Photography's Crypt

Abstract

6 Codex Goodman, Aaron, and Luis Liwanag. 2017. Duterte’s Hell. Film. July 31. New York: Field of Vision. http://www.fieldofvision.org/. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2012. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. See, Sarita Echavez. 2017. The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum. New York: New York University Press. Simangan, Dahlia. 2018. “Is the Philippine ‘War on Drugs’ an Act of Genocide ?” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 1: 68–­ 89. Photography’s Crypt John Labella A photograph holds the subject. It frames him or her in no way different from the seizure of objects and any scene in time. In doing so, as if covering its own tracks, it also conserves and hides the force with which it captures them. Writ with both light and darkness, this representational violence is well known by now. Photography has the power to fracture the real, to take bits of the human in no way different from taking hold of inanimate surfaces, and to displace whatever the eye of the camera arrests. It is blind to the distinction we make between persons and things while enabling us to insist on their separation. It brightens and dims with the logic of substitution, mistaking the human for the nonhuman while thriving on the distinction between that which belongs to civil domains and that which these domains relegate to oblivion. It takes part in the process of distinguishing between the faces that can be invested with care or mourning and the kinds of humans susceptible to defacement. Photography’s limits and possibilities pivot, hence, on its susceptibility to sovereign power. A photograph reproduces sovereign power in visual domains. Nowhere is continuity with sovereign power more palpable than in images of humans destroyed by that very power. Such images lodge the gaze in the zone where the distinctions of sovereignty operate, founding and perpetuating the boundary between the human, political domains and whatever lies beyond depthless unconcealment of the human face. It is with reference to that zone where ethical perplexity comes sharply into focus. Is there a place, then, for the ethical in representing scenes where the human has been negated or made worthless? In the context of the rogue state, is it still possible to claim the ethical uses of photography’s power to represent violence? Codex 7 An answer to these perplexities may be found in the work of Eloisa Lopez,aFilipinophotojournalistwhohastrainedherlensontheextrajudicial killings in her country. What compels in her documentary images, two of which this essay close-­reads, is their ability to make visible not just the ongoing death meted out by a rogue state, a state willing to suspend due process in the name of waging its war on drugs. In self-­referential ways, Lopez confronts viewers with the processes by which photography encrypts sovereign violence. It puts us in touch with the techniques of framing and selection. It insistently uses the motifs of seeing the unrepresentable, of disrupting the hierarchical, implicitly narcissistic economies inscribed in pity. This restless vigil over the photography’s techniques punctures sight with its very power, the logic of sovereign gaze. In the process, the invisible as much as the unseeable—­that which we cannot bear to see but also that which resists visual technique—­ punctuates the act of seeing. Lopez exposes and interrupts the sovereign power lodged in her very medium, as the first photograph depicting three killings illustrates. This image is uncanny. A tunnel frames a gathering of police officers and the three victims. While resembling a crypt, the site of passage doubles as a photograph within a photograph, delineating the physical limits of the image with the tunnel’s dark solidity. The lawmen form part of the inner frame. Their threshold of whispers and shadows divides the living and the dead. The cops form a line, a cordon, separating the blurred onlookers in the well-­lit street and three faceless bodies slumped on the asphalt. With strong diagonal lines, Lopez guides the viewer’s simulated passage into and through the tunnel, toward the other side. This visual movement enacts not just the decisive cuts between the visible and the invisible...