By Fred Ritchin
The recent murders by ISIS f foreign journalists and aid workers sparked enormous outrage and condemnation.
But what seemed to have provoked much of the fury were the videos of the beheadings that were produced and distributed by the murderers themselves.
Committing horrific acts and then broadcasting them is an attempt to humiliate the victims and, by extension, to mock those in their home countries whose values they represent. No one else, ISIS seems to say, can report upon, interpret, or judge their organization’s actions, other than themselves.
In some ways these videos resemble what has been called “happy slapping” among adolescents – someone is beaten up, or sexually attacked, and the video of the event that is circulated afterwards becomes a re-victimization that can, at times, lead to the suicide of the victim. Social media, or what might in this case be called anti-social media, aggravates the initial horror to the point where there seems to be no escape.
But there are crucial differences. In that kind of digitally enabled bullying, not only are the attackers at fault, but so are the others in the community who view and pass along the video with an expectation of voyeuristic enjoyment. But in the case of the videos produced by ISIS, viewers are not complicit in the murders and no social bond is being broken or frayed by watching them (looking at something is not endorsing it). In fact, carefully watching the videos may well be a way to understanding the mindset of the murderers and the threats that they pose. It can also lead to a political will to punish the perpetrators.
There is more to consider, however, as became clear in the debate on social media and elsewhere about whether to post these videos online. One had to take into account the horrific character of the videos, their invasion of privacy, as well as a desire not to make the individuals’ deaths a spectacle, potentially providing a public relations coup for ISIS. But looking at a video of the last seconds of life of those killed can also be seen as an act of empathy with them, as well as with their families and friends, sharing some of their grief and their revulsion. Just because murderers want people to look at these videos does not mean that one should not, or should, comply – one can view them in many ways that deny their intended messages. As we have learned from literary theory, the reader or viewer, not only the author, determines meaning.
One way of interpreting these videos (and there are others that were made for regional viewing that are just as horrific, showing massacres and beheadings of local people) is that ISIS forced their captives into what were essentially snuff films, presenting them as individuals but denying any sense of agency on their part or any sense of redemption in the killing. It is not, as in the Bible, Abraham being told by God to spare Isaac, but a man, his face concealed, who is announcing that members of his group can kill with impunity any others unlike themselves. There are no scruples, no room for discussion, and no other possible ending – due process is not part of their
vocabulary.
The executions are also an assertion of a media monopoly – not only are the ISIS video creators the central protagonists in this image war, but as producers and directors they also control the exclusive rights to its representation. Unlike the attacks of September 11, when the production and distribution of the imagery was left to others, ISIS does not allow individual interpretations by outsiders. After September 11, photographs by amateurs and professionals alike were used as part of a process of grieving and remembering,
because many of those depicting the suffering did so out of empathy, unlike those who aim to humiliate and re-victimize.
Contemporary image wars usually have tried to conceal activities that may not jibe with international humanitarian laws, rather than flaunt those that can be perceived as war crimes. During the conflict in Gaza neither Hamas nor Israel wanted the media to accompany their combatants, for example, but instead to focus on civilian casualties on each side. In Syria a military police photographer, code-named Caesar, had to smuggle out tens of thousands of photographs of prisoners whom he asserted had been tortured and executed in secret by the Assad regime. The impact of previous imagery on world opinion – as the famous 1972 photograph of a young girl being napalmed in Vietnam, or the one of the summary execution of a captive on a Saigon street in 1968 – continues to play a cautionary role.
In the case of ISIS, which is not interested in working within international norms, an image war of concealment makes little sense. The creation of horrors for public consumption is both an explicit rejection of such conventions as well an appeal to nihilistic youth who are being encouraged to join, sanctioning their own rage and frustration. In their version of the image war, the shooter in the video game actually gets to kill the target, as brutally as possible; the man with the knife gets to mock the world’s greatest military. ISIS has stepped in with its own macabre form of cinema verité, and by doing so has managed to temporarily dominate the image war.
What is the best antidote to the image wars assaulting us? Certainly we have to try to seek a more rational explanation of why such images are being made. In the case of ISIS, are the people making these images powerful, or desperate? Are we being asked to watch holy war, or pornography? And by looking at this excruciating imagery, are we being complicit or are we doing our duty as citizens in a globalized world?
This act of resistance may be carried out in solidarity with those who have been so awfully victimized. One can recite their names.
May their memory endure.
Ritchin is Dean of the School at the International Center of Photography. His last book is Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (Aperture 2013).