Visualizing Disposability: Photographing Neoliberal Conflict in the United States

Abstract

On July 6, 2016, millions of viewers watched Diamond Lavish Reynolds's live Facebook video of Philando Castile bleeding to death after having been shot by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop. She knew, even as her fiancee sat dying and the police officer continued to point his gun through the car window, how important it was to have proof of that violence and to make that proof public. The first thing she said as she began filming from the passenger seat is stay with me--and it is unclear whether she is speaking to Castile or to us, the viewers and complicit witnesses to yet another police shooting of a black man. What is powerful about Reynolds's video is its articulation of the lethal danger faced by marginalized populations in the United States, as well as the video's contextualization within an ever-widening range of documents of state violence--from photojournalism to graphic representations in popular culture--with which viewers are confronted on a daily basis. The proliferation of such visualizations sustains the decades-long debate about images of violence and their ethical and political usefulness, and amid the sheer volume of images it becomes increasingly clear that greater quantities of more graphic images do not necessarily signal a corresponding jump in awareness or attention. This conundrum, fueled by the digital age and widening distribution of images, has unsettled photography at large and placed the photographic treatment of conflict in a state of flux, characterized by both the shifting forms and content of atrocity images. What has been termed post-photography (1)--describing, among other things, digital preponderance, the blending of previously discrete photographic approaches, and the rising use of found images, bricolage, and collaborative approaches has emerged increasingly in the documentation of conflict. The landscape of war photography is forced to adapt as journalistic access is restricted, the prosecution of war is increasingly digital and remote, and photographers struggle ethically and aesthetically to make sense of enduring states of conflict. Traditional photojournalism is often unable to respond to the growing discomfort with the hierarchical relationships between photographer, audience, and subject, or to the enduring visual traffic in Western stereotypes about brown and black bodies. The politically influential mode of photojournalism that emerged during the Vietnam War has been steadily dismantled by several material factors within the visual economy, including labor insecurity as secure staff assignments and investigative journalism are replaced by rapid story turnover, the popularity of citizen journalism, the rising dominance of uninsured contract work, and diminishing journalistic freedom. As a result of this shifting landscape, photographing conflict that is characterized by evolving forms of precarity and disguised forms of warfare requires new approaches that engage self-consciously with the role and state of photography itself. While photographs are crucial for translating combat across geographical and cultural distances, contemporary photographers must contend with the complexity of neoliberal conflict's domestic dimension in the US. Powerful narratives about threats to American safety are deployed to foment domestic militarization just as much as they are utilized to justify international military intervention. Such militarization includes the evisceration of due process and privacy through the 2001 USA Patriot Act and ensuing NSA transgressions; the arming of state police forces with surplus military equipment; draconian policies that overwhelmingly target people of color, the poor, and those with dissenting opinions; and the institutional barriers in place that prevent collective organization, protest, or the sustenance of productive and democratic public discourse. (2) These deformations are implemented through the solicitation of consent to certain types of violence and infringements of rights, guided in large part by the visualization and public representation of war and violence. …