“Killing for Show”: - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

“Killing for Show”:
A Conversation with
Julian Stallabrass

MIGNON NIXON

Mignon Nixon: Would you start us off by explaining what you mean by “killing for
show,” the title of your new book (Killing for Show: Photography, War and the
Media in Vietnam and Iraq)?1

Julian Stallabrass: It’s the move that those wielding weapons make to show their
power publicly. The two wars that I examine were staged as global demon-
strations of virtuous power—against communism and against tyranny—to
show that democratic and liberal virtues will be victorious, and the devastat-
ing price paid for disobedience. In my opening example, of a very costly RAF
mission to launch a smart missile to blow up a pickup truck in Iraq, the main
point seems to be to generate images of the killing—in this case a snuff
movie for domestic consumption.

Killing for Show raises the delicate matter of the balance
between demonstrating military power, efficiency, and bravery, along with
the clear moral purpose of their mission, without appearing to glory over-
much in slaughter and destruction. Corpses must be piled up for the cam-
eras without besmirching the nobility of the cause.

Such public wars are the exception, especially in the last few decades.
Yet even in wars from which the media are forcibly excluded, armed groups
still regularly stage killing for show: It’s just that the audience is local, et
the scene may not be recorded, or if it is, the images have a limited circula-
tion. Like the state of exception, to which it is related, the scale can be
large or small: a war, a single police shooting. I reproduce a powerful
image taken in Vietnam by Steven Curtis, showing a group of ARVN soldiers
standing over the partially naked corpse of a young woman. Her body had
been dumped on the road as a public warning to the locals. Curtis was pun-
ished for taking the photograph, and even now its display elicits scandal-
ized responses: The rule he violated was to attempt to transmit a local
killing for show to a wider viewership.

1.
Lanham, MARYLAND), 2020.

Killing for Show: Photography, War and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (Rowman and Littlefield:

OCTOBER 177 Été 2021, pp. 3–23. © 2021 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00430

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OCTOBER

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Viewfinder image of Royal Air Force airstrike on ISIS vehicle.

Throughout both wars, the two were in continual tension: In his
remarkable book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,
Nick Turse notes that Vietnamese peasants were perplexed by the weird
inconsistency of US and Korean troops: Sometimes they would pass through
villages handing out sweets, sometimes burning homes, and sometimes mur-
dering anyone they could find.2 This inconsistency reflected the double
aspect of killing for show, directed at different audiences. Charity and the
clean kill for the press; for the locals, something else entirely.

Nixon: In the book, you discuss the Curtis photograph as an atrocity image. You
point out that the US armed forces used military photographers extensively to
document the war, subject to strict censorship and control. Steven Curtis was a
Marine photographer, and you tell us that he was removed from his photo-
graphic unit for taking that picture. You also reveal, from your own correspon-
dence with Curtis, that the photograph survived and has since been exhibited
in the US and online, but that it has also been re-censored. You observe that
“overt disruptions to US collective memory do not go unpunished.” That’s
manifestly true, but this photograph and its history raise other questions about
atrocity images and war memory: about sexualized atrocity and the ethics of
photographic representation, and about how photographers, artists working
with photographic images, and we as viewers can counter the denial of atroci-
ty—all of which you explore in depth in the book.

2.
New York 2013, pp. 132–3.

Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, Metropolitan Books,

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

The photograph in question, titled The Enemy, shows the partially naked
corpse of a young woman placed in the road. Her body is twisted and her
arms outstretched, accentuating the violation. The obvious purpose is to
humiliate and, as you point out, to terrorize. The five men loitering in the
road near the body are smiling, leaning on their bicycles or striking relaxed
poses, gazing toward something out of frame, perhaps the Marines who have
arrived from Curtis’s unit to search for land mines. You explain in the book
that the woman lying dead in the road was a suspected National Liberation
Front (NLF) activist and that it was common practice to display a naked
corpse “as a warning to others and to mortify her loved ones.” Curtis recalled
to you that by the time his unit arrived, someone had covered the corpse
with a plastic sheet, “but when they saw me with a camera, they pulled the
plastic back partway,” to facilitate a more graphic image. Stones have been
placed to anchor the sheet covering the lower half of the body, but the torso
has been exposed in an explicitly sexual manner. The shirt has been yanked
up to the armpits, making it evident that this person has been killed,
stripped, exhibited, and then re-desecrated for a picture. From the satisfied
expressions and body language of the men standing over the body, it is
apparent that sexualized killing and sexual-atrocity exhibitionism are prac-
ticed and routine, and that the perpetrators are eager to cooperate in mak-
ing this technique more widely known.

The pervasiveness of rape and sexualized atrocity in the US war in
Vietnam is still denied, and one important contribution of your book to
scholarship on the war is to confront this history at the level of the image. Dans
Kill Anything That Moves, Turse details the extent of rape, gang rape, and sex-
ualized torture and torture-murder in the war, which was officially docu-
mented by the military and then of course buried. Yet there were voices,
including returning veterans, calling out the culture of rape and sexualized
torture and killing at the time. Women Strike for Peace (WSP) activists were
also outspoken in drawing attention to the rampant sexual violence and sex-
murder, and claimed this as one basis for solidarity with, and responsibility
à, Vietnamese women. Like the photographs you discuss, the testimonies of
WSP women, in dialogue with Vietnamese women, have disappeared from
war memory and are rarely mentioned in scholarship. The firsthand reports
of veterans, which you draw on in the book, are only slightly better remem-
bered. But traces of this history of sexualized atrocity are visible in feminist
artistic production of the time. I’m thinking in particular of the work of
Nancy Spero, Martha Rosler, and Carolee Schneemann, who incorporate
atrocity images, directly and indirectly, in drawings, collages, and film.
Through their work, the war’s sexual sadism does find a place in war memo-
ry, in forms that also take account of our psychic as well as political defenses
against such images.

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This brings me finally to a question. One of the defining features of
your book is that it works across many photographic registers, including pho-
tojournalism, amateur photographs, and art photography, for want of a bet-
ter term. Could you talk about the heterogeneity of the images you analyze,
and how this methodology informs your thinking about war memory and war
resistance?

Stallabrass: You give a fine description and contextualization of Curtis’s lacerating
image. Such photographs that contain both the crime and the celebration of
either the perpetrators or those who sympathize with them are very rare—part-
ly because such circumstances are fleeting and partly because it is perilous to
take them. This image has an affinity with a photograph taken in Beirut in
1976 by Don McCullin, “Young Christian Youth Celebrating the Death of a
Young Palestinian Girl,” in which one of the killers is playing a lute. The pho-
tographer claims that he was threatened with death for taking it.

As you say, rape and torture, very often followed by killing, were stan-
dard practice in the Vietnam War, and not just among US troops but among
their allies, including the South Vietnamese Army. The deep problem that
confronted photographers who wanted to show that was how to do so. Même
if you were able to make such images, they would only capture a single event
and were unlikely to reach publication. Some of the photographic books
made at the time—such as Felix Greene’s Vietnam! Vietnam! (1966)—that cir-
culated among antiwar activists tried to do so by assembling numerous
images of atrocities, which was the approach taken by the radical women
artists you mention and, plus tard, the war museums in Vietnam.3

Your question on method is linked to this very problem: Against the
largely successful efforts of the political and media elites to create a tenden-
tious culture of selective memory and to aggressively suppress anything that
does not fit the narrative, how can we revivify these images and make them
speak to the present? Part of what I try to do is to get at the specificity of each
type of image through comparison: We may get a sense of photojournalism’s
place in the current array of war photography by comparing it with other
types of images. Compared with the stately, reserved, severely composed
“aftermath” images that dominate the depiction of war in museums, photo-
journalism embodies speed and intimacy, both of which are written into its
style as well as its content. Compared with citizen journalism and the ama-
teur productions of the troops, photojournalism embodies professional val-
ues; while its aesthetic often encompasses the apparently casual, it bears the
sheen of photographic competence and the visual quality of high-definition
digital cameras or fine film and sharp lenses. Compared with official military
photography (which shares the same production values), it has too great a
variety to be dismissed as mere propaganda and does not quite so readily fall

Felix Greene, Vietnam! Vietnam! In Photographs and Text (Palo Alto: Fulton, 1966).

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Don McCullin. Young Christian Youth Celebrating the
Death of a Young Palestinian Girl, Beirut, 1976. 1976.
© Don McCullin. Courtesy of Hamiltons Gallery, Londres.

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OCTOBER

into generic categories. Compared with photographs of atrocity, of the
bloodied corpses blasted by modern weaponry that circulate in certain maga-
zines and websites, published photojournalism is often tempered and
restreint, standing on its dignity. Taken together, as a variegated image cul-
ture created by and sometimes in the service of war, these different types of
images comment on each other in a way that reinforces the general and sys-
tematic features of the whole. Yet they cannot stand alone, and require at the
time of their viewing and even more in retrospect a great deal of elucidation
about the circumstances in which they were taken and published, the politi-
cal climate into which they issued, and the various uses to which they were
put. In the case of the Vietnam War, we are helped a great deal in this, pas
just by Turse’s book but by the detailed archival work of Bernd Greiner in
War Without Fronts and by John Tirman’s examination over a longer time
period of the scale of US military killing in The Deaths of Others.4 It is more
recent conflicts that have sparked such reexaminations, which follow and
solidify the earlier efforts that you spoke to, as well as others such as the
Winter Soldier investigations and Bertrand Russell’s “war crimes” tribunal.5

Nixon: Your book considers the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq together, complicat-
ing the model of repetition that would see the war in Iraq as being, as is
sometimes argued, another Vietnam. You demonstrate that a specific analysis
of both image wars exposes the limitations of that analysis, even as you also
acknowledge that there is something akin to a compulsion to repeat under-
pinning this history (though I appreciate that this is not how you would put
it). You demonstrate that both wars were intrinsically photographic—that
photographic strategy was embedded in them—and you explain how this
strategy adapted and mutated over time as part of a general effort to inte-
grate control of the media into the conduct of war, transferring into new
wars and, in the case of Vietnam, crystallizing the war itself at the level of the
image. It’s not that photography documents or promotes or responds to war,
as if it were somehow apart from war, but that photography and war are
bound up together, as are photography and war resistance.

I found your analysis helpful for thinking about, in particular, the per-
sistence of extreme cruelty. The psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell refers to the
“de-repression” of war, and the catalogue of horrors you lay out testifies to
that and leads to the question of why: Why this magnitude of “violence per-
versity,” as Mitchell calls it, in both of these wars, and how does concentrat-

4.
Bernd Greiner, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam (Londres: Bodley Head, 2009);
John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (Oxford: Oxford University
Presse, 2011).

5.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American
War Crimes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972); Bertrand Russell, War Crimes in Vietnam (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1967).

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

ing on photographic images help us to make some sense of this?6 An under-
lying claim of the book is that we need to confront the inventory of sadism in
the photographic record, however partial it is, as a starting point. To the
extent that atrocity in these wars is mistaken for aberration, the problem of
blanket cruelty is missed.

There are ethical and psychical considerations in your project, de
cours. In her essay “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with
Sontag,” Judith Butler points to “the way in which suffering is presented to
us, and how that presentation affects our responsiveness.”7 Butler addresses
photographs of Vietnam, Iraq, and Guantánamo, but without the images
themselves. She raises the problem of “our inability to see what we see,»
which becomes a somewhat different problem when the photographs are
present.8 You take an uncompromising approach, reproducing over two hun-
dred photographs, most of them evidencing exceptional cruelty. This seems
perhaps the most crucial decision for the book, and you address it partly in
terms of fostering a “counterculture of the present” by helping equip your
readers with the ability to interpret such images, to see them. So the book is a
history but also a primer in a way. Is that how you view it?

Stallabrass: The differences between the two showcase wars are many and various.
On the conscious level, if you like, the two wars against Iraq—the Gulf War
(1991) and the Iraq War (2003–2011)—were concerted attempts not to
repeat the defeat in Vietnam, either in military terms or in the media realm;
and indeed, by the time of the Iraq War the two realms were seen as entirely
integrated through the ambition to control all signals emanating from the
region of conflict. From the point of view of the Pentagon, a war modeled on
the Blitzkrieg would avoid the Vietnamese “quagmire.” So why did wars
waged by such different means throw up images that were so similar?

Photographers were operating in a media environment in which there
was significant pressure to supply a stream of rapidly readable and spectacu-
lar images that would stand out from the flow of photographs continually
crossing the screens of picture editors. Some would leap out because they
were recognizable, either because they used familiar formal arrangements or
because they echoed a famous image of an earlier war. I look at some of the
echoes that are also mutations—for instance, in comparing McCullin’s shell-
shocked Marine at Hué to Luis Sinco’s briefly celebrated “Marlboro Marine”
during the second assault on Fallujah. Some of that searching for cliché may
have been a cynical opportunism encouraged by the photojournalism indus-
try, but some was a poignant haunting of the supposed power of photojour-
nalism at the time of the Vietnam War to change political opinion. For exam-

Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 36.

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Londres: Verso, 2009), p. 63.

Ibid., p. 100.

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ple, a very courageous and accomplished photographer, Andrea Bruce,
writes of her obsession to make the definitive image of the war, which would
force people to pay attention to what went on in Iraq and caused her to risk
her life by returning there again and again.9

The unconscious side of it—and it really is unconscious in many cases,
as I have found when trying to raise the issue in print and in talks (even at
the Imperial War Museum)—is colonial conquest and occupation, et le
long continuities across their history. If Iraq began as Blitzkrieg, it ended in
prolonged occupation, and then the parallels with Vietnam stepped to the
fore, though as they did, the media largely turned away. In both, utter disre-
gard for the history, culture, and society of the places to be occupied was
apparent. In both, the invaders were widely reviled. And in both, racism was
flagrant, leading at best to negligence towards civilian life and safety and at
worst to atrocious attacks on those living under occupation. It is inconceiv-
able that a drone would fire a missile into a school or church in Dublin
because it was believed that the buildings might contain terrorists, but dur-
ing the Obama regime equivalent strikes took place almost daily in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. The divide is surely race (and access to social media).

So this brings us to the issue of systemic cruelty, which is very difficult
to know how to deal with, in terms of images, words, and their combina-
tion. I don’t think that most of the images in the book are overtly cruel:
Many are banal, propagandistic images—portraits and generic scenes—but
you are right that, within the frame of the book, all may be seen within the
horizon of cruelty. In Vietnam, the aim of the war, which was sometimes
stated openly, was the extermination of the peasantry, the basis of resis-
tance, through forced relocation or murder. It is hardly surprising that the
result was systematically cruel, or that crimes against civilians were stan-
dard, or that new soldiers were obliged by their troop units to commit
them on pain of ostracism or even fragging. And those troops were merely
those whose cruelty was up close, a sideshow to the overwhelming use of
bombs, napalm, chemical weapons, and defoliants. Some troops plainly
enjoyed committing cruel acts—and photographing them—and they found
their photographic poet in Tim Page, as he documented a realm of excep-
tion in which no indulgence of intoxication, violence, or sexual predation
was forbidden. I don’t know whether their pleasure was necessary to the
operation of the genocidal machine—it would be good to have your
thoughts on that.

In Iraq, the war aim was ostensibly to make the place a regional beacon
of liberal democracy—as I have said, with scant regard for the character of
the nation. As the occupation ran into increased resistance, the US funded

9.
University of Texas Press, 2013), p. 37.

Andrea Bruce, in Michael Kamber, Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq (Austin:

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

and armed rival sectarian groups so that alongside the sometimes extrava-
gant cruelty of the occupiers was set a terrible process of ethnic cleansing. Dans
dealing with that daunting subject, I drew on Mary Kaldor’s work on the
character of contemporary warfare in places where government has essential-
ly collapsed.10 She examines the utility of overt cruelty to those who engage
in it: to terrify people into compliance or more often drive them from their
territoire, which is then open to the plunder of its resources. This fits what
was happening in Iraq quite closely: The occupying powers had dismantled
the repressive and organizing powers of the state only to find that they could
not reassemble them.

Is it necessary, alors, to look at images of the resultant cruelty? Le
book is in many ways a response to a conformist and amnesiac culture, et
to the difficulty of finding images that are inconvenient to power, même
online. In curating an exhibition, Iraq Through the Lens of Vietnam, as part of
the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2008, I was struck by how many people said
that they simply had not seen anything other than innocuous images of the
Iraq War, which showed that the various military and media mechanisms of
censorship and self-censorship had worked effectively. Michael Kamber
made a remarkable book of mostly unpublished images showing that photo-
journalists, Iraqi and foreign, had made a remarkable record of the charac-
ter of the war, but it had been kept from public view.11

It is good that you use the word “primer”: The art photographers Adam
Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin asked me to write an essay about their alter-
ation of Brecht’s War Primer, in which they overlaid his press photo and
poem couplings with a wide variety of “war on terror” photographs.12 Brecht
was famously suspicious of photography, which he thought could be used as
an ideological tool for presenting oppressive realities as natural, but he also
believed it could be made to serve radical ends when subjected to critical
rereading so as to, as Ruth Berlau put it in the preface to the book, “decode
the hieroglyphs.”13 I try to do the same through a clear exploration of the
military, politique, économique, ideological, and media-specific frames of the
images. I think it is necessary that they be present: Many people don’t know
eux, even those that are supposedly famous, such as the Abu Ghraib
images, let alone those taken by the National Liberation Front and North
Vietnamese Army photographers. It is an attempt, obviously, to turn “killing
for show” against those who make it.

10.

11.

Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

Kamber, Photojournalists on War.

12.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, War Primer 2 (Londres: MACK, 2011); Julian
Stallabrass, “A nova cartilha da guerra” [On Broomberg and Chanarin’s War Primer 2], Zum: Revista de
Fotografia (São Paulo) 5 (Octobre 2013), pp. 166–81; available in English here: https://julianstal-
labrass.wordpress.com/writing/.

13.

Ruth Berlau, “Preface,” in Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel (Berlin: Eulenspiegel, 1955).

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OCTOBER

Nixon: Your point that systemic cruelty is difficult to address at the level of the
image is, for me, the core problem posed by the book. Psychoanalysis gives
us our only theory of cruelty, Derrida observed.14 In her recent theoriza-
tion of war subjectivity, Mitchell provides an account of the psychic founda-
tions of systemic cruelty in war, in particular sexualized cruelty. Your sug-
gestion that all the photographs in the book, including the most generic,
might be viewed within a horizon of cruelty seems crucial. The category of
atrocity images might in some way corroborate the notion that cruelty,
including sexualized cruelty, is anomalous in war rather than intrinsic. Or
at least that is how I read the book’s argument, a reading admittedly
grounded in a psychoanalytic perspective in which the absence of evidence
is sometimes a kind of evidence.

To turn to another aspect of what you have just helpfully described as
the unconscious of war, in her essay “From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and
After,” the British psychoanalyst and anti-nuclear activist Hanna Segal
remarked that one factor driving the first Gulf War was the imperative “to
wipe out the depression about Vietnam.”15 From this point of view, the entire
apparatus of the Gulf War, in its concerted effort not to repeat the humilia-
tion in Vietnam, amounted to “a revival of megalomania.”16 Writing in 1997,
after the Gulf War was already, as Segal observed, long forgotten by the per-
petrators, she made provision, in that phrase “and after,” for future repeti-
tions she regarded as inevitable, owing to unacknowledged guilt. For any
group, let alone a world power with an exceptionalist self-image, to admit
making “a mistake of vast proportions” and assume responsibility for the con-
sequences would, she observed, go against “the predominance of psychotic
processes” in groups.17

The proposition that groups are psychically ill-equipped to experi-
ence guilt is a bleak one, and your book provides a litany of such failure.
To mention one instance, in your chapter entitled “Don’t Show Me That,»
you point out that the massacre of My Lai elicited criticism from newspaper
readers for the publication of the photographs as much as for the killing
lui-même. This dramatizes the predicament any photographer would face in
producing a definitive image of the war, as Andrea Bruce aspired to do,
since “forcing people to pay attention” might have the paradoxical effect of
hardening our defenses, a dynamic your book evidences again and again.
Segal’s suggestion is that if we grasp such “psychic facts,” we stand some

14.
Presse, 2002).

Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches for Its Soul,” in Without Alibi (Université de Stanford

Hanna Segal, “From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and After: Socio-Political Expressions of
15.
Ambivalence,” in Psychoanalysis, Literature and War, Papers 1972–1995, éd. John Steiner (Londres:
Routledge, 1997), p. 165.

16.

17.

Ibid..

Ibid., pp. 167, 162.

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

chance of altering the dynamic and facing up to the self-deception and
denial of reality that are defining unconscious features of these wars.18
While this might not be a language you would use, it strikes me that your
book is aiming to confront the resistances we have toward the psychic fact
of extreme cruelty. It is asking, in effect, What does it take to get ourselves
to look at, to take on and take in, these images?

As you point out, the Gulf War laid the groundwork for the Iraq War
both in its use of bombardment to produce spectacles of destruction, lequel
you describe as “photogenic operations,” and in its tightening of censorship
to prevent journalists from reporting the effects of that destruction on civil-
ians. That part was not for show. To start with what you call the Blitzkrieg
model of war, this arouses triumphalist fantasies of domination from above
without visible casualties below, a scenario that, for Segal, harks back to the
primal scene of nuclear war, the atomic bombings of Japan by US forces in
1945, which was also accompanied by strict prohibitions against the publica-
tion of photographs taken on the ground. Segal uses the term “nuclear-men-
tality culture” to describe the mania and paranoia that arose from the drop-
ping of those bombs, as Rosalyn Deutsche has discussed in her

18.

Hanna Segal, “Silence Is the Real Crime,” in Psychoanalysis, Literature and War, p. 155.

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Andrea Bruce. Widows March. 2004.
© Andrea Bruce / NOOR.

OCTOBER

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Silvia Kolbowski. After Hiroshima Mon Amour. 2005–08.

book Hiroshima After Iraq, pointing out that the official rationale for both the
Gulf War and the Iraq War was the supposed evidence that Iraq had
acquired a nuclear capability.19 It was by stoking anxieties of nuclear annihi-
lation and projecting destructiveness onto the enemy that aerial bombard-
ment on the scale of the Blitzkrieg could be rationalized, and a number of
artists—Deutsche’s book considers Silvia Kolbowski’s After Hiroshima Mon
Amour (2008), Leslie Thornton’s Let Me Count the Ways (2004–2008), et
Kryzystof Wodiczko’s The Hiroshima Projection (1997)—tuned into that echo,
which is to say into the way in which the Gulf War and the Iraq War were
bound up with a nuclear imaginary.

But as the artist Mary Kelly remarked, there was something hollow about
“the façade of American militarism” on display in the Gulf War, to which she
attributed a “curious flatness,” an insight that led her to produce one of the
relatively few ambitious artistic responses to that war, Gloria Patri.20 The cata-
logue of atrocity you compile attests to both of these trends, to fantasies of
omnipotence and to the curious flatness of a display culture that, in many of
the images you analyze, has an almost pathetic character to its sadism.

19.
Presse universitaire, 2010).

Rosalyn Deutsche, Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (New York: Columbia

20.
(Cambridge, MA: AVEC Presse, 1996), pp. 182–183.

Mary Kelly, “On Display: Not Enough Gees and Gollies to Describe It,” in Imaging Desire

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

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Thomas Hirschhorn. The Incommensurable Banner. 2008.

Calculated or improvised, the cruelties to which the photographs bear wit-
ness—whether in triumph or in critique—appear, as Kelly puts it, “botched.”21
I wonder if this sense of something botched partly accounts for the occlusion
of the images, for the fact that, as you say, “many people don’t know them.” In
art, perhaps the images of Abu Ghraib, entre autres, remain most visible
through their appropriations, as in Martha Rosler’s second series of House
Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, for example. That series seems to anticipate
the repression you describe, using appropriation as a provocation to consider
how we consume and disavow images of war, and as a mnemonic strategy, un
logic Thomas Hirschhorn also adopts in his Ur-Collages. Just now you men-
tioned the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, during which you presented
Hirschhorn’s The Incommensurable Banner, which incorporates trophy pho-
tographs of the war in Iraq.22 There, a photographic subculture of pathologies
of “violence perversity” was in some sense claimed as a subject. In Killing for
Show you concentrate on photographs per se, and on older genres and formats
such as the photographic book that rely on modes of attention that, as you also
argue, are in decline. You suggest that these are genres and formats we lose at

21.

22.

Ibid., p. 183.

This exhibition was staged at Fabrica, Brighton.

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OCTOBER

a cost, in part because they offer context and demand patient reading, mais aussi
because they attest to sustained modes of witnessing.

This leads me to a key question you raise in the book, which is whether
something has fundamentally changed at the level of technology and social
relations that might account for the peculiar amnesiac condition of our time
of continual war. You observe that the photographic archive of war seems no
longer to yield iconic images capable of condensing “wider collective frames
of understanding.” This process, you remark, “seems to have faltered or even
stalled,” a situation you attribute to a combination of factors, including satu-
ration, acceleration, and immediacy (“the unceasing flow of news and media
feeds”). You also ask what explanatory models we might turn to in prefer-
ence to “well-worn” psychic theories of trauma and repression. Here I would
like to interject a note of theoretical hope. I share your view that our inherit-
ed theories of group subjectivity need to be reinvigorated to attend more
closely to the group unconscious in thinking about the psychic sources of
war, about the pervasiveness of war rape, systematic torture, and “killing for
show.” My note of hope is that our desperate situation has prompted, or at
least coincided with, some radical theoretical work. I’m thinking, for exam-
ple, about Juliet Mitchell’s theorization of the lateral axis, which is funda-
mentally a theory of how we are psychically wired for war and even for atroci-
ty.23 For me, your book has synergies with this research because it makes the
case so systematically—partly through sheer critical mass but also through
witnessing and attention—that atrocity is not aberrant.

Stallabrass: You make a rich and complex series of remarks: Let me see if I can do
them any justice. D'abord, on the idea that wars can be collective psychic
responses to past insults: There is a sense, bien sûr, in which the Gulf War
was an explicit riposte to the defeat in Vietnam, to allow the superpower
once again to project military power without restraint. Neoconservatives
made no secret of that, or of their dissatisfaction with the result (which gets
at the hollow character of the display of power). They complained that the
Gulf War had not been enough to eradicate “Vietnam syndrome” because
that conflict was not a war of choice but had been forced on the US by the
invasion of Kuwait and because it had been left unfinished, with the offend-
ing tyrant remaining in charge.24 Similarly, I took a good deal from Retort’s
remarkable book Afflicted Powers, particularly the idea that a large-scale
demonstration war was needed to counter the attacks of September 11, le
grand spectacle of US defeat and vulnerability: One media spectacle was set
against the other, as the ancient armor of the Iraqi Army provided one target
and the office blocks, palaces, and monuments of the regime another.25

23.

Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence.

24.
Order (Cambridge: la presse de l'Universite de Cambridge, 2004), p. 30.

See Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global

25.
Spectacle in a New Age of War (Londres: Verso, 2005).

Retort (Iain Boal, T. J.. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

The hollow character of the results issues from a variety of sources, je
think: There is neoliberalism as a cancer of the state, progressively draining
it of resources and power until it can no longer perform even its basic func-
tion. Unlike the US state in 1945, which imposed reconstruction and trans-
formation of the defeated nations after World War II, the neoliberal state
had no such capacity, and its efforts foundered in incompetence, ignorance,
and rampant corruption. The ideological expression of that frail but vainglo-
rious state was found in the neoconservative faith that history and society
could be ignored and reality manufactured out of thin air. In the British
case, it led to the remarkable delusion that the old imperial connection with
the region would be an asset: It turned out that the histories of British theft,
massacre, and bombing of civilians from the air had not been forgotten.

Overlaying and dialectically interacting with this condition of the state
was that of the media and its visual products: Like the state, it had been con-
stitutionally weakened by neoliberal profit-taking and corruption. This media
was vulnerable to the military PR opportunities served up to them: Either
they were gullible or simply cynically accepted the commercially valuable
images on offer. Expertise in the Middle East was, with a few exceptions, dans
short supply; time to make reports and images was continually squeezed; dig-
ital technology was used to introduce further time constraints. Often the
resulting spectacle bore the marks of preexisting mindsets, political and aes-
thetic, rather than discovery and change. Much of it fed into a rapid cycling
and recycling of familiar imagery through photojournalism, movies, TV
shows, and computer games, all of which exhibited the pervasive air of déjà
vu with which capitalist mass culture as a whole is plagued. It was indeed hol-
faible: The photo ops concealed a reality that was eluding the control of those
powers that sought to fabricate it, and they were made by a media that usual-
ly acted as the dull servant of those powers.

I wonder about the collective “we” and “our” in your remarks. It is rare
for a state, except in total defeat, to recast its history and accept responsibili-
ty for its actions. But states do not have complete control over collective
mémoire, and my book draws extensively upon a long tradition of dissidence
and counter-memory in which consciousness of the hideous character of past
crimes, and especially the suppression of radical change by massacre, a
been thoroughly internalized. The elites and the comfortable professional
classes are least likely to hold such views, which are unevenly distributed
along class and racial lines. Those who are more often on the hard receiving
end of power (at work, at the hands of the police, and in dealing with social
services) are the most skeptical of its exercise. They are not necessarily in a
minority, as long-term polling about the ethics of the Vietnam War has
shown: They were those who could look at the My Lai images and under-
stand how they occupied a position in a long history of oppression.

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OCTOBER

On the grounds for hope, I think that it goes beyond the writing of new
theoretical resources, important as that is, and which has also transformed
photographic theory. What the integration of the digital realm into military
strategy—the so-called revolution in military affairs—took from the Blitzkrieg
was the value of propaganda and terror (think of the sirens built into Stuka
dive bombers that served to induce panic in their targets) and the idea of
using small, mobile shock troops to continually destabilize an enemy. It was
supposed to be a move away from the massing of vast armies, the long prepa-
ration of the attack by bombardment, and the flattening of an enemy and
everything in the vicinity with carpet bombing. Sometimes recourse was had
to those older tactics in Iraq, particularly in Fallujah, but the idea that you
could simply bomb your way to victory was ruled out, partly on grounds of
coût (Rumsfeld believed that cheap wars would open the way to more fre-
quent global discipline) and partly on the grounds of “optics.” It had
become much easier for the victims to speak back, and the US public was less
likely to dismiss the humanity of the victims on racial grounds.

There is a lot of evidence to show that the number and severity of wars
are in long-term decline, and the reluctance to accept casualties, même
among professional soldiers, is a matter of deep concern for states that want
to project military power. Régis Debray recently pointed to the extraordinary
phenomenon, when taken in a long historical view, that in France “the death
of two soldiers on maneuvers is a national trauma, meriting an emotional
ceremony and a presidential address.”26 The life of those in target nations is
certainly cheaper, but even so there is a certain dreadful sense in which the
smart missile, the drone, and the JSOC death squad are an advance on carpet
bombing: My book argues in part that there is an opportunity to push to
another stage, one in which the state’s right to kill, at home or abroad, est
constrained to very limited and extreme circumstances.

Yet a properly functioning democracy and mass media are central to
advancing this cause. Wars are generally fought for limited national gain,
and while in the process state powers seek to induce a national derangement
through the demonization of the enemy and the summoning of partial patri-
otic histories, these lies also often seem hollow. If they are reasonably well
informed (a big “if,” though, given the state of the media, especially in the
NOUS), few people are willing to sacrifice their lives to give their government a
minor advantage in international affairs.

Nixon: I hope you won’t mind if we talk a little more about hope. You make the
vital point that dissent instigates and sustains counter-memory, which plays a
crucial part in the prevention of future war as well as in ending war in the
présent. To the essential question of what photographs offer in a situation of

26.
posts/macrons-wars.

Régis Debray, “Macron’s Wars,” Sidecar, Mars 2021, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

war, your book evidences the significant part images play in enabling the
work of counter-memory to evolve. Photographs helped raise consciousness
about the systems of killing, as you aptly put it, in Vietnam and Iraq, mais le
effects of images are not necessarily punctual, or direct, and one aspect of
your book I found revelatory were the relays and palimpsests it produced,
underscoring that memory is a mutative and dynamic process. We’ve
touched on the importance for you of working with an expansive archive—a
strategy that reveals how distilled the photographic memory of the war in
Vietnam is, and how diffuse the photographic record of the war in Iraq is—
but for me the book also summons the archival turn that coincided with the
invasion of Iraq. I’m thinking of Hal Foster’s “An Archival Impulse,” which
was published in 2004. The article concerns “archival art,” but I found reso-
nances in your project with the argument he makes about archival practices
as both registering failures of cultural memory in a time of war and marking
an attempted “shift away from a melancholic culture that views the historical
as little more than the traumatic.”27 Do you see your book as intervening in a
melancholic/traumatic view of history?

I also want to pick up on another observation you just made about
counter-memory, which is that difference is pivotal in responses to war. Dans
her reply to the October questionnaire on the US-led invasion of Iraq—to
which you also contributed—Rosalyn Deutsche raised the concern that not
only pro-war constituencies but also certain sectors of the Left were in dan-
ger of regressing to “masculinist political analysis” that “re-grounds politics in
the authority of a solid foundation—economic antagonism.”28 Deutsche’s
argument that psychic and subjective transformation, informed by feminist
and psychoanalytic interrogations of the political, has to accompany material
transformation is perhaps something we are trying to negotiate in this con-
versation. Many years have passed since you and Deutsche wrote those short,
compelling pieces, but in them I see the kernel of the essential work on war
that you have both gone on to do. En effet, I am struck by a shared aim, que
art (and perhaps art history, aussi) might cultivate “the democratic capacity
for being in public and responding to the suffering of others.”

Stallabrass: It is perceptive of you to ask about melancholy and trauma. I’ve long
been interested in the melancholic dimensions of photography, especially of
the various actions of the photographer in gathering, titling, cataloguing,
and archiving their images. Some of these activities may find affinities with
Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, his capacious catalogue of mental
maladies and their occasions—and of course melancholy pervades much of
the theoretical writing about photography, at least from Walter Benjamin

27.

28.

Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004), p. 22.

Rosalyn Deutsche, Octobre 123 (Hiver 2008), pp. 38–40.

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onwards.29 The (now distant) origin of this book project was fixed on images
and icons of Left defeat, and it was to take in the Vietnam War and its cultur-
al legacy. That project was overtaken by immediate political events, especially
the war on Iraq, which demanded a response that was more focused, specific,
and in a sense practical: to provide curatorial and written resources for those
opposing that particular war and neocolonial domination more broadly.

So much of melancholic photography, however—a register of loss, disaf-
fection, and alienation—is the result of colonialism and of a colonizing com-
mercial “modernization.” It pervades the work of, say, Luigi Ghirri, as he tries
to photographically decipher what he calls (like Brecht) the “hieroglyph” of
arbitrary spaces. One example of this would be degraded environments and
advertising images in postwar Italy, which had been subject to much bombing
and then rapid reconstruction. Another example would be a swath of photo-
graphic work from South Korea, which had been subject to a rapid and brutal
initiation into urban modernity—again, at first by US bombs.

It is there in the postures and glances of passersby in Seoul in the late
1950s and early 1960s, who stalk the strange, new urban scene in the pho-
tographs of Han Youngsoo; and more recently in the intensely seen and felt
photographs of pine forests, taken by Bae Bien-u, implicitly set against the
pervasive environment of motorways and tower blocks from which viewers
would generally see his work. It is there in Vietnam too, bien sûr, for exam-
ple in Dinh Q Lê’s huge collection of old family portraits found in flea mar-
kets—often of people who had been forced to flee the country—which he
scatters in installations across gallery floors.

In an important essay published in 1999, Wendy Brown warned of the
dangers of the “left melancholy” that had attracted me: She argues on Freudian
lines that it may become a self-destructive and repetitious wallowing in defeat
and a displacement of the political activity that should have been taking place,
albeit in daunting political circumstances.30 This argument, cependant, a
recently received a learned and eloquent revision in Enzo Traverso’s remark-
able book Left-Wing Melancholia. It excavates various histories of melancholia
across theory, painting, photography, film, and literature to argue that the great
and violent defeat, not of victims but of those who resisted, must be internalized
and mourned. It also argues that dwelling on defeat and loss, and on cultural
responses to them, does not necessarily mean disempowerment. Melancholia
may be a necessary and escapable phase that can lead to the combination of
“mourning and militancy,” Traverso writes, quoting Douglas Crimp on ACT UP.31
One photographic model here is surely Susan Meiselas, who document-
ed the Nicaraguan revolution and later went back to the country repeatedly.

29.

30.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001).

Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 26, Non. 3 (Fall 1999), pp. 19–27.

31.
Presse universitaire, 2016), p. 21.

Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (New York: Columbia

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

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Dinh Q Lê. Erasure. 2011.

She wanted to show her images again to those whom she had photographed,
keeping the memory of the revolution alive. She also wanted to say some-
thing about its fate, as it found itself in the midst of a deep regional reces-
sion, its social advances brutally assaulted by US-funded terrorists, finally set-
tling into an accommodation with neoliberalism.32 This work registers
defeat, and many of the responses that she gathers are full of despair, yet she
refuses to stop there: In registering the past, she allows for different futures
to potentially come into view. In writing about Meiselas’s later work on
Kurdistan, Allan Sekula contrasts false and often dangerous national myths
with photography’s “incapacity for abstraction,” which can act as a guard
against ideological generalization.33 I attempted to learn something from
Meiselas’s long commitment and her insistence on the particular.

On the important question of masculinist political analysis, I hope that
I do not stray into it, either in the book or in my answers here. The book
contains some materialist analysis, along with accounts that draw upon politi-
cal theory, media theory, military strategy, and other fields. En même temps,

32.
and Reframing History (2004).

Aside from exhibitions of this work, Meiselas made the films Pictures from a Revolution (1991)

33.
éd. Kristen Lubben (New York: International Center of Photography, 2008), pp. 343–44.

Allan Sekula, “Photography and the Limits of National Identity,” in Susan Meiselas: In History,

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it is about how images are used to wage and oppose war, which is necessarily
a matter of perception, psychologie, emotion, mémoire, et, as you say, trau-
ma. I cannot pretend to have dealt with all these equally or adequately, et
the emphases in the book are determined by what I felt equipped to do—
and by the knowledge that you, entre autres, were working on aspects of
this subject in ways that I could not.

It seems to me that the materialist aspects of Marxist theory do not
need to be in contention with gendered accounts of the world, and I have
made use in other work of writers who integrate them in novel and produc-
tive ways. Nancy Fraser, Par exemple, has much to say about the interplay of
“lean in” feminism, identity politics, class, and neoliberalism across her work,
particularly in her recent short book, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be
Born.34 And, in a very different register, Sianne Ngai has provided a striking
analysis of “minor” aesthetic categories in a book that unites gender and
materialist analysis.35 I have used her account of the zany in my recent writ-
ing about street art.

Your last point—about “being in public and responding to the suffer-
ing of others”—seems a very apt description of much political protest,
including Black Lives Matter, and this bears on the issue of hope. In helping
to stage some demonstrations in my locality—a suburban, diversifying, mais
still conservative corner of London—I could easily see that the young often
brought in the old, the children their parents and grandparents. For most of
the young, racism is rightly seen as a central issue, one pervading society, et
personally racist behavior (par exemple, voting for a racist politician) is a red
line that must never be crossed. Art and art history have an important role to
play in this, given the ever-greater integration of protest, politique, and a fast-
evolving and rapidly changing image culture. In light of the history that I
examine in Killing for Show, in which violence was so often grounded in a
dehumanizing conception of racial difference, this is a cause for hope.

On the other hand, we have recently had an object lesson in the
growth of reaction: A nascent fascism threatens as soon as the ghost of
equality so much as raises its head. It is an old reaction, of course. Marx
noted in his remarkable analysis of authoritarian political populism, lequel
has some striking parallels with the present, that the conservatives under-
stood the threat of even minor socialist reform much better than the social-
ists themselves, who could not comprehend why anyone would oppose
common sense and brotherly love.36 In the UK, BLM proved to be very divi-

34.
Trump and Beyond (Londres: Verso, 2019).

Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to

35.
Presse universitaire, 2012).

Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

36.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 189.

Karl Marx, “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Surveys from Exile, éd. David Fernbach

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A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass

sive, and many people feared where it would lead—in a sense, with reason.
To taint the country house, for example—that engine of false nostalgia,
noblesse oblige, and aristocratic grandeur—with the histories of exploita-
tion and slavery was no small matter. Once you pull on one thread, the rest
of the hegemony may unravel.

Thus our home secretary, Priti Patel, believes that there is political capi-
tal to be seized in describing the BLM protests as “dreadful.” And the
Johnson government realizes that such capital can also be found in cultivat-
ing imperial nostalgia, defending the public display of statues of slave traders
and projecting hollow military power—sending a leaky aircraft carrier to the
South China Sea, Par exemple, in an echo of gunboat diplomacy, and stirring
up low-level conflict with the EU. Since this has so far been met with sweep-
ing electoral success, at least among the English (who are a special case,
admittedly), my hope is tempered.