Visual Culture Blog

Widely referred to as ‘The Situation Room Photograph’, the image of Barack Obama and his most trusted advisors as they watch the events unfold in Pakistan is rapidly becoming the most viewed photograph on Flickr. The photograph is based on a simple, yet a very powerful dynamic characterized by an exchange of gazes: the viewer looks at the photograph, while the subjects in the photograph look at the ‘situation’ in Pakistan. Tapping into the viewer’s imagination, part of the allure of the photograph thus hinges on, not necessarily in what it depicts, but what it does not depict.

A number of important details in the image clearly stand out. Barack Obama’s leans forward in such a way that his body appears crouched, almost humbled by what he is looking at. In stark contrast to the strength and power projected by a ‘Commander in Chief’, Obama’s figure appears far smaller than most of those around him. His dark jacket has the effect that his upper body appears even slimmer. This sense of scale is photographically and optically further emphasized by the his body falling out of focus. The camera did not focus on him. Most importantly however, in the photograph Obama is surrounded by a large empty space above and behind him. Despite sitting in a small room packed with people, Obama appears alienated, withdrawn even marginalized. This reading is not necessarily counter productive to Obama’s interests. The empty space above Obama in fact emphasis an important assumption: even though he is surrounded by advisors, the final decision rests alone with him. In a sense, Obama’s crouched body signifies humility in recognition of the historical impact of his decision. Here, I am not only referring to the killing of Osama bin Laden, but also, all the legal, ethical and moral ramifications that come with it.

Obama is flanked by Brigadier General Marshall B. Webb, Assistant Commanding General of Joint Special Operations. Webb holds, in the true sense of the word, an exceptional position in the photograph: he is the only person whose full military uniform is visible, he is sitting at the top end of the table further underlining his elevated position within the room, but most importantly, he is, unlike everyone else, not looking at the screen but at a laptop in front of him. He appears to be typing on the keyboard evoking the impression that, to an extent, he is controlling the very events that the others are looking at on the screen.

While Webb’s facial expression appears controlled and emotionless, Hilary Clinton’s expression, on the other hand, displays a far more emotional response to the events unfolding. As she covers her mouth with her hand, Clinton’s hand and face signifies tension, shock, maybe even fear. Following the rule of thirds, the composition of the photograph in fact hinges on Clinton’s gesture and facial expression. A close reading of the photograph thus also points to an overdetermined and problematic gender stereotype: in a room full of men (apart from Audrey Tomason in the very back), Clinton, as woman, shows the strongest emotions. Fully aware of a patriarchal order which holds no place for emotions in politics, Clinton meanwhile quickly denied that her facial expression had anything to do with what she was looking at on the screen as she later said: “I am somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs. So it may have no great meaning whatsoever”. Clinton’s statement suggests that in a male-dominated order, emotional responses are far less associated with compassion, care or concern, then they are with lack of will or weakness. It explains why Clinton swiftly sought to distance herself from any emotions, blaming the hands over her mouth on ‘allergic coughs’.

As a sign how quickly the photograph has gained an iconic status in visual culture, a whole number of situation room spoofs have emerged from the internet. At the forefront of a wave of creativity (and mockery) have been users of the rapidly growing micro-blogging website Tumblr. The instantaneity of ‘tumbleblogging’ has the effect that spoof images are distributed at a vast speed with a global reach. There is for example a situation room spoof photograph which shows everyone with Princess Beatrice’s ridiculous hat she wore for Kate and WIlliams wedding only a few days before Osama bin Laden was killed. In an apparent reference to Aphex Twin’s classic music video for Windowlicker, another spoof shows Barack Obama’s face superimposed on everyone else in the room.

Another spoof photograph displays an uncanny similarity with Sir Peter Blake’s cover art for The Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper. It is perhaps Brigadier General Webb’s uniform that triggered an association with the exaggerated and clicheed depiction of Sergeant Pepper in Blake’s version. The numerous spoofs emerging from the internet however point to a more serious dynamic emerging from the killing of Osama bin Laden. The White House has so far resisted releasing photographs or visual ‘evidence’ of Osama bin Laden’s death. In search for a visual representation of one of the biggest news stories of the year, the press therefore had to refer to the ‘Situation Room Photographs’ as a matter of course. Yet the lack of a visual representation of Osama bin Laden is also the ideological breathing ground for conspiracy theories. I would suggest that the spurt of creativity in response to ‘The Situation Room Photograph’ hinges precisely on the very lack of visual information on Osama bin Laden’s death. As the viewer of ‘The Situation Room Photograph’ reverts to imagining what those in the room are looking at, a small army of tumblebloggers rely on their imagination in creating spoofs which fill the visual vacuum left by the unrepresentability of Osama bin Laden’s death.

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AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev

It is a simple, yet a strikingly powerful image: a woman looks at family photographs found in the rubble of the devastating earthquake and tsunami. The photographs have been meticulously cleaned and left to dry on clothing pegs in a school gymnasium in the town of Natori, Miyagi prefecture. Survivors are given the opportunity to look at the photographs on display in the hope of identifying friends and family members. In some cases, the photograph will be the only thing that is left behind.

AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev

Another photograph by the Russian press photographer Sergey Ponomarev depicts the sheer scale of the collection of photographs, and, by extension, the sheer scale of the disaster. A man is looking at an old family album, so enthralled in the images that he appears to be unaware of the very camera depicting him in the process of looking. In the background, several people can be seen doing exactly the same, sometimes in groups or as individual, trying to come to terms with the images laid out in front of them.

Ponomarev’s photographs are indicative of the complex and troubled relationship between photography and death. In his classic book Camera Lucida, the French semiotician Roland Barthes sought to overcome the death of his mother as he analyzes, over and over again, a photograph of her. In one of his most famous quotes, he writes ‘death is the eidos of photography’. In other words, photography operates on the idea that the photograph will, eventually, outlive the subject photographed. It is this tragic and perverse dichotomy between an inanimate and dead object (the photograph) and the sense of a person liveliness in a photograph – a liveliness particularly apparent in family photographs.

Anonymous, a butsudan in a traditional Japanese household

Apart from referring to an universally applicable attribute of photography, the hope to find photographs from deceased friends and family members in the school gymnasium of Natori also displays a culturally specific phenomenon. Similar to other Asian cultures such as China and Korea, funerals are usually accompanied by a formal portrait with black rope on the top corners of the image. These photographs of the deceased constitute a crucial aspect in the process of mourning: they are later displayed on or above small Bhuddist shrines (butsudan) kept in most traditional Japanese households. In the school gymnasium of Natori, the survivors’ search for a photograph of family and friends is partially motivated by a spiritual process that subscribes great value to the photographic likeliness of a person.

AP Photo/Vincent Yu

In contrast to the sterile and composed black and white portraits associated with the funeral procession and the butsudan, the photographs on display in the school gymnasium represent moments of vivacity and liveliness – moments traditionally perceived as worthy of photographic representation. An image by Hong Kong born photographer Vincent Yu can be read as a collage representing significant life stages: amongst several photographs of new-born babies, there are photographs of weddings, sports days, school groups and holidays. In sum, they are the kind of photographs that represent a lived experience, that situate the subject within a community, that communicate what it means to be human.

As the family photographs in the school gymnasium continue to dry on clothing pegs, those who survived are coming to terms with the discrepancy between the tragic loss of human life and the happiness encountered in the image. The press photographs depicting family photographs are thus deeply self-referential: they are photographs about the very materiality of photography, the collective memories produced by photographs and the photograph, perhaps, constituting a source of comfort.

If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.

Parents posing with their deceased daughter.

In this classic example of post-mortem photography, a mother and a father are sitting next to their deceased daughter. The long exposure of the camera has the eery effect that the daughter is completely in focus, while the parents, the live subjects in the frame, are blurry. The photographer might have even moved the daughter’s mouth so that it appears that she is smiling, while the parents facial expression is strained by their recent loss. The daughter is remembered via the photographic image, or, in other words, the photograph stands in for the missing subject. Here, the successful representation of a deceased family member hinges on the subject appearing alive.

Post-mortem photography tends to be a genre associated with the Victorian era (1837-1901), when photography was a technological novelty unaffordable to the working classes. The implication is that those commissioning a post-mortem photographic portrait of a family member also had the economic means to do so. Yet as much photography might have been celebrated as a novelty in the late 19th century, post-mortem photography is treated like a novelty from todays point of view. The strict association with the Victorian era tends to overlook a number of points: post-mortem photography is a global phenomena popularized in parallel to the inception and reception of the photographic medium all over the world. Post-mortem photography is not exclusive to subjects of the British Empire. Secondly, the association between the Victorian era and post-mortem photography underestimates to what extent a similar variety of this genre continues to be an integral part of contemporary visual culture.

Hippolyte Bayard, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840

From the very beginning, photographers explored death as a significant trope via the new medium photography. In ‘Self Portrait as a Drowned Man’, Hippolyte Bayard for instance theatrically staged his own death as early as 1840. Bayard’s fascination with his own death reflects a fetishistic attitude towards death photographers have explored ever since. Enrique Metinides’ strangely beautiful photographs of accident victims in Mexico depicts a morbid desire to capture the border between life and death. As I have explored in a previous post, the American photographer Weegee displayed an equally voyeuristic attitude in his photographs of car crash victims.

Enrique Metinides, Untitled (Primer plano de mujer rubia arrollada e impactada contra un poste, en avenida Chapultepec, Ciudad de Mexico), 1979

Seiichi Furuya, Contact sheet, 1985

A far more personal interpretation of death can be found on a contact sheet by the Japanese photographer Seiichi Furuya. Married to an Austrian woman and living in a flat in East Berlin, Furuya appears to have been taking pictures shortly before and after his wife committed suicide by jumping of the balcony on the 9th floor. The violence that Furuya’s wife would inflict on herself is foreshadowed by two photographs of tanks taken from a television screen. A photograph of the balcony is followed by the morbid image of Furuya’s wife lying on the ground below. In the presence of the East German police, Furuya appears to photograph through his open jacket to avoid being stopped by the authorities. He photographed his wife’s dead body until the very last instance. As Roland Barthes famously wrote in his book Camera Lucida: ‘Death is the Eidos of Photography’. As Barthes exhaustively argues in his book, the desire to photograph is inextricably linked to the desire of capturing subjects that the photograph will outlive. In Barthes’ case, it’s a photograph of his late mother which prompts his nostalgia through the photographic image.

Andres Serrano, The Morgue (Rat Poison Suicide), 1992

The controversial photographer Andres Serrano photographed dead bodies not in the place where the death occurred, but where it is investigated: the morgue. The titles of the photographs usually inform the viewer about the type of death the victims experienced (‘Jane Doe, Killed by Police’, ‘Knifed to Death’, ‘Burnt to Death’ etc.). The caption thus fulfills an important function with regard to the reading of the image. Here, the viewer becomes an unwitting participant in the evalution of bodily features and anomalies. In above photograph for instance, two distinct aspects stand out: the subjects arms are stiffened while her body hair is, similar to goose-bumps, pointing straight up. Foreshadowing the huge popularity of American TV shows such as CSI, Serrano provokes the viewer into his own crime scene investigation.

Luc Delahaye, Taliban Soldier, 2002

Giovanni Bellini, Pieta

Yet the most common encounter of photography and death can be seen in photojournalism. From Robert Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’ in the Spanish civil war, to more recent conflicts, death is an integral part of representing the horrors of war. The French photographer Luc Delahaye applies the aesthetic of the tableau to his photograph of a deceased Taliban soldier in Afghanistan. The soldier is doubly captured: by his enemies and by Delahaye’s interrogative camera. The soldier’s body position is strongly reminiscent of Christian iconography and more specifically the Pieta. In Delahaye’s photography, Mary morning the death of Jesus is replaced by rubble and dirt. The photograph depicts the loneliness of the soldier in the moment of death. The dirt and rubble, but also the reference to the Pieta, underline the initial perception that the soldier has died.

From Bayard’s staged death, to Victorian era post-mortem photography, Delahaye’s photograph represents the fascination with death, the macabre, the morbid. The main difference between Victorian era post-mortem photography and more recent examples of this type of photography can be found in the way these images are consumed. In the Victorian era the post-mortem photograph was usually a unique object commissioned for purely personal consumption. Contemporary art photographers or photojournalists on the other hand depend on the photograph entering a cycle of consumption. In addition to that, Victorian era post-mortem photography aspired to depict the subject as still alive. The photograph was seen as the medium which would momentarily enliven the deceased subject. More recent examples of post-mortem photography are far less ambiguous in its depiction of death.

I would argue that the way the photograph is consumed and to what extent the subject is enlivened in the image is deeply related to each other. As soon as the image enters a highly complex image economy via the mass media, contemporary post-mortem photography becomes the antidote to Victorian era photographs of the dead. Rather than depicting subjects that look alive, the dead are represented precisely as such.

For more on this topic, please read Audrey Linkman’s book Photography and Death.