First part of a text written in 2014 for a presentation at the University of Western Ontario
Months ago, while browsing through Time magazine’s website, I happened upon a photo gallery which, according to the accompanying text, showed the public beheading of a young Syrian man at the hands of Islamic militants in the village of Kerghan, not far from Aleppo. I mention the text, because I did not want to look at the end of a series of photographs, which presumably concluded with the actual cutting off of the head of the victim. In a war, whose images and reports of atrocities elicit constant controversy, these images called attention to themselves, because they were, as the text in Time magazine attested, one of those rare occasions where a professional photographer of non-Syrian origin got the opportunity to photograph an event of this kind.
At a certain point in the report, the photographer, whose name was not published for security reasons, says: “Two rebels whispered something into his ear (the ear of the prisoner who is going to be beheaded) and the young man replied in an innocent and sad manner, but I couldn’t understand what he said because I don’t speak Arabic.”
What were the words the executioner whispered in his victim’s ear? I invite you to think about this.
By now everyone knows that a photograph can be a source of tension when it is not consented. Take a stranger’s photograph in the street and you’ll be challenged on it. It’s as if the simple act of taking a photograph carried with it the strange ability to inconvenience, to create aversion on the person being photographed—less than the photograph proper, it is rather the act of photographing which carries this consequence.
It can end up inconveniencing people, but it can also form, why not? a part of a perverse system of torture: with the advent of digital photography it has become possible to find images of those dark places where pain and humiliation meet, such as the chambers of Abu Ghraib in 2004.
These photographs were certainly upsetting because of the arrogance and sadism displayed by a group of soldiers in a widely unpopular war. However, although it may not be obvious, we were confronted by the question of why these photographs were taken. Perhaps for some strange form of personal or group pleasure, or as a tourist imagining him or herself many years later, looking at old photographs and reminiscing upon his or her travels in exotic countries?
Whatever the reasons, the act of photographing—the necessary abstraction to look through a viewfinder, or a screen, and compose a photograph—meant a humiliation, or more directly, an intentional psychological torture inflicted upon the prisoners of Abu Ghraib. Because taking photographs is, in some instances, a display of power.
Before moving on to some images on the topic at hand, I would like to make a few remarks relating to photographic abstraction. Take, for example, the image of Omayra Sánchez caught in the ruins of what was the town of Armero in Colombia. It is a painful and unforgettable photograph, a source of much controversy at the time for those who think that neither the photographer, nor anyone present at the scene did anything to prevent the agony experienced by Omayra in front of the cameras. A polemic at once absurd and superficial to which I will add this thought: look at Omayra’s face. She’s looking directly into our eyes from the center of the image. We can see her fingers white with cold and their prolonged immersion in water. One of her hands is barely holding onto a piece of wood. The focus and composition are perfect, professional. In order for this picture to exist the photographer needed to stop thinking of Oymara Sánchez’s tragedy, so as to look through the viewfinder of his camera to take the photograph. In other words, he had to focus, compose the frame, etc. It wasn’t just a matter of looking and taking the picture, as an amateur would do. The photographer, Frank Fournier, needed to think abstractly, to detach himself in order to carry out the work, and think, in the midst of that tragedy, in something as “frivolous” as photographic composition. Isn’t that at the heart of the controversy that has always accompanied photojournalism, be it the photograph of Omayra or that of a dying Sudanese child next to a vulture?
Let’s go back to the original topic, but we’ll also stay close to the idea of abstraction, or rather, the concept of professional photography. In this photograph, we see Pedro Castillo. Not visible in the frame is Roberto Giron, his eyes closed. You will see him soon. Little is known about the two men. I assume Pedro and Roberto were friends, but the truth is that I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that they shared the same fate at the end of their lives. They were Guatemalan, and a newspaper reports say that they worked as farm hands and that they earned half a dollar a day, that they were alcoholics, that they led miserable lives. In the seventies, while drunk, Giron killed his brother and was condemned to 10 years in prison. In this photograph Pedro Castillo is looking straight at the press; more than 100 journalists are registering every detail. Pedro Castillo is looking at all of this, and every time I myself look at this photograph, I give thanks that he is not looking directly into my camera.
Here you can see the photograph in its entirety. For those of you who haven’t yet figured this out, what we are witnessing here is an execution by firing squad. The condemned were found guilty of raping and killing an underage girl, and they were executed three years later, in 1996.
Pedro Castillo’s gaze still unsettles me. “The hopeless (Enrique Lihn wrote in a poem, shortly before his passing) observes that, before the prospect of death, those things that are forced to occupy a limited space … find their place as if in a painting… Never before had he been in a similar situation, centre stage / Like a saint with a lion lying at his feet.” What is it that Pedro Castillo and Roberto Giron see, or choose not to see by closing his eyes? A lion lying at his feet. A lion with hundreds of eyes (or rather, thousands, if we take yours into account, and those of the ones yet to come).
Roberto Giron looks at the media, his gaze rises beyond the firing squad that has just entered the scene, and he looks at us. What is the press doing there? In order to answer that question, in my case, I have to think in terms of photography: what is photography, exactly? A piece of paper with silver halides, or printer ink, the sensor of a digital camera, ink on a newspaper page? If it were only that, mere mounting or support, we would have to agree that faced with a war photograph we’d have the same reaction as being before Picasso’s Guernica. But that’s not how it is. A photographic image has a different impact on us than a painting, or other kinds of representation, simply because it is not that: it is not a representation. The photograph of a man condemned to death, fear in his face as he looks on, is a man condemned to death with fear in his face, not a representation. If a photograph is not about the matter that it is composed of, the photograph must necessarily be about what it represents, in this case the photograph is the two condemned men, the firing squad, a few sand bags. In short, the almost infinite presence of details that makes up the photographic image. However, it isn’t this either, since, when one considers its implacable presence at the time, what we have before us is not an execution, but the image of an execution, the record of what happened, the irrefutable proof. I have used these theories in order to explain my presence at the place where the execution was to take place that early morning. Had I been able to get close to the condemned men to explain to them why we were there, attentively observing every one of their gestures, I might have said: “We are here to leave an objective and irrefutable testimony of your deaths in the hands of the State in accordance with the law, etc…” This is an act (the execution and the reasons thereof), that history will judge exactly as you probably are doing at this moment.
That was our reason for being there: to bear witness and to reproduce the fulfillment of an act pre-established by the justice system. The only “meddling,” if that’s what it was, on our part in this process, may have been the availability of physical space so that we could carry out our work. Lastly, it was thanks to us that people knew that the execution was not carried out as the government intended. The image of the coup de grace on Pedro Castillo went around the world and brought to an end the legal practice of execution by firing squad in Guatemala, giving way to the “cleaner” method of legal injection, to which the press also got access.
What I do want to make clear is that as a photographer, I had little impact on the manner of Pedro Castillo and Roberto Giron’s execution and even less on its being carried out.
It was quite a different matter in the case of this other photograph. I took it in Guatemala City in 1998, and I was the only photographer present. In this image a group of university students show the naked body of a supposed thief they caught on the street. After the photograph was taken, the person was kicked to the ground, punched and beaten with sticks, and handed over to the police.
The photograph is quite eloquent and doesn’t require second reading. The students pose with their victim and he closes his eyes, just as Roberto Giron did in front of the firing squad. The photograph was given to me to take alone, because, again, I was the only photographer present. The next day it was published on the front page of all the Guatemalan papers, as well as many newspapers from around the world, thus multiplying tenfold the humiliation of the so-called delinquent. I am not saying that the students caught that person in order for me to take the photographs. The same scene is repeated in March, year after year in Guatemala City. The students pose with the so-called felon just as in the old photographs of lynchings in the United States, the only exception being that the victim, in this case, will not be burned alive. What would it had been like had I not been there? The detainee was already naked when I arrived on the scene and would have been beaten regardless.
Perhaps they would have beaten him more had I not been present as a journalist, we will never know. What is certain is that they posed for me and in the process added an additional detail to the person’s martyrdom. But there were reasons for my being there. It wasn’t about trivializing, it wasn’t banality, as is the case these days every time something is witnessed by a group of people who take a picture with the only aim of posting it on a social media. I was working and my photograph probably contributed, thanks to its dissemination, to generating a debate about violence in Guatemala, or to document for future discussion the notion of what was just or unjust at the time, exactly as we debate today when we look at photographs of lynchings in the United States at the beginning of the last century, photographs that in their day achieved commercial success as postcards.
I would like to approach to the end with a less pessimistic image from the point of view of the condemned. This photograph was taken during a riot in a jail on the outskirts of Guatemala City. Here a group of inmates is shouting at the police, while the latter point their weapons at them from one of the watchtowers. I was standing next to the uniformed men and the photograph I took of one of the shirtless mutineers—his face concealed, climbing up a fence, his arms outstretched—has always seemed to me an image of freedom. An unidentified person, who I do not judge, the crimes for which he is incarcerated being unknown to me, is—for a couple of hours—the owner of the space he’s otherwise imprisoned in, and expresses himself thusly before his captors, certainly, but more specifically expresses himself in this manner before the camera that is focusing on him. He is not the pale Nietzschean offender, as is Pedro Castillo, but rather he is what the latter could be, were he to break free from the bindings in front of the firing squad.
Let’s now return to the question that opened this lecture. What did the executioner whisper in the ear of the condemned? I think he said something like this: “now I am going to cut off your head and that foreign journalist who is there is going to take photos and the whole world will see them”. He gave permission to the photographer to document the execution not for the sake of freedom of press, but rather because of a decision from the executioner that could well have been add one more degree of torment to the person who is going to be beheaded alive. In a space like a torture room (in this case, a torture square), where every object has a specific role to fulfill, the camera and its operator (and every news outlet that published the photos) are used as another tool.
