Frank Möller

Photographic Interventions in Post-9/11 Security Policy

Regardless of its cultural and discursive turn, the field of security studies has not yet paid sufficient attention to visual culture. In particular, approaches that focus on the articulation of security have been quite inattentive to images. With respect to post-9/11 security policy, it is argued here that the images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center have become not only a legitimacy provider for security policy but also part of every persons visual reservoir and pictorial memory, on which the successful articulation of security in part depends. It is therefore suggested to link the study of securitization with the study of both images and pictorial memory. The present article, by discussing three visual projects revolving around 9/11, looks for desecuritizing potential in photography and examines the extent to which photography can offer oppositional interventions in security policy. However, the surplus meaning that images inevitably carry with them, while limiting the securitizing potential of images, also reduces the extent to which opposition can rely on images.

The looking/not looking dilemma

When confronted with images of war and other forms of human suffering, not looking is not an option, not only because we are permanently exposed to images but also because it would not seem to be a morally tenable position. However, looking at images of human suffering is often said to prolong this very suffering and to fix human subjects as victims. Especially when acts of violence have been committed in order to produce images of these very acts the relationship between viewing the images and participating in the acts of violence qua viewer appears to be uncomfortably close indeed. Thus, looking is not an option, either. This article, in the first part, engages with standard criticisms of photography, especially with accusations according to which photographs aestheticise that which they depict and desensitise their viewers. In the second part it discusses Alfredo Jaars and Jeff Walls work in order to show possible ways to circumvent the looking/not looking dilemma.

Engaging the limits of visibility: Photography, security and surveillance

In this article, we introduce selected photographs in order to engage with their capability for questioning the representational codes dominant in the visualization of security policy and surveillance. We argue that the intangible, abstract workings of state power in connection with security, surveillance and current forms of warfare can aptly be represented and challenged by means of photography. By engaging the limits of visibility, the selected photographs explore the limits of photojournalism and security alike. First, they operate by making visible what is normally invisible, though they also blur the boundaries of the seen and the unseen. Second, they function outside the discursive-representational regime within which photojournalism, based on a powerful tradition, operates, and within which media and security professionals visualize security. By so doing, they avoid involuntary incorporation into and support of this very regime that simultaneously they help understand. Third, they visualize structures and institutions rather than people, thus avoiding ethical dilemmas in connection with representations of people in pain. Discussing selected photographs by Trevor Paglen and Simon Norfolk, we show what these photographs do to alter the discursive frame within which the politics of security is understood. Such alteration facilitates understanding of the extent to which current societies are penetrated by the ideas and practices of security and surveillance, and furthers investigation of the discursive structures that enable such penetration.

Security and Marginality Arctic Europe after the Double Enlargement

It is argued in this article that after the EU and NATO shift of attention towards eastern Europe, Arctic Europe is again at a turning point behind which a remarginalization and a silent remilitarization (which is often advanced in terms of environmental protection) loom. After a decade during which time the region enjoyed considerable international attention other than military, it is now facing the possibility of a loss in attention resulting from both the Northern Dimension’s development towards, or replacement by, an Eastern Dimension and the decrease in US interest in northern Europe. Yet, marginalization may also be seen as a possibility for the Arctic to regain its own political subjectivity which, resuming lines of thought introduced in the early 1990s, may be understood in terms of a universal Arctic.

Rwanda Revisualized: Genocide, Photography, and the Era of the Witness

Engaging with the literature on visual representations of human suffering, being a witness, and trauma, this article discusses visual representations of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and especially the art photography of Alfredo Jaar, Robert Lyons, and Jonathan Torgovnik of the aftermath of the genocide. It explores the conditions in which photography can succeed in disrupting stereotypical political interpretations of the killings. Art photography, it is argued, may help transform the viewers from being consuming spectators into being participant witnesses who self-critically reflect upon their own subject positions in relation to the conditions depicted in the image. By discussing photography of the aftermath of the genocide, the article acknowledges the unrepresentability of genocide; by focusing on visual representations, it reflects the extent to which political space is nowadays constituted by means of images; by concentrating on Rwanda, it contributes to the necessary process of examination and self-examination in connection with the killings.

Capitalizing on Difference: A Security Community or/as a Western Project:

The development of a security community in the north of Europe has been made difficult by two trends that could be observed throughout the 1990s. On the analytical level, a shift of emphasis from compatible to common values has substantially altered the original conception of a security community. Applied to Europes north, this has been accompanied by calls for adaptation by the former socialist part of the region to norms and values prescribed by the West. This may result in a weak internalization of norms and values that, in turn, may be insufficient for the development of the sense of community necessary to a security community. On the policy level, what has already been achieved in regard to a security communitys core value - peaceful change - seems to have been frequently underestimated, in particular with respect to the achievements of the Russian Federation. Taken together, both trends have resulted in an underestimation of the steps already taken towards security community-building in the north of Europe.

Photography after Empire: Citizen-Photographers or Snappers on Autopilot?

In this paper, it is argued that it is given not only to artists but also to citizen-photographers, both professional and non-professional, to make a new world order. Rather than being unreflective and unpolitical snappers on autopilot, citizen-photographers help create what Jacques Rancière calls a “new landscape of the possible.” Instead of rehearsing standard criticisms of photography, especially criticisms of representations of people in pain, the paper suggests looking at such representations in search for new ways through which subjects of photography may exert political influence. The paper emphasizes that in the digital age the paradigmatic subject position is being alone together—being spatially apart from but virtually a part of a larger community. It is through visual/virtual networks and in communication with others that the individual may exert political influence. Digital technologies, it is argued, offer an ever-growing number of people the chance to become agents of their own photography rather than being subjects of the photography of others. Such photography may help to disclose and denaturalize established positions as well as to change and diversify discursive patterns.

Imaging and Remembering Peace and War

The social and cognitive frames within which questions of peace and war are negotiated are, to a large extent, shaped by images. This frame cannot be thought of without memory because it is memory that crucially helps us order and assign meaning to incoming information, visual and otherwise, and make sense of the world. Without the capability to remember, acts of articulation, representation, and signification would hardly have any meaning at all, and the social construction of knowledge on, for example, questions of peace and war would hardly be possible. Representations depict memories of experience rather than the experience itself, and every representation is influenced by the representations of previous events that we are already carrying with us as memories. Because we are living in a culture dominated by images and a world dominated by visual representations, every person carries with them a huge reservoir of pictures and images interfering with, and influencing the perception and memory of, every occurrence.

Witnessing violence through photography

ABSTRACTIn this article, I think about photojournalists and citizen photographers as, respectively, political and moral witnesses to violence, the one testifying to what it is like, the other showing what it feels like to live in extraordinary circumstances. This distinction is Avishai Margalit’s, developed in his work on bearing witness to twentieth-century totalitarianism. To explore the potentialities of citizen photography decoupled from established photojournalistic discourses on documentation and verifiability, I think with Margalit, but in a different context, about what it means to be a photographic witness to violence. Focusing on what it feels like to be exposed to extraordinary circumstances and thus emphasizing the affective dimensions of being a witness makes us understand that the victim’s truth need not reflect objective, empirically measurable and realistically photographable facts. It can be photographed in other ways, especially if photographed by citizen photographers who qualify as mor...

The Implicated Spectator

Photographs of war, famines, atrocities, and other forms of human suffering may aestheticize suffering and anaesthetize emotions. Quite regardless of the photographer’s intention, they often fail to trigger a political response to that which they depict. Indeed, photographs are often accused of having a dulling and desensitizing effect, reflecting processes of habituation and self-protection on the part of the viewers who might read them as evidence of their own political and moral failure to prevent this very suffering. However, “the limits of photography are not the limits of art” (Danto 2006) and photography is not as limited as it is often accused of being.1