distantwitness

[distantwitness]

PositiveNegatives: Comics Working With Survivors For Human Rights

Originally published at International Observatory of Human Rights blog.

Can journalism work in cooperation with the principles of art to produce stories of survival? That is the question a team of researchers and illustrators grapples with everyday at PositiveNegatives.

Based in London's School of Oriental and African Studies, PositiveNegatives is a small organisation that blends humanitarian advocacy, academia, journalism, and art. The name comes from these “negative” stories of human tragedy can lead to a “positive” outcome through their unique methodology of storytelling. PositiveNegatives sometimes receives commission from larger NGO's, like Amnesty International or the United Nations Development Programme, or media, like The Guardian or BBC, but also works independently on their own ideas.

Founder and director Benjamin Dix had been a communications liaison with the United Nations in Sri Lanka for four years before foreign staff was evacuated. He left with the stories of so many people suffering through the civil war that were not being told by global media. In 2012, he founded PositiveNegatives and worked with an illustrator to bring to life some of the photos he had taken. That project turned into “The Vanni”, a 200+ page graphic novel funded by Arts Council England.

Most of PositiveNegatives' creations are much shorter, with many intended to be viewed on web pages rather than in print. They have even produced a few video animations, where a camera zooms over the illustration and voice and sound are added.

Throughout each iteration, PositiveNegatives emphasizes its particular methodology of working with the narrators of the story. Instead of referring to the inspirations for the stories as simply “survivors” or “sources”, they are “participants”. Part of their mission is to keep the participants at the centre of each production and encourage lasting relationships between them and the teams of artists and researchers. Although PositiveNegatives is not in the business of providing participants with psycho-social support, many also describe their experience working with the team as a form of catharsis.

Sarah Wong, Research and Project Manager at PositiveNegatives, tells me that comics were the ideal format for interviewing people who had been through serious trauma. “When you put a camera into a situation like this, there can be a perception of an imbalance of power,” she says. “It can give an impression of voyeurism, whereas a sketchpad does not.” She refers to a lot of the images of human suffering currently in circulation by charities or the global press as “development porn”.

This eschewing of the “voyeuristic” and “pornographic” can be especially tricky when the subject concerns sexual assault. But above all, PositiveNegatives is concerned with the wellbeing of the participant before and after the publication of their story.

“Abike” is the story of a young Nigerian woman trafficked into sexual slavery in the UK. Facilitated alongside the POPPY Project, PositiveNegatives worked closely not just with the voice behind Abike herself, but also her lawyers. Abike, who had her power taken from her through sexual assault, was given an opportunity to take it back through the direction of the images in the comic. Only female artists are hired to work with female sexual assault victims.

Some basic rules for the audience also serve as guidelines for the content: the comics need to be fit for readers of at least sixteen. This means there can be no nudity and a heavy reliance on suggestion rather than showing the act of rape itself.

In one panel of “Abike”, we see hands reach and grab the narrator by the throat. Her shirt is torn and unnamed characters shout abuse at her, telling her to stop resisting and to “turn over and shut up”. In the next frame, Abike is lying in bed with a sheet over her nude body. Her description of the events that passed in between the frames is simply “That man...he abused me.”

Another panel shows men in various states of sadistic thrall. Each are shown from the torso up, their hands either adjusting their tie or completely out of the frame. Abike suffers nightmares featuring the faces of these men, they are ghostly white outlines in a sea of black. A more abstract image shows disembodied arms pulling on chains attached to Abike's limbs.

Other depictions follow a similar formula. In the comic “Almaz”, the titular character, an Ethiopian maid in the Gulf, is assaulted by a member of the family she works for. Most of the images on the page where this event occurs are about the lead-up and the aftermath of that assault. The assault itself is only two images, where only Almaz's protestations and the placement of the bodies makes it clear what has happened.

For “What The Girls Say”, where an unnamed narrator tells us about sexual abuse of young girls recruited to militias, there is no depiction of sexual assault in the illustrations. Plenty of the images show men with guns threatening and kicking the girls, but stop short of sexual violence. A panel closes in on her face and her tears as she relates how horrible her life among the militia was, and how girls were lucky if they only had one man.

Positive Negatives is not just concerned with producing comics, but also providing research to support their inclusion in mainstream media and humanitarian advocacy. “Comics are a growing medium,” says Wong. “They naturally lend themselves to complex storytelling and empathy building.”

A few weeks ago in this blog, we visited the idea of animation, that is, moving video, to present stories of violence.  Although PositiveNegatives does sometimes use video, the bulk of their work is static images. The ethical principles of animation and comics may be the same, but there is a different function to a video with sound and music than a page full of silent images where audiences must read without an auditory emotional guide. While legacy and digital news publications are quickly “pivoting to video” to engage more audiences, we shouldn't underestimate the power that stationary images and the written word have in communicating complex stories of violence.

Image Credit: A panel from the comic “Abike”, artwork by Gabi Froden.

[distantwitness]

Animating Torture: A New Horizon In Human Rights Reporting

Originally published 17 August 2018 at International Observatory Human Rights. 

By Christa Blackmon

When telling stories of violence for mass audiences, we cannot always rely on text or audio to make an impression. If our goal is to build empathy and understanding between the viewer and the victims, visuals can help us achieve that. But when the subject we want to draw attention to is so potentially disturbing, how can we engage with eyes without causing further harm?

Increasingly for human rights organisations and news media, the answer lies in animation. Moving images and audio based on survivor memory offers everyone a way to witness violence without resorting to voyeurism. Often, these videos will mix documentary footage with the animation, grounding it all firmly in reality.

One example we may see in this growing trend comes from an Amnesty International Report on the infamous Saydnaya prison in Syria, which media later uncovered was the site of mass cremations. The animated three minute video, “Human Slaughterhouse”, is one part of a larger report featuring anonymised testimonies from survivors as well as digital renderings of the prison.

In “Human Slaughterhouse”, we are lead from light to dark as an unnamed narrator calls forth memories of his family to give him strength in prison. We see him experience hunger, trying to aid others who are suffering in his crowded cell, hearing the cries of others being tortured, and finally lead to a noose. There is no blood, no gore, but instead a pervasive mood of terror. We are only ever given a short glimpse of the authorities in the prison. Most of the guards are black silhouettes while the bulk of detail and emotion during the traumatic scenes is communicated directly through the victim's face.

In July of this year, Human Rights Watch commissioned the use of animation in their spotlight on torture in Ethiopia's prisons. The introduction to the video features audio clips from an eleven-day assessment where former prison guards detailed the abuses to a tribunal. Interspersed with narration from HRW staff are black and white renderings of prisoners being tortured. We are shown how guards would bind the prisoners with rope in these drawings and then brought back to footage from an anonymous survivor lifting her sleeves to reveal the deep scars on her arms.

To illustrate some of the sexual abuse, where prisoners were forced to undress and then beaten while their genitals were tied together, the animator opts to show us only a shadow. The silhouettes of the prisoner's heads are the centre-point of this frame, with only the boots of the guards visible on the ground.  

Just this month, AJ+, the all-digital channel for Al Jazeera English, brought in their own animators to help visualise harrowing stories of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. In the Facebook video “Rohingya Refugees Surviving Rape”, we are introduced to nine months pregnant Shafika living in the refugee camp of Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh. As she tells her story to the camera, the scene shifts to animated reenactments.

The colours are vivid, but the patterns and detail remain simple. The faces remain blank except for the moment Shafika, still grieving the death of her children and physically weakened from sexual assault, spots an opportunity to escape. Her black eyes open wide with hope and determination and she leaps from a mountain and into the jungle.

As in the Amnesty and HRW reports, it is the faces and bodies of the victims, not the violence enacted on them, that transmits the terror and pain. We are not watching figures but actual people.

The most recent example of animations of torture being used in a longer documentary format can be seen in the film Naila And The Uprising. The film uses a mix of archival footage, contemporary interviews and voice-overs, and animation to tell the story of Palestinian women's activist Naila Ayesh during the First Intifada.

Thanks to a previous group of documentarians, we can be witness to Naila's struggle as it actually was. We see her leading political meetings with both men and women, marching in the streets alongside her community, and even clips of her wedding. But what about the traumatic memories she recounts in an Israeli prison, where she suffered a miscarriage, for which no camera was present?

Director Julia Bacha decided from her usual “cinema verité” style and included a team of Montreal-based animators to add a new element of drama to the film. Bacha, alongside Sharron Mirsky and Dominique Doktor, were keen not to simply depict Naila's torture and time in prison, but have her experience those moments with her. Part of this vision was to remove the eyes and mouths from all the human figures.

The idea of the silhouette was born as a way to avoid caricaturising Naila while keeping the images simple and yet still expressive. The characters perform a lot of small, suggestive movements: shoulders slump, heads tilt upward in search of something, and their hands embrace others.

In order to achieve an “impressionistic” style, Mirsky and Doktor used watercolour crayons on vellum, under camera animation and ink on glass in some areas. This method involves putting the image on one sheet of paper and then underlighting it gives a richness of texture. The background textures were especially important to the story. When Naila is in the complete darkness because a bag has been placed over her head the textures, abstract visuals, and sound are played up.

The absence of a discernible face has a second, more symbolic function. Its serves to universalise Naila. Following the film's premeire at the London Human Rights Film Festival, Naila told audiences that though the story is her own it is also the story of “every Palestinian woman and family”. It is a human story of loss, grief, anger, and resistance.

[distantwitness]

Al Jazeera continues to experiment with different mediums for war reporting, including “virtual immersion”. In this short video, journalists Manal Qaed Alwesabi and Ahmad Al Gohbari use 360 video footage to place the viewer in the shoes of Yemeni civilians. The footage is bookended by colourful animated figures with captions that detail casualties from the war. Personally, I find this video disorienting and not in a helpful way. Because this is a web video, I am restricted to the size of whatever screen I’m watching it on which to me is the antithesis of “immersion”. I’d prefer it if it were just the animation. 

[distantwitness]

Repost: #KillAllMen Is Feminist Liberation Through Satire

This blog is purely about my research into visual depictions of human suffering, but because I am being personally attacked on a medium I use professionally I feel it is appropriate to share here. 

Please distribute as you see fit and nolite te bastardes carborundorum. 

Originally posted at Laywers, Guns and Money.

Trolls aren't just after me, they're after your rhetorical tools in speech against oppression

Days after my twelve-hour suspension from Twitter ended, the trolls have returned under the same absurdly bad faith humanitarianism. 

The first lockout was annoying but it ended before I knew it. An evening spent on a romantic date with my very male husband made the time pass easier. 

This time I'm locked out for seven days, and when I'm a writer who depends on Twitter for contacts and research this is no minor inconvenience. My husband and I can't eat out at nice French restaurants for seven straight days, Groupons have some pretty strict limits.

On March 19th I lampooned a Federalist article, penned for the purposes of the gun control debate, proclaiming that all men are born violent. Well if that's so, then the only logical response for women, the disproportionate victims of men's violence, have no choice but to #killallmen. 

To interpret this joke of mine, which is quite clearly a joke, as an endorsement or threat of violence is stupid. Even more stupid is that the joke was banned even as it floated above an article with quotes like, "A man’s nature cannot be repressed...Men were made for the intentional use of force and power." Whatever your thoughts on Punch RockGroin's parenting advice, the response of "#killallmen" cannot be seen as a serious and to do so is either profoundly stupid or profoundly dishonest. In order for "#killallmen" to be a credible threat, it has to have some basis in reality. Spoiler alert: It does not.

An Unreal Hashtag

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that #killallmen, at least in my use, is just a joke. It is satire, and as I am currently teaching satire in world literature to British secondary students, let me tell you satire is deadly serious. To be a satirist is to identify oppression and to take power back by upending the dominant narrative. I can't claim to be the inventor of #KillAllMen, but allow me to explain the way I use it. Feminists and their male allies are constantly calling out abusive behaviours of men to stop, whether it be street harassment, unequal pay, dictating reproductive rights, etc. The response of anti-feminists is frequently to say that we are trying to end masculinity, that we are weakening men (see the Federalist article cited above), that all our desired policies will be the death of men. 

Turn of the century anti-suffragette postcard and their imagined women's violence against men. Plus ca change...

A Men's Right's Activist created meme featuring feminist video games critic Anita Sarkeesian.

It is ridiculous. So what does a satirist do when faced with an oppressive ideology that is in fact quite ridiculous? We mirror it. We say, "Yes, Kill All Men!" Because it is an absolutely ludicrous conclusion to draw and the louder you say it the stupider it sounds. We are echoing stupidity not to imitate it, but to mock it and strip it bare. 

I don't particularly care if anyone thinks I'm good at satire, all that is subjective. What I do care about are readers interpreting the function of my satire correctly. You don't have to laugh but you also don't have to phone up Interpol. Just imagine I'm a white male stand up with a beer belly on Comedy Central and change the channel when I'm not funny.

The "Threat" Against Men 

What makes "#KillAllMen" a non-serious threat where "#KillAllJews" or "#KillAllGays" are much more dangerous? The simple answer is reality. We know that there are armed groups out there with the intent, opportunity, and historical record of killing Jews and gay people. Nothing similar exists when it comes to male identity. Is there an organized armed group out there with the stated mission of eradicating all XY genes?

No.

There are however armed groups, like the military in Myanmar and the government in Chechnya, who wish to wipe men from specific ethnicities or even sexual orientation off the face of this Earth. But these threats are typically carried out by other men, and there is plenty of evidence to show the perpetrators are happy to carry on killing and assaulting the women associated with the victimized men. Women from the same group as those engaging in the violence may even show support, but they do not do as individual actors autonomous from the men running the murder show. Are men more likely to be targeted for assault simply because of their gender identity as men?

No.

Men whose physical appearance marks them as members of an out-group are absolutely uniquely targeted for violence. Black men, Latino men, Jewish men, Muslim men, gay men, men who dress in traditionally female clothing, all of them have been victims of one hate crime or another. The FBI doesn't keep statistics on the gender of the attackers in hate crimes, but individual reports of women engaging in violent physical confrontation solo against men are rare if not unheard of. Nowhere is there any evidence that men are under attack by women simply for their identity as men. 

Are men more likely to be victims of domestic violence or sexualized violence? No-ish.

Men, as well as young boys, are absolutely victims of domestic violence. No serious advocate would try and tell you otherwise. Men in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships can experience physical abuse at the hands of a partner. Male children are also vulnerable to abuse from mothers and not just fathers. However, there's a difficulty in assessing whether they are more likely because of the stigma around reporting. Women are simply more likely to report intimate physical abuse. 

It is my own personal opinion that men and boys have a much harder time coming to grips with physical and sexual abuse and might very well need more support in the short term. Women are absolutely guilty of abusing men with prejudice against race, religion, sexual orientation, or even disability. But there is no epidemic of women's violence against simply for being men. That is the paranoid fantasy of the Men's Rights Activist.

Comedian Donald Glover explaining the difference between telling "crazy ex-girlfriend" and "crazy-exboyfriend" stories to friends.

Even if we gathered all the data showing how men can be victims of violence with different motivating factors, women are always disproportionately more vulnerable and are therefore are in greater need of protection.  

Satire Is A Power Move

The Alien was female, but Ripley certainly had to mow down a lot of men standing in her way that tried to use the Queen as a bio-weapon.

If Jonathan Swift's initially anonymous pamphlet A Modest Proposal were shared on Twitter today without the historical distance, I have no doubt one of his many enemies would be arguing Swift is actually calling for us all to #EatIrishBabies. The hashtags #RoastAllBabies #YumYumYum must clearly violate Twitter's policy against hateful conduct. No one living today could argue in good conscience that Swift was actually advocating for frying up the chubby little cheeks of infants born into poverty in order to control the population of urban, and predominantly Irish, poor. So why would he argue that poor women could get themselves off the street by skinning their toddlers to make into gloves for fine and elegant ladies? Because the people Swift is ridiculing, the upper classes so concerned with these poor and lazy souls in the street, have had their humanity so far removed as to believe it. Only an idiot or a dishonest philanthropist could be so credulous of A Modest Proposal at face value.

This Isn't About Me

I watch friends and colleagues like Reza Aslan, Jillian C. York, Hend Amry, and Talib Kweli (just to name a few) get trolled all the time. I shout back at the trolls or offer public support to them when I can just so they know they're not alone. 

I am white, I am straight, I am married, and I can take nice photos because my chosen appearance is traditionally feminine.I have a lot of privilege which has protected me thus far from the sorts of abuse many of my out-group and female friends have received online. I have a body of published work out there that demonstrates my serious commitment to human rights and my ability to write compassionately about victims. I'm not terribly worried about any professional losses, simply the threat of chronic inconveniences. I'm not angry for my own sake. 

I'll get back on Twitter sooner or later and I'll be fine. We need to think about what tactics the trolls are learning to silence so many others with views similar to mine. Buzzfeed reporter, and white female, Katie Notopoulos was locked out for ten days after trolls reported her for joking "kill all white people". Granted I think my satire is a bit more sophisticated than Kate's, our tweets have the same function and we shouldn't be banning satirical speech based on a subjective judgement of its value. 

Women, of all types, are at the most risk of abuse online. Amnesty International has researched this subject pretty thoroughly and finds that women are disgusted by Twitter's response to harassment. Twitter knows it has a problem but seems unable or unwilling to fix it. Last year at The Root, Monique Judge looked at how race and gender correlated with harassment on Twitter. The list of studies and articles on the subject go on and on.   

Meninists will probably always exist, but there's no reason Twitter should take our attempts to laugh at them so seriously.  

Extra Fun: My Prezi for Year 10 and older students on Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". Created for my job as a Tavistock Tutor. 

[distantwitness]

Re-posted from Lawyers, Guns and Money. 

When Is Dressing Up Like Hitler Okay?

The difference between “good” Nazi humor and bad is about who gets to be the butt of the joke.

“There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” said Theodor Adorno. One can only imagine what he might have said about laughter. 

Black humor, dark humor, gallows humor; none of this is new to human cultures. Legendary American Jewish director Mel Brooks became famous in part because of his jokes about Hitler and the Nazis. Perhaps his most notable contribution is the 1967 film turned Broadway musical The Producers, for which he was awarded an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. His comedy was an expression of American Jewish attitudes towards their own pain and had a lasting impact on comedians and actors of all backgrounds. So what made it “okay” for him to turn human suffering into laughter?

First of all, Mel Brooks never made fun of the pain of innocent victims. His targets were always the oppressors and while his comedy showed them to be ridiculous, they were still capable of horrible things. Brooks was born in 1926 in New York under the name Melvin Kaminsky (his later name change hints at the anti-Semitism in the post-war American entertainment industry). During WWII he served in the Army Corps of Engineers clearing land mines. His family were never direct victims of the Nazis, but he was nonetheless very familiar with the threat that they posed.

In The Producers the character of Franz Liebkind, a former Nazi, poses little threat at the beginning of the film but is later driven into a murderous rage and is only thwarted by a comedy of errors. Even in the play within the film, the stage Hitler is seen singing about the destruction he has rained down on Europe. In the 1983 film, To Be or Not to Be (itself a remake of a 1942 film), the actors in a play that lobs comedic insults at the Fuhrer are doing so with a direct threat to their lives. It is the victims, or the potential victims, in much of Mel Brooks’ comedy that are making the jokes at someone else’s expense.

There is a logic and order to Brooks and his Hitler jokes, and there are times when he has felt that it has gone wrong. In a 2015 interview with Spiegel, he describes the pushback he received from other Jews and what makes him different from Robert Benigni and his Oscar winning Holocaust comedy film Life Is Beautiful.

Brooks: The Jews were horrified. I received resentful letters of protest, saying things like: “How can you make jokes about Hitler? The man murdered 6 million Jews.” But “The Producers” doesn’t concern a concentration camp or the Holocaust.

SPIEGEL: Can you really separate Hitler from the Holocaust?

Brooks: You have to separate it. For example, Roberto Benigni’s comedy “Life Is Beautiful” really annoyed me. A crazy film that even attempted to find comedy in a concentration camp. It showed the barracks in which Jews were kept like cattle, and it made jokes about it. The philosophy of the film is: people can get over anything. No, they can’t. They can’t get over a concentration camp.

SPIEGEL: But the film has deeply moved a lot of people.

Brooks: I always asked myself: Tell me, Roberto, are you nuts? You didn’t lose any relatives in the Holocaust, you’re not even Jewish. You really don’t understand what it’s all about. The Americans were incredibly thrilled to discover from him that it wasn’t all that bad in the concentration camps after all. And that’s why they immediately pressed an Oscar into his hand.

Purpose is important when creating a Hitler joke, and in this same interview, Brooks describes his purpose as “revenge”. I might also like to posit that Hitler jokes may serve another purpose when they are seen to be made by Nazi victims: empathy. In To Be Or Not To Be it is easier to feel so strongly for the characters lampooning their oppressors because they have made us laugh. This is different from eliciting feelings of pity, which tends to reduce victims to objects and pretty much kills any piece of art or cultural expression.

What are your favorite Nazi jokes and Jewish jokers?

[distantwitness]

“‘This was drawn before the capital was bombed. It contrasts the chaos you often see in the streets of a Middle Eastern city with the delicacy and beauty of the architecture. I started working on a bigger panorama of the old city, but three of the buildings are missing now. Some of the most beautiful buildings in Sana’a have been destroyed by Saudi airstrikes.’” - Sana’a, Yemen

The Guardian has collected a series of drawings from one of their war correspondents, Ghaith Abdul Ahad. His artwork is his own attempt to confront the trauma of the human suffering he has witnessed. Most of his drawings are of places, with few human figures. But his captions reflect that the people who suffer in these places are very much on his mind. 

In a separate interview he says this about depicting buildings rather than humans:

“Of course, who cares about the buildings when people are dying? But then there’s this other person inside you looking at these scenes and wondering, who is going to rebuild these buildings?”

[distantwitness]

Cross posted from Lawyers, Guns and Money on the occasion of the 16th anniversary of 9/11.

Think about the photographs and videos you remember from 9/11. Now think about which ones you weren't supposed to see. Is the taboo fading?

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post for my (then class project) Sight of Suffering blog about the ethics of viewing bodies from the September 11th attacks. Nearly the whole of the blog is about Americans, and others in the West, and their viewing of bodies from other places or other people. But when it comes to one of the deadliest single attacks on American soil, there are almost no images of bodies available to the public. That's quite an interesting difference, isn't it?

The one possible exception was "The Falling Man" by photographer Richard Drew, and he was absolutely lambasted for publishing it. The man's daughter even disowned him in a comment to a journalist about it. Susie Linfield, a journalism professor from NYU gets at why the photo is so disturbing:

The jumper photographs make clear to us the utter vulnerability of the victims; they present us with terrorism as a human experience, not just a political crime. Those trapped in the Towers had only two choices—to jump to their deaths or to be incinerated—which is to say they had no choice at all. To moralize either “choice”—to despise one as cowardly and valorize the other as heroic—is to misunderstand both. What the 9/11 victims faced was the absence of options.

The further in time we get away from 9/11, I think we'll find a little more acceptance of it. Every year around the anniversary we find a piece in the media about "rare" or "unforgettable" photographs of the event. For someone like me, who lived very far away from New York City and Washington, DC at the time and had never even visited those places, the media of the day is the memory.

For this year's anniversary, an Australian outlet has published a collection of jumper photos. These are actual photos that exist in the 9/11 Memorial Museum, so they carry a certain weight of authority behind them that makes it less sleazy to look at.

What do you think? What media from the day stuck in your mind the most? Sixteen years later, do you think maybe time has taken the sting out of some taboos in remembrance?

Photo: Lyle Owerko

[distantwitness]

Breaking the fourth wall

My latest feature on witnessing is for openGlobalRights. However, this time I decided to focus on witnessing stories of war and injustice through live theater instead of through the mediation of a camera. Even though what is before you is not real, it is really happening in the physical space you inhabit as an audience member. So what does that mean? And what does it mean for storytellers and activists?

Read below and find out!

Breaking the fourth wall: theater and human rights activism

Originally published at openGlobalRights.

Human rights activism relies on an ability to tell stories to diverse audiences that will inspire action toward justice. Distributing information through journalism, whether it be traditional or new media, is the standard method of raising awareness. Globalization and the movement of people means that activists and artists from affected communities may cooperate to mutual benefit and find new audiences in the process. Live theatrical performances in particular offer an exceptional form of audience engagement that human rights organizations may find more meaningful than the circulation of films or literature.

Theater is also a highly adaptable medium, able to be molded over and over according to the vision of its social and cultural location. How many places in time and throughout the world have versions of Romeo and Juliet been produced? What if the two leads were not male and female, but male and male? What if one was a black African and the other white and British? What if one was Hindu and the other Muslim? The story remains the same and yet the meaning is given new life. Old texts adapted and applied to human rights issues can help us understand the universality and timelessness of struggle.

This was the vision for Queens of Syria, which mixed Euripides' 410BC text of The Trojan Women with the real-life stories of women refugees from Syria. The UK based charity Developing Artists, which seeks to support the arts in post-conflict nations, worked with a drama therapy group, as well as British and Syrian directors, to translate the ancient play into Arabic while journalists added archival footage that played on a screen above the women. Queens of Syria sold out in a number of venues throughout its three-week UK tour in 2016 and was featured in The Guardian, Financial Times, and on the BBC. Audiences were given supplemental materials about the conflict and the actors in their programs and encouraged to learn more about the refugee crisis.

I attended the show already knowing a fair amount about the subject, and the play itself was very light on context, focusing instead on emotion. While I may not have learned anything new, what I felt while watching and being in the presence of these women who were engaging in a creative form of post-memory work was certainly an arresting experience. To do so in the presence of others, who laugh when you laugh and who applaud when you applaud, creates a form of consensus. The audience members certainly already had empathy for the actors, which is why they bought the tickets, but the experience created a new and intimate connection. Independent theater critic Paul Taylor cited a scene where the women read letters to family members as particularly evocative and capable of expressing a “piercing homesickness”.

Theatrical performances need not be explicitly tailored for an activist audience in order to have an effect. The Broadway production of OSLO, about the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords between Israelis and Palestinians, was not created with any specific development goals in mind. However one feels about the presentation of narratives in the play, its placement in the competitive market of Broadway and its receipt of the 2017 Tony Award for Best New Play means that human rights topics can be palatable to mainstream theater going audiences and the industry at large.

A number of faces from film and television have also shown an interest in embracing theater to tell stories about war and conflict. Zimbabwean-American actress Danai Gurira, who graces the screen as the katana wielding Michonne on The Walking Dead, co-founded the non-profit Almasi Arts Alliance to bring African voices to American stages. Gurira wrote the play Eclipse, about the experiences of “wives” of rebel commanders in Liberia, and attracted Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o to the 2015 Off-Broadway production.

Beyond commercial theater, drama therapy has grown into a staple for post-conflict and social reconciliation programs all over the world. Communities in Africa affected by HIV/AIDS have taken on performance as an educational and social inclusion tool. One such program called “Wise Up” in Botswana, funded by UNICEF, ran workshops to create 20-minute plays in the local language that would be presented to an audience. “Drama...serves a mirror to reality,” said facilitator Mpho Rabotsima, “but is not actually reality—and therefore transports an audience and allows members to question why they like or dislike a character or story—and also presents them alternative solutions to a problem.”

Theater can also be a form of resistance. Brazilian born Augusto Boal, for example, coined the term Theatre of the Oppressed in the 1970s. His theory called for a different kind of audience: a group of critically engaged witnesses that were ready to become actors themselves and also stand up for social justice. “At some stage we are told we are too old to play and act, we must become spectators,” he told the Guardian in 2002. “But we should not be spectators in the theatre, even less in our lives. We should be actors. In the Theatre of the Oppressed we don't have spectators in the sense that you go there and consume something. We have what we call 'spectactors'."

The lesson we can learn from activist oriented productions like Queens of Syria, Hamilton, and the Theatre of the Oppressed is that in order to achieve both the goals of art and activism, the artists and the audience must be treated as agents of change. Whether the production is commercial or charitable in nature, creators and actors are engaged in the act of speaking truth to power, while the “spectactors” maintain the possibility of relating what they've witnessed outside of the theater. Human rights organizations must recognize the desire of both the artist and the audience and increasingly look towards ways to fill that demand.

[distantwitness]

The Consequence of Sound

When sound is added to video, the emotional impact can change dramatically

In keeping this blog about the suffering of people caught on camera, it is unavoidable that I will have to expose myself to images I would rather not see. As anthropologists, we are taught to record our thoughts and feelings while engaging in fieldwork.

So here is my reaction to a video of a child who has had his legs blown off in Syria, uploaded to Twitter by a BBC journalist. I have screen grabbed the tweet so that image you see is only the introductory text and the shadow of the cameraman. 

Because of the way video works when it is uploaded to Twitter, the images immediately start moving when they appear on your screen. I watched the short video at first with no sound. My first thoughts were “Can this be real?”. I was searching for proof that it might not be real. If it were a fake, it would mean that this child was fine. That is what one might call “hope”.

A second look at who tweeted the video, a BBC journalist. He comes with the credibility of a network. He is extending his credibility to the video, whose source is unclear from this instance. 

It’s real. So I watch it again, this time with sound. Now I feel the urgency of the moment. That numbness I felt at first glance fades. 

It is only with sound that I understand, not through comprehension of language, that the men are in shock. The child is in shock. He is completely awake and yet perhaps a quirk of biology has not yet told him he is in pain. It is only a 30 second video. We don’t know what the child may be experiencing now. 

This viewing is instructive to me as it tells me I am at a point where an initial silent image is not enough to communicate. I am not uncaring when I saw the child with bloody stumps below his torso, I am simply not understanding. 

It takes time, and sound, for me to take in the horror and the tragedy. What does it take for you?

[distantwitness]

Your friendly local media anthropologist who specializes in the ethics of documenting and viewing human suffering (aka me) makes an appearance at the 1:40 mark.

[distantwitness]

Ethical Storytelling Through Animation: Sadnaya Prison and Ebola in Africa

Animated drawings can center the lived experience of survivors and provide audiences with safe visuals for witnessing.

Cross posted from Lawyers, Guns and Money.

On Monday of this week, new allegations about the egregious human rights abuses of the Syrian government's secret prison in Sadnaya surfaced: that a crematorium had been built to permanently disappear detainees. Reports about the prison have been public for a while with many witnesses speaking to Amnesty International.

Many of these witnesses obviously cannot come forward and there is no way to get visual evidence to corroborate their stories. Even if there was visual evidence, it might be legitimately censored by news networks for disturbing content. So how to tell the story to a global audience when no images could exist or even ethically be published?

Amnesty International's solution was to create an animated short called "Human Slaughterhouse". This is a 3 minute video featuring the anonymized testimony of a survivor of the prison. In the video we can see moments from the horrible experience, waiting in a crowded cell, being blindfolded and lead to a noose, etc.

The ten-minute "Inside Sadynaya" video gives more context to the story while making heavy use of still drawings and drawn maps. They feature survivor interviews, who have obviously consented to their faces being shown, as they give a behind-the-scenes look at recreating their experiences through animation.

If these images had been real photographs or video, I can't imagine we would ever see them. They might be used as evidence in legal proceedings, but there is an ethical reason why it is extremely rare to find Nazi captured footage of the Holocaust outside of a courtroom context. Anything that could have been captured in Saydnaya would have been done so by those committing the crimes and therefore the documentation would be another form of torture.

The Global Health Media Project did something similar in cooperation with the International Red Cross in "The Story of Ebola". Ebola is of course a particularly nasty disease that makes viewing an affected person potentially graphic. Yet it is difficult to visually tell the story without somehow involving blood. The animation provided a culturally sensitive way of doing so.

Last week I wrote about the rise of video games that engage in virtual witnessing, though I argued that they're not really "games" but interactive graphic novels. Those projects take a similar approach, except they make the viewer role play as a victim. In a 24 hour news cycle, its unlikely we would see a whole lot of journalists choosing to hire an artist to create a rendering for a deadline. But for long investigative pieces, the choice to employ animation is a brilliant one.

Animation provides us with a safe distance from reality and (in theory) is created based on witness memory, centering their personal experience of events. The identity of victims can be properly protected without having to rely on voice modifiers or blurring of faces, which can make it difficult for a viewer to connect with the humanity of the victim. In animation, we can have visually recognizable faces and emotions that can better facilitate empathy.

If we come to the conclusion that the news could benefit from more images of the horror in Syria, animation can be a creative way to present those images in an ethical manner that puts victims in their proper place as subjects of a story rather than objects.

Images

1. A graphic created by Amnesty International for their “Human Slaughterhouse” report.

[distantwitness]

Virtual Witnessing Through Video Games

Creative storytellers are turning to the gaming world to bring understanding and empathy to the complex Syrian conflict

Cross posted from my guest blogging at Lawyers, Guns And Money. 

A few weeks ago, I posted about Mass Effect: Andromeda and in the comments we started talking about a piece published in The Atlantic that bemoaned the popularity of narrative structures in video games. This seems like a good opportunity to talk about the rise of story heavy games that are meant to tell us about real-life events. And also to question whether some of them really deserve the label "game" at all.

One thing I have noticed over the last few years is a rise in games about the Syrian Civil War and the refugee crisis. Mostly made by Western developers with significant reliance on Syrian testimony, these games make you a virtual witness to war and grief with a clear goal of both raising awareness and generating an empathy that will lead to humanitarian action.

As a media anthropologist, what I really want us to pay attention to is that it is not just visuals that humanitarians are using to inspire action, but making the user a character within a visual world. This is completely new field for everyone, and it could only be made possible with the ease of developing through the internet and sophisticated personal devices (not just smart phones, but tablets too).

Endgame: Syria (2012)

British based Auroch Digital produced a mobile trading card type of game where players can act as rebels and deploy different assets and strategies in the Syrian Civil War. Wired's Game The News blog pitches it like this:

Will you choose to accept peace at any cost? What if the war goes badly and the only options left mean more extreme actions; would you agree to follow this path? Can you win the war and the peace that follows? Find out in Endgame Syria.

In case you were wondering, no it did not really go over that well. Apple rejected it. Reviewer Lucy Draper panned the creators for saying that they wanted to raise awareness while creating a game that did nothing to make anyone think about the reality of the war. I'm inclined to agree.

1000 Days Of Syria (2014)

American journalist, Mitch Swenson, received a decent amount of press when he developed the  1000 Days of Syria for the web. In the introduction, Swenson describes it as “Part electric literature; part newscast; and part choose-your-own-adventure”, but also seems to shy away from the “game” label:

Sometimes the word "game" can be misconstrued into something that seems removed and reductive in the context of real life danger and death. In that way some might say that 1000 Days of Syria should not be considered a game at all, but rather an interactive education. That is for you to decide.

Its a creative venture to be sure, but in checking it out I don’t see the “gaming” aspect that people are talking about. Categorizing it as a “game”, i.e. a piece of entertainment, is a marketing ploy. What I see is simply an interactive story. There’s no goal, there’s no prize, nothing to make anyone feel good about completion of a task and ready for the next one.

This War Of Mine (2014)

This survival PC game is not explicitly about Syria. In fact, its based on the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996 but set in a fictional city. With Syria making headlines at the time of its release, the connection to the real life war and a group of civilians trying to survive an urban landscape was easy to make.

11 bit studios created downloadable content (or DLC) for This War Of Mine that added the perspective of children into the mix. Proceeds for this DLC went to the UK charity War Child specifically to help Syrian refugees.

What makes this venture stand apart from the others I’ve mentioned is its financial success. The Polish produced game sold so well that the company is planning on making a triple A title that will keep with their serious themes.

Like the next game I’m going to talk about, this one makes a great success out of its illustrative visuals. Perhaps the subject matter is not “fun” or “enjoyable” to look at, but it is beautiful. It is art.

Bury Me, My Love (2017)

This one came to my attention through a Muftah article. Another journalist, this time from France, Florent Maurin and his company Pixel Hunt created a mobile game with graphic-novel like illustrations to put people in the role of a Syrian refugee. Like 1000 Days Of Syria, I also don’t feel like the “game” label is accurate. However, it is much better at offering visuals that make it feel like a game.

A Vice interview with Maurin uses the term “interactive project” to describe some of Pixel Hunt’s other products based on real-life crises. You go through and make decisions that impact what you can do next, but you’re still stuck in a linear progression of tasks that offer no reward or achievement upon completion.

Maurin insists that it is a game, but what he describes is something more in line with journalism and graphic novels:

"Games do not necessarily have to be fun and trivial," said The Pixel Hunt's Florent Maurin, in an email interview with Polygon. "On the contrary, I took examples such as documentaries and graphic novels to explain that, like every medium, games can tackle any topic. It's all about finding the good distance, with an honest methodology."

The Future Of Media Activism?

Even though I’m skeptical of the gaming label, it is there and its probably not going to go away any time soon. So what will this mean for activist story-tellers of the future looking to explain complex situations to large audiences? It can certainly cost a lot less and be produced in less time than films or documentaries. Perfect for small companies, individual artists, or large NGOs to contract for campaigns.

Can they be expected to generate a profit? Will mainstream gaming companies try their hand at it? I am reluctant to pick up games like this, because I want the escapism, but if there’s an effort to tie a fictional story line to a real-world crisis and send money from the game to relief efforts I would certainly be interested.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve come across any games like this, not just those related to Syria.

[distantwitness]

The War Poet And the Utility of Stoicism

We write war poetry not to make war into art, but to make survival into beauty

Cross posted from my guest blogging at Lawyers, Guns And Money

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric..."

Theodor W. Adorno (1)

An image is worth a thousand words, but a thousand words often create their own images. 

Poetry has long been an important cultural form of bearing witness to tragedy and shaping our understanding of historical events. The poetry produced during and after World War I brims with cynicism and exhaustion and has always haunted me. While I was an undergrad at American University studying peace and conflict resolution, I picked up a text that had been assigned in a friend's class: Against Forgetting, an anthology of twentieth century poetry of witness. From Latin America to Russia, the Holocaust and Palestine, this collection is a tribute to the human desire to build beauty out of pain.

Why would we want to make genocide beautiful? Is it because of a Judeo-Christian notion of suffering that purifies the soul? Romantic poet and illustrator William Blake was famous for his depictions of the suffering of the biblical Job. No, let me posit that is not at all the goal. It is the survival of trauma that we strive to make beautiful.

One of my favorite early 20th century writers, Mervyn Peake, struggled with his role as a secondary witness of human suffering and his attempts to capture it through text. In 1945, Peake became a war artist for the British weekly magazine The Leader. His commissions took him to German concentration camp of Bergen Belsen. He produced several poems from that time and a number of illustrations. Throughout his witnessing, he could never shake a feeling of detachment. Literary critic RW Malsen describes this in the introduction to Peake’s Collected Poems (emphasis mine):

But failing to connect with war and its victims was as horrifying a prospect for Peake as being possessed by them. His famous poem “The Consumptive. Belsen 1945” expresses shock at his own callous reaction to a dying girl he saw in the hosital for concentration camp inmates at Bergen-Belsen. In her face he notes the seeds of a ‘great painting’, and as he mentally nurtures these seeds he finds himself unable to respond as he should to the girl’s suffering. Filled with remorse, he promises in the penultimate line that her dying “shall not be betrayed”, presumably by being transformed into a work of art. Yet by then the work of art has already come into being: it is the poem we just read. (2)

I wonder if perhaps personal detachment for a secondary witness of atrocity is the only way anyone can properly communicate to the rest of the world what they have seen. A survivor obviously cannot be personally detached from their own suffering and if they do choose to put their experience into words it is a process that is as much about personal identity as it is about truth telling. Whatever stoicism the poet or artist adopts in the moment of witness or in the creation of images and text, the experience may still weigh heavily on them. The enormity of the darkness Peake saw would influence his writings and sketches for the rest of his career, even touching his illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. His magnum opus, the Gormenghast novels, are also filled with pieces from the war.

Theodor Adorno is said to have reconsidered the quote that I use above, on the “barbarism” of Auschwitz poetry. However he meant it in the moment, he is correct. To engage in a lyrical depiction of the inhumanity of genocide and war through text or image is to engage with that inhumanity. The only way we can overcome that obstacle is to include the victim and/or survivor as an active subject, not object. No matter who takes the pen or the paintbrush, the narrator of the story must always be them.

Further Reading:

Art After Auschwitz: The Problem With Depicting The Holocaust, Ysabelle Cheung

Gaza: Poetry After Auschwitz, Hamid Dabashi

Images

1. Theodor Adorno by Leandro Gonzalez de Leon

2. Job Rebuked By His Friends, William Blake

3. Mervyn Peake with his sketchbook in Germany, 1945

4. Dying girl at Belsen, Mervyn Peake, 1945

Citations

1. Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983.

2. Peake, Mervyn, and R. W Maslen. Collected Poems. Manchester: FyfieldBooks, 2008. 

[distantwitness]

The Faces of The Dead vs The Faces of The Living

The recent suspected chemical attack by Assadist and Russian forces on the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikoun has produced a number of grisly images that were shared almost immediately on social media. 

Many of the images that were circulated were the pale faces of children, their mouths open and their eyes closed as if sleeping. 

For a moment, I thought I was looking at a collection of dolls. But their stillness is because they are dead. And in that moment, it became unreal. 

In my daily life, I am very fond of seeing children. I flirt with babies on the bus, I listen intently to the conversations of primary school children as they walk past, I dream about putting a tiny wiggly body in a teddy bear onesie. 

The photo of dead children is so shocking to me, because it is so many and they are so very pale, that I cannot understand the horror of what has happened. It doesn’t make sense.  A day or so later, a different image started making the rounds. There were different versions, some that blurred parts that were too sensitive and some that didn’t. But it all conveyed the same emotion. The bodies of two infant twins, wrapped in white, are held close by their mourning father. The focus of our attention is not on the bodies but on what they mean to the man holding them. 

The man is Abdel Hameed Yousef. He lost several family members in the attack, including his wife and their nine month old twins Aya and Ahmad. 

The brutality of the Assad regime and their Russian allies is still denied by many, even by voices in the West. Capturing this father’s grief is not an act of exploitation but a radical act of truth telling. 

The truth is not so much coming from the faces of the dead, but from the faces of those still living. It is from them that we learn what this loss means. It is from them we learn how important it is to let them narrate their own story. We owe it to them not just to see but to listen.

Photos:

1. AP News

[distantwitness]

“Ravished Armenia” and The Fetishization of Female Suffering

In the early days of cinema, film for humanitarian action was sidelined by the desire to entertain.

The Armenian Genocide was a systematic massacre and expulsion of ethnic Armenians from Eastern Anatolia in 1915 to 1917  by Turkish forces that would go on to establish the modern Turkish state. It was perhaps not the first genocide of the 20th century, but it was certainly the first which captured the attention of the global public. 

The American public was particularly concerned by the atrocities because of existing Christian missionary relationships in the region. These Christian missionaries and their supporters formed a charitable organization, American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (later renamed Near East Relief) that conducted fundraising campaigns and spread the testimony of refugees through church networks. Their efforts were recognized by then President Woodrow Wilson who dedicated two days in October to a national fundraising drive for the organization in 1916.

How did ACASR-NER manage to raise more than $100 million from 1915 to 1930? The answer may lie in not only in their production and distribution of advancing film and photography technologies but their decision to employ sexual titillation to garner empathy. 

Early Hollywood Aesthetics of Racism and Female Suffering

The film Ravished Armenia (known as Auction of Souls in the UK) starring a real-life refugee Aurora Madriganian playing her then 16 year old self was released in 1919. It was directed by Hollywood figure Oscar Apfel, produced by Colonel William Selig, with ACASR-NER publicity secretary Nora Waln as the screenwriter. 

In the early days of cinema, when you had to coax audiences out of their homes and into screening venues, the filmmakers made Orientalist aesthetic choices. In one of the posters below the film is described as a “tremendous spectacle”, further demonstrating the “entertaining” nature of the film. 

“The mediation of the Armenian crisis drew heavily on established tropes of the savage Turk, sexually avaricious and cruel, ravishing helpless Christian women...Although such images were designed to dehumanize the Turk and engage audience sympathy, they were clearly designed to titillate as well.” (Torchin, 217)

One scene in particular blends Christian iconography with the sexual fetishization of the “ravished” woman: a line of crucified naked Armenian women. While survivor testimonies describe Turks impaling women they had raped on wooden spikes (an already awful image), the filmmakers wanted to make the message of Christian persecution and sexual violence abundantly clear to the audience. 

Whatever the intention, the result is a humanitarian strategy that further devalues the dignity of victims. Madriganian was given a voice, but only the parts of her story containing sexual violence were acknowledged as worthy of sympathy while simultaneously offering up the female Armenian body as an object of consumption. 

As such, these images in particular are THE icon associated with the film. 

What emerges from the legacy of Ravished Armenia is a lesson about the potential for dramatizations of genocide and mass atrocities to both inspire public action and yet continue the dehumanization of victims in a very gendered way. 

A More Noble Legacy of Genocide at the Movies

Ravished Armenia is a case example of early re-enactments of human suffering captured on film specifically for the purposes of promoting humanitarian action. But it was not the last time an eyewitness to genocide would be involved in a film about the event. 

In 1984 Haing S. Ngor would play a Cambodian journalist who witnesses the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, himself being a doctor who survived one of the camps. He would go on to win an Academy Award. 

In 1993, Auschwitz survivor Branko Lustig would also win an Academy Award as the producer for the Holocaust film Schindler’s List. 

What dramatized films about genocide and mass atrocities have you seen that did justice to the victim’s stories?

Video

1. This was found on YouTube, but given the unofficial nature of the uploader, it may not be the full film with its original soundtrack and/or title cards. However, it gives us a sufficient impression of what the original film was like.

Photos

Film posters and stills from Ravished Armenia courtesy of The Armenian Genocide Museum - Institute.

Bibliography

Torchin, L. "Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Humanitarian Advocacy, And The Formation Of Witnessing Publics". American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 214-220. 

[distantwitness]

Killing for The Camera

When the image of a murder becomes an icon in the digital age

A young, clean shaven man in a dark suit stands in an art gallery. A graying foreign ambassador in black spectacles is speaking to a crowd. The attention is on the ambassador and then it is on the young man who has just pulled out a pistol and shot him in the back. The ambassador falls to the floor. The young man steps forward and tells us why he has done this.

The World Press Photo Competition has declared Turkish photographer Burhan Ozbilici's widely circulated image of Mevlut Mert Altintas after the murder of Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov “Photo of the Year”. This achievement of iconicty could never have been possible had the crime not been optimized for the cameras or without the circulation of the image via social media.

When the off-duty Turkish police officer Altintas murdered Ambassador Karlov on December 19th, he knew there would be photographers. Whether or not we assign the often murky legal designation of terrorism to his crime, the visual is meant to inspire terror as much as it is meant to inspire awe. The intentions of the murderer present a dilemma for news editors everywhere: how to tell the story through photos while remaining in control of the narration.

That control, for better or for worse, is eroded through the popularity of social media and the way it allows audiences to add their own individual framing to the story of a photo. Facebook shares, not the home page of CNN, are a better gauge of what captures popular attention.

“If you have an iconic image on your hands, forget the front page,” writes Mashable author Damon Beres, “You're posting it on Facebook.” Beres estimates the now famous AP image reached approximately nine million people within days through Facebook alone.

We may wonder what sort of havoc may have been unleashed had the radical Baader-Meinhoff Gang, an artistically-inclined West German group responsible for numerous politically motivated killings in the 1960's and 70's, if they had access to GoPro cameras or Instagram. Were they still active, the Gang might very well have applauded Altintas for his choice to exploit cameras that were already on the scene.

In the following days after the assassination, Burhan Ozbilici would be lauded in the press as a profile in “courage”. He was not the only photographer on location, however. Two other photographers, Yavuz Alatan and Hasim Kilic, also took photos that have been presented alongside Ozbilici's. In both sets, the face of Ambassador Karlov is fully visible while Altintas is standing profile to the side of the frame.

Time editor Andrew Katz pointed to the photographer's availability and English skills, in comparison with Alatan and Kilic, as one reason for the image appearing so often in major Western media outlets. But there is also a sense of “action” that draws the viewer in. “Understanding that a photographer faced the gunman to capture the scene also allowed a certain power...” he writes. “It had a nowness that the others didn’t.”

On the web, the New York Times story lead with one of Kilic's photos, pushing the Ozbilici photo further down into the page. Al Jazeera opted to use an Ozbilici photo, however they chose a more passive version where the view is partially obscured. The Guardian also chose to use this photo.

Notably, Russian English language media used the images of Altintas sparingly. In the Russia Today live-blog of the attack and the diplomatic fallout, images of the Ambassador Karlov's body are discreet. However an “unconfirmed” image of Altintas' bloodied and lifeless body after a shootout with authorities is much less subtle.

Similarly Sputnik gave the image of Ambassador Karlov moments before the attack, with a very particular sense of dread, much more space than Altintas' pose with the gun. This is not an admonishment of Russian media for obscuring truth, but rather a demonstration of how presentation of the narrative matters. If the US had such images of the attack on American diplomats in Benghazi available, it is very likely American digital media would have adopted similar framing.

With such a high honor bestowed upon Ozbilici's photograph we have to ask ourselves what it is about the image we are honoring. Is it the bravery of the photographer? Or is it the iconicity of a killer? What does the ease of circulation of violent images mean tell us about our consumption of media? These are questions we may never find truly satisfying answers to, but they are questions we have to ask ourselves over and over. If we stop turning our eyes inwards, we risk giving up control over them completely. Photos

1. Ambassador Andrei Karlov gives a speech moments before the man blurred in the background opens fire, Burhan Ozbilici 19 December 2016

2. The World Press Photo Competition Winner: An Assassination In Turkey, Burhan Ozbilici 19 December 2016 

3. Poster for West German film based on the activities of the Red Faction Army (Baader-Meinhof group) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979

4. Photo of the assassination by Yavuz Alatan

5. Photo of the assassination by Hasim Kilic

[distantwitness]

Nick Ut, Icon-Maker, Retires

Legendary AP photographer, Nick Ut, who won renown with his images of Vietnam, will retire at the end of March 2017. 

This blog previously looked at Ut’s 1972 Pullitzer Prize winning photo “Napalm Girl” and the enduring relationship the photographer had with the child victim of war whose image he made famous. It is a unique story of a photographer from the embattled community he sought to document bringing a sense of personal responsibility into Western photojournalism.

A native of Vietnam, he began working for the Associated Press at 16 and would later become a US citizen. Throughout his professional journey, he worked to ensure that “Napalm Girl” got a name: Kim Phuc.  

In this video, Ut describes the day he came across the children badly burned by napalm and the decision he made to take the photo and then to put the camera away and act as a rescuer.

Photos

1. Kim Phuc poses with Nick Ut, 1973.

2. Kim Phuc and Nick Ut pose together with a signed copy of the famous photo