It took a few days to accept the idea that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not just an episode of momentary tension, destined to be resolved with an agreement between the parties. Then we realized that the war had returned to the heart of Europe, and with unprecedented violence, that those areas had not seen since the Second World War.
This refusal to consider the very hypothesis of a military conflict in Europe, for those who grew up in a world that left the Cold War behind and was opening up, reaching levels of interconnection and cooperation unknown to previous generations, is something of more than a conviction based on the experience of many years of peace. It almost has an existential dimension. Which had not even been shaken by the dramatic experiences of the wars in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in the various areas, even very close to us, which have been involved (and in some cases devastated) in recent decades by military conflicts, including those of considerable intensity. The claim of Europeans that they had the right to call themselves out of war was an illusion. A self-deception which, in order to be supported, required denying that the Balkans or Albania were part of Europe. The war in Ukraine dissolved this illusion and returned Europe to history.
Almost twenty years have passed since the publication of Facing the pain of others (Mondadori 2003, republished last year by Nottetempo) by Susan Sontag. A reflection on the way of looking at war images – in particular photographs – and on the relationship they have with a certain idea of truth, which is intuitively attractive, yet elusive. Rereading it, one is struck by how much Sontag’s observations on the pragmatics of war photography (what the image shows, what the photographer intended to capture, what effect does it have, in different circumstances, on the public observing it, what is seen in the photo ) are still interesting, despite the changes in the way we communicate. Even in the digital society, the photo still remains, as Sontag writes, the basic unit for learning and memorizing. We have seen this in recent months, after the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian armed forces.
Sontag writes Facing the pain of others a few months after events as dramatic as those we are witnessing: the attack on the twin towers in New York, and the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is not just the war on terrorism, however, that the American writer and intellectual considers in her writing. In fact, the background to the essay is the experience of the twentieth century, starting from the great war up to the bloody Balkan conflicts of the nineties.
Today not many remember it, but Sontag was very active in attracting the attention of international public opinion and in mobilizing consciences to promote initiatives of solidarity with the inhabitants of Sarajevo during the long siege to which the Bosnian capital was subjected. Feeling the need to give a concrete meaning to this commitment, he managed to visit Sarajevo several times, and on the occasion of one of these visits he oversaw the staging of Samuel Beckett’s Godot in a place where it was not even possible to turn on the lights of scene, because there was no electricity. Reading about these trips to Sarajevo, and looking at the photos (again, the photos) of this act of rebellion against a war in which civilians were indiscriminately killed, images of Mariupol and the other inhabited centers come to mind. been devastated in recent months.
Still, the photos themselves do not have an evocative capacity. We are the ones who connect the images by putting them into a reasoning made up of assumptions, descriptions, judgments that concern both facts and values. Photos can be used as evidence for a court charge precisely because they simply show something. One can doubt, analyze, test, but if a photo has not been altered or produced with the deliberate intent of misleading, it eventually shows something. Not a fact, but an element of what constitutes a fact: that is, that things, in that given place and in that given moment, were in a certain way. The bag was or was not in the car of the magistrate murdered by the mafia. If there is a photo that unequivocally shows that the bag was there, one aspect of the fact is established. Among the various forms of expression and representation of reality, the photo is the one that seems most at ease in the conception of truth as correspondence. Much more than the hypotheses, and the words we use to formulate them.
It takes time to understand, and you need to be aware of many details that are invisible today, hidden as they are by the “fog of war”. The certainty that there has been an unjust aggression, and that this justifies the use of force to defend oneself, is only an important piece, but nothing but a part of a mosaic to be composed. In this patient and industrious waiting, one must beware of both overexposure to images and the abuse of words. That is, the opposite of what has been done in recent weeks should be done: an absurd, useless and exhausting war of words. In which Ukraine, with its drama, was only the occasion, and Italian politics, with its miseries, the central theme. One of the saddest spectacles I have seen in decades following the public life of this country.
Once again we can return to Susan Sontag’s essay for a warning about the danger of not handling carefully the images and words that show and comment on the drama of war: “Photographs of an atrocity can elicit opposite reactions. Appeals for peace. Proclamations of revenge. Or simply the vague awareness, continually fed by photographic information, that terrible things are happening ”. Sontag effectively describes the danger that one runs when one lets oneself be carried away by the emotion aroused by the images and delves into the repertoire of words, pursuing one after the other all the expressions of condemnation that we have at our disposal. When, on the other hand, we should ensure that they have not completely lost their value, due to a kind of inflation, when the time comes to judge.
Today there is discussion of photos circulating on social networks and are published by various media outlets showing tortured bodies, people summarily buried in mass graves, and these images have become possible evidence in investigations into war crimes committed by the invaders. It will take time, and above all political conditions will have to be fulfilled which unfortunately cannot be taken for granted now, but this gives hope for the possibility of a trial. They are photos that must therefore be collected, preserved, studied because they are an essential element of that tiring work of reconstruction of what is happening in Ukraine that will have to be done. Out of love for the living and out of respect for the dead. For justice, without which peace is fragile.
This is the third in a series of interventions on the war in Ukraine which began with an article by Ida Dominijanni and continued with one by Marino Sinibaldi.
This article appeared in issue 30 of the Essential, page 11.