Impossible Photographs: Images of War from Rossellini to dOCUMENTA 13

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How can a critical practice of the image affect the way we make war visible? How can it not only increase the visibility of war-related events but also rearticulate the very frames through which war acquires visibility? Here I adopt the term "frame" to name the aesthetic and political parameters according to which certain regions of the visible are included in (or excluded from) a given image and, concomitantly, a certain past or present comes into view while another remains in obscurity. I am thus concerned with the system informing the relationship between the visible and the invisible—what Jacques Rancière has called "the distribution of the sensible"¹—to the extent that it also regulates the relationship between different temporalities as well as our relationship to what we might describe as the time of war. To make war visible is also to make time visible. It is to abide by or disturb the chronological, linear order that has too often taken hold of our sense of history. In particular, the obsession with the instant and the instantaneous—chronology as a mere succession of instants or points in time—has played a crucial role in the fields of both audiovisual media and warfare, leading to the development of a "vision machine," in Paul Virilio's apt formulation, for which speed constitutes the new law of profit.² The critical practice of the image I am tracing counters the conflation of visibility and acceleration, truthful documentation and instantaneity. It refuses to aim at the visible as if it were a target to be destroyed and, concurrently, forgoes "capturing" the moment as if it were an entity to be isolated and secured. By doing so, such a practice also refuses to place images within a determinate context—as if they were here and not beyond, now and not then, incapable of haunting us, the viewers, from more than one place and more than one time.

As critics answering the October questionnaire on art and antiwar opposition have remarked, any attempt at making war visible today must confront the logic of the media spectacle of the September 11 attacks.³ The RETORT collective, following Guy Debord's critique of capital's new power of accumulation and control over images, has argued that the attacks constitute an example of image warfare—for the United States, a defeat in the very domain of spectacular visibility that has sanctioned its symbolic and material dominance on the world stage. Significantly, RETORT refuses to separate these horrific events from a long history of aerial bombing, a history of terror from the air that begins with the Italian assaults on Libyan territories in 1911, culminates in the atomic blasts that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and continues after World War II through a series of allegedly pacifying military interventions around the globe. "Bombing," they maintain, "is a constitutive feature of modern life."⁴ In fact, the spectacle operates by isolating discrete events and making them hypervisible at the expense of other variously related occurrences. We are all too familiar with the images that were produced during the attacks on the World Trade Center, and indeed, this very familiarity betrays a logic of mediatic enclosure. Writing in Artforum only a few months after the attacks, Sarah Boxer observed that "the events of September 11, 2001, were beyond measure. But when the day ended, the visual limits were fixed. The editors of news agencies and newspapers had their film."⁵ I interpret her comments as a way of signaling that these images had become intractable in their very specificity—self-identical and immediately expressive—and as such had already entered the arsenal of the war to come. "For all time," Boxer explains, "there would be certain balls of fire, certain bits of debris, certain last views of the World Trade Center, certain running crowds, certain spectators, certain firefighters, certain oxygen tanks, certain ruins, and certain shirts."⁶ She also notices that most front pages of newspapers "decided to focus on the instant that the second plane hit," as if by...