Images of Death
November 21, 2008
Virginia Woolfe wrote about it, Susan Sontag wrote about it…it came back again today, at home, eating lunch with my mother, listening absently to the radio – joe duffy – a pinch of salt – there were people calling in, as per usual, in (as expected) distressed tones – their voices sharp with anger, or damp with desperation.
Ruffled voices. Tinny voices. Coming across as whinging voices…until your ear tunes in – and their words become significant. Some were lamenting the floods which the heavy rains had brought. The graveyards were flooding around Dublin – their loved ones remains sodden all the more – they were fearful of their escape, their exposure, presumably.
A woman spoke of how she’d seen the flood waters rising through the football pitches that stretched out in front of her house. The storm drains on the bungalo lined cul de sac were clogged – untended. She had called the local authorities to warn them – to request that they send her sandbags as soon as possible…there was a promise but no response. She had, just the day before, finished redecorating from the floods five years previous. ‘At a loss’ I’d call her tone.
I don’t usually listen to this radio programme – as I said, it comes across as a lot of moaning individuals, eager to complain about something. But in essence, they are legitimate woes, in one way or another. Some exclamations, however, lose their perspective on a wider field of pain and suffering.
Some complained of the flooding graveyard – others complained of the graveyard toilets being locked…using one lament to exaggerate another, in a sense.
Later, another caller raised the issue of photographing the dead…or recently deceased. Those caught in the moment of their untimely death – in this case in the flood waters of a river in England…the man was photographed face down, bloated by the swollen river. He had been on a Stag weekend from what I could gather, though I may be mixing my stories. The woman caller was expressing her horror that such an image be published in a “family paper”. The Radio host, not notable for broadcasting his own critical opinion or point of view, but rather for his careful management and slucing of others, interjected as more callers entered in on the subject. He begged the question as to why it was not okay for an image of an Irish man drowned in a swollen river to be printed in a Daily Paper, and why it seemed perfectly plausible and normal that images from the growing conflict between Georgia and Russia should be spread across front pages World Wide? He pulled in a wider frame of reference. And this is a point which Sontag (and Woolfe) raised in her writing – Images of War are abundant…Images of everyday accidental death are taboo. Why?
The talk show – known nationally for it’s disgruntled overtones – raised a fundamental question about spectatorship and war, and the Image of Death. The talk show, a serious political entity, permitted a questioning, however superficially interrogated, of a normative practice in journalistic photography – peddling images of war and images of death, and the subtle differences between these two and their wider acknowledgment in society. The talk show scorned – and yet, as Hannah Arendt put it:
“Whenever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.” (The Human condition)
