tel•e•gen•ic by ozge

tel•e•gen•ic (ˌtɛl ɪˈdʒɛn ɪk)

Özge Ersoy & BİKEM Ekberzade WITH Thomas Keenan

SPOT Production Fund 2014

Authors Özge Ersoy & Bİkem Ekberzade with Thomas Keenan PRODUCE 2 Curator Zeynep Öz

This publication was commissioned for the occasion of PRODUCE 2 (September 20 - November 19, 2014). PRODUCE 2 is fully funded by the SPOT Production Fund.

Translation from English to Turkish Özge Ersoy & Bİkem Ekberzade Turkish Proofreading

tel•e•gen•ic (ˌtɛl ɪˈdʒɛn ɪk)

Eray Çaylı English Proofreading Merve Ünsal Design Selİn Estrotİ GRAPHIC DESIGN APPLICATION ESRA ARSLAN Printing Nest Medya, 500 Copies

İstanbul 2014 © The Authors & SPOT Production Fund

adj. having physical qualities or characteristics that televise well. [1935–40] tel`e•gen′ i•cal•ly, adv.

Before we start... On June 12, 2014, amidst daily Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and executed by armed militia. On July 2, in a retaliatory attack, a Palestinian child was abducted and burnt alive by Israeli settlers. Immediately thereafter, Israel started one of the most vicious air assaults on Gaza. In a matter of days, whole buildings were razed to the ground, people trapped in the rubble, killed on the streets and in UN shelters, which were targeted by the Israeli army. Hospitals were bombed, entire neighborhoods were obliterated. In the midst of this mayhem, on July 22, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer 1: Wolf Blitzer (CNN): […] It’s a horrendous sight what’s going on right now, if you look at the images, heartwrenching. What goes through your mind when you see that? Benjamin Netanyahu: I’m very sad. When I see that I’m very sad. We’re sad for every civilian casualty. They’re not intended. This is the difference between us. The Hamas deliberately targets civilians and deliberately hides behind civilians. They embed their rocketeers, their rocket caches, their other weaponry from 1

“Netanyahu: Israel seeks ‘sustainable quiet’ with Gaza,” CNN, July 21, 2014, accessed August 1, 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/20/world/meast/ mideast-crisis-blitzer-netanyahu-interview/. 3

which they fire, which they use to fire on us, in civilian areas. What choice do we have? We have to protect ourselves. We try to target the rocketeers, we do, and all civilian casualties are unintended by us, but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can, because somebody said that they use, I mean it’s gruesome, they use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause.

human rights violations in whichever way they can. Some die, the rest live to tell their story. Telegenic, or not. —August 2014

The phrase “telegenically dead Palestinians” caught like bushfire on the Internet. The cold-blooded reference to hundreds of unarmed civilians, women, children killed by one of world’s best-equipped armies was enough to make anyone with a conscience, flinch. Images shape our everyday lives more frequently now than before. They are everywhere. Cell phones, tablet PCs, small mobile devices with cameras are being more frequently used than ever before, and images, from all corners of the world including those in conflict, are being disseminated continuously. How much of this is registering in our conscience or how much of it is helping write near history? Whether we like it or not, these digital footprints we leave on the virtual universe are shaping our lives, our choices, and they are here to stay. Before we start, we, the authors want to take a minute and remember the unnamed heroes, civilians with a conscience and courage, who stick their head out and record 4

How would history be recorded were it not for the image Bikem Ekberzade in conversation with Özge Ersoy Özge: Last November, coinciding with the opening of Paris Photo, French newspaper Libération published its entire issue without photographs. Instead, the newspaper featured empty black frames to “highlight [its] commitment to photography.”2 Libération journalist Brigitte Ollier defines this gesture as “a visual shock.” She writes that the newspaper was printed without photographs for the first time in its history, and the series of empty frames created “a form of silence; an uncomfortable one. It’s noticeable, information is missing, as if we had become a mute newspaper.” Do you think Libération’s gesture is a shocking or radical one to make in 2013? How does the newspaper lose its voice without photographs? BİKEM: I would say Libération’s “radical” decision not to run any images is in fact a rational one. However, the way we read this act, through our societal prejudices and our habits, is limited. Is Ollier shocked because she wakes up to a morning paper that lacks violent images? Not seeing fire and blood on the front pages next to our breakfast plate makes us feel incomplete? So much so that the incompleteness Ollier attributes to Libération, is in turn reflected back on us, the reader?

2 See “French paper published without photographs,” The Guardian, November 15, 2013, accessed June 1, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/ media/greenslade/2013/nov/15/news-photography-france.

We are helpless in the face of all the violence that surrounds us through the news media, and more now than ever through social media. Images of violence are more immediate, more constant. And the only reaction most of us show to the downward spiral of humanity is to tap the “like” button on our tablets or mobile phones. Through a gesture simplified for us by technology, we strive to leave our mark in history, desperately. The various share/like buttons below the images circulating on the internet turn into our primary channels, which allow us to actively participate in those burning squares, transforming us into civic editors, in other men’s wars, in other men’s lands. Imagine, through “liking” news images and by way of passing the information along to our “followers,” we complete our “social responsibility,” i.e. supporting an uprising without leaving the relative comfort of our bedroom. Masses die, starve to death, and are forced to cross borders on foot, while we decide in our safe homes, which atrocity to “like.” In other words, we decide what remains visible and what is ignored. Which death, which massacre is more worth our while? Which uprising should be supported and which is to be left to fend for itself? I do not believe that the newspaper is muted at all with its lack of images. When I say Libération’s move is a rational one, rather than Collier’s interpretation of it as “shocking,” I mean exactly this: Libération, by depriving us of the images which push our fingers to the “like” button, is forcing us to read the captions and perhaps even the articles themselves. Through this “annoying” act we are pushed 7

to become a better-informed audience, donned with more details, preferably showing us multiple sides. Özge: The newspaper’s editorial states that this gesture gives photography “the homage it deserves,” and acknowledges that photojournalists, especially war photographers, risk their lives while barely making a living. Here, I would like to talk about how to think of photojournalism as a “public service” that relates to history. This April, Anja Niedringhaus—a photojournalist who worked with Associated Press and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for coverage of the Iraq War—was killed in Khost, Afghanistan while she was covering the presidential elections. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! co-authored a text with Denis Moynihan, where they wrote: “When scrolling through the images of our times that she left behind, you are struck by the courage, the talent and the ability to capture and transmit an instant in time charged with the full weight of history (emphasis added).”3 Could we talk about what the “full weight of history” might be?

On the field, in conflict, there is enough pressure. Often us, professional photojournalists, think about getting the images out there to the public, as quickly as possible, so that someone can start doing something about the madness we witness. For most of us, it is a humane response. But the image belongs to that moment and that moment alone. When a photographer like Niedringhaus dies, Democracy Now! makes a point of carrying her story to the virtual airwaves. When instead award-winning Bahraini photojournalists such as Ahmed Humaidan4 are imprisoned for doing their job—shooting protests in his country with a valid press ID—few voices that remind us of them are their friends, colleagues, Committee to Protect Journalists, and Human Rights Watch. For the rest of us, he is a Twitter mention, and soon after a mere statistic.

BİKEM: At times, an image acts as a silent witness, sole evidence of the wrongdoings in a certain place at a certain time, but to carry the “full weight of history”? I am not so sure about that. Perhaps, I don’t want to think of the image carrying such weight, as a creator of images myself.

The eulogies following a western photojournalist’s death always put our profession and us on such a high pedestal that it often astounds me. First of all, we have to start acknowledging that professional photojournalists are no longer the only legitimate image gatherers who are losing their lives in the field. There are so many unnamed photographers, ordinary people, who are targeted and killed by security forces or armed militia as they try to document atrocities. The role their gathered images play in shifting political balances makes them a target, and shooting the

3 See “From Kabul to Cairo, the Killing and Jailing of Journalists Continues”, Democracy Now!, April 10, 2014, accessed June 1, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/4/10/from_kabul_to_cairo_the_killing

4 Bahrain: Award-Winning Photographers Targeted,” Human Rights Watch, June 21, 2014, http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/20/bahrain-award-winning -photographers-targeted (accessed July 1, 2014).

messenger is no longer a metaphor. The line between the press and the public has been blurred for some time now. The five-letter word printed on our cars, helmets, flack jackets that once protected us, has long turned into a bull’s eye. Second and foremost, the term “western photojournalist” truly bothers me. Artist Renzo Martens boldly throws this in our faces in his film Enjoy Poverty (2008).5 We have been talking about the unnamed civilian image-gatherers. Martens takes that one step further and makes a critique of the way Western media handles crises in the third world: by bringing in their “photographic troops.” Martens, mocking this elite photographic “force,” gathers his own team from the local population in a village in the Congo, and as lesson one, he gives them the rule of thumb for making images that will sell: the bloodier, the more heartwrenching, the better. Lesson two is more cynical: as local photographers your photography will never make it to the front page of The New York Times. Özge: What is striking to me is that in the film Martens does not suggest a rescue plan from poverty and suffering in the Congo, but exposes the conditions under which images of human pain are produced: the war against poverty is feeding an industry controlled by economically developed countries. There is no catharsis at the end of the film—Martens leaves the country as he performs the only humanitarian ritual he is able to conduct: offering a 5 “Episode III: Enjoy Poverty,” http://renzomartens.com/episode3/film (accessed June 1, 2014).

free meal to a family during which he attaches the European Union logo to a child’s shirt. In other words, he does not bluntly criticize international news photographers; rather, he mimics what their cameras do: they eventually leave without being able to make long-lasting, structural changes, and take a series of images home, just like Martens does with his film. He simply uses another method of dissemination by circulating the work in biennials and film festivals. I think he is honest about his position. He implies that we all fail at acknowledging our complicity in the reality of poverty and suffering. Going back to the civilian/protestor becoming the roving eye, we could think of how artist Rabih Mroué tackles “the moment of death” of the photographer in his lecture performance A Pixelated Revolution (2012).6 Looking at online videos shot by Syrian protestors, he explores how ordinary people get killed by hitmen as they don the role of the messenger while documenting a social uprising. In the beginning of the work, he says that all started with the following sentence: “The Syrian protestors are recording their own deaths.” He focuses on a specific video, in which there are two people: the shooter and his killer— the shooter looking through the screen of his mobile device at the sniper as the sniper looks back, through the viewfinder of his rifle, at the shooter. They both shoot. In the end, we assume that one gets killed. The cameraman shouts: “I am wounded,” and then the video stops. 6 “Rabih Mroué,” SALT online, http://saltonline.org/en/727/rabih-mroue (accessed June 1, 2014). Istanbul-based organization SALT hosted the exhibition “Rabih Mroué” in collaboration with CA2M, April 2–July 13, 2014

Here, the cameraman is not only a spectator—he and his camera become an integral part of the event: he gets shot because he shoots with a camera. In other words, the image does not only record the event, it becomes “the event itself.”7 BİKEM: The material that costs the shooter his life may or may not make its way to the virtual media. In case it manages to get out there, it is consumed and soon forgotten— unless an artist like Mroué bothers to dig it up, bring it back to life, make an issue of it and make us all remember what we forgot. Only then it makes sense, and only then it may start bearing any weight of history, if at all. This holds true for hundreds of videos shot by amateur means uploaded to social media sites such as YouTube. As Mroué also says, so many more mobile phones, tablets out there in the battlefield fall from the hand of the person filming, with images that will never be retrieved, lost forever. Mroué’s work reminds me of 2003, the peak of the Iraq invasion, and the relative start of the much controversial new era of “embedded journalism.” On the road to Mosul, following the movement of US forces and Peshmerga troops, BBC’s John Simpson goes live. Minutes later we hear a major explosion, the camera falls to the ground and we see a single drop of blood on the lens, slowly running down in front of our eyes. In that instant we do not know if the cameraman died, was injured, or is fine. Yet, that single drop of 7 Aurora F. Polanco, “Fabrications Image(s), mon amour,” in Rabih Mroué, Image(s), mon amour (Madrid: CA2M, 2013), http://ca2m.org/en/exibitionspast/2013/rabih-mroue (accessed July 1, 2014).

blood, while shocking us, also makes us question not only the insanity of war but also the lengths journalists would go to report it: and not only professional photojournalists, as Mroué shows us but amateur civilians as well. Özge: Mroué also poses an essential question with this work: How does the witness engage with images of poverty, violence, and social uprisings? He insists that the Syrian protestor doesn’t mind getting shot at, as he wants to identify the murderer, so here the viewer becomes something more than a passive spectator. How is the viewer involved in this event, though? As a photojournalist, do you believe that images can turn into a field of action? If yes, what kind of an action are we talking about? BİKEM: I am a bit old-school about the role of news media: I don’t believe it is or should ever be the role of news outlets to become activists. Our job is to try and stay objective while getting the story out there as accurately as possible. We are supposed to be intermediaries: informing and aiding the public to make up their own minds, but not coercing them. However more so than ever—especially with the emergence of blog sites and personal op-ed pages— news is starting to take sides: side of guerillas, militia, people, and governments. Regional news agencies are becoming advocates of civil wars. In Iraq, more so in the last few years, the tonal rift between the Arabic and the Kurdish media outlets has become the norm following along the lines of Nouri al-Maliki’s partisan approach to rule a diverse country. The Western news outlets’ coverage of Syria has also been extremely biased, especially during 13

the deadly gas attack in Ghouta, lacking proper reporting, investigation, research.

hunger, the forced displacement before our editors come back to us and say, “the reader is no longer interested”?

Taking sides, moving away from objective reporting is killing the profession as we know it. Or maybe journalism has been dead for a while now with flowers being planted all over it to cover up the crime scene, much like war nam niˇ zek ˇ hadan, a Persian expression which Slavoj Zi uses in the introduction of his book The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2012). He refers to the expression in relation to the media murdering the news story, and later covering up the crime scene to make the story disappear. I will take it up a notch: I like to think of the expression as the State(s) murdering journalism, and to cover up their crime, planting flowers over the carcass.

Özge: In the comic, Knodell and Badgley emphasize that despite the partial visibility of the Darfur genocide on the international media, political progress has been scant and the violence keeps intensifying every day: “The war looks to be getting back into full swing.”

Knowledge leads to motivation and action on the side of the photojournalist, but what moves public opinion? Much more than mere images of war and strife, it takes someone to champion the cause. Even then, there is no guarantee that the action will result in permanent peace. Recently the blog site War is Boring published a comic strip by freelance writer Kevin Knodell with artwork by Keith Badgley.8 Titled “How the world forgot Darfur,” the comic did an honest job of portraying the ongoing cycle of war, media, activism, advocacy, intervention, more war, less media, less advocacy: an impasse. How many more times can we go and cover Darfur, the civil war in Sudan, the 8 “How the World Forgot Darfur: A cautionary tale of trendy activism and half-hearted intervention,” Medium, May 29, 2014, https://medium.com/waris-boring/how-the-world-forgot-darfur-52bba62ea3a2 (accessed June 1, 2014).

Here, we could talk about a controversial photography project that deals with the idea of reconciliation in the face of genocide. This April, photojournalist Pieter Hugo published a series of photographs to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, coupled with texts by Susan Dominus, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.9 Titled “The Portraits of Reconciliation,” the photo essay has a subheading that reads: “Twenty years after the genocide in Rwanda, reconciliation still happens one encounter at a time.” This sentence is superimposed on a photograph of two men, both facing the camera—one’s arm and shoulder touch the other’s chest. The caption of the opening image immediately invokes an opposition: the perpetrator’s name (left) and the survivor’s name (right). Below, I read one paragraph for each man, one asking pardon and the other granting forgiveness. Another photograph shows a man and a woman, standing side by side, not touching each other, both facing the camera again—the perpetrator on the left and the 9

“Portraits of Reconciliation,” The New York Times Magazine, April 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/06/magazine/06-pieter-hugorwanda-portraits.html?_r=0 (accessed June 1, 2014). 15

victim on the right. But what does the act of facing the camera imply? Is this an outcry for justice or a sort of reconciliation, and for whom? I’m curious about what the viewer can take from these photographs beyond a couple of dichotomies, namely Tutsis versus Hutus, victims versus perpetrators, good versus bad, liberation versus redemption. On the one hand, I agree with writer Suchitra Vijayan’s critique.10 She responds to the photo essay and asks, “How could the trauma be spoken of through one photograph, one voice? How can a range of contradictory and irreconcilable emotions of loss be explained through one narrative, one self?” Vijayan argues that Hugo’s photo essay simply stirs up the trauma as it only focuses on individuals. On the other hand, it might be too much to ask from the photographer to hint at the political and structural issues that lie behind the genocide. BİKEM: Frankly, I don’t have a problem with the risk of picking up at the scabs, not if it will lead to closure. However, in that lies the problem with Hugo’s project—I am not convinced that his are portraits of “reconciliation.” By photographing the victim and the perpetrator holding hands or standing by each other, assuring us that everything is now OK between them through forgiveness, the project only seems to aim at treating the Western trauma over the genocide in Rwanda. We can now “like” the 10

Suchitra Vijayan, “Rwanda and the NY Times: On those images by Pieter Hugo pairing perpetrators and victims of the 1994 Genocide,” Africa is a country, April 25, 2014, http://africasacountry.com/rwanda-the-genocidemust-live-on/ (accessed June 1, 2014). 16

project and “share” The New York Times Magazine article with the photographs, far away from the jungles of an African country where the cadavers of those killed during the genocide still lie to rot in the bushes. In other words, the superficial approach to the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator in the project bothers me. It feels rushed. For a solid step forward in reconciling with our pasts what we need is the actual reality disclosed, laid bare: the monster that is lurking in the back, like a shadow, hovering at times over the pairs of people in Hugo’s photographs, or firing back at us through the eyes of the victim. For me, the person that says it all in these series of posed photographs, with her posture, is Evasta Mukanyandwi. She is not holding hands. Her eyes are squinting, possibly in reaction to the superficial light the photographer’s reflector is creating to fill in the shadows in the subjects’ features, but somehow I am not convinced that is the only reason. I look at her and I see the same expression I saw on numerous women I have been in contact with as a journalist, who have been systematically raped in conflicts where rape is actively and efficiently used as a weapon of war. Despite her written account, I am not convinced Mukanyandwi is forgetting, nor is she forgiving. Scholar Tamar Garb writes about Hugo’s work: “Some people feel his work perpetuates an image of Africa as a space of abject poverty and of theatrical display for a Western art market, but he genuinely engages with the places he works in 17

and questions the means of his own representation.”11 Does Hugo’s “genuine engagement” in his subject matter make things OK? We all want and need closure, but Hugo’s work is dangerous in the sense that it provides us with a false sense of closure. Based on previous experiences in lands where ethnic and religious separation leads to massacres, I can safely say that closure is hardly ever achieved through forgiveness; it takes several generations before some form of reconciliation can be reached. However in Hugo’s work, once we run down the stream of images, we can now finally turn our backs on Rwanda and go on with our daily lives, content that the parties involved have kissed and made up. Just like the imageless Libération published in France. The violence is there, crying to be seen, but the imagery is not. Hushed, yet present in the stares of Evasta Mukanyandwi. Özge: On “genuine engagement” of the photographer and the subsequent value of the resulting image: Photojournalists of course have more stake than simply disinterested critical positions or aesthetic production with monetary and circulation value. But could we demand that photojournalists take a critical distance from their practice at times, and to not take refuge in the idea of a “genuine engagement” with the subject matter? Here, I think of two examples that scholar Thomas Keenan spoke about a couple of years ago in Antiphotojournalism, a seminar he 11 Hugh Montgomery, “Africa united: Photographer Pieter Hugo casts a new light on tired stereotypes of his home continent,” The Independent, April 10, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/africaunited-photographer-pieter-hugo-casts-a-new-light-on-tired-stereotypes-ofhis-home-continent-2264048.html (accessed June 1, 2014).

co-directed with artist-curator Carles Guerra.12 The first one is artist, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula who coined the term “antiphotojournalism” during the Seattle protests in 1999. Sekula was not lamenting for the demise of photojournalism, but made a statement on how image-makers could rethink their own position. He photographed the protests with no press card, no gas mask, no flash, no zoom lens—refusing to take a professional “defining image” at that time. Second is photographer Paul Lowe. Covering the war in Sarajevo, Lowe wrote: “I am waiting to go and see a massacre,” acknowledging that events, massacres were happening because there were cameras. When he works in the field, there is a moment when he turns his camera away from the event and directs it towards his fellow photographers, asking what their agency is at that moment. So perhaps the conversation is not about “genuine engagement” but rather about acknowledging that as long as you have the camera in your hand, you are holding a position of power. Do you think it’s still possible to make journalistic images of suffering and accept that the photographer is always inscribed into the power structure we’re talking about?

12 Thomas Keenan and Carles Guerra taught the seminar Antiphotojournalism at Bard College in Fall 2010. Subsequently, they curated an exhibition of eponymous title at La Virreina Centre de l’Imatge, Barcelona, July 5–October 10, 2010.

BİKEM: With photographers like Sekula and Lowe, I feel I am not alone, and my faith in the profession is restored. Another name dear to me would be Weegee (Arthur Fellig)—always the first photojournalist at the scene of a murder in Manhattan during the mob turf wars of 1940s. After getting what he wants (he was doing it for the money after all) he would often turn his camera to the crowd on the street there to guffaw over the horrible faiths of the victims. Weegee’s images of the bystanders, the potential readers of the murders as morning news, ordinary people staring in awe, excitement, wonder, and curiosity are reflections of our very selves as we consume violent news. Turning the camera over to your colleagues, something which I have found myself to do many times as the mob of cameramen rush over a fallen protester to get the “best” image, is giving the audience the other side of the story. Not holding a press card—in my case, at least—is a stance. I don’t hold a State-issued press card in my country either. I never applied for one and I don’t think I ever will. Accreditation to a news event aside, I don’t need the State’s permission to conduct my craft on the street. I feel that it is a breach of impartiality to be granted “recognition” whereas the only criteria for that recognition are a monthly paycheck and health insurance. Not your work, not what you do, have done, recorded, disseminated, but who you work for. The relationship between the photographer and his/her subject is one in which all “real world” hierarchies are swept aside. Even if you are photographing someone in 20

a position of absolute power, since it is you who is holding the camera, the image that you created will be the one seen by the masses. So the photographer temporarily becomes the person in power. This illusion plays heavily on the ego of the photographer. But it only is an illusion. We are just ordinary people much like the demonstrators, the public, or the statesmen. Our knowledge is limited by our research, and our reach is limited by the scrutiny of a photo editor. And when push comes to shove, our best excuse in mishandling sensitive subjects is that “we are genuinely engaged.” There are many photojournalists out there who will tell you they are “genuinely engaged” with their subjects in Gaza, Darfur, Central African Republic or in Mali. I will say, they are at most “genuinely concerned.” Özge: Here, I would like to discuss something we recently experienced in Turkey: the power of images in creating (and promoting) oppositions around the Gezi Park protests. It has been more than a year since the protests have started. Now, what are the images that are stuck in our minds? I don’t believe that images commemorate the protests or offer closure as this is an ongoing resistance—but how do we remember them? I immediately think of people wounded and killed because of police violence. Some others would say the public buses turned upside down, the damaged public property, and the like. BİKEM: Or the young man with guitar in hand, challenging the riot police on an empty street in the dead of the night, and the young woman baring her chest to the water cannon, not moving an inch. There are so many memorable 21

images, most of which have been captured by amateur photographers during the Gezi protests. The roving eye, street photography at its best is what Gezi means to me. Özge: At Gezi, photographs were not simple representations of the events, but they fought for the public opinion, they participated in the protests. Let’s take a difficult example here. One of the most remarkable symbols of the Gezi protests has become Berkin Elvan who died at the age of fifteen because of injuries caused by a tear gas canister fired at close range by the police.13 Berkin fought for his life in a coma for almost a year. Acknowledging that this is still an open wound and an extremely sensitive issue for many, including myself, I try to question why social media has been bombarded with Elvan’s photographs from elementary school. What could be the difference between killing a seven-year-old kid and a fourteen-year-old kid? Is the former more evil and the latter less justifiable? Or is it because he faces the camera in his earlier photograph? I would not say the use of his younger self has to be deliberate choice, but I’m curious—how do we select images not to forgive and to forget but to remember? BİKEM: There is no difference. Murder is murder, regardless of how old the victim is. However childhood rings innocence home. Berkin was shot when he was fourteen. During his 269-day long struggle for life in intensive care, he was accused of being a terrorist by the perpetrators. 13 Emma Sinclair-Webb, “Dispatches: Turkey – Justice for Berkin Elvan,” Human Rights Watch, March 11, 2014, http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/03/11/ dispatches-turkey-justice-berkin-elvan (accessed June 1, 2014).

The accusations targeting him and his family became so brutal that his family felt a need to explain: in his defense they continued to say he was only a kid, out to get bread, to help out his mom as his neighborhood was smothered in teargas fumes. The more Berkin was demonized by the government, the younger he seemed to appear in photographs serviced to the social media. Most civilian casualties of the protests were extremely young. However Berkin was the youngest of all, forever child, forever innocent. And although all protesters were unarmed civilians, Berkin symbolized struggle, hope, as well as a potential threat through his days in the hospital. The longer he kept on breathing, the more him and his family became a target. Every time a new photograph of Berkin’s childhood was posted on the Internet, it turned iconic. The images of him and of other victims kept the resistance alive. The more the government lashed out at Gezi Park protesters, the more the photographs of the protests’ casualties turned into people’s avatars on social media. We have many Berkin Elvan illustrations. The one where he has angels’ wings and is holding a loaf of bread—he is barely a teenager, maybe ten or eleven years old. On the stencil of his face with the number of days he spent in a coma tagged on walls, he is depicted at the time of his injury, fourteen. Then there is a photograph of Berkin running with a kite, when he is barely eight or nine. The child pictures of Berkin Elvan are a form of resistance, a 23

reminder to all of us of the innocence of the victims during Gezi protests. I can’t tell you what kind of images we want to remember atrocities with, but I know that portraits of victims are extremely powerful in getting the message across: putting a human face on killings, giving it a voice through victims’ stories. At the expense of missing out on the perpetrator’s story (which Hugo’s project manages to scrape at the surface a little bit in that respect) and through idolizing the victim, we create a cause to remember, and with it we create a wound that we will never let scab over through remembrance. You may remember the massive photograph of a Pakistani girl, whose family says was killed during a drone strike, laid on an empty field in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa this year. This was an artist intervention that aimed at raising awareness against civilian casualties by drone strikes. Imagine the trigger-happy drone controller back at base, coming across this massive image of a little girl he himself may have killed in one of his previous assaults. Faces of the three young men hanged during the military coup in Turkey in 1971, the “three young trees,” as well as the face of Che Guevara are all iconic images of heroism, resistance (and sadly failure) and all are predecessors to images of Berkin Elvan and the rest of the Gezi Park fatalities. But, also there is, as always, a flipside. With martyrdom comes the whole package. The casualties are iconized to 24

remember not only them in person, but the brutality and the mad violence of the days in which they are killed. And there has to be someone who will keep these images alive and keep on reminding us. Özge: Here we should mention another type of protest with a similar baseline, using victims’ photographs: Saturday Mothers of Turkey. From 1995 on, for almost 500 weeks, every Saturday, a group of women, holding the photographs of their sons and daughters who were “lost” in detention—a highly common issue after the 1980 coup d’état—gather on Istiklal Street, near Taksim Square in Istanbul, and do a silent sit-in protest. Just like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina. They gather at noon, sit on the street for a few hours, holding the photographs of their children lost while in police custody, and later they silently depart. What kind of a closure could we speak about here? The one thing I’m sure about is that we, random passersby, encounter these photographs, the remnants of the disappeared people every Saturday, and have been haunted by them for a long time. BİKEM: You may remember—the police used to intervene heavy-handedly in the first few weeks of the sit-ins in the mid-1990s. Repeatedly. Each week there was a clash, people violently taken into custody. Police tried to break up the group each time, detained those who resisted. But every Saturday the mothers came back carrying the haunting photographs of their children. A moving congregation. Victims’ portraits, their constancy, their continued visibility, their omnipresence in the perpetrators’ faces is 25

as close to some sort of closure as it gets for the victims’ families. So they sit silently, showing us, reminding. But has it achieved anything? Has anyone of the victims’ bodies been recovered? Anything found out about their actual fate? Has there been any closure for the families? None, as far as I know. The protest still continues and each week there is a small group of people that show up to show support. Overall, the crowd hardly amounts to one hundred: mothers, supporters, and a handful of press members. The photographers circle the small congregation to catch a few frames. The small circulation, independent, left-wing newspapers often stay throughout the whole event, recording. And then there are the organizers. Those are the handful of young people that arrange the crowd, hand out the photographs and tell those that block the view to move away. On such a Saturday, several months ago, one of the organizers was asking members of the press to move up a little so the protest stays visible, saying, “We want the passing public to be able to see the faces of the ones we lost.” Yet the photographers hardly moved. The pedestrians walked on by and all they registered was a commotion, for the first timer perhaps “a demonstration of sorts.” No one stopped to ask a question.

sion station, and maybe maximum a paragraph with a photograph of mention in a local newspaper. Yet it is no closure. Özge: Although there is no closure, I would still argue that the photographs that Saturday Mothers hold in their hands, the videos of shooting that Syrian protestors upload on YouTube, or Berkin Elvan photographs are not simply representations of the disappeared or killed people. They don’t necessarily fail as photographic images, as evidence or proof, even though they cannot immediately lead to reconciliation or closure. Yes, images are not self-evident and cannot speak for themselves, but as scholar Ariella Azoulay says, we can claim rights with and through images. This is precisely where the photograph goes beyond representing the victim; instead, it becomes a strong, indispensable tool for all—including the photographed, the photographer, and the spectator. A tool to make civil claims—our very basic right to life and liberty.

Each week, Saturday mothers sit inside that closed circle: mothers holding their children’s photographs in one half, the press in the other. On a slow news day, the story runs at most as a two-minute news segment in a local televi26

A wound without a scab Thomas Keenan “We can’t be driven by images, because there’s plenty of other places that aren’t being photographed where terrible things are going on. But we can’t ignore the images either.” The Vice-President of the United States was talking, in the Oval Office, to the President and his advisers about one image in particular, a photograph by AP’s Darko Bandic which had appeared that weekend in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and around the world. In it, a woman in a red sweater and a white dress was hanging, dead, from a tree in a forest. Post reporter John Pomfret’s front-page article on Saturday began with the story of the picture: “The young woman died with no shoes on. Sometime Thursday night she climbed a high tree near the muddy ditch where she had camped for 36 hours. Knotting a shabby floral shawl together with her belt, she secured it to a branch, ran her head of black hair through the makeshift noose and jumped.” “My 21-year old daughter asked about that picture,” said the Vice-President. “What am I supposed to tell her? Why is this happening and we’re not doing anything?” It was July 18th, 1995, and by now, a week after the killing had started, the full dimensions of the Srebrenica mas28

sacre were becoming apparent. Bosnian refugees, most of them women and children, streamed into the United Nations base at Tuzla with stories of separation and slaughter. The woman in the photograph had been one of them. More than three years into the war in Bosnia, the President of the United States committed the nation’s military resources to halting the damage. Bill Clinton said: “The status quo is untenable.”1 * * * It is difficult to say exactly how an image makes the situation it records untenable, how it makes not only itself impossible to ignore but also makes a claim on us to interrupt the events it depicts. But that this happens on occasion seems indisputable. We often generalize from these occasions to admire, or worry about, the power of the image in contemporary life.

1 The story of the photograph is told in Bob Woodward, The Choice: How Bill Clinton Won, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 262–3. I first encountered it in Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, New York: Basic Books, 2002, pp. 413–4. Many reporters wrote of the woman hanging in the tree; I quote John Pomfret, “‘We Count for Nothing’; Srebrenica’s Refugees Unwelcome in Tuzla,” The Washington Post, Saturday, 15 July 1995, p. A1; see also Stephen Kinzer, “Terrorized Human Tide Overwhelms Relief Camp,” The New York Times, Saturday, 15 July 1995, p. 4, where the photograph’s caption reads “As terrorized Muslims who had been forced out of the United Nations ‘safe area’ at Srebrenica gathered in an emergency camp in Tuzla yesterday, the body of one of the refugees, a woman of about 20, was found in a grove of trees, where she had apparently hanged herself. (Darko Bandic/Associated Press).” The woman was later identified as Ferida Osmanovic; see Fawn Vrazo, “Enter a World of War, Family, Life and Death,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, 14 April 1996, p. A01; Anthony Loyd, “Bosnia’s orphans of despair find heart to forgive,” The Times (London), Wednesday 10 July 1996; and Lorna Martin, “Tragic story behind the picture that shocked us all,” The Observer (London) Sunday, 17 April 2005, p. 4.

This can be misleading. There are “plenty of places that aren’t being photographed,” indeed, and plenty more where the photos disappear as quickly as they are taken. These places with their untaken or evanescent photos are not entirely randomly distributed, either—charting them would allow us to draw a rather precise map of the ebbs and flows of global power. There is an unforgiving geopolitical economy of visual attention. So let’s stipulate there are too many photographs that don’t exist, or that never get seen. But the existence and appearance of photos, however comforting, is no guarantee of anything. For there are the places that produce photos that don’t disappear, photos that circulate and even enter into the realm of public opinion and political debate, and yet the status quo they portray nevertheless seems to remain tenable. We could say that these photographs are being “ignored,” but there is something not quite right about this word, as if the photograph were something that calls to us unequivocally and in a voice that cannot but be heard—so that, if we do not respond, it is because we choose, whether consciously or unconsciously, not to. “The jurors looked but did not see. [...] The jury watched the film but claimed it did not see.”2 Without renouncing the ethical dimension of the image 2 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 81.

that these phrases seem to assume, Susan Sontag suggests another approach: “To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames.”3 No photograph calls out unequivocally, tells us what to do, speaks in the imperative. This does not mean that images don’t communicate, or are incapable of telling the truth, or that they lie, or that our responses to them are “always subjective.” On the contrary, photos of this sort can tell difficult and contentious truths, truths that become inscribed in public debates and disagreements about how best to respond to them. These debates are one way of responding, attending, to the images, even when the outcome of the debate is to allow the status quo to endure. It is incorrect to describe this as “doing nothing.” Up until those dark days of July 1995, after all, it was not as if the United States and its allies had done nothing in Bosnia. Much had been done—the problem was not one of inaction, but rather that nothing in all that action had done anything to stop what was happening. When the Vice-President confronted the President, and in particular his military advisers, about Srebrenica, he spoke at once in the name of his daughter and of the photograph. The question he asked—“Why is this happening and we’re not doing anything?”—seems to echo, as though he were quoting the rebuke his daughter has uttered, and as though she had simply been quoting or giving voice to 3

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador (FSG), 2003, p. 114. 31

a question asked originally by the photograph itself. In a sense, this is what all photographs of injustice or suffering can ask. And this question has the virtue of seeming to anticipate, even of supplying, the terms of its own answer—this is happening because of what we are doing, which is nothing (to stop it from happening). But the question and its answer, when it comes, are only the first steps on the path to challenging the status quo. Photographs said by some to depict suffering, though, are not always understood to pose the question of why it happens. Sometimes they want to take credit for it. There is a long history, reaching directly into our present, of atrocity proudly photographed by its perpetrators, of violence understood as justice rather than injustice. From the American MPs with their prisoners at Abu Ghraib to the mujahedeen of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria with theirs in Tikrit, one does not have to look hard to see these images.4 * * * Photographs record. They do not record everything, and of course they are constitutively subject to editing, staging, manipulation, and interpretation. They frame, they focus, and they have a grain, a resolution. All of these factors affect what and how they record. But they record.

4 For a compelling example of photographic self-incrimination, see Fred Abrahams, Gilles Peress, and Eric Stover, A Village Destroyed: May 14, 1999, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; on Tikrit, see Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin, “Militants Claim Mass Execution of Iraqi Forces,” The New York Times, Monday, 16 June 2015, p. A1.

History is recorded in images, say Özge Ersoy and Bikem Ekberzade, and they ask us to attend to the way in which the history of the present is not simply illustrated by but written in images. To record means to remember, from the Latin recordari (re- + cord- , cor heart), “to call to mind, recollect, [...] also to testify (9th cent.), to put on record.” (OED) To record is to learn by heart, to commit to memory, to memorize—in the mechanical sense. It is in this sense that images can serve as witnesses or evidence of history, of what is happening, if not exactly as proof. Like all evidence, their testimony is of necessity debatable—it opens, rather than closes, the case. As Allan Sekula forcefully insisted, “the only ‘objective’ truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something [...] was somewhere and took a picture. Everything else, everything beyond the imprinting of a trace, is up for grabs.”5 The shutter clicks, the sensor captures, and the debate begins. To cameras, and other unreliable devices, our history is entrusted. The documents of contemporary history are increasingly photographic. “What is happening,” good and bad, is being narrated by its protagonists in pictures. Those images, although they constitute in retrospect an archive of sorts, fly through our present at the speed of light. (The fact that they are circulated, “shared,” posted and re-posted, contributes in fact to the reality of an

5 Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4, Winter 1978, p. 863.

otherwise dubious phrase like “our present”—a certain, still partial but more and more actual, “we” is being created along and by the routes on which these high-speed migratory images travel.) Sometimes the volume or intensity of their movement, their repetition and re-appearance, can be as important to their force and impact as what they show. * * * The face of Ferida Osmanovic is almost invisible in the photograph of her hanging from the tree in Tuzla. The photographer takes her picture from the side, in profile, and his perspective conspires with her hair and the leaves of the trees to shield her face from our gaze. Only a sliver can be seen. Bikem reminds us that the portrait of the victim has a special status where atrocities are concerned: in “putting a human face on killings, giving it a voice through victims’ stories, [...] we create a cause to remember, and with it we create a wound that we will never let scab over.” The face is a cause for memory, something (causa) to take to heart, to record. The scab allows for healing and reconciliation—at the price of forgetting, of the disappearance of the trace. Even the scar that sometimes replaces the scab can eventually fade away. But the obscurity of Ferida Osmanovic’s face radicalizes the wound; the absent or barely seen face deprives us of the chance for any scab to form. Being able to see her face might remind us the injury; seeing that her face is there, but just out of sight, makes forgetting it even more difficult.