Jelena Jureša
in Aphasia
ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts
MER. Borgerhoff & Lamberigts
KASK
2019
‘Do you remember when you first saw that photograph?’— asks Croatian journalist and writer Barbara Matejčić, during one of our numerous skype conversations.
I cannot.
***
‘Certain lives do not qualify as lives,’ asserts Judith Butler, ‘the photograph has already determined what will count within the frame.’[1] The way we respond to the suffering of others, and how we form our moral positions, depends on our framing of reality; which is to say, the sensible reality in which we locate recognizable human subjects. The discourse of power in which the privileged speak in the name of the oppressed is part of the machinery of war—and does not consider how it represents those whom it alleges to.
Suvendrini Perera discusses subjects ‘at the edge of the human’, delineating their presence in photographs as trophies, or trophy bodies, to ‘suggest the modalities through which [these images] are caught, captured, affixed, immobilized, corralled, within violent regimes of visibility and power’.[2] She follows Derrida’s meditation on the blurry lines between human and animal, which are ‘imbricated with racial categories and hierarchies’.[3] In Perera’s view, the camera nails the non-human head to the hunter’s mantle.
It is in the craft of killing that life is constructed, not in the accident of personal, material birth.[4]
Photography has long had an unstable historiography. On the one hand, it has been employed as a means of constructing patterns in the nascent disciplines of biological and physical anthropology. Scientific studies became the basis for the racial theories that have sustained structures of colonialism and imperialism, whereas photography became part of a show: a carefully staged choreography passing for a chronicle of people and places, peddling the myth of ‘other races’ and their ‘natural habitat’. On the other hand, photography has served as evidence, a tool in the persistent struggle to expose the violence sustaining those same structures.
The ‘hunt for images’ during the Yugoslav wars illustrates Butler’s assertion that photographs leave reality out of the frame. Despite the abundance of images, the overwhelming evidence of suffering, the conflicts in Yugoslavia were perceived as somehow external to the European context, beyond its frame.
… Fuck, the minute I even think that in some book of world history some asshole is going to write about this war as a conflict of national and religious interests between ethnic groups located in the perpetually unstable region of the Balkans, which lasted from 1991 to whenever, I could just blow this whole planet to bits so that not a particle of it remains.[5]
***
The photograph Barbara is asking me about was shot by photojournalist Ron Haviv in the city of Bijeljina on 2 April 1992. It was taken in a split second: the back of a Tiger kicking a Muslim woman named Ajša Šabanović, who had been shot by Serb forces. The image has come to epitomize the horrors of the war in Bosnia.
In April 1992, Bijeljina was occupied by the Serb Volunteer Guard, a paramilitary group led by Željko Ražnatović Arkan, known as the Tigers. They rounded up and killed non-Serbian residents and disloyal Serbs. Most of Europe considered citizens residing in the ‘border’ countries as less-than-equal, outside the frame of reality. The publication of the photograph in TIME did not achieve much among the magazine’s readers in Western Europe and the U.S. other than to provoke a debate over the international response to the emerging war in Bosnia, which continued for more than three years. As the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina unfolded, the Serbian authorities embraced the prospect of proxy-war in the neighbouring states, creating paramilitary formations overseen by the secret police.[6] This was an attempt to clear the Serbian authorities of any responsibility for the crimes committed by the paramilitary troops. It was essential to send a message, to fuel panic among the non-Serbian population, and the media played a crucial role.
We have come to know this photo by heart, so we see it even with our eyes closed.[7]
I cannot remember the first time I saw it.
***
I sought out a role—I was there to document what was happening in the hope that even in a worst-case scenario there would be a record of what had occurred.[8]
Explains Haviv. There was an opportunity to record a crime, and he took it. One photograph. Three dead bodies on the pavement. Ajša Šabanović lying prone, her face shoved into the pavement, a young soldier standing above her with his leg swung back into a casual stride, balancing on his left foot, about to kick her dead head—‘as casually as he used to kick empty beer cans in the school yard five or six years before’.[9] The soldier is standing with his back to us, a hand grenade launcher slung over his right shoulder, like a postman’s bag. He is holding a Kalashnikov. Sunglasses perched on the top of his head, a fashion accessory, a cigarette in his left hand. The kick, mid-stride, captures the horrors of the war in Bosnia and the breakup of Yugoslavia.
When he kicked her, it was like the ultimate disrespect for everything.[10]
The events that followed the publication of the photograph would epitomize Serbia’s failure to confront its criminal past. Haviv’s photographs became part of a large collection of photographic and video material consulted as (often critical) evidence[11] in criminal prosecutions at The Hague. Several trials, starting with that against Slobodan Milošević, used the Bijeljina photo to illustrate the responsibility of the Serbian authorities for the war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. This photograph was used along with approximately one hundred payroll lists proving that the Serbian State Security Service had paid per diems to Arkan’s Voluntary Guard from September 1994 until the end of 1995, which provided some of the soldiers with police pensions.[12]
The faces of the perpetrators and their victims are identifiable. The nature of the crime is clear.[13]
Several witnesses in multiple proceedings identified the soldier as Srđan Golubović, a former member of the Serbian Volunteer Guard, known in Belgrade as DJ Max. He continued to perform in Belgrade night clubs in the years during and after the war. No investigation was launched into members of Arkan’s troops and their connections with the government in Serbia, just as there had been no investigation in 2002, when Haviv’s photos were exhibited for the first time in cities across Serbia, provoking a strong public outcry and protests.[14]
***
‘Can you imagine,’ said Barbara, ‘I tried to reach him, to interview him. They told me he was charming. The thought that absolutely bewildered me was the idea that our lives could actually have intersected at some point. That we might have visited the same clubs all these years, or that I could have spent the night with that man.’ [15]
The idea that a killer could be among us—or, worse, center stage, playing music for us through the war years—does not provoke nearly as much horror as the thought that the criminal is someone ‘like us’. We do not try to imagine the face of the soldier in the photo, yet we are disturbed by the thought that he might turn around and face us. We are terrified by the thought that we might meet his gaze, that we might see a familiar face, a reflection even. We stand behind him, watching as he prepares to kick the dead Ajša Šabanović in the head.
There is a syllogism: ordinary people could not have done what these monsters did; we are ordinary people, therefore we cannot commit such crimes.[16]
***
‘Let the atrocious images haunt us’,[17] proposes Susan Sontag. Even though they are no more than a caveat to our conscience, ghosts—such as those captured within the Bijeljina photograph—whisper revelations about the horrors we are capable of. Sontag notes that there are many reasons why people might feel put off by violent images. ‘[N]ot all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience’—‘people can feel afraid, or ashamed, in addition to the initial shock.’[18] But again, Sontag observes, ‘not all violence is watched with equal detachment’.[19] She takes issue with the claim that the war in Bosnia was uncontrollable, rejecting it as the genuine reason why people abroad switched off ‘the terrible images’ from their screens.[20] Sontag notes that the real reason lies in the fact that the Balkans have never been seen as a part of Europe, allowing for a detachment such as that produced by the troubling images of Africa and the ‘Orient.’
One has to make a deliberate choice to relate to the suffering in the photograph as real. Writer and media theorist Ariella Azoulay further considers the ethics of spectatorship, warning us of a civil contract within and around photography. She started to develop the concept throughout the five years of the second Palestinian intifada, during which she was a spectator who was ‘addressed every day by photographs documenting the daily horrors of the Israeli occupation’.[21]
Azoulay’s writing helps us rethink the role of photo-journalism within the spheres of conflict, citizenship, and spectatorship[22]—‘outside of the merely psychological framework of empathy, of “regarding the pain of others”—on the basis of civic duty and the mutual trust of those who are governed.’[23] Azoulay formulates her concept as a political space ‘imagined’ by people using photography every day (the photographers, the spectators, the people in the photographs). The ‘deployment of photography on the part of the modern state’ incorporated the logic of the capitalist order through the uneven distribution of wealth, ‘turning weak, disadvantaged, and marginal populations such as ethnic minorities, criminals, and the insane into utterly exposed objects of photography’.[24] Therefore, those who employed photography immediately became ‘the members of this imagined public’, or ‘the citizens of the nation of photography’.[25]
The photograph is liable to exploit the photographed individual, aggravate his or her injury, publicly expose it, and rob the individual of intimacy.[26]
It is for this reason, Azoulay insists, that photography is not an object, it is an event which is ‘subject to a unique form of temporality—made up of an infinite series of encounters.[27]
Between the event of the photograph being taken and the event of spectatorship are a sea of variables which often remain hidden. For Azoulay, it is not enough to focus only on photographers and spectators. Spectatorship is participatory; there is no level of pure interpretation. Azoulay argues that such culpability plays a crucial role when it comes to facing the violence and suffering portrayed in photographic images. She pushes against the writings of postmodern theorists (Barthes, Baudrillard, or Sontag).[28] Even when such postmodern theorists consider the social context of photography, she argues, they hold onto ‘the notion of a stable meaning for what is visible in the photograph,’ reducing ‘the role of the spectator to the act of judgment, eliminating his or her responsibility for what is seen’.[29] Photography, Azoulay insists, denotes time and movement within it. It requires you to stop looking at the photograph alone and start watching it.[30]
***
It is July 2017 and I am meeting Barbara Matejčić at Zagreb Central Station. We have roughly half an hour before my bus leaves for Rijeka.
‘Do you want to see him?’ asks Barbara, dragging on her cigarette. I hesitate for a moment. Do I want to see him, really? I wonder: I have already seen a couple of clips of him on YouTube, where, admittedly, I could only make out the outline of his figure. The bleeding colors of the club lighting and the limited video capabilities of a concert-goer’s mobile phone: images that can only ever be their owners’ mementos and nothing else.
My internal dialogue is brief. Like two teenage girls, in the stuffy station café (it is 35 degrees and this place is the only one with a hiccupping AC) we huddle over Barbara’s smartphone, peering into the video clip. Before us is the face of the soldier, twenty-five years older, yet unequivocally recognizable to me from Haviv’s photo, facing the camera this time. I am amazed by the clarity of Barbara’s footage, taken in early morning, practically in daylight, nothing concealed. For a moment, DJ Max is looking straight at us, or rather at the camera of Barbara’s phone, and then the next moment he repeats the gesture of straightening his collar. He likes to wear it upturned, practically stuck to his neck. Unexpectedly, my brain plays a trick: I am reminded of Modesty Blaise and her black collar defiantly up. However, his collar is real, and so is his history. It needs something to hold it upright, so he uses his earphones, which are thus given a double role; they become an aesthetic detail which completes his stage persona, like a tie that completes a uniform. I realize that he still takes great care of his looks, he accessorizes. I think of the white sunglasses he wore in 1992 while kicking a dead body on the pavement in Bijeljina.
I can still see her knitted cardigan.[31]
Several months later, I talk to Ivana Jozić, performer and dancer, and ask her how she would perform the soldier on the photograph.
As he kicks, he holds a cigarette—almost whimsically—in his left hand. It is that gesture that is most unsettling: relaxed, even flamboyant. He could be kicking a football back to children on a beach.[32]
We discuss the kick of his leg, what is so profoundly disturbing in his posture. Suddenly, Ivana recalls watching a bullfight, an act of murder which ‘juxtaposes’ aesthetics and ethics, codified so that we experience it as a clash between culture and nature. It must be stressed, Ivana insists, that the positions occupied by matador and animal are absolutely unequal. Like the scene in Haviv’s photo, where the kick carries no risk whatsoever.
[T]he act appears balletic, elegant, like the graceful movement of a skillful athlete or dancer.[33]