The choreography of war
Since Jean Baudrillard’s provoking claim that ‘the Gulf War did not take place’ warfare has been associated with illusion . Today’s hyper-medialized warfare raises new questions about conflicts of reception and truth value in the images we see. We're accustomed to seeing distant wars through fragmented snapshots, often captured amid the disorder of conflict via news media or blurry "poor images" shared via camera phones . Such alleged spontaneous representations reproduce an experience of the authenticity of war. Blurriness and pixelation is here seen as technical testimonies of the truth value of images. “Pixelating – or blurring has taken over the role of authenticity”, as the Artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s has phrased it in relation to his Pixel-Collage series . This stands in sharp contrast to the pre-staged image, that this article centers around: a still-photo from a live-broadcasted press conference at Al Jazeera held in the rubbles of the bombed Al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza on oct. 17, 2023. The disturbing thing about this image, that quickly circulated on social media and news sites, is less to be found in its extreme gruesomeness, epitomized in the dead baby in the arms of the man sitting at the center of the image, blood covering its little body in lieu of a white sheet. It is rather the almost collage-like choreography, the formal clash between the press conference and the warzone. Somewhat echoing Martha Rosler’s collage-technique in her photomontage-series House Beautiful (1967-72), this clash of contradictory forms creates an alienating effect of the war. The very thought of practically preparing and arranging the podium, the stage, and the dead bodies is hard to even imagine. Did the speakers straddle over the dead bodies to the stage? Did someone yell ‘action’ before livestreaming this macabre scene? The predictability in the composition of the official press conference, following a pre-set choreography of elements, is disrupted by the dead bodies covered by blood-stained sheets, placed in a circle around the podium. Like the other elements of the press conference – spotlights, stage, microphones, authority evoking clothes – the bodies have been staged in the frame of the camera directed at the scene. If one thing, the video, the still-images that quickly circulated, hereby brought testimony to the very ‘exhibition value’ of war. This ‘exhibition value’ of the war site was only bolstered in the subsequent days and weeks where forensic image analyses of the crater and the surrounding areas began to circulate on X (former twitter) and on global media. The still-photo was different though. It was meant to be seen, it was staged, or it became staged, and thus opposed and affirmed in one and the same gesture our very desire for authentic images of war.