He and it are dead and he and it are going to die.
Welcome to the 88th edition of this newsletter!
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A little while ago, I had a discussion about trigger warnings with a European teacher. I forgot most of the details. But I remember how my interlocutor told me that there apparently was some research that showed that they don't work. The reason was that the warning itself had the same effect as the actual content. I didn't look into this, so I don't know whether that's true or not.
I don't teach classes any longer (let's not even go there), but when I did I added trigger warnings to my syllabi. If you ignore the "culture-war" aspect around so many of these discussions, maybe my own thinking around this makes sense: I view trigger warnings as a form of respect.
I'm here as a writer, not a teacher, but the same thinking applies.
With that said, this email contains a discussion of photography and violent death. If you don't want to read about it, please simply wait for my next email. I was going to add a lot of links after the following discussion. But now I'm thinking that separating things out into two emails makes a lot more sense.
I'm going to assume that you've seen this picture of Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Payne), taken by Alexander Gardner in 1865. Roland Barthes included it in his book Camera Lucida, adding the caption "He is dead and he is going to die". If you don't know the story, Powell was one of the conspirators that killed US president Abraham Lincoln. He was executed.
Fast forward in time, and you arrive at this photograph by Robert Capa. It was taken in 1936 during the Spanish civil war. It recorded the moment the soldier was hit by the bullet that killed him.
There have been quite a few discussions over whether or not the picture is real. Was it staged? Given that this discussion is besides the point I'm interested in, I'm going to ignore it here.
Even as making a point about technology is tedious, we might as well note that in his time, Alexander Gardner would have been unable to take a picture like Capa's. Apart from the fact that it would have been crazy to set up a view camera on a battlefield, the materials would also have been much too slow. Even if he had been able to press the shutter button in just the right moment, the picture would not have come out right (just look at the movement blur in the portrait).
Improved technology has always meant that photographers were able to get closer and closer to the moment where something important happened. Capa was able to use the technology available in 1936 to get his picture.
Fast forward to roughly today, and modern digital cameras with their burst modes can now take the action pictures that photojournalists love so much: the big boom when the gun goes off. You've seen those pictures.
But I'm not interested in photography, I'm interested in death.
This image was taken by US Army photographer Hilda Clayton in Afghanistan in 2017. She was photographing a training exercise. A mortar shell exploded when it was supposed to be launched, killing the soldiers nearby -- and the photographer.
Much like the Capa picture, the photograph shows the moment someone dies. But now the photographer also dies.
If I remember this correctly, there are one or two photographs taken with film cameras, in which the photographer(s) recorded their own death(s). So strictly speaking, this is probably nothing new. But new camera equipment has vastly increased the odds of it happening.
I've been looking at the imagery emerging from the war in Ukraine in part because I am interested in both the use of images and in whether or not there are new types of images.
Interestingly, the world of photojournalism is still stuck in the Capa model. There has been very good work. But it's all following the tradition, an endless series of pictures of old women crying, people waving hands, and all those other tropes photojournalists love so much. Just briefly, these tropes are dangerous not because they don't portray a reality. They're dangerous because they reduce a reality to a set of visual cliches, thus undermining the actual work at hand.
You might have heard that in the war in Ukraine, drones play a huge role. If you're interested in what this looks like, this video is all you need.
Camera technology plays a huge role for drones, because they all have one. The camera might be used to navigate the drone, or it might be used to take videos (or both).
There now also exist so-called FPV (first-person view) combat drones that you might have heard of as kamikaze drones. The name says it all: it's a relatively small drone that has some grenade attached to it. It rams into its target and explodes. They're relatively cheap, and they're magnitudes cheaper than what they can destroy.
You can easily find videos from drone feeds online because Ukrainians share them. The above is a screen grab I took in May 2022. It shows a moment just a split second away from a US supplied Switchblade drone hitting the tank in the center. If you look carefully, you can see two or three soldiers standing on top of the tank.
Now the situation has arisen where the camera and the killer are identical. The camera plays one of the two crucial roles: navigating the deadly payload to its destination. The people that are present at the target are being filmed.
However, unlike in the case of Capa and Clayton, you do not get an image from the moment of death. In that very moment, the camera is destroyed. All of the videos showing such attacks cut out a very brief moment before the explosion (typically, the screen suddenly is filled with black-and-white static).
You don't have to spend too much effort to see war footage from Ukraine. A lot of soldiers wear GoPro cameras, or they simply use their cell phones. I don't know whether russians use GoPros, but there is ample cellphone footage.
This is where all of this collided. This is the final moment of an FPV drone hitting a russian vehicle. As you can see, the soldier in the back happened to film (or photograph) the scene outside. There would have been images or a video. The moment the drone hit, both cameras were destroyed.
It's dangerous to make such pronouncements, but I'm thinking that this might be to end of the development I described above. A person is filming his own death, while the machine that will be killing him is also filming its own act.
He and it are dead and he and it are going to die.
I'm thinking that photographic thinking has not caught up with any of this. I'm thinking that a lot more can be said about this than what is contained in Roland Barthes' book.
With that I'm going to conclude for today. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg