Erik Varela

Thought Paper: 11/9

Bernd Hüppauf: "Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation"

 

In his article, Hüppauf describes the role of photography in modern warfare, particularly in the First World War, but also in the American Civil War and the Spanish Civil War.  At the time, the photograph was seen as the ideal method for representing warfare for both artistic and political purposes.  This belief stemmed from the idea of photography as a completely objective source of information that could reflect the imagery of the wars through its mechanical reproductions of reality.  The truth of the matter, however, turned out to be just the opposite. 

 

In a purely artistic sense, the camera is unable to accurately capture images of war.  Modern battlefields are of such a large scale, modern weapons so fast and dangerous, that it is simply impossible for a photographer to accurately capture a true war-time image.  Frank Hurley's "Over the Top," one of the most famous photos of World War I was, for example, actually a composite image put together from 12 negatives of which Hurley himself says: "Nothing could have been more unlike a battle" (53).

 

Without the ability to capture battle scenes, early war photography tended to focus on the up-close human element.  Pictures of soldiers, and especially pilots became iconographic representations of the war, but these could in no way reflect the total mechanization of modern warfare.  As Jünger showed us through In Stahlgewittern, battlefields that stretched on for untold miles and sprawling, mechanized armies in which the individual soldiers lost their identities and their ability to connect to reality were the truth of the war, but they remained hidden from the camera lens. 

 

This dichotomy continues to the present--even our contemporary war photography and film focuses on a concrete, usually human element (although in very recent times the technology of warfare has become a point of interest as well) and ignores the reality of modern warfare, which has no true focal point.

 

In his article, Hüppauf raises two essential points about the representation of war on film.  First is of course the paradoxical idea of the photograph--the most accurate and objective means of recording that we have--being completely unable to accurately portray modern warfare.  A normal photograph of a battlefield will capture only a small portion of it.  The soldiers will be indistinct, the destructive technology (save for a lucky shot that happens to catch an explosion) will be missed, and the scale will be completely lost.  A close-up photo of a soldier will bring in the human element (just as a close-up of a cannon or missile will portray the technological), but this is at the expense of the battlefield.  An arial shot on the other hand, will reveal the full scale of the modern battlefield, which is, unfortunately, so large that it is impossible to make out the individual soldiers and weapons that actually fight on said battlefield.  Our best chances of re-creating a wartime image then, lie in simply creating it:  the most accurate war imagery is, paradoxically, the least objective.

 

As Hüppauf illustrates, a second, even more paradoxical problem arises in representations of war through the need to identify with a human subject.  In anti-war photography and film in particular, we are shown the suffering of the individual at the hands of the nameless mechanized war entity.  Through the depiction of suffering, we are exposed to the instruments of violence that inflict that suffering.  By constantly reminding the public of the weapons of war and filling galleries and theaters with images thereof, the photographic image indirectly ushers in a certain glorification of war.  If allied war imagery from World War Two associated the iconography of weaponry and technology with a faceless Nazi threat, then what direction has our society been taken in if in the Gulf War it was the sleek cruise missiles and fighter jets of the US military that were the shining focus of photo and film in contrast to the disheveled and disorganized but human Iraqi infantry?  Has photography run up against something in war that it cannot accurately display in any way, and indeed where attempts to display the subject matter only end up twisting our perceptions of war into the thing that we want to avoid at all costs--adoration instead of revulsion?  Is Jünger’s completely apolitical approach then perhaps the only way to get an accurate representation of modern war?