Abstract
In Chapter 1, I quoted Walter Benjamin to the effect that viewers can respond to photographs only by proclaiming, ‘What a beautiful world!’ Photographs, according to Benjamin, transform everything — even abject poverty — into objects of enjoyment. In contrast to Benjamin, I argued that the viewer’s immediate response to a given photograph may be repressive but that this repressive moment may subsequently be transformed into critical inquiry of the structures of power and authority visible or alluded to in this photograph. In Chapter 2, I suggested that the second moment of photographic reception may, indeed, be more important than the first moment; it may have a stronger impact on the observer than the first one, tricking the viewer into patterns of inquiry and modes of thought absent from the first moment of reception, turning reception into reflection, including reflection of one’s own subject positions in connection with the conditions depicted in a given image. Photography, thus, may help transform viewers into participant witnesses. From a peace research point of view, such transformation would seem to be especially important in connection with representations of violent death (although not only in connection with violent death but more generally in connection with representations of people living in unfavourable conditions).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in M.W. Jennings, B. Doherty, and T.Y. Levin (eds), Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 87.
Frank Möller, ‘Photographic Interventions in Post-9/11 Security Policy’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 38, No. 2, June 2007, p. 192.
Jim Crace, Being Dead (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 192.
David Campbell, ‘Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 29, Special Issue, December 2003, p. 57.
David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 31.
Ekkehard Krippendorff, Die Kunst, nicht regiert zu werden. Ethische Politik von Sokrates bis Mozart (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 223–4.
Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 98.
David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 210.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 85–6.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory. Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 38.
Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 13.
Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002), p. 192.
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 73.
For a meticulous chronology of the wars, see Aniceto Afonso and Carlos de Matos Gomes, Os Anos da Guerra Colonial —1961.1975 (Lisbon and Matosinhos: QuidNovi, 2010). For a rather sympathetic analysis of the Portuguese strategy, based on Portuguese sources, see John P. Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War 1961–1974 (Sulihull: Helion, 2012).
Altino Magalhães, Monumento aos Combatentes do Ultramar (1961–1974) (Lisbon: Estúdios Europress, 2007), p. 17.
Patrick Chabal, ‘Lusophone Africa in Historical and Comparative Perspective’, in Patrick Chabal with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert, and Elisa Silva Andrade, A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 14–15. Ill-advised promotion plans ‘enabl[ing] non-professional (conscripted) officers to enter the ranks of the professional officers by attending the Military Academy for just over a year’ instead of the four-year course for professional officers let, in September 1973, to the foundation of the Movimento das Forças Armadas, which would play a crucial role in the coup d’état and the following revolution in April 1974.
See Hugo Gil Ferreira and Michael W. Marshall, Portugal’s Revolution: Ten Years On (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 29.
Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle (London: Stage 1, 1969), p. 110.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude by Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon, trans. R. Zenith (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), p. 292.
This logic is sadly familiar to students of politics, of course. For a trenchant criticism, see Ekkehard Krippendorff, Staat und Krieg. Die historische Logik politischer Unvernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985). In the context of German colonial policies, Krippendorff calls into question the sense of erecting an empire, the mere sustenance of which subsequently consumes all resources (p. 24).
The Atlantic expansion was a ‘logical continuation’ of the slave trade, which ‘started in the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century and then moved westwards’. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Orlando: Academic Press, 1974), pp. 43–4.
For the historical context, see Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds), Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
According to Simpson, 9/11, p. 2, the Vietnam War ‘proved too divisive and unresolved to allow for ready representation’. The same can be said of the Portuguese colonial wars. Negotiations, initiated by the Associação de Comandos, concerning the construction of a Monumento aos mortos da Guerra do Ultramar de 1961/75 started only in February 1985; see Magalhães, Monumento, p. 19. Note the planned dedication ‘aos mortos’ rather than ‘aos combatentes’ which is in accordance with the French tradition of monuments aux morts. See Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 78.
António Lobo Antunes, Knowledge of Hell, trans. C.E. Landers (Champaign, London, and Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), p. 205.
For an exception, see the Monument gegen Faschismus, Krieg und Gewalt — für Frieden und Menschenrechte in Hamburg-Harburg (Germany) by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz. This monument was designed to disappear in the ground after the transfer of the responsibility to remember, from the monument to the visitors, who, by adding their names to the monument, acknowledged such responsibility. See James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).
José Luís Porfírio, ‘Manuel Botelho — Aerogramas para 2010’, in Isabel Carlos (concepção), Professores, trans. J. Elliott (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2010), p. 72. This seems to be changing, given the number of recent publications on the wars, including memoirs and collections of photographs.
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009), p. 103.
Jenny Edkins, ‘Exposed Singularity’, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 9, No. 4, October 2005, p. 372.
Fred Ritchin, In Our Own Image (New York: Aperture, 1999), p. 101.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Frank Möller
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Möller, F. (2013). On Combatants and (Other) Victims. In: Visual Peace. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137020406_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137020406_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43749-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02040-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)