Animal Bodies, Oil, and the Apocalyptic in the First Gulf War Aftermath

Abstract

The First Gulf War (1990–1991) is typically remembered as a virtual, video-game war, in which close to no pictures of human bodies were seen. In its aftermath, images of the devastating Kuwaiti oil fields’ fires were frequently described as visions of apocalypse, conjuring a posthuman world. Some Gulf War photographs depicting oil damage, among which those taken by Steve McCurry, Bruno Barbey and Sebastião Salgado, feature animals from soiled sea birds to horses and camels irretrievably lost in the polluted desert. This article, by focusing notably on three photographs by Salgado as published in his 2016 book Kuwait: a Desert on Fire, proposes a close observation of those easily overlooked pictures, to question the hegemonic understanding of the Gulf War as a “war without bodies” (Sekula). On the contrary, using notably the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, I will argue that the animals’ bodies, and specifically their liminal character akin to ghosts and zombies, convey the damage wreaked by this war, not in terms of battle casualties, but rather of its wider environmental damage. The belated publication of Salgado’s Kuwait: a Desert on Fire and the relationship of that timing with the evolution of the visual representation of climate change will thus be examined.