La fotografía y el otro. Cuerpo y estética de retorno

Diego Lizarazo, 2022 Gobierno de México-Subsecretaría de Cultura, Mexico, 164 pp.

Professor Diego Lizarazo offers us in his latest award-winning book, Photography and the other (2022), three refined and essential chapters to think about the relationship between photography and otherness; or, in the words of its author, to think about the "aesthetics of return", which is the aesthetics centered on the return of the disappeared, but always as a force of otherness and not as an idolatrous resurrection. To this end, he discusses three women, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag and Judith Butler, who have reflected on the photography of the atrocious and traumatic events, on the photography that makes death and disappearance more evident.

Woolf's photographic thought is presented as the most naive of the three authors. Diego Lizarazo (2022: 34) writes that the English writer assumes the photographs as abstract statements that allow everyone to understand the evil inherent in any war conflict. Now, Lizarazo is right when he argues that the same images can be interpreted and used in different ways: photographs of war and other violent acts can arouse feelings of indignation and pity for the victims, but they can also be used for the purposes of the perpetrators. What is certain is that, in the face of such photos, there is first an impact and an impression of a lack of "intrinsic legibility" (Didi-Huberman, 2015: 23), and only afterwards should we make the effort to make sense of them.

Photography and the other continues with some acute pages dedicated to Susan Sontag. For this author, the "presupposition of unanimity in the face of the horror that photos provide" (Lizarazo, 2022: 33) is false. It has often been commented that the photography of war disasters could serve to increase the detractors of war conflicts and even to end wars, but history has shown that these aspirations have failed. Thus, as Lizarazo (2022: 35) warns, "pointing out the destructive nature of war does not constitute an argument against war action. It is not enough to show the horror of all armed confrontation to convince that this instrument should not be used for political purposes.

The author somehow invites us to ask ourselves whether the iconoclastic or iconophobic strategy that translates into the prohibition of the image is legitimate, or even whether the censorship of images that may be offensive and trivialize evil should be admitted. What is certain is that the same image can be, for some, respectful of otherness and, for others, annul it. Photography is an attack on otherness or is indifferent to it when it becomes an instrument of domination (e.g., identification photos or mug-shots) and when it is reduced to its technical function. Such use of the image has much to do with that concept, the "visual", that Serge Daney (2004) invented to think, in a time in which the simulacrum reigns, the sign without outside. On the other hand, genuine "images" constitute the gateway to otherness. Thresholds of this type are all those photos that we find in the third and last chapter of the book reviewed here. All these shocking photos are very precarious: they say as little about traumatic events as any other photo of the most banal event. When it comes to the photograph of a frightening and traumatic event, the important thing is how to mount it, that is, how to relate it to other images and to different discourses so that we can understand it. We believe that Diego Lizarazo is referring to this aspect when, in the indispensable second chapter of his book, he speaks of the work of "narration" that the interpretation of the photo requires. It is also very important that such a narrative can deactivate its possible perverse effect on the viewer.

Since Roland Barthes' famous essay (1990), La chambre claireIt has been said that the photo, the image, can belong to the order of pornography, of the "visual", and it can then be thought that nothing is missing in it, that what it shows is the whole truth. But photography can also be conceived as something precarious that, in order to begin to "speak", must be related to its context and its frame; that is, we must approach what is outside the field of the photo in order to find some sense in it. Diego Lizarazo has shown that it is absurd to counterpose narration to the image, since the precariousness of the "true" image, which is not complete or self-sufficient, always requires an exercise in montage or narration.

In relation to this last theme, the controversy between Susan Sontag and Judith Butler (2017: 99-106) regarding what a photograph can express is very important. According to the author of Ante el dolor de los demás, photographic images lack "narrative coherence" because by themselves, without a caption or written analysis, they cannot offer an interpretation. In contrast, Butler (2017: 99-106) argues that the photo, by framing reality through a certain angle, focus, lighting, etc., is already an objective interpretive act that depends on "structured conditioning of genre and form" and not on merely subjective choices. Thinking the image from the frame makes a narrative unnecessary to understand the context or political background of the photograph. For this reason, "the photograph is not merely a visual image awaiting interpretation; it is itself actively, sometimes even coercively, interpreting." However, it seems to us that Butler contradicts herself when she later argues that the same photograph "can be instrumentalized in radically different directions, depending on how it is discursively framed and in what medium of communication it is presented or displayed" (p. 133). Such instrumentalization means that we are indeed before an image awaiting interpretation; but, in reality, we are waiting to decide on a discursive framework that allows us to analyze and understand it.

Butler's debatable thesis differs from some thinkers who, like Siegfried Kracauer (2008: 36-37), think that the photographic image, which is limited in itself to showing the spatial continuum in a precise instant, remains opaque if it is not accompanied by a discourse or a narrative about the photographed object or subject. Likewise, Butler departs from the reflections of Jacques Rancière (2015: 98), for whom the aesthetic force of the photographic image derives from that which departs from the knowledge provided by the "frame." Referring to one of the most individualized photos in the Auschwitz album, the French philosopher states that the more enigmatic the photo is, the less we know about its function and, ultimately, the more indeterminate it is, the greater its aesthetic force will be.

We also find very relevant Butler's thought analyzed by Lizarazo regarding the relationship of the "frame" with the photographer, the camera and the scene. Although the photographer and the camera, unless their reflection is photographed in a mirror or something similar, are not usually visible in the same image, they are part of the event represented or of the reference, since the photograph is the result of the actual encounter of the photographed event with the technical device and the photographic subject. It is true that the images taken at Abu Ghraib demonstrate that photographs can be part of the event and allow us to suspect that the photographer (or photographeress) has intervened in that terrifying scene of torture, but this is something we can never be sure of. Butler (2017: 125) adds that "the indefinite circulability of the image," the fact that the image has circulated outside the original scene, "allows the event to keep happening, not to say even that [...] it has never ceased to happen." To identify, as the philosopher does in the fragment quoted above, the image with the event, with the reference, seems to us an idolatrous conception of photography, a transmutation into pure presence of the absence inherent in every photographic image which, at most, is the trace, the "ash", of what was in front of the camera.

Butler herself (2017: 140-141), in a further contradiction, seems to recognize this and to move away from the idolatrous conception when, in relation to a Barthesian fragment by Sontag, she dwells on the hypothesis that the photograph tells of absence or "death in the future," and then states that in such a case the photo emphasizes that a life is "worth mourning." His pathosis evidently "affective and interpretative", which is another way of referring to the punctum and to the studium Barthesian. Beyond the weaknesses of Butler's discourse on photography, the author of Photography and the other has been able to extract the best from it. Undoubtedly, Lizarazo (2022: 77) is right when he says "that we cannot see except through the frames", but he adds that "it is possible to question, deconstruct, interrogate, what such frames allow and what they leave out or erase".

Ethical and political reflection on photographs of torture, murder and other intolerable acts must necessarily focus on their effects on viewers. Lizarazo (2022: 46) reminds us that, for Sontag, "to the violence inflicted on the victims is added the violence of their exhibition and of the objectification that their becoming pure images causes". It is true -and the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (2003)- that in the photographic image there is always something of violence, of force, because, by cutting out or framing a part of reality and exhibiting it, the image takes things out of the background of indistinction in which they remained in the dark. However, it is also true that not all violence is bad, just as not all cruelty is bad. Showing atrocious images can be cruel and distressing, something that hurts us; but this act of cruelty, this pain inflicted on the spectator, can give rise to a state of indignation that leads us to act in favor of justice, reparation and emancipation.

The issue of image saturation or an excess of both traumatic photos and abject and ethically and politically damaging photos should be related to the question of the "ecology of images". Peter Szendy (2021: 32) reminds us in this regard that Susan Sontag (2006: 251) is the first to advance, in her 1970s essay on photography, the idea of "an ecology applied not only to real things but also to images". At that early date she proposed the ecology of images as an antidote to the consumerist logic of an infinite iconic surplus. When he returned to this problematic a year before his death, in his book Ante el dolor de los demásSontag (2014: 92) writes that the idea of an iconic ecology has no future because she considers even worse the existence of gatekeepers or censors who control the doses of horror that we can "digest". Szendy (2021: 33) contrasts this position with the one held by Andrew Ross in his article. The Ecology of Imagesin which she argues that Sontag, by limiting herself to deploring the overload of images offered by our modern information society, has not taken into account that the images themselves allow us to fight against "the material disappearance of the real" and "to oppose the destruction of the natural world". The American writer gives in to the cliché of "information overload" and eliminates the possibility of "a resistance of the images themselves against their effects".

The reflections on the "frame", which, as we have found, occupy a very important place in the book we review, have a certain "aroma" of ocularphobia (Jay, 2007), since they mainly focus on the pathologies derived from the coercive frame "that blinds us with respect to what we see" (Butler, 2017: 144). Thinking of the frame is not enough to grasp the photograph's force of alterity, nor to access the "aesthetics of return" that the book Photography and the other proposes from the analysis of the beautiful and just works of Yael Martinez, Gustavo Germano, Jesus Abad Colorado, Erika Diettes and Lucila Quieto. In fact, Lizarazo (2022: 90) goes in the opposite direction to the limit of the frame. He thus opposes the force of alterity, which liberates an "uncontained" and incommensurable existence, to "the force of framing".

It is obvious that photography always brings together two contradictory attributes. On the one hand, there is no photography without the objectivity of mechanical registration. Georges Didi-Huberman (2015: 59) is right when he speaks of "the 'fundamental innocence' of the optical record," of the record of something that is outside and has not been created by the photographer. On the other hand, there is no photography without objective framing and without subjective manipulation or point of view of the photographer. When photography is reduced to the "frame", to the "matrix gaze" or to "the historical configuration that organizes" what is to be seen and not seen, valued or not, etc., then a discourse of profound distrust dominates. Of course, it is fair to distrust the photos, it is legitimate and necessary to make visible the frame and the political and social forces that determine what is framed by the photo. The operation -as psychoanalysis would say- of "piercing the phantom", of showing the frame, has an emancipating character because it allows to deactivate the invisible or transparent ideological domination. But the most beautiful thing about photography has to do ultimately with what Diego Lizarazo shows us in the third chapter of his book: with the "aesthetics of return", with the aesthetics that transmits a "force of otherness" that, although it is in the photo, is alien to the frame and the matrix that homogenizes everything. The power of the photograph to show otherness cannot be apprehended by knowledge.studium as Barthes (1990: 63) called it - provided by the revealed image itself. We have then to resort to categories that, like those of the punctum, Stimmung or latency, are not hermeneutic because they are related, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2011) teaches, to experiences or experiences.

It is also necessary to take into account the centrality acquired in photography by the unforeseen or by chance, which since Walter Benjamin (1987: 48) is called "optical unconscious" and which for Antonin Artaud is the most poetic thing that can be found in a photo or a film. The mismatch between the eye of the photographer and the eye of the machine makes it inevitable that only after photographing, after the encounter of the technical device with the outside, do we really know what we have photographed. It is likely that the best expression of the unexpected remains the photograph of the park shown in the film. Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni. If the photo that gives its name to the series is so impressive The house that bleedsPerhaps this is because its author, Yael Martinez, before making the "gesture of photographing", did not know what the photo would reveal: the perfect and sinister symmetry of the shadow of a hanged woman, at one end, and the red stain of the bleeding wall, at the other.

It seems to us that the "aesthetics of return" cannot accept what Sontag says and Butler (2017: 143) picks up on at the end of her second chapter of War frames: lives mournedThe dead are profoundly disinterested in us", "they do not seek our gaze" and "they do not care whether we see or fail to see". On the other hand, the book we are reviewing invites us to think that, for the viewer of photographs endowed with the "force of otherness", the dead do seek our gaze. When we speak in this way, we enter the realm of the imagination. So does Pascal Quignard (2018: 188-189) when he writes that the photographed faces, especially those arriving from the "depths of absence," "require us, need us, ask us for help," beg us to resurrect them with our gaze. These dead have disappeared, but they have not been forgotten. It should be noted in this regard that disappearance, which is inherent to the photographic image, is not nothingness and, therefore, should not be identified with the entropic death drive or with oblivion. It supposes, on the contrary, one of the modalities of absence that, as such, always demands a search and, consequently, demands setting the image in motion, vivifying it, relating it to its outside, so that, as Lizarazo (2022: 148, 154) writes, "a certain return of the invisible, of the eliminated, of the disappeared body" can take place and in this way the "death of the past" can be resisted. Our imagination allows us to affirm that photography has pity on the dead and returns their gaze. This pity is the same that, for Benjamin and Kracauer (2010: 169), is felt by the antiquarian and the collector when they rescue and redeem things, when they extract them from obscurity so that they do not fall into oblivion.

The return of that otherness that the body of the missing person represents helps to mourn and to come out of the melancholic petrification. All the images commented on in the last chapter of Photography and the other are photographs that heal. For this reason, the act of photographic creation -writes Diego Lizarazo (2022: 153) using Gilles Deleuze- becomes an "act of resistance". We find ourselves at the antipodes of the theory that maintains that the image of pain trivializes, objectifies and introduces the zero degree of otherness. Lizarazo (2022: 149) has expressed it very precisely: they are photos that seek healing, that reinterpret "the pain of violence in rites that allow us to subsume the present in a cosmic time". Unlike the terrible images of Abu Ghraib, they allow us to re-inhabit the world, even the very spaces stained by atrocious and inhuman acts.

Finally, I think that the photographs of the "aesthetics of return" coincide in essence with Benjamin's "dialectical images", with images that show the return of the "other" of the present. That "other" is both the past, the time of the disappeared, and the future, the future time that opens up for the survivors when the eternal present of pain is transformed into a beautiful and consoling memory. Let us say, in conclusion, the same with the words of Diego Lizarazo (2022: 157): "the denied body of the other is included in the new form of memory. The uninhabited is re-inhabited".

Bibliography

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— (2010). Historia. Las últimas cosas antes de las últimas. Buenos Aires: Las Cuarenta.

Lizarazo, Diego (2022). La fotografía y el otro. Cuerpo y estética de retorno. Ciudad de México: Gobierno de México-Subsecretaría de Cultura.

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— (2014). Ante el dolor de los demás. Barcelona: Penguin Random House.

Szendy, Peter (2021). Pour une écologie des images. París: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Filmography

Antonioni, Michelangelo (dir.) (1966). Blow-Up [película]. Reino Unido, 108 min. Inglés.

Antonio Rivera García is Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts in the Department of Philosophy and Society at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he is currently its director. He is also co-director since 2010 of Res Publica. Journal of the History of Political Ideas. He is currently a director of Grupo ucm research project "Contemporary Aesthetics: Art, Politics and Society". His research has focused on the history of political ideas and concepts and contemporary aesthetics, with particular attention to image theory. His latest book is The cruelty of images. Aesthetics and politics of cinema (2022). Madrid: Guillermo Escolar Editor, 744 pp.