I co-authored and co-presented on war photography and the spectacle of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict with my human rights lawyer sister, Anjali Manivannan. I handled the material on photography while she addressed the legal perspective. I was exhausted and unwell for most of the conference, but our presentation was solid, and our Q&A was marked by big questions about journalism, ethics, and the politics of the image in the context of mediating stories that, because they are so awful, may discourage even the very act of looking.
Access copy of the talk below. Due to the sensitive nature of my sister’s work, I have chosen to consolidate our speaking roles without attribution.
“We are Sri Lankan Civilians Plz Save Our Life”: Photography and the Spectacle of Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict
Vyshali Manivannan, Montclair State University
New Narrative IV: Image and Spectacle, Toronto, CN
May 5, 2011
Sri Lanka’s three-decade long ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese-run government and separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or Tamil Tigers was largely a war without witnesses. Today, two years after the war’s end, Sri Lanka remains in the bottom tier of press freedom rankings. As a substitute for traditional press, pro-government and pro-Tiger sources emerged, constructing biased and contradictory narratives. So in lieu of testimony, photography chronicled the war and its aftermath, reconfiguring it as politicized spectacle. However, the photography characteristic of neutral news sources often fails to animate us by privileging political, cultural, and historical elements—what Roland Barthes refers to as “studium”—over “punctum,” or heterogeneous elements that “disturb” the studium to create a lasting impression. The punctum often forces us to critically reflect on the photograph, which leads to our greater understanding of the portrayed conflict. Photography’s mobilization power lies in its ability to advene on us or engage us to take positive action. In the case of Sri Lanka, each category ultimately encourages the submissive consumption characteristic of media spectacle. Ideally, war photographs should impart accountability by selectively framing our response to and understanding of the conflict. But in Sri Lanka, photojournalism does not seek to explain the conflict’s roots or consider policy solutions for the future. Instead, the horror communicated by these images is attenuated by ethnic dichotomization within the frame that restricts compassion and promotes self-righteous judgment of the depicted victims.
Of the mass media practices most concerned with international law, photojournalism is especially engaged with war crimes discourse; the spectacle of Sri Lanka’s war and its politicized visual rhetoric makes it particularly compelling to examine. Moreover, understanding spectacle and spectatorship of war photography is critical to the viability of international law, which is profoundly influenced by media coverage.
Photographs representing horrific experience presumably demand a moral response from us, but media spectacle has rendered war too familiar for reflexive empathy or critical reflection. Mediatized conflict has become spectacle as it continually genericizes war. For instance, an empty bomb crate positioned on a beach, or piles of confiscated Tamil Tiger rifles, depict expected images of war. The man’s skin color, tropical landscape, and the weapons signifying violence coincide with the Western stereotype of conflict in developing countries. These images serve more as a cliched testament to what war generally looks like—as if it has one face—rather than the particulars of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Moral response is therefore deflected on two levels: first, through visual elements with a narrative; and second, through a lack of specificity that discourages bearing witness to specific abuses and suffering in favor of speculating broadly about suffering, death, and human nature.
In order to actively engage spectators, the photograph must delineate a clear relationship between studium and punctum. The punctum may be as miniscule as a ripped foot amidst predictable sanitization on BBC, or overwhelming in size, as in numerous posters depicting Western politicians as “wanted: for aiding and abetting terrorism” alongside a patrolling soldier. Since the Sri Lankan government stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the repeating posters are an arousing detail and thus serve as punctum for Western audiences. The resulting heterogeneity of the image compels critical reflection, as we are left to wonder how such incongruous details coexist in the same frame.
Barthes distinguishes between these images and unary photographs, or homogeneous images with singular interpretations. The unary photograph contains only studium as seen in this photograph of protesters storming the U.K. High Commission in Colombo; the frame is divided between soldiers barricading the High Commission and protesters holding flags. We infer the protesters’ ethnicity to be Sinhalese from their anti-Tiger signs; we also recognize the insuperable divide signified by the split frame. Without further context, we define this dichotomy through ethnic divisions and alliances, which is characteristic of Western ordering thought processes. This leads to incorrect assumptions, such as believing the British support the Tamil Tigers in light of Sri Lanka’s colonial history when the British favored Tamils. Thus, our interpretation is limited to studium: colonial British rule, its influence on ethnic tensions, and the present-day relationship between British, Tamils, and Sinhalese. The lack of punctum further flattens the image, restricting our engagement to passive consumption.
The other category of unary photographs, where the image is evacuated of studium and solely shocks, horrifies, and accuses, projects only horror and so also avoids critical reflection. The uncensored image of a child killed in a shelling forces revulsion on us in its depiction of the child’s gory wound and vacant stare. Detached from studium, this unary image genericizes violent conflict by transforming the child into a representation of war in any developing nation. The resulting spectacle is drained of pathos-evoking morality and does not provide any insight into Sri Lanka’s war politics or postconflict progress. This affords viewers multiple interpretations, but Moller notes that Westerners, when faced with suffering in the developing world, often make assumptions about deep-seated ethnic rivalry, resulting in their own feelings of powerlessness. As such, Westerners are likely to ignore the systematic nature of attacks perpetrated by the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers and instead divide individuals into an “Us” and “Them” that cannot be reconciled due to poorly understood or misunderstood ethnic tensions.
Unary images most obviously sustain passive consumption of spectacle by an unquestioning public, as well as submissive acceptance of the rationale provided for a particular war. However, heterogeneous images, surprisingly, also fail to subvert the spectacle of Sri Lanka’s war; rather, they encourage broader existential contemplation. In neutral news sources, the largely voiceless Tamils in Sri Lanka find their representation in photographs, without which they would truly be invisible to the outside world. Expected unary images, such as a man solemnly waving the Sri Lankan flag, are stereotypical of postwar celebrations, convey a cliched narrative, and thus are unmemorable. Successful representation may occur in photographs containing punctum, such as a shirtless old man, dancing amidst triumphal celebrations in Sri Lanka’s capital. One arm upraised, palm to the sky, the old man’s expression is absorbed in his own happiness even while his shirtlessness starkly represents him as a citizen of a developing nation amidst the modern button-downs worn by the other celebrators. The image advenes due to the incongruity of the man’s age, attire, and posture, along with the photograph’s reliance on studium of postwar celebration.
At the same time, professional photojournalism typically genericizes suffering, which interferes with our ability to consume the image politically. For example, an image of internally displaced Tamils clutching at barbed wires recalls images of Holocaust concentration camps; however, relating Sri Lanka’s tragedy to an already iconic image of suffering allows Sri Lankan imagery to be consumed passively as spectacle, eclipsing the possibility of a moral response. Images that interrogate our own role as spectators would seemingly overcome this limitation, such as the photograph of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran’s corpse, carried by soldiers eagerly photographing his body. Here, the striking aspect is found in the young men’s actions. Prabhakaran’s body is dehumanized as he is paraded through the crowd, one soldier casually walking alongside with his hand pressed to Prabhakaran’s face. Additionally, the image is starkly dichotomic as it shows victorious Sinhalese military forces dehumanizing the Tamil figure who represented separatist ideology and, albeit problematic, a sector of Tamils.
Our knowledge of the Tamil Tigers—proscribed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1997 and by Canada in 2006—might cause us to empathize with the joyous government forces concerning their victory against terror. Instead, the majority of us become viewers looking at viewers, thus becoming immersed in the spectacle of spectatorship. We may feel obliged to view atrocity photographs, but even here, these photographs’ emotive power remains in their ability to dichotomize, not to convey empathy for the represented victim. Thus, Sri Lanka’s war photography encourages spectators to passively consume images instead of becoming responsible witnesses who actively reflect on specific conflict issues.
By contrast, biased media appropriates war photography in order to mobilize public empathy by creating inauthentic representations of events. War photographs on government-sponsored websites tend to be unary but use captions and graphic layout to overtly blame the opposition through the actual or misrepresented ethnicity of photographed subjects, thereby encouraging blame-placing.
The Internet has facilitated such biased narratives by the Sri Lankan government, as seen in the Ministry of Defence’s homepage where graphic layout and captions constrain us to singular interpretations. This is most evident in the gallery titled “Portrait of a Psycho as a Con Man: The Intimate Life of P’Karan Exposed.” Here, the conflict is narrativized to laud the government’s actions by painting the Tamil Tigers as indifferent to the suffering of the Tamils they claim to represent. This recontextualization not only vilifies Prabhakaran but also portrays the Sinhalese-nationalistic government as being sensitive to Tamil issues and needs. The images are strategically arranged such that, taken together, the two columns emphasize Prabhakaran’s hypocrisy. The left-hand column displays family photographs with sarcastic comments about Prabhakaran’s luxurious lifestyle, starkly contrasted with the right-hand column’s depictions of suffering, presumably caused by the Tamil Tigers. While ethnicities within the frame are unidentified, we can infer from the captions that the right-hand column depicts Tamils living under Prabhakaran’s leadership.
Although captions are often necessary, they also influence our interpretation of the photograph, regardless of the original context in which the photographs were taken. This is seen in “A father’s wail,” where the victims are presumably Tamils killed in a Tamil Tiger attack. However, the image actually depicts Sinhalese victims of a claymore bus bombing for which no group has claimed responsibility. Significantly, Sinhalese ethnicity is misrepresented to fit the series’ holistic narrative: that all Tamils are actually suffering because of the Tamil Tigers. Ironically, the Sri Lankan government has perpetrated innumerable war crimes themselves, so the narrativization of Prabhakaran as an uncaring hypocrite blatantly disregards the government’s oppressive policies toward the Tamils they “saved” from the Tigers’ ruthlessness.
The dichotomizing practices exhibited in government propaganda photography are only advanced in online visual culture, in body horror and photoshopped imagery. Where war photographs circulated in neutral and politically sponsored news sources urge moral responsibility, online spectatorship reduces the consumption of war photography from civic duty to spectacle, while so-called “body horror imagery” demands that we experience the image as viscerally as a physical assault. Body horror, unlike spectacle, insists on our complicity in terrorizing acts. This action—seeking out images to cause a strong, even physical response—may seem to convey a desire to bear witness to the explicitly “real,” which should necessitate responsive gazing—the precedent to action—but Sri Lanka’s war photography continually denies this possibility.
Body horror images of incidents such as the suicide bombing attack on Major General Janaka Perera are only available in graphic detail online. Gruesome images of ruined bodies are left uncaptioned. The image of the dismembered leg, for instance, can only horrify by asserting its presence and as such excites the amoral gaze, which is purely stimulative and devoid of morality. The photograph of the row of ruined bodies, however, is transformed by the inclusion of the pointing finger. Without context, the braceleted hand dichotomizes even this “gore pornography” image by portraying a witness who isn’t taking action beyond simply pointing, which may or may not be a politicized gesture.
As a gratuitous, contextless display of suffering and ruined bodies that do little more than claim that they exist, online shock images could potentially utilize captions to move away from dichotomic practices and instead mobilize public empathy as Sontag contends. However, the captioning practices in Sri Lanka’s satirical shock images simply exist to insult one ethnicity. TamilNet.tv, a satirical website, compiles news articles using biting criticism and scatological humor to compel us to passively accept their mockery of the Tigers’ movement without seriously considering the reasons behind the struggle.
Much of the visual discourse on TamilNet.tv consists of Tamil Tiger corpses and various photoshopped shock images. Captions viciously disparage the Tigers, as in one gruesome photograph of a dead man with his innards spilling onto the pavement, the caption attributing the death to a Tamil Tiger lieutenant colonel and citing the cause as explosive constipation. Interestingly enough, the corpse is most frequently attributed to the Iraq War, and the lieutenant colonel may have simply died from a heart attack. The producer’s zeal in undermining the Tigers—to the point of appropriating a gory, violent death from another war—thus underscores the extremely divisive politics of the conflict.
This type of body horror not only divorces the image from objective moral discourse but also precludes serious, albeit racially divisive, dialogue. As a whole, body horror spectatorship strongly demonstrates the importance of narrative in preserving ethical space and promoting responsive gazing. The remaining question is how to provoke the visceral sense of moral responsibility once characteristic of body horror, while preserving the empathetic and ethical space of war photography in mainstream media.
The most memorable images of Sri Lanka are typically taken for their shock value and graphic violence while others are politically manipulated and captioned using Photoshop. As such, the distribution of unauthorized images by amateur photographers has great potential to exacerbate the level of human rights abuses—already all too prevalent in Sri Lanka—by framing the images to dehumanize and degrade the photograph’s subject.
Punctum of a textual nature, it seems, could provide a viable solution. Photojournalism is essential to advening on viewers through narratives of crisis and suffering as images have the potential to mobilize empathy; the natural presence of text within an image could, ideally, narrativize the image in the context of studium while simultaneously advening on the viewer. The inherent difficulty, of course, is that punctum cannot be staged or the image will not advene on the spectator.
In the neutral news postwar image of boat refugees, studium and punctum converge through expected imagery and startling text. The predictable element of this image is the young man, representative of Tamil suffering. Unexpectedly, the dominating element is the wooden sign painted with the words, “We are Sri Lankan civilians / Plz save our life.” The punctum aggressively contradicts typical dichotomic practices by asserting that the refugees—and by extension, all Sri Lankans affected by the war—are united as Sri Lankan civilians and not divided by ethnicity. We presume the text was written by the individual within the frame, whose ethnicity is now called into question. Where we may have assumed he was Tamil due to his genericized suffering, the textual element frees the image from dichotomy and advenes on us by accusing us of ignoring the refugees’ plight. As such, spectacle is reconfigured as bearing witness, provoking our moral responsibility. We are left with a lasting impression of the image and a more nuanced understanding of the conflict as a whole: that civilian suffering is a uniting, not a dividing factor, for most.
For the most part, photographs of Sri Lanka’s war have not been distributed to serve justice but to place blame on the other side, which is the antithesis of international law’s objective. War and postwar photography should aim to advene in order to reach its full potential as an agent of change through visual rhetoric of suffering to aid international legal institutions. Future photographs from Sri Lanka must live up to the standard exemplified by the boat refugees image, to politicize us to take positive action and at the very least, engage us to understand the specifics of Sri Lanka’s war and postwar situation.
