A Concise Companion to Visual Culture by A. Joan Saab;Aubrey Anable;Catherine Zuromskis; & Aubrey Anable & Catherine Zuromskis

Author:A. Joan Saab;Aubrey Anable;Catherine Zuromskis; & Aubrey Anable & Catherine Zuromskis [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119415473
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2020-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

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In his coverage of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Hetherington continued to reflect on the problem that motivated him to travel with LURD: what makes men kill? Immersive reporting enabled the sustained attention, cumulative knowledge, and emotional connection that Hetherington valued in his reporting. In Afghanistan, this method was sanctioned by the US military’s official policy, inaugurated in 2003, of embedding reporters with military units. Military embedding restricts the reporter’s gaze, in a “concerted effort on the part of the state to regulate the visual field,” as Butler (2010, 64) puts it, and at the same time deepens that gaze through the reporter’s intimacy with his or her subjects.

Photojournalists have often contended with state‐imposed constraints on what they can witness. As David Campbell observes, the “conventions of war photojournalism have been frequently aligned with the state,” and thus “the frames through which the visualization of Afghanistan is enacted” are not without precedent (Campbell 2017, 29). The practice of embedding is not identical, however, with its military applications, but belongs at once to a history of military censorship and to a tradition of immersive reportage. When we consider Hetherington’s photographs from Restrepo in relation to his work in West Africa, we can see that military embedding and immersive reporting are inimical in some respects. Immersion typically deepens and widens the gaze of the observer. Hetherington’s Long Story is a case in point, as its rendering of Liberian society is both intricate and expansive. Military embedding, by contrast, trades breadth in exchange for access and thus deepens and narrows the reporter’s perspective. In the case of Hetherington’s embed with the US military, this narrow gaze enabled a rich and unconventional portrait of American soldiers while ensuring that other people—Afghani civilians and combatants as well as female journalists—all but disappear from the scene of war.

Hetherington’s portraits from the Milton Margai School belong to a sentimental tradition in that they use fond emotion—in this case, the reporter’s attachment to his subjects—to bridge the divide between blindness and sight, childhood and adulthood, the black subject and the white observer. At Restrepo, Hetherington continued to combine the techniques of immersive reporting with sentimental modes of expression: his portraits of sleeping soldiers surely recall the domestic sentimentality of the postmortem photograph and at the same time affirm an eroticized male camaraderie—or brotherhood—that is the stuff of sentimental nationalism. At Restrepo, Hetherington explored the gendered significance of immersive practice as he toggled between a rhetoric of sentimental motherhood and a romance of masculine fraternity—both of which regard war through the lens of deep emotion.

On their first visit to the Korengal Valley, Hetherington and Junger were surprised by the intensity of the fighting there, and Hetherington’s initial photographs were, in his words, “very action oriented. Photojournalism. Reminiscent of classical war photography … because I wanted people to see that there was a lot of fighting going on” (Kamber 2010). But on returning to Restrepo he found that “fighting sort of bored me.” He became interested, increasingly, in

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