Abstract
Opening part 3 of the book, This chapter returns to discussions anticipated in chapters 2 and 5: to questions pertaining to witnessing, remembering and forgetting. I ask what forms of knowledge—including knowledge on peace—photojournalists and citizen photographers produce. In order to answer this question, I engage with Avishai Margalit’s writings on political and moral witnesses and argue for a non-hierarchical approach to collective memories, accepting different memories as equally valuable in terms of knowledge production. This does not include moral equivalence.
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Notes
- 1.
Susan Sontag , Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), p. 115.
- 2.
David Rieff , In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 57.
- 3.
Andreï Makine, The Life on an Unknown Man, trans. G. Strachan (London: Sceptre, 2011), p. 68.
- 4.
- 5.
Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man, p. 154.
- 6.
Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 217–218.
- 7.
See Maurice Halbwachs , On Collective Memory , edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
- 8.
Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 40.
- 9.
Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 4.
- 10.
See Annette Wieviorka , The Era of the Witness, trans. J. Stark (London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
- 11.
Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 12.
The paper’s original title was ‘The Truth of the Witness and the Truth of the Artist: Witnessing, Remembering and Forgetting ’. Many thanks to the participants in the panel Artistic Interventions, chaired by Paul Lowe , for thoughtful and helpful comments.
- 13.
Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller, ‘Witnessing in Contemporary Art and Politics’, in K. Lindroos and F. Möller (eds.), Art as a Political Witness (Opladen, Berlin, and Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2017), p. 36.
- 14.
Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). The following page references in the text are to this book.
- 15.
Margalit’s moral witness is not identical with Primo Levi ’s true witness. Levi’s true witness has first-hand experience of suffering but has not survived this experience. For Levi, a survivor is not a true witness; for Margalit, a survivor can be a moral witness . It is irritating, however, that ‘observers who are not themselves the suffering victims can serve as moral witnesses’ (pp. 149–150) in which case they were moral witnesses, but not paradigmatic, ‘central, uncontroversial, standard cases’ (p. 159). Such standard cases only refer to the personal and actual experience of suffering.
- 16.
Essentially, the issue here is one of trust. We trust somebody’s testimony because we trust him or her.
- 17.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that, as of June 21, 2018, 28 journalists were killed in 2018. Since 1992, 1305 journalists were killed. See https://cpj.org (accessed June 21, 2018).
- 18.
With regard to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, for example, Misha Glenny reports that from the beginning of the violent escalation of the conflict , ‘journalists were even prized targets’. See Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 121.
- 19.
This section draws from an article published as ‘Witnessing Violence Through Photography’, Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Contemporary Thought, Vol. 7 (2017), No. 2–3, pp. 264–281. I use the material here, adapted to the purposes of this chapter, by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. See also Stuart Allan , ‘Blurring Boundaries: Professional and Citizen Photojounalism in a Digital Age’, in M. Lister (ed.), The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 183–200.
- 20.
See Stuart Allan (ed.), Photojournalism and Citizen Journalism: Co-operation, Collaboration and Connectivity (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
- 21.
Jacques Rancière , The Emancipated Spectator, trans. G. Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009), p. 93.
- 22.
Jerry L. Thompson , Truth and Photography: Notes on Looking and Photographing (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), p. 3.
- 23.
Quoted in Errol Morris , Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) (New York: Penguin, 2011), p. 193.
- 24.
See Sontag , Regarding the Pain of Others, pp. 36–37.
- 25.
Frank Möller, ‘Celebration and Concern: Digitization, Camera Phones and the Citizen-Photographer’, in C. Martin and T. von Pape (eds.), Images in Mobile Communication: New Content, New Uses, New Perspectives (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwisenschaften, 2012), p. 66.
- 26.
Fred Ritchin , Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (New York: Aperture, 2013), p. 118.
- 27.
Louie Palu, ‘Image Control in the Age of Terror’, in Art as a Political Witness, p. 59.
- 28.
See Möller, ‘Witnessing Violence’, pp. 264–269.
- 29.
Margalit, The Ethics of Memory , p. 167.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 155.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 168 (italics added).
- 32.
David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, Introduction by John Berger (New York: Aperture, 2003).
- 33.
Frank Möller, ‘Rwanda Revisualized: Genocide, Photography, and the Era of the Witness’, Alternatives, Vol. 35 (2010), No. 2, p. 130.
- 34.
In a similar fashion, Thompson, Truth and Photography, pp. 17–48, follows the trajectory of photographic discourses from verisimilitude to correspondence between the picture and the experience of the artist, and from this correspondence to the truth of the subject depicted (see also John Roberts , Photography and Its Violations [New York: Columbia University Press, 2014], p. 150). The truth of the victim is a kind of truth even if it cannot be corroborated by factual evidence .
- 35.
José Eduardo Agualusa , My Father’s Wives, trans. D. Hahn (London: Arcadia Books, 2008), p. 222.
- 36.
Ritchin , Bending the Frame, p. 11.
- 37.
Margalit, The Ethics of Memory , p. 155.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 151.
- 39.
Wieviorka , The Era of the Witness.
- 40.
Frank Möller, ‘Colonial Wars and Aesthetic Reworking: The Artist as Moral Witness ’, Arts and International Affairs, Vol. 2 (2017), No. 1, p. 35.
- 41.
Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 3.
- 42.
Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 43.
- 43.
Wieviorka , The Era of the Witness, p. 101.
- 44.
Margalit, The Ethics of Memory , p. 181.
- 45.
See note 4.
- 46.
Rieff , In Praise of Forgetting, p. 57.
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Möller, F. (2019). Remembering Together. In: Peace Photography. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03222-7_8
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