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Фара КАРАПЕТЯН / Farrah KARAPETIAN | Жесты стреляющего / The Gunman Gestures |
Фара КАРАПЕТЯН / Farrah KARAPETIAN
Университет Сан-Диего, Калифорния, США Доцент фотографии, художница
University of San Diego, California, USA Artist and Assistant Professor of Photography farrahkarapetian@gmail. com
ЖЕСТЫ СТРЕЛЯЮЩЕГО
Данная статья посвящена рецепции фотографии Бурхана Озбилиджи, на которой запечатлено нападение Мевлюта Мерта Алтынташа на Андрея Карлова, российского посла в Турции, и обстоятельствам современного восприятия фотографий. В статье высказывается предположение, что, несмотря на то что ни зрители, ни сами фотографии не претерпели существенных изменений со временем, что-то всё же изменилось. Современная фотография - это индекс скорее других фотографий, чем реального мира, но закончить на этом -значит навлечь на себя риск оставить зрительский опыт в тупике бодрийяровского симулякра. Статья предлагает, учитывая соединение в симулякре автора, действующего лица и зрителя, выявить обновлённую возможность действия в каждой из этих позиций - не вопреки, а благодаря особенностям распространения изображения в цифровой среде.
Ключевые слова: фотография, симулякр, цифровая фотография, аналоговая фотография, зритель, медиа, индекс, знак.
THE GUNMAN GESTURES
This paper uses the reception of Burhan Ozbilici's photograph of Mevlut Mert Altintas' assassination of Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, to unpack the circumstances of contemporary viewership of photographs. The paper suggests that while neither viewers nor photographs have essentially changed over time, something has. The contemporary photograph indexes other photographs rather than the real world, but ending on this note risks leaving view-ership at the impasse of Baudrillard's simulacra. Instead, the paper suggests that, given the conflation of author, actor, and audience in the simulacra, it is possible to recognize renewed agency in each position -not despite the digital consequences of dissemination, but because of them.
Key words: photography, simulacra, digital, analogue, viewership, media, index, sign.
38
Here is a picture; it arrives on a screen, of varying resolution depending upon who sees it where. In it, a man in a black suit stands to the left of the center of the frame. His left hand is raised; its index finger is also raised. His right hand is lowered, but holds a gun pointed at the ground with fingers extended as if ready to shoot. Immediately behind him, stage left, lies a man, splayed out on the ground, seemingly dead.
The ground is immaculate. It shines. Behind both of them, on equally immaculate walls, hang pictures. Even out of focus, they appear to be photographs, and appear to depict buildings in pastoral landscapes during the day. They hang from wires in black frames, as black as the suit of the gunman and as black as his hair.
Burhan Ozbilici, a photographer, took this picture. It circulated via the Associated Press
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Фара КАРАПЕТЯН / Farrah KARAPETIAN | Жесты стреляющего / The Gunman Gestures |
(AP), at first with the caption, "An unnamed gunman gestures after shooting the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey, Dec. 19, 2016. A gunman opened fire on Russia's ambassador to Turkey at a photo exhibition on Monday. The Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman said he was hospitalized with a gunshot wound."1 This is a caption written according to the formula for captions described in the AP Stylebook, which indicates that the first sentence of a caption should state the name of the subject(s), the place, and the day, month, and year when the photograph was taken. The second sentence should provide any further clarification necessary to provide information to a reader. A third sentence should not be necessary. The caption here, then, is one sentence longer than is conventional, and the first sentence contains the most important information: the gunman gestures.
The conventional index
Photographs are colloquially approached in terms described by Charles Pierce in the 19th century. In Pierce's division of signs, a sign stands for an object, creating an interpretant.2 The sign that stands for an object, according to Pierce, may be in some combination icon, index, and/or symbol.3 Most frequently, photography is read as the
1 Russia Joins Investigation Into Ambassador Andrey Karlov's Assassination in Turkey. (2016, December 20). Retrieved from URL:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-joins-
investigation-ambassador-andrey-karlov-s-
assassination-turkey-n698341
2 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce. Volume II: Elements of Logic. Book II: Speculative Grammar. Chapter II: Division of Signs. §1 Ground, Object, and Interpretant. Paragraph 228. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960).
3 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce. Volume
II: Elements of Logic. Book II: Speculative Grammar.
Chapter III: The Icon, Index, and Symbol. §3 The Na-
kind of sign known as an index: "physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair, but the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this connection, except remarking it, after it is es-tablished."4 A door is indexed by its knock. The index of Ozbilici's photograph is the closest connection with which it seems to pair, especially physically, with an object. Typically, then, Ozbilici's photograph would appear to index that which was performed in front of the light-sensitive surface: the assassination. The photograph itself has not essentially changed: it does index an assassination. This, however, is not what the caption in question emphasizes, nor, as we will see, what the cultural consequence of the photograph in question became.
Roland Barthes' "studium" is the general commitment of the photograph in which the interpretant participates culturally. The gunman in the 3g
photograph is named Mevlut Mert Altintas. He -
was an off-duty Turkish police officer. Karlov was delivering a speech at the opening of an exhibition of Turkish photography of the Russian countryside entitled, "Russia through Turks' eyes" at the Cagdas Sanat Merkezi centre for modern arts in Ankara's Cankaya district. Ozbilici was there to photograph the opening. At this level, the studium of this photograph is still an assassination. The studium, is, also, culturally received, and so it is more than, in this case, an assassination. After killing Karlov, Altintas shouted in Arabic and Turkish, "Do not forget Aleppo; do not forget Syria."5 He said, "We die in Aleppo; you die here." Perhaps, then, the subject of the photograph is the Syrian Civil War. Conflicting allegiances and pol-
ture of Symbols. Paragraph 299. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960).
4 Ibid.
5 Russian ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov shot dead in Ankara. (2016, December 20). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38369962
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icies in Russia and Turkey in terms of Syria and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) contributed to protests in Istanbul in July 2016, a few months before Atlintas Killed Karlov. Perhaps the studium of the photograph is the relationship between two countries - Turkey and Russia -as they support different endgames in the south.
For Barthes, the photograph goes beyond this testimony; it is pierced, pricked, wounded, and punctuated by what he calls the "punctum." The photographs on the wall behind the assassin include some Slavic architecture and a horse's ass. The dead man's tie floats improbably. These things are memorable, as is the underweight way in which the assassin's rectangular belt buckle sits his belly. Roland Barthes spoke not only of the famous punctum, but also of a "gamut of 'surprises'" (32) in which a photographer's practice can participate, all of which are still available: "the rare", a "gesture apprehended", "prowess", "the contortions of technique", and the "lucky find." Certainly Ozbilici's picture exhibits a rare referent and a lucky find, an arrested gesture, and the prowess of a photographer who did not run away in the event of violence. If there are no contortions of technique here, it is no surprise; the analogue documentary photographer's technique has simply carried forward into the premise of the digital documentary photographer's technique, seamlessly, with its promise of non-intervention into the scene of the exposure and processing of the image. Neither studium, punctum, nor surprises are absent in this photograph, then, even if as we will see, not primary in its reception; and so the photograph as codified in the twentieth century has not changed.
The media has changed - not essentially, but in terms of its capacity to be everywhere at once. In fact, this is the reason the Associated Press was born: "in 1846, five New York City
newspapers funded a pony express route... to bring news of the Mexican War north faster than the U.S. Post Office could deliver it."6 People have always wanted more news faster, so that instinct has not essentially changed, nor the idea that the news should arrive credibly, whether verbal or visual. There were newspapers, such as the Arab News, which published editorials fearing - hoping? - that Karlov's assassination might be a "Franz Ferdinand moment."7 In other words, Al-tintas' murder of Karlov might invoke yet another cultural reference: the catalyst for World War I, when Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand, and his wife. On 29 June, 1914, the San Diego Tribune ran the story of the Archduke's assassination without any image at all. The New York Times ran it with photographic portraits of Ferdinand and his wife, alive, laid out in cameo oval designs as if in a locket. Photographers were 40
not following Ferdinand's car when Princip found -
opportunity to shoot him, nor were random onlookers equipped with cameras. Photographs from the day bookend the assassination, but do not include it: one showing Ferdinand descending steps earlier in the day, and one showing Princip being apprehended later. Neither of these photographs index the assassination or describe its studium, and so they were not what was widely used in the news immediately after the assassination.
Ferdinand's assassination did not go without its visuals, however. On 12 July, 1914, Le Petit Journal ran an illustration8, as did La Domenica
6 Our Story. (n.d.) Retrieved November 28, 2019, from Associated Press website. URL:
https: //www. ap. org/about/our-story/
7 Editorial: Hopefully not a Franz Ferdinand moment. (2016, December 19). Arab News. Retrieved from https: //www. arabnews. com/node/ 1026711/editorial
8 Illustration of assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. Illustration from Le Petit Journal, July 12, 1914. (Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via
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del Corriere 3-12 July 19149, of Ferdinand dying, his wife also in a state of crisis, Princip shooting, the driver of the cab shocked, and soldiers running to assist. These painted illustrations by various illustrators differ from one another in their detail, such as from which direction the assassin approached the car. The illustrations could not be presented in a court of law to defend an account of from which direction the shots were fired. The intention to relay news is different from the intention to provide evidence, however: these paintings have studii identical to the studium conveyed by language and to the studium a photograph would have conveyed had a photographer been present at the assassination: a man of political significance was shot in a car. Language and then painting did the job that photography could not do at the time, and both language and painting did it fine. The job that they each would have done if they could was to convey a truth about what happened when Ferdinand was assassinated. What matters here is that neither the concept of the studium nor the act of approaching a truth is the exclusive province of language, painting, or photograph. When what is at stake is the news, all such mediums try. What matters also is that, if the photograph has not changed essentially, neither has the media.
The index of other indices
A century later, the photograph of Karlov's assassination is not positioned as evidence either, but rather as the pursuit of some other truth. People on the internet looking at the image of Kar-
Getty Images) Retrieved from https://www.getty-images.com/detail/news-photo/illustration-from-le-petit-j ournal-july- 12-1914-news-photo/526102110
9 Illustration of assassination of Archduke Ferdinand
and his wife in Sarajevo. Illustration from La Domeni-
ca del Corriere, July 12, 1914. (Achille Beltrame) Retrieved from https://www.listal.com/list/la-domenica-del-corriereworld-war
lov's assassination did not discuss the Syrian war, nor did they discuss Karlov's killing, nor did they discuss Franz Ferdinand. They did not discuss the studium or the punctum of the photograph. They discussed the gesture, or, in the language of the internet, they memed the gesture. The gesture's lineage seemed to begin with Harvey Keitel in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, or Uma Thurman in his Pulp Fiction, dancing with John Travolta. She seemed to inherit her move from Travolta himself, in Saturday Night Fever. Travolta appeared to have been quoting Elvis. The internet went so far as to suggest that the Statue of Liberty's posture, holding its torch aloft, is gene-ologically related to the posture of Altintas. People began to imagine that the image belonged in a fiction, such as a meme around a fake PlayStation game called "Hitman: Absolution" featuring the photograph. Kurt Andersen tweeted, "the great
photojournalism of 2016 is continuing to resemble -
stills from a scary, not-entirely-realistic movie."10 Yet, of course, the image is not a still from a movie; it is real. The Associated Press sets standards for those journalists with whom it is associated. They state: "AP visuals must always tell the truth. We do not alter or digitally manipulate the content of a photograph in any way." They illustrate on their website the level of color correction that is acceptible, for example, in order for an image to qualify as unmanipulated. Studio portraits are even captioned to "avoid misleading viewers to believe that the moment was spontaneously captured." This photographically fixed moment in Ankara was spontaneous; even the photographer's shooting of it was unplanned, as he
10 @KBAndersen. "As I said a few weeks ago, the great photojournalism of 2016 is continuing to resemble stills from a scary, not-entirely-realistic movie." Twitter, 20 Dec 2016, 6:42 am, URL: https://twitter.com/KBAndersen/status/811220250930 905090.
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was not exactly on duty himself, but had simply brought his camera to an exhibition opening. Yet the significance of the photograph, for viewers, is rooted in its relationship to other images, rather than to the events indexed by the photograph, or to the larger political context potentially influencing the photograph's interpretation.
This is a picture that even the art critic Jerry Saltz took the time to aggrandize. The day after the picture arrived on screens all around the world, Saltz published an essay considering this photograph as "history painting." He said he had "never seen anything like" it, and that it was "surreal", "uncanny", and "in some very painful ways, beautiful."11 What made him write about this photograph was not its political implications or its subject; it is its relationship to other images. He says that in the photographs from this event, "the poses are almost classical, frozen, or rehearsed as if from theater, ballet, painting, or mannequin display." He imagines that this photograph is a "Ca-ravaggio; the prelude to David's Oath of the Ho-ratii; or one of Robert Longo's large black-and white Falling Men drawings of figures in dramatic arrested motion - human beings seemingly cut out from the world, thrust onto this pictorial stage." Saltz imagines that the reason the image has struck him so is because it is in "perfect focus", or because it was taken with "gallery lighting", which "balances and color corrects everything", or because it was taken "from eye level. The photographer isn't running away... He or she values frontality, clarity, structure, density, form." The image is "radically self-determined."
These are some of many reasons why an art critic might align this image with other hall-
marks of significance from other images he knows. Such an argument knows no end, however; it is the ultimate mise en abyme, as a vaguely comparable Caravaggio, such as David with the Head of Goliath from 1610, is based on the Bible, or David's Oath is based on the story of the Ho-ratii in Livy's History of Rome. The references are potentially infinite. While critiques of photography may always involve references, in the case of Ozbilici's photograph, the references upstage the conventional things to which the photograph points - those things on the other end of the photosensitive surface, that one would normally imagine the photograph indexes. It is possible that this too was the mindset of the assassin, before he assassinated or even planned to assassinate. The subject of the photograph knew that he would be photographed, and this altered his performance of the assassination. It catalyzed the assassination. 42
Photography made a man die, and we celebrated -
it.
Whereas authors of representations at one time in a Western world would have shared with their works' viewers a certain set of symbols, the religions of the book are no longer the dominant network through which symbols are created or shared, nor is "the Western world" a possible orientation from which to begin a conversation about the nature of a sign. Had Karlov's gunman stretched his arms out in cruciform, as have, say, some of Sebastiao Salgado's subjects, we might recognize in him a kind of kitsch that has spawned many arguments12, rather than the kind of fascination that this image unleashed in 2017. We have other symbols in common now, which derive from
11 Saltz, J. (2016, December 20). Considering the Ankara Assassination Photos As History Painting. Vulture, URL: https://www.vulture.com/2016/12/those-harrowing-ankara-assassination-photos.html
12 See in particular Sischy, I. "Good Intentions" The New Yorker, September 9, 1991, p. 92, & the response by David Levi Strauss, ''The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anesthetic,'' in Between the Eyes. D. L.Strauss (New York: Aperture, 2003).
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popular images, which may in fact share symbol-ogy from Western art or religious history, but may not.
The gunman's gesture, cited in the AP caption, is predominant in the public imagination of what this picture means, because the public has more of a physical connection with mediatic references to this gesture than it does to death, or to the Syrian civil war. The gunman's gesture is predominant in the gunman's imagination of what this picture will mean, because he has more of a physical connection with mediatic references to this gesture than he does to death, despite his job as a policeman. It is not the notion of whether or not a photograph indexes that has changed; it is what on earth has the photograph indexed that has changed. The photograph, as popularly received, indexes other photographs. These constitute our new shared symbology. We know both objects and representations through photographs, and we know these photographs through other photographs, and so on.
When this current writing uses the word "we", what is suggested by the pronoun is those who share twenty-first century, extra-linguistic viewership, and are in turn implicated and affected by the interpretant. "We" share the context of the internet, but are not necesssarily informed similarly in any other way - location, language, or even positioning inside the internet's landscape - and these dynamics affect the way in which we are habituated to interpret images. The gunman was familiar with this context as much as are we. Did he really know he would be photographed? Yes. Instinctively, we feel that the assassin is performing, even though we know a man is dead behind him and that he killed him. We formulate the possible rule that photographs can be both performative and actually consequential: the man performed, but in order to do so effectively, actually
had to effect real change first. The problematic thing is that we care more about the performance than we do the change.
These are two very big differences between the representation of the 21st century assassination and that of Franz Ferdinand's. One of the consistencies between the two painted illustrations of Franz Ferdinand's assassination mentioned above is the assassin's absorption in his act. The painters both painted him approaching the car from different directions; neither painted the gunman after the assassination turning towards his audience, realizing what he had done, and gesticulating in one of the most symbolic signs hands can make with respect to the notion of resistance and radicality. On the other hand, the most prominent visual sign left from Karlov's assassination is the gesture after the murder, in which position the assassin's body turns away from his ostensible pur- 43
pose and towards his real one: us. Having inten- -
tions towards history, he is not interested in being seen only by the people attending the exhibition's opening; he knows that - whether or not there had been professional photographers present - there would be as many cameras present as there were guests, who all can be presumed to possess mobile phones. To be seen by an audience in the 21st century is to be photographed. He kills to pose to be photographed; that is the sequence of events.
It is tempting to suggest that the photograph may have changed in terms of which of Pierce's orders of signs the photograph actually summons. If in the past, given the nineteenth and twentieth century astonishment at the capacity of the photograph to connect an author's product physically to an event, people emphasized the index, perhaps now they simply do not. Perhaps now it is widely understood that every picture is made from a subjective perspective, let alone that every picture might be manipulated, either physi-
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cally, through the movement of bodies in space; conceptually, through selective editing; or graphically, through work in an analog or digital darkroom. It is tempting, then, to presume that people have stopped seeing the photograph in terms of its indexicality. It may be that the photograph is more strongly associated with the other kinds of signs: the "symbol": "connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using mind, without which no such connection would exist."13 Perhaps. The icon, however, is a little closer: that sign which "has no dynamical connection with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness. But it really stands unconnected with them."14 Possibly. This is very very close to what happened with the photograph of the assassin.
But it's not entirely true: people still want to connect photographs to real events. AP's values make good argument for the notion that digital -or photographic equipment and processing techniques more technologically contemporary with Ozbilici's photograph - do not essentially influence the potential for the photograph to be what it has always seemed to be: true. AP states that "minor adjustments in Photoshop are acceptable. (analogous to the burning and dodging previously used in darkroom processing of images) and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph."15 The only difference between capturing a filmic or
a digital image in this AP photographer's experience is that had he used film, he would have had to hold the images he thought he took in his mind until he developed them, rather than know that he had gotten particular images on the spot, rather more immediately to when he took them. He would have sought to authentically record either way. He would have had in mind a responsibility to viewers, who too will not change in their desire for authenticity. The means by which we seek it verbally and visually and the avenues through which we try to provide it change primarily quantitatively and technically. Quantitatively and technically, the media has changed as much as has photography: we see more news items, more frequently, and more quickly than we did in 1914.
Pierce himself categorized photographs, "especially instantaneous photographs" as "like the objects they represent" because they were 44
"produced under such circumstances that they -
were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature."16 Written in the late nineteenth century by a logician, this is not a terribly wholehearted argument for the index of the photograph with respect to its object. All representations are, for Pierce, a part of the category he calls "Third-ness"17, which is to say that they mediate, whether they are watercolors, writings, photographs made from glass plate negatives, or screenshots. They are intellectual experiences rather than practical or emotional. The technique may change, but they
13 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce. Volume II: Elements of Logic. Book II: Speculative Grammar. Chapter III: The Icon, Index, and Symbol. §3 The Nature of Symbols. Paragraph 299. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960).
14 Ibid.
15 Visuals. (n.d.) Retrieved November 28, 2019, from
Associated Press website. URL:
https://www.ap.org/about/news-values-and-
principles/telling-the-story/visuals
16 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce. Volume II: Elements of Logic. Book II: Speculative Grammar. Chapter III: The Icon, Index, and Symbol. §1 Icons and Hypoicons. Paragraph 281. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960).
17 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce. Volume I: Principles of Philosophy. Book III: Phenomenology. Chapter II: The Categories in Detail. C. Third-ness §2 Representation and Generality. Paragraph 339. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960).
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each exist in a triadic relationship between sign, object, and interpretant. That relationship is an "infinite series", by its very nature, because the "meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation... stripped of irrelevant clothing."18 What is happening to photographs is that their relationship to other representations is changing.
The dynamic interpretants
"We" have not changed; the sign's ramification has changed. Essentially - qualitatively -the interpretant has changed.19 Instead of imagining that the photograph has essentially changed, because it has not; or that viewers of photographs have essentially changed, because we have not, another question becomes instead one of how viewers are positioned with respect to the image and how that has changed. Pierce's mathematical parsing of semiotic systems make it difficult to render them completely parallel to later ones specific to the art context, but later writings by authors crucial to the development of photography's philosophy still seem to react to the genuine semi-otic relationships he recognized, and how they evolve given mediatic evolutions. They can help us to begin to find the more accurate index for this photograph, and in turn may also help to see that it is not only the actor - Atlintas - who was conscious of being photographed, but that we too are more conscious of looking at the photograph of him than we are at looking at the death it includes.
In 1935, Walter Benjamin discusses in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction the evolving role of the audience with respect
18 Ibid.
19 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce. Volume II: Elements of Logic. Book II: Speculative Grammar. Chapter II: Division of Signs. §1 Ground, Object, and Interpretant. Paragraph 228. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960).
to that work. The audience, he says, takes "the position of a critic" because of the distance upon which a reproducible artwork is premised from its original.20 Moreover, the actor his or herself begins to feel that "ultimately [s]he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where [s]he offers not only his [or her] labor but also his [or her] whole self, his [or her] heart and soul, is beyond his [or her] reach."21 We are now very very close to the image of Kar-lov's assassin, because Benjamin's notion of the interpretant takes into account the author, audience, and actor, all of whom assume a critical role in their apprehension of the event - the studium. They are able to do so because they are familiar with condition of living with reproduced imagery: multiples that resemble the image in which they participate.
In 1967 and 1981 respectively, Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard take this idea further, however: describing not only the ways in which the audience and actor have changed independently, but also the ways in which social relations between people change, and then become unstable. For Debord, everything that used to be directly lived has "receded into a representation."22 He muses that "social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy" and that this stage is bringing about "a general shift from having to appearing."23 He clarifies that this notion of spectacle "is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between peo-
45
20 Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Trans. H. Zohn. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books. 1969, p. 10.
21 Ibid. p. 11.
22 Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. (K. Knabb, Trans.) Canada: Bureau of Public Secrets. 2014, p. 2.
23 Ibid. p. 5.
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ple that is mediated by images."24 Between the World Wars, news media was just beginning to catch up to the potential of reproducible mediums to create critics of audiences and actors alike. By the middle of the Cold War period, audiences and actors both live in a world of appearances. In 1981, when Baudrillard publishes Simulacra and Simulation, audiences and actors both live in a simulation: "a real without origin or reality: a hy-perreal."25 By the end of the Cold War, human audiences are not critics of actors, nor are actors conscious always of an audience out of their reach. All are conscious of a context in which they function that may or may not be real. The very notion of an index is imperiled, because the door upon which one raps may fail. If the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it26, the rap may find no purchase on a door at all.
For all three of these authors - Benjamin, Debord, and Baudrillard - the conditions of production are foremost in their arguments with respect to the "why" of their evaluations of the conditions of reception. For Benjamin, a political environment he witnessed - the development of Fascism - gave the masses "a chance to express themselves" while "preserving property."27 Thirty-two years later, Debord knows that expression is impossible inside of a system of "unanswerable communication" wherein a consumer is compelled to imitate, "conditioned by all the aspects of his
24 Ibid. p. 2.
25 Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and simulation. (S.F. Glaser, Trans.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1994, p. 1.
26 Ibid.
27 Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction. Trans. H. Zohn. In H. Ar-
endt (Ed.), Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books.
1969, p. 19.
fundamental dispossession."28 By the end of the Cold War, Baudrillard knows that the simulation inside of which we all operate is more dangerous than any situation it might reference. A real hold up only upsets the order of things, he says: "the right to property," whereas a simulated hold up interferes with "the reality principle itself. Transgression and violence are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, that law and order themselves might be nothing but a simulation."29
These three writers share - especially Debord and Baudrillard - an anxiety over the notion of how humans might respond to distance from agency in productive political life. Benjamin may have had some optimism about art's existence in the age of mechanical reproduction: "for 46
the first time in world history, mechanical repro- -
duction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."30 What Debord and Baudrillard witnessed in their writing, however, was a new form of slavery embodied by the emancipated image: one in which the sign, its object, and its interpretant were always at one another's mercy, embroiled in an endless game of symbolic authorship, wherein no one of them were anything close to an agent possible to index onto the physical world.
What does this do, though, to the protagonist of a picture of a staged hold-up, when the hold-up turns out actually to have had conse-
28 Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. (K. Knabb, Trans.) Canada: Bureau of Public Secrets. 2014, p. 117.
29 Ibid. p. 20
30 Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Trans. H. Zohn. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books. 1969, p. 6.
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quence? On 17 February 2017, Siti Aisyah, a 25-year old Indonesian woman, was arrested in the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for suspected involvement in the killing of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. She thought she was part of a comedy show prank, and indeed had been paid to convince men to close their eyes and spray them water. The last target was Kim Jong-nam, and he died. Charges were withdrawn from Aisyah's case in March 2019.31 With no details of the reason for her release, we may operate from the position that she really did think she was on TV. Whether or not that is true, it is credible. We have all seen reality TV shows in which people do stupid things for the amusement of later viewers, performing as televised jesters. Aisyah operated in the mise-en-abyme of entertainment, and yet someone used her relationship to those images, and her trust in them, to achieve a real end: an assassination. As a point of contrast to Altintas' assassination, in this case, the simulacra was used against a protagonist, but in both cases, the simulacra was used to achieve a very real, very mortal end.
This is very different from conventional, sensible Public Relations. It is human - not new -to use communication, for example, to enhance the power of civil disobedience. Direct action such as Gandhi's Salt March was staged to provoke authorities in front of an audience of journalists. The Manchester Guardian reported on 7 April 1930 that a large crowd witnessed Gandhi and about 100 volunteers render salt from the sea, breaking salt monopoly laws. Authorities stated that the salt was not fit for human consumption, and also did not want to render Gandhi a martyr, and so although hundreds of police officers were drafted,
31Kim Jong-nam murder: Suspect Siti Aisyah 'shocked' at being released. (2019, March 12). BBC. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47544915
they did not interfere.32 The situation was complicated by a counter-protest by untouchables, and so Gandhi turned to private industry for his spectacle: the ensuing Dharasana Satyagraha, a nonviolent raid of the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat, was witnessed by the press, attracting attention. Some of this witness was born photographically and other aspects of it were communicated through words, such as through American journalist Webb Miller's testimony on the "spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed into a bloody pulp."33
The principle behind Gandhi's press strategy, however, was, yes, to be seen, but preserves the classic relationship between actor, audience, and author. The authors were the media, who then amplified witnessing to readers of their publications, who acted as audience; the actors worked with their salt and were beaten by police. No 47
fourth wall was broken here, despite the knowing- -
ness of the man who orchestrated the theatre. No one became aware of their position and stepped out of line to change it. While radical political change ensued from Gandhi's public relations strategies, they function thus because embroiled in the media environment that derives from between the World Wars, when Benjamin was writing optimistically about reproduction. That Debord and Baudrillard would despair at the inescapability of the mise-en-abyme of contemporary life - and that generations growing up in the media environments in which they did too - is understandable. The
32 From the archive, 7 April 1930: Gandhi's civil disobedience plans go wrong. Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 7 April 1930. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https: //www .theguardian. com/theguardian/2012/apr/07 /archive- 1930-gandhi-civil-disobedience
33 Weber, Thomas (1998). On the Salt March: The His-
toriography of Gandhi's March to Dandi. India: HarperCollins.
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simulacra can appear to castrate symbolic action, since everything - image or act - seems only applicable to the image-world. Benjamin, Debord, and Baudrillard's writings trap their readers in an endless stream of dynamic interpretants, each of which is affected by and affects the representa-men, but provides no finish.
The final interpretant
This anxiety is now a-historical. It is the project of the digital native to become again a protagonist in their own photograph, and to acknowledge the positive truth of a final interpretant. They - we - are accustomed to the environment of the simulacra, and yet live also, of course, in the real world and wish there to engender real change. On 4 February, 2017, Sweden's climate minister Isabella Lovin tweeted a photograph of herself signing a climate bill surrounded by her closest female colleagues34. She stares at the camera from the left of the frame. Her colleagues, one of whom is visibly pregnant, gaze at her hands, which are poised: the left one steadying the document, and the right, holding a pen at the left of the signature line, ready to proceed with her signature. Lovin would have signed this bill irrespective of Twitter, as it aims to make Sweden carbon neutral by 2045 and demonstrates her and Sweden's commitment to climate leadership. The photograph, however, references photographs of U.S. President Donald Trump taken on 23 January 2017 "signing an executive order barring US federal funding for foreign NGOs that support abor-
34 @IsabellaLovin. "Just signed referral of Swedish #climate law, binding all future governments to net zero emissions by 2045. For a safer and better future." Twitter. 3 Feb 2017, 2:03 am, https://twitter.com/IsabellaLovin/status/827457588094 758912
tion, as his all-male colleagues looked on."35 The potency of the photograph was not exclusively in Sweden's commitment to the earth's climate, nor to working with women, but in its direct address to another photograph. Photographs become more powerful the more photographs with which they speak. Rather than get lost within the simulacrum, Lovin's photograph uses it - letting author, actor, and audience in on the same game in order to express her commitments.
Ozbilici's photograph may appear the classic simulacrum, in which the referent precedes and informs the action. He took it in a gallery, where we relive or observe evidence of something that has happened elsewhere, as is usually the case with photographs themselves. There is, however, a way to characterize this picture as productive rather than reproductive. Altintas made the photograph as much as did Ozbilici, since he staged the 4g
scene there, as in some Duchampian Readymade -
set, and since his body informs Ozbilici's photograph with the reference set that made it famous. Viewers made the photograph as well, insofar as we built its significance out of mediatic references. We each took part in the construction of this photograph, according to theatrical variables, and yet, this photograph does not only seem to dislodge itself from theatre, but does: people died because of it, not only in it. Altintas killed Karlov there and then and in that way because he knew what the whole thing would look like, and then because he did that, he died too. The photograph is a vehicle through which we can witness - even as we participate in - the changing ramifications of signs, and in that regard, the shifting tectonics
35 Is the Swedish deputy PM trolling Trump with this all-female photo? (2017, February 4). The Guardian. Retrieved from URL:
https: //www .theguardian. com/environment/2017/feb/0
3/sweden-criticises-us-climate-stance-as-it-reveals-
ambitious-carbon-emissions-law
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of icons, indices, and symbols that stand for objects, and the shift indeed in interpretants.
In this context, the photograph need not index a real place or time for its potency. On 8 March 2017, feminists in Russia rallied to protest the patriarchal structure of Russian power. A photograph shows a banner reading, in Russian, "Feminism is a National Idea," hanging from the red brick of the Kremlin's tower, flanked by red smoke bombs against Moscow's winter white gray sky. The 8th of March is known as International Women's Day, and has been celebrated in Russia since women gained suffrage in Soviet Russia in 1917, and feminists stood holding hand-painted cloths all over the capital: "Men, Get out of the Kremlin," for example, or "A woman for president." Many were arrested. All of the signs were thoughtfully simple and all of the people were brave. All were conscious of the architectural backdrop of the Kremlin as a site of power, and so the set was intentional, as with most mediati-cally valuable direct actions. The difference in this case is that the banner on the tower was placed there through digital processing, whereas the other photographs include banners and figures that were physically, not just existentially, present, precisely where depicted in the photographs.
Some feminists objected to the dissemination of a Photoshopped picture, since they thought it might discount their cause. Certainly the Federal Security Service sought to discount the photograph by confirming through metadata and their own accounts that the photograph was unreliable.36 It doesn't matter, though, for the existential
36 Феминизм над Кремлем. (2017, March 9). Радио
Свобода. Retrieved from URL:
https://www.svoboda.org/a/28358167.html?fbclid=Iw
AR2yQMn9vvL55zoC-
rad-
sWqwuwXDa0iqXDm 1uwzI1Z4iREsWAqa3dhADJd U
nature of the photograph whether this picture was differently produced than the others from the same feminist rally. They are all cut from the same amateur documentary cloth: they're all bad photographs, and in this Photoshopped one the green of the tower is cut off, and it has a kind of amateur disregard for parallax correction with respect to the surrounding buildings. The point of the picture is the banner and the smoke, and the picture indexes not only onto the Kremlin - rapping so hard on its door that somebody from security really answered - but also onto the other photographs from the event, providing legitimacy, rather than its opposite, to fellow protesters. The sign that stands for the object that is the protest is strong, because it truly indexes the other photographs from the protest, and from protests around Russia, which often look this way. It's entirely credible, and contributes to the notion that women can climb up the
f 49
Kremlin's walls. The interpretant that is created -
from this work - its ramification - derives from the fact that the primary representation we are looking at (a Photoshopped photograph) both adds credibility to and derives credibility from the other images from the Russian protest in which it is contextualized, even though it's technically fake. The final interpretant of the internet image is that we understand it in context, and that whether or not it indexes a real moment, we believe what we want to believe about it, based on the other images to which it refers.
The gunman in Ozbilici's photograph is about as old as Baudrillard's argument when he commits his murder. He does so both as Benjamin's critic and Debord's consumer. He is fundamentally comfortable with being mediatically processed. He knows that he will appear a certain way, interfering with Baudrillard's reality. Inside of the system of communication in which he dwells, he has found a way to answer back. The
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picture is not just a meme, nor a PR stunt, because he has acted: he has killed, and is - following on that third, usually unnecessary line of the AP caption - killed, himself. The anxiety that grew from Benjamin through Debord to Baudrillard around the potential energy of the twentieth century actor has been sidestepped. In the twenty-first century, it is not the audience that determines the agency of the photograph, nor is it the photographer; nor alone the actor, aware of his or her reception. The actor, in mortal principle, and for better or worse, gestures. Pictures answer back. A-historical anxiety about the digital environment, the simulacra, social media, and all such related concepts is unproductive. The simulacra is here; we live in it and with it, and it is our job to recognize its potential to catalyze the actions in which we believe, the understanding we hope to stoke, in the real world. As we are all actors, authors, and audience in this new media environment, now what remains to remember is when to talk about the picture and when to talk about the act.
References
1. Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and simulation. (S.F. Glaser, Trans.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1994.
2. Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Trans. H. Zohn. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books. 1969.
3. Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. (K. Knabb, Trans.) Canada: Bureau of Public Secrets. 2014.
4. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce. Volume I: Principles of Philosophy and Volume II: Elements of Logic. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960).
5. Editorial: Hopefully not a Franz Ferdinand moment. (2016, December 19). Arab News. Retrieved from https://www.arabnews.com/node/1026711/ed itorial
6. Feminism over the Kremlin. (2017, March 9). Radio Liberty. Retrieved from https://www.svoboda. org/a/28358167.html?fbclid=IwAR2yQMn9vvL55 zoC-
rad-
sWqwuwXDa0iqXDm 1uwzI1Z4iREsWAqa3dhA DJdU
7. From the archive, 7 April 1930: Gandhi's civil disobedience plans go wrong. Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 7 April 1930. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/t heguardian/2012/apr/07/archive- 1930-gandhi-civil-disobedience
8. Illustration of assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. Illustration from Le Petit Journal, July 12, 1914. (Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images) Retrieved from https://www.gett yimages.com/detail/news-photo/illustration-from-le-petit-journal-july-12-1914-news-photo/526102110
9. Illustration of assassination of Archduke Ferdinand
and his wife in Sarajevo. Illustration from La Do- 50 menica del Corriere, July 12, 1914. (Achille Bel-trame) Retrieved from https://www.listal.com/list/l a-domenica-del-corriereworld-war
10. @IsabellaLovin. "Just signed referral of Swedish #climate law, binding all future governments to net zero emissions by 2045. For a safer and better future." Twitter. 3 Feb 2017, 2:03 am, https://twitter.com/IsabellaLovin/status/827457588 094758912
11. Is the Swedish deputy PM trolling Trump with this all-female photo? (2017, February 4). The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2017/feb/03/sweden-criticises-us-climate-stance-as-it-reveals-ambitious-carbon-emissions-law
12. @KBAndersen. "As I said a few weeks ago, the great photojournalism of 2016 is continuing to resemble stills from a scary, not-entirely-realistic movie." Twitter, 20 Dec 2016, 6:42 am, https://twitter.com/KBAndersen/status/811220250 930905090.
13. Kim Jong-nam murder: Suspect Siti Aisyah 'shocked' at being released. (2019, March 12).
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BBC. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-47544915
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ber 20). Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com /news/world/russia-joins-investigation-ambassador-andrey-karlov-s-assassination-turkey-n698341
16. Russian ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov shot dead in Ankara. (2016, December 20). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38369962
17. Saltz, J. (2016, December 20). Considering the Ankara Assassination Photos As History Painting. Vulture, https://www.vulture.com/2016/12/those-harrowing-ankara-assassination-photos.html
18. Sischy, I. "Good Intentions" The New Yorker, September 9, 1991, p. 92.
19. David Levi Strauss, ''The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anesthetic,'' in Between the Eyes. D. L. Strauss (New York: Aperture, 2003)
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21. Weber, Thomas (1998). On the Salt March: The Historiography of Gandhi's March to Dandi. India: HarperCollins.
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