Fashionistas Strike Again - Sex and War

All three images from "Muscle Beach" © Alexi Lubomirski.

It has been a while since I posted on the ways fashion photographers blur the boundaries of militarism and, well, tawdry sex [e.g., here and here and here]. I recently came across this series (posted without comment) taken by Alexi Lubomirski* for the German version of Vogue. That Lubomirski's images are slightly less misogynistic than those I've noted before hardly makes them defensible - and it seems to me that they are entirely derivative.

To call these images militaristic may seem odd. You'll note, though, that the men in these images are not only (scantily) dressed in military garb, but are sporting dog tags. And while they are working out in sandy terrain, I doubt it is meant to convey a beach! So, take some G.I.s enjoying a little R&R - all glistening, bulging pecs and biceps - and drape models over them and voila! - yet another sanitized, sexualized vision of war.

You may think that that claim is a stretch. But as I have pointed out before, fashion photographers have an odd relationship to issues militarism and security. And our "embedded" photojournalists have (among other things) had their work integrated into homogenized reporting (here), been sharply criticized for actually depicting the agony of war (here) and, too often, focused on "our boys" at play - the human interest side of death and destruction (here and here and here and here).** Lubomirski's series seems to me to represent a hybrid between this last category and the misogyny of the fashion photography to which I link above.
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* When you get to Lubomirski's web page click Editorial, then German Vogue, then 2011, then "Muscle Beach." The photographer too posts the images without comment.
** Make no mistake - the clear difference in genre here lies in the fact that photojournalists risk their lives for their work - see e.g., here and here and here and here and here and here.

Linda Norgrove

Funeral: The coffin of Linda Norgrove, is carried from the Uig
(Scotland) community centre to the cemetery by mourners (Picture: PA).

I have to say that this image, and several others, of Linda Norgrove's funeral today, really hit me. I am not quite sure why. But Norgrove, an aid worker kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan and killed (apparently) by U.S. military personnel trying to rescue her, is a hero. We commonly honor "warriors" when we ought to be honoring those who clean up the mess the warriors make or who seek to prevent the mess-making in the first place.

Using Aisha ~ Can We Get Beyond Time's Propaganda (Again)

A couple of days go I posted a response to this essay by Susie Linfield in which she agonizes (and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense) about the fate of women in Afghanistan in the event the U.S. were to withdraw from military operations there. Linfield's essay was occasioned by the notorious recent cover of Time magazine, depicting a young woman maimed by Taliban thugs for resisting an arranged marriage. My comments on Linfield was my second post on the matter.

The folks at Time importuned: "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?" And their reply was that the Taliban would be unleashed, placing the modest but real gains women have made in Afghanistan at grave risk. In the past couple of days, I've come across a couple of articles [1] [2] in The New York Times that suggest that the problem in Afghanistan is not just the Taliban, but other trends in Islam* as it is institutionalized there, putatively "moderate" or "mainstream" clerics who are more than willing to accommodate fundamentalists. In other words, the claim that we might just stay long enough to quash the Taliban (no minor feat, in itself) seems radically to underestimate the cultural problem. We are not, by military means, going to overturn or reform or whatever a traditional culture.

There are a couple of other matters. In the first place we are talking about a set of practices that we in the west deem 'barbaric' ~ "stoning — along with other traditional penalties like whipping and the amputation of hands." In the second place Afghanistan is hardly the only place where such practices ('stoning' specifically) are indulged ~ "in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria." These observations suggest that if we have concerns about human rights generally (you know, protection from 'cruel and unusual punishment') and women's rights specifically (since such punishments for 'sex crimes' tend to be meted out disproportionately to women) we ought to be intervening in those other places.

But let's set such messy, complicating factors** aside and focus exclusively and narrowly on Afghanistan. After all, such rhetorical narrowing is the point among pro-war types striking moralistic stances. Here is one telling passage:

"Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, interviewed by telephone, said Monday that stoning to death was the appropriate punishment for an illegal sexual relationship, although he declined to give his view on this particular case. An Ulema Council is a body of Islamic clerics with religious authority in a region.

And less than a week earlier, the national Ulema Council brought together 350 religious scholars in a meeting with government religious officials, who issued a joint statement on Aug. 10 calling for more punishment under Shariah law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.

Failure to carry out such “Islamic provisions,” the council statement said, was hindering the peace process and encouraging crime.

The controversy could have implications for efforts by Afghan officials to reconcile with Taliban leaders and draw them into power-sharing talks.

Afghan officials, supported by Western countries, have insisted that Taliban leaders would have to accept the Afghan Constitution, which guarantees women’s rights, and not expect a return to Shariah law."

So, all you pro-war types, what, exactly is the plan here? How long do you think we should we 'stay'? What would you count as 'success'? Uprooting the Taliban? Subverting the other "mainstream" actors who seem to endorse barbaric practices? When we finish in Afghanistan, shall we proceed to Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? (After all the connections between those countries and al-Quaeda are reasonably well documented.) What would count as 'success' there? If we want to pose the question the Time cover presses upon us, why not pose these questions too? The answer is that asking them does not allow us to be quite so moralistic, quite so certain of what we have grounds to do.

Military force is a blunt instrument. It is ill-suited to the task of trying to protect women - or anyone else - in Afghanistan from fundamentalist thugs or those who abet them. I am not sure how better to proceed. But that discussion is hampered by a preoccupation with 'winning' an impossible military mission. And propaganda of the sort that Time has spewed simply obscures that fact. But that, after all, is the point, isn't it?
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* Please Note: The practices under discussion, as the essays in The Times make clear, do not derive from the Koran but from ancillary sources. The extent to which they are "Islamic" is contested.

** We can set aside too the hypocrisy of the U.S. with its official commitment to the death penalty and huge prison population of disproportionately minority and poor men has much claim to be scolding others about barbaric practices. We'll leave aside too the newly found willingness of American administrations to blatantly ignore the principles of international law in the prosecution of the GWOT.

Talkng Back ~ Susie Linfield on Time and Afghanistan

"Bieber’s photograph of Aisha . . . is disgusting. I am very glad that Time ran it." So says Susie Linfield in this pointed essay at Dissent online. As is usual, Linfield offers smart and insightful comments on the fracas surrounding the image. She insists that "the photo, taken by South African photographer Jodi Bieber, did the opposite and is, in a sense, a model of how photography can be used."

Interestingly, though, Linfield doesn't actually discuss the use of the photograph as much as she excoriates "the antiwar Left and . . . feminists" who "[w]ith a couple of notable exceptions," have responded to the Time cover with "a dispiriting lack of appropriately complex thinking, or, one might say, a distressingly reductive reading of events and of what feminism, and leftism, might mean." Since I have already posted on the cover in a highly critical way, I feel as though it is important to engage Linfield. So, here goes.

In the first place there is ample room for agreement:

There were, however, some thoughtful responses to the Time photo and the larger issues it raises. And in this case, thoughtful means uncertain. (Contrary to what readers of this piece might think thus far, I am not an advocate of “staying in Afghanistan.” In fact, I am thoroughly confused about what the “right” thing to do is; the only thing I’m certain of is that there are no good choices—and certainly no unambiguously good choices—on offer.) For some, the agonizing question is how to respond to conflicting demands.

OK. That is a more or less accurate depiction of where I stand. Conflicted. However, nothing Linfield says there is incompatible with the following.

[1] Attributing a significant helping of hypocrisy and disingenuousness to the people at Time. As I noted earlier, to the best of my knowledge the editorial staff there showed scant concern with women's rights when, for instance, the "moderates" in the U.S. Congress negotiated to have the demands of our own fundamentalists (e.g., the Catholic Bishops on abortion rights) incorporated into the health insurance legislation.

Moreover, the notion that this story is not a brief for staying in Afghanistan is simply not credible. Linfield bemoans the fact that the Time story has not generated any debate. But, having read the report, let's be clear that it accords roughly zero attention to any alternative beyond 'stay the course.' If, as Linfield rightly insists, we read the report for evidence of what Afghan women think, why not read it for evidence of what the folks at Time think? Absent an argument to the contrary, it seems entirely appropriate to charge Time with trafficking in propaganda.

[2] Acknowledging that the Taliban are barbaric thugs and that the Afghan people and nearly everyone else would be significantly better off if they could be eliminated. Nothing I've said so far reduces to the position that "the ousting of the Taliban [is] inconsequential, or that a commitment to women’s rights is only a form of hypocrisy." I think ousting the Taliban is quite consequential. But not in the abstract. How many lives - Afghan and American and other - are we willing to expend? What means - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, imprecise drone attacks - are we willing to use? These are political questions, not as Linfield insists, questions of "conscience." And, beyond a protest about simplistic thinking she offers no answers to them.

On the charge of hypocrisy, let's agree that the matter is best addressed by attributing bad faith not to some indeterminate "we," but to identifiable actors and agencies. When discussing members of the Bush administration, various right-wing war-mongers, and, as I've just suggested, the folks at Time and other bastions of corporate media, I have no problem claiming that the newly discovered commitment to women's rights is "only hypocrisy," false concern trotted out to rationalize a disastrous policy. (By disastrous I mean a policy that has been poorly executed from the start and for which there is no plausible criterion of "success.")

[3] Questioning just what it means to speak, as Linfield does, of "the NATO presence." If this is not to work simply as euphemism for a war prosecuted by American troops, we need to be clear. How many non-American military personnel are in Afghanistan? I don't know but I suspect the answer is someplace in the vicinity of "few." And what about consequences? I recall hearing a report on npr recently that stated that Taliban and other 'insurgents' cause roughly three-quarters of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. American troops and their allies cause the remaining quarter. But, the report went on, many Afghans remain convinced that something like the opposite is the case. If we grant that our campaign in Afghanistan is of a 'hearts and minds' sort, this is troubling. Continued military intervention may simply be a losing strategy on that dimension. I am not certain of that, but absent some evidence to the contrary, it is hard to discount skepticism.

Likewise, Linfield rightly insists that we "at least call barbarism by its right name." OK, let's do. The various tactics I just mentioned - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, 'collateral damage' caused by drone attacks, and so forth - are barbaric. Agreed? (And recall that I've already conceded that the Taliban and their terrorist tactics are barbaric.) What are the alternatives? Neither the Time piece nor Susie Linfield offer any suggestions. But that is where we ought to be headed - a discussion of how to proceed that does not simply assume that our current policy and tactics will "work" (whatever that means).

[4] Questioning what it is that Afghan women (is that a homogeneous category?) "want"? There is a strange ambiguity in Linfield's essay. On the one hand she thinks we ought to be paying attention to what Afghan women say (at least as the Time folks report that). On the other hand, she dismisses those who are concerned with attributing "agency" to those same women. This ambiguity is perhaps unavoidable. I agree that the downtrodden generally are not going to, without significant aid and support, throw off their oppressors. Conversely, it is unclear that clauses in the constitution alter underlying realities in the hinterlands. And I am not so sanguine that the Time report offers an even-handed assessment of the views that Afghan women articulate. Those views, as I have noted here before, are complex. They are not, in short, determinative. They do not mitigate the uncertainty that Linfield herself feels. To assert otherwise, I think, displays a dismaying level of credulousness.

[5] Recalling that much of the current disaster in Afghanistan is the result (wholly or partly) of U.S. policy. We funded the precursors of the Taliban against the Soviets. And we prosecuted a war in Iraq instead of dealing with the Taliban and their links to al-Qaeda. How confident are we - Linfield, I, others who think the Afghan campaign is a mess - that the folks who brought us those policies can clean up even part of the mess they've made?

Being a progressive or a leftist indeed requires avoiding knee-jerk reactions. The latter, after all, make one a reactionary. Insofar as the Time cover story has prompted debate it has proven valuable. But, I suspect that any such debate has been an unintended consequence. The folks at Time used the cover photo for a quite specific purpose - to shore up support for continued American military intervention. In other words, they are seeking to thwart debate by painting those who criticize the war as fools who are willing to sacrifice women's rights. (How does their report differ from the claims of BushCo to which Linfield refers?) In my view, they have undertaken that task in what I think is a hypocritical way. That brings me round to my initial claim: Time has used photography for propaganda.
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Update: Lest you think I am overly suspicious of the good folks at Time, I recommend this post which not only claims that the CIA has been pushing the "women's rights" angle on defending the Afghan mission, but makes the following point, which should be especially pressing for a news weekly:

It’s worth noting that the Taliban are Sunni, not Shia, and that the US-backed president has enacted a law for the non-Taliban sector of society, rolling back rights for women that were written into the constitution. Before the elections, the Times Online reported that “the United States and Britain [were] opposed to any strong public protest [against the law] because they fear[ed] that speaking out could disrupt [the] election.” The bill was pushed through parliament in February of 2009 and came into effect in July of last year. Afghan women fumed, while US and UK leaders stood by, and where was Time’s cover advocating for women’s rights then? Here are the covers they ran in February 2009.

Update 2: See also this post at Conscientious.

TIME & War Propaganda

You will likely have seen the original cover (top) and may be interested in this shameless rationalization TIME printed. The editors insist: "We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground." Right. You ought also to see the second, photo-shopped version (Thanks Stan!) and read the reasoning of the fellow who took license with the original (scroll down the comments). His claim is only modestly less credulous. For some sensible discussion go here.

You might ask: So, you oppose the war? What about the Taliban and women's rights? Good questions. But, yes, I still oppose the war. And my simple, visceral retort is "What about, say, the Catholic church and women's (or children's) rights? What about the medieval attitudes that our own fundamentalists display regarding women's rights?"

My more complicated retort is, "OK, we can agree that the Taliban are fundamentalist thugs. But we are not going to get rid of them in any plausible scenario. And the ineffectual and corrupt Karzi regime is hardly an enlightened replacement. You might say the same of "our" fundamentalist allies in Pakistan. And, oh, by the way, let's have a graphic TIME cover story on the many various families we have bombed into oblivion in predator drone attacks - you know, the people we treat as collateral damage - and then talk support for the war." After all, we are deploying the drones mainly in hopes of avoiding American military casualties! I suppose Afghan lives are not worth quite as much?

This cover story is propaganda, pure and simple. TIME hardly is a font of feminist politics when it comes to our own relatively comfy lives. And, whether they admit it or not, they've adopted a moralistic stance in the service of a losing war.
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P.S.: The cover photo was taken, in the words of the TIME folk, "the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber."

Changing Conventions in War Photography (2)

So, I thought perhaps I was being too hasty in talking about the emergence of a new convention in war photography, one that places a premium on the 'human interest' aspect of American troops. You know, shots of the military personnel being just guys. So I had a quick, admittedly unsystematic look. The top two images below made it into the pictures of the day at the Lens blog at The New York Times last week. The top one, though, I lifted from The Washington Post who had also published it. The rest were easy enough to find on-line. Note - three different agencies, a half dozen different photographers. And we end up with the soldier in tee shirt and shorts, again.

Life in a war zone can mean improvising, including for exercise,
as illustrated by a U.S. soldier from the 1st Squadron, 71st Cavalry
at a forward operating base in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan.
The number of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan is expected to
peak at 150,000 in coming weeks. July 19th, 2010
(Manpreet Romana/agence France-presse Via Getty Images).

A U.S. soldier watches an Afghan movie on TV while relaxing at
Combat Outpost Nolen, an outlying base for the 2nd Brigade of the
101st Airborne Division, in the volatile Arghandab Valley, in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, Wednesday, July 21, 2010. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd).

A United States Marine from Bravo Company of the 1st
Battalion of the 2nd Marines eats watermelon as he rests
following a gunbattle as part of an operation to clear the
area of insurgents near Musa Qaleh, in northern Helmand
Province, southern Afghanistan, Friday, July 23, 2010.
(AP Photo/Kevin Frayer).

U.S Army First Lieutenant Sean Snook from Concord,
Massachusetts, and Alpha Company, 4th Brigade combat
team,1-508, 82nd parachute infantry regiment tees off
at FOB Bullard in Zabul province, southern Afghanistan,
February 12, 2010. (REUTERS/Baz Ratner ).

A U.S. Marine throws a football at Delaram base in
Nimroz province, southern Afghanistan January 24,
2010. (REUTERS/Marko Djurica) January 24, 2010

Spc. James Lollis, right, who was on his way to the gym, and an unidentified
soldier from the 2nd Battalion 12th Infantry take cover as incoming fire
hits inside Command Outpost Michigan at the Pech River Valley
in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009.
(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills).

There are, of course, many, many pictures of American troops, mostly in full combat gear, on patrol - sometimes they are engaged in firefights, sometimes they are menacing Afghans of various descriptions, sometimes they are talking to groups of kids or even kicking a soccer ball with them. These images are familiar enough. So the sorts of images I've lifted here are not exactly crowding out those more 'standard' images. However, with the exception of the occasional photograph of marines mourning the death of a colleague, images of death and destruction - the actual consequences of war for Afghans and the U.S. military - are exceedingly rare. In fact, other than the image of Joshua Bernard that generated so much controversy last fall, I don't recall seeing any. That may not be intended by the photographers who are covering the war, but it surely is politically convenient.

Changing Conventions in War Photography & the Disaster in Afghanistan

U.S. Army soldiers of the 1-320th Alpha Battery, 2nd Brigade of
the 101st Airborne Division, look towards insurgent positions
during a firefight at COP Nolen, in the volatile Arghandab Valley,
Kandahar, Afghanistan, Saturday, July 24, 2010.
(Photograph © AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Over the course of the afternoon I had an interesting and helpful exchange of comments on this earlier post. My interlocutor, photographer Tim Hetherington, has taken exception to the post, interpreting my comments as questioning his integrity. I certainly did not intend the post in any such way and indeed stated as much at the outset. I apologize to Tim if I created that impression.

Having said all that, I thought it might help to depersonalize the disagreement. Let's not talk about Tim's work. My concerns are two. The first is directly political in the pedestrian sense; it centers on whether whether our troops in Afghanistan are serving our national interest. I stand by my judgment that they are not. They are there enacting a misguided policy. We can argue the question, but I am pretty confident about where the preponderance of evidence will fall.

My second concern has more to do with the politics of photography. Here is the nub of the issue: why is it acceptable to depict our military adventures in Afghanistan with images like the one I discuss here, whereas images like the one I discuss here generate an uproar? My concern is that we are witnessing not just the sort of censorship (and accompanying official rationalizations)* of images of war that prevents the media from showing even flag draped coffins being unloaded at military bases, but also the emergence of a parallel convention wherein we will get sanitized views of war dressed up in tee-shirts and boxers as though the soldiers just happened to be camped out there and came under attack totally by surprise. That is what I meant by visual euphemism.

As if on cue, I just found the image above festooned across the top of the home page at Huffington Post accompanying a story on the publication of classified records of the Afghanistan debacle (here and here too). Given the information that was released today, the confidence I noted above is growing.
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* For examples of censorship see, e.g. [1] [2] [3] ...

Tunnel Vision on the Costs of War, Or Why People Around the World have Reason to 'Dislike Us'

TAKING SHELTER: Afghan workers employed to clean debris
after a suicide attack took shelter underneath their wheel
barrows Tuesday after a sudden downpour in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Photograph © Ahmad Nazr/Associated Press.

This one falls in the 'what's wrong with this picture' category. Not the picture above, which reminded me of school kids hiding under desks during air raid drills. No, a reader, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, called my attention to this terrific graphic display at CNN.* It is visually striking and makes a strong point about the increase and distribution of U.S. casualties in our two wars. You know, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the the ones that the hope and change mongers in the Obama administration continue to prosecute despite the futility of both. But, as Stanley succinctly pointed out, the graphic is radically incomplete; there is no mapping of the domestic casualties in either war. Afghan and Iraqi deaths do not register (here either). Try Iraq Body Count instead; I cannot find an analogous site for the Afghan foray.

So, as the futile efforts to clean up the oil spill on the Gulf Coast are attracting your attention, don't forget the death we are sowing elsewhere. They are even less susceptible to clean up.
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* Thanks!