War in Silence?

Abstract

As contemporary geopolitics is intrinsically linked to media-produced imagery, the mass media have emerged ts the largest and most powerful vehicle for distributing the sights and sounds of war. (1) Video footage representing sites of destruction, terrorist threats, and witness testimonies are increasingly becoming contemporary war's medium of choice. While video, television, and online news are conspicuously full of images penetrated by sound to the point of inseparability, still photography (still in the sense of free of noise or turbulence as well as immobile) remains a powerful way of transmitting traumatic events. Testimonies of war and disaster, both aural and visual, are rendered only visually in photographs. The way of seeing incorporates the way of listening: the photographer must produce images in such a way that their meanings will be congruent with those produced by both sight and sound. Yet photographs of exploding buildings, screaming bystanders, and lamenting mourners are not populated by deaf and mute characters moving about in a soundless space, nor must we as viewers remain insensitive to their sonic effects. Images from war zones can suggest a variety of acoustics, from noises (the loud, irregular, and startling sounds of bombings) to tones (a lament with its specific musical quality, resonance, and pitch). How does the incorporation of sound into photographs change our comprehensive and receptive skills? Twentieth-century criticism has paid ample attention to the visual--on the one hand questioning vision as the sole means of reliable knowledge about the external world, while on the other pointing out how our reality is constituted, disciplined, and normalized by the power of surveillance. Consequently, sound is almost without exception theorized as subordinate to the visual. For example, in cinema studies, terms like on-screen and offscreen have been applied to dialogues, monologues, and music even though these sounds were in themselves never off-screen (only their source was off-screen). The aural has been muted by the very words used to describe it. Yet, sound is so well-suited to recount the traumas of war. Unlike vision, which has often been theorized as distancing the viewer from the viewed,' (2) the physics and phenomenology of sound in Western culture are frequently associated with proximity, contact, and, consequently, violent disturbance. Through the air, sound transmits to our ears and skin the agitation resulting from collisions of objects surrounding us (often against our will) at a 360-degree expanse. Sound enables/forces contact, from the bond between mother and fetus to urban noise pollution and sonic weapons. What happens if we bring the notion of sound back to the photographic rendition of war and violence? In cinema studies, a sound one hears in a film without seeing its origin is called an acousmatic sound. What would we then call sounds of which, conversely, the sources are visible (bodies, objects, explosions), but which do not reach our ears? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] All of the photographs accompanying this text show women in the aftermath of individual or systemic violence. This choice reflects the tendency of contemporary media to use women as signifiers for the ravages of wars, genocides, and racial and gender inequalities. This may partially explain the recognition of these images by both professional and wider audiences-all of them have received awards in the prestigious World Press Photo contest. While conflating femininity and oppression risks reducing women to the pathological and the melancholic, women's screams and silences may also form a crucial expression of private pain that is consecutively transferred into a communal web of global and intermedial relationships. Hocine Zaourar's photograph, which was awarded World Press Photograph of the Year in 1997, shows a woman crying outside of the hospital where the dead and wounded were taken in the aftermath of a massacre in the Algerian village of Bentalha, in which approximately two hundred men, women, and children were methodically slaughtered in their homes in the middle of the night. …