There are multiple distances in an image. Not only is there distance from the thing depicted, but also distance from judgment and emotion. Sometimes, this takes shape as detachment or impartiality. The camera, the projector, the artist’s pen, renders all things neutrally in the space of their presentation. The image gives things to appear without comment or elaboration. The image is mute with respect to its appearing. It is simply there. Horrible or banal, joyful or tragic, the image remains present through a medium that records and represents without judgment or condemnation.
Sometimes, distance takes shape as a sort of indifference to what appears. I am not suggesting a kind of callousness or hard cruelty. Instead, I only want to say that the appearing of the image, its presentation as an image, is indifferent to what is present as imaged. Indifferent distance occurs where images appear in a space that is not governed by what becomes present through the image. I was reminded of this sense of indifference, and reminded of Charles Scott’s account of it in a recent book (Living With Indifference), as I read of Michael Ware’s difficulty as he struggles to come to terms with his behavior while a reporter for CNN on embedded assignment in Iraq (h/t Huffington Post). He reports filming a war crime with an indifference similar to, if not identical with, that felt by the soldier who brutally shot an innocent civilian in the back of the head. It took the young man 20 minutes to die. Michael Ware filmed it all. He reports being more concerned with the composition of the filming and photography than he was with the young teenager dying at his feet. Ware’s indifference horrifies him and this horror at his own indifference (as well as the indifference of the soldiers) contributes now to his strong desire to expose what happened, and is continuing to happen, in Iraq.
Images can occur in indifferent distances, and yet that distance gives rise to highly personal and immediately emotional impacts. In Michael Ware’s case, the indifference of the image of a boy dying in the dirt is compounded by his own indifference as he filmed (without watching) the last gasping minutes of a life. His current difficulties, his struggles with PTSD, his laudable desire to expose what goes on in Iraq, and his disgust at himself and his behavior are the result of this indifference. Images can delight, as Aristotle tells us. But they can also horrify, and for the same reason. It is hard to encounter powerful images of suffering in the indifferent light of the camera that records them.
But when awareness of this dimension of distance is lacking, bad things happen. Michael Ware did not put down the camera, and he is right to condemn himself for this. He is right to be horrified by his own indifference, by his lack of awareness of the distances that a camera can indifferently and impartially put into play. An image of a boy dying on the ground is not the same as a boy dying on the ground. An image can invoke an indifferent space of appearing – a space indifferent to what appears, whether it be dead children, callous soldiers, or broken bodies – and this space can distinguish emphatically between images of dead boys and actual dead boys. When we are attentive to such indifference in appearing, or when we are attentive to the distances invoked by images, we gain I think an important awareness of the power of images and of the measure of things. There is something horrifying in the indifferent presentation of images about which no one should be indifferent. In similar measure, there is something horrifying in filming a boy dying on the ground without the recognition that it is a real boy.
The indifference of the camera need not always be destructive, and I think in many ways it is not. But I read Ware’s indifference as originating in and through the indifference of a medium which records without seeing. Distanced from the emotional impact, and indifferent to the scene playing out through its lens, Ware does not see the teenager dying in the dirt. This dislocation in the midst of filming is all too common, and yet there is something protective about it. I would even be willing to say that Michael Ware filmed the boy’s death in order not to see it, in order that the trauma of what he saw (without seeing) was mitigated by the indifference of the camera lens. There is something protective in the need to experience trauma non-traumatically and this is something the camera can do.
I do not want to condemn Michael Ware. I do not think he was morally indifferent to such a horrific act. Quite the opposite. I think he was traumatized. Deeply so. And I think there is something powerful in the ability of images to present with distance traumatic occurrences in non-traumatic ways. In most ways this is a good thing though indifference sounds like a hard word. And in most ways an indifference of presentation is necessary for the resolution of trauma. But I see also the risk that we might lose a necessary and important sense of connection to real and horrible events when we encounter them solely through an indifferent lens. And there is still a part of me that wishes that Michael Ware – and all of us for that matter – saw a young boy dying needlessly in the dirt.
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