upward drive on that day twenty years ago. And the experience of that day allowed us to see terrible things more clearly: Afghans falling from their desperate handholds on a departing cargo plane, their twisting and flailing bodies a contrast to the almost balletic grace of the jumpers from the towers.

The photo of “The Falling Man” captures the duality of all traumatic testimony: that it describes both what happened, and what it is like to have experienced it. For the only experience that we can access, come even close to, is that of the onlookers whose only decision is what to allow into the lens of history, helpless as the thought hundreds of metres above turns into action that can only be witnessed, never truly understood.

As the event unfolds, the shift in metalanguages accelerates. Comparisons and analogies are sought, however hackneyed, however inadequate, to convey something of the unthinkable in terms that have already been thought, relating it back to their own lives and preoccupations. A few weeks later, my MA adviser commented on a draft of my dissertation, saying “You know, this is the end for a certain conception of Auschwitz.”

But for most, the early period is a time of confusion. As Muska Dastageer, a university lecturer in Kabul, tweeted on 19 August: “You feel like a speck of dust in some uncontrollable convulsion of history. It is not true, of course. There was a causal chain, decisions, failures. But that is how you feel. And from this shaking ground, it is hard to speak.” One strategy is to take pieces from the wreckage, hoping the specks of dust resolve themselves into a whole that can be understood. But that wholeness comes from without the storm, as we see what the others saw.

Slowly, however, dust does settle, creating the first symbols out of what comes to hand, as people try to position themselves and sift their memories as rescue workers sift ashes. Art Spiegelman, author of the graphic novel MAUS, found himself both the child of survivors (of the Holocaust) and the parent of a survivor (his daughter’s school, within Ground Zero, became a triage centre). Commissioned to design a cover for the New Yorker magazine, he later described himself as “reeling on that faultline where World History and Personal History collide” – realising that the “indescribable” smell of burning flesh his father had described in Auschwitz was now a sense memory for him too. Otherwise, the image of “the looming north tower’s glowing bones just before it vaporised” was the essential image as he tried to “sort out the fragments of what I’d experienced from the media images that threatened to engulf what I actually saw.” His eventual design was black, the silhouettes of the towers picked out in a deeper ebony, “in the shadow of no towers.” The legacy of trauma is ongoing, and sometimes all the more indelible for being invisible.

Symbols are created with dizzying speed, to try and provide an ending, or at least a way station to recovery, triage for the mind. I remember the way the twisted metal silhouette whose disintegration so transfixed Spiegelman was suddenly everywhere: on television, in newspapers, on the covers of magazines. A shorthand of ruin, a stage-set for a president to proclaim the invincibility of the American spirit as it smouldered, it was woven into the fabric of everyday life, as hard to remove as the stench of smoke from clothes. The way the essence of the image was distilled from photograph to graphic reminded me of the way the terror and complexity of Auschwitz is reduced to the symbol of the Birkenau gate and rail tracks: simplifying and smoothing the roughness of the real into the manageable symbol.

But symbols allow healing, of a kind. The Polish poet Andrzej Bursa of how “Inside Auschwitz’s barren rib-cage/ Through which the setting sun flowed/ Like blood/We journalists wandered around looking/ into the black holes of crematoria”. The ruins can be viewed, studied, understood – even if this can be “Blasphemously objective”, it presupposes that there was life afterward, even if only of a kind. The “ribs” of the towers are now museum pieces.

The challenge of the next catastrophes will be that they will not come roaring out of a cloudless sky, raining death with vicious suddenness. It will not be, as Jonathan Safran Foer wrote, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but something which we will have to make an effort to hear. News will come slowly, confusingly, in scattered reports of disease, in sudden silences from remote settlements, in the repetition of “once-in-a-generation” events. It is announcing itself now, in a microscopic virus that brings nations to their knees, in sea levels that only reach their deadly new point of advance for a few moments of a turning tide, in air that is imperceptibly less easy to breathe, even in the increasing intensity with which fools insist it is not happening, that all is well, that the sky is not falling.

But if we do not do something, the question the children will ask will not be “Where were you when…? but “Why did you not…?” And we will have no answer, because the task of making sense of now was often hard enough, and the future is unknown. But in moments of silence, as we measure the distance from the certain tragedies of the past, we can perhaps stop and ask what has changed, what is changing, what could change before the next anniversary arrives, unbidden, unexpected and yet completely anticipated. Listen carefully for the storm beginning: all we can do is wait for loud noises, hollowly consoled that if we can hear them, we have escaped the first stage, at least for now.

For Julian Bessa, an accidental survivor, and Dr Syed Tabatabai, who works to save the world from both Covid and itself, and narrates its complications in stunning prose poems. Eyewitness accounts of 9/11 are taken from The Only Plane in The Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff. The lines from ‘Auschwitz – Excursion’ by Andrzej Bursa come from Killing Auntie & other work, translated by Wiesiek Powaga.

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:

USHMM 77241

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.

File_000

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Image

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:

Image

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

icon, legacy, Margaret Thatcher, reputation, symbol

Image

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?

Image

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.

Image

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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