Pictures may speak louder than words, but how we hear their voice depends on our cultural archetype.
Nothing in recent years could be more instructive about the meaning of photography — as a vehicle of hyping or interpreting reality — than the famous photos showing the progress of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in downtown Baghdad, at 10.50 a.m. on April 9, as it fell in two stages, at first hanging for a moment onto the platform by its ankles, and then falling from its pedestal to the ground, followed by seemingly jubilant citizens dragging the statue’s head through the streets, with one man riding on it triumphantly and another bashing it with his shoes.
But despite the presumption of veracity that the pictures of a photojournalist are imbued with — their inconvertible proof that a certain event had taken place as depicted there — he is still impelled by tacit imperatives that he brings up, often unconsciously, from his cultural vantage point and political stand. A photograph may indeed capture reality, but it also interprets and fiddles with the scale of it, as it were, much in the manner that writers abstract the world into printed words.
All of which brings us back to that image of Saddam Hussein’s statue being so ignominiously toppled three weeks ago, and how Arabs and American each saw it in their own unique way.
Very simply, what Arabs universally saw there was summed up in what my colleague on this page, Khaled Al-Maeena, told the Washington Post’s Michael Dobbs he saw there — “Anarchy, looting and chaos, one devil being replaced by another.”
And therein lies our subjective biases, as Arabs, in how we internalize and react to photographs. In our media world, what proliferates are stereotyped and pedestrian pictures that are guaranteed not to disturb our preconceived notions of objective reality. We steadily recycle commonly accepted tastes in our political culture, with the Arab population’s understanding of the value and implications of photography rendered slender.
Because of the repressive nature of much of Arab society, a photograph there is defined, just as an issue for debate is, as having two lines, right or wrong, and Arab photojournalism draws much of its raison d’etre from that consciousness of self, which at this time in history is narrow, moralistic, defensive and uninquisitive.
To that extent, we reject the West’s ideal of seeing reality, depicted in photography, as decidedly pluralistic and multihued, imbued with complex and at times contradictory meanings. In the US, as a case in point, photography is effectively a subconscious projection of the soul of American popular culture, a zestful orientation of reality, seen from every possible angle. The photographer, in other words, opines, editorializes, accuses, with no limits placed on his forms of expression.
We did not want to see, even believe, the truth of that shocking photo depicting the pathetic end of Saddam Hussein for what it was. It disturbed our internal psychic economy to see an Arab leader whose statue, with a US marine placing an American flag, then an Iraqi one, over its face, being toppled, and be reminded that, of all the popular uprisings that had taken place in recent history, including the Islamic revolution in Iran, People Power in the Philippines, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overthrow of communism in Russia, only the collapse of the Iraqi regime came about as the result of a foreign invasion, not a popular intifada.
We cannot persist in denying that reality is real, as we have persisted, for example, in denying, to this day, that the wars between us and the Jews of Palestine in 1948 and 1967 were terrible military defeats, referring to them instead as being respectively the “nakba” and the “naksa.”
The present danger to the soul of our culture is not censorship or even political repression, but how we ourselves have not yet come round to the central idea that we need a transforming liberation of consciousness through the abolition of those verbal taboos that we place on our existential and social reality, simply because acceptance of that reality cuts deep into what we hold dear in our lives.
That one photograph should boost the claims of the reality — painfully surreal, if you wish — that we inhabit in our world. It really happened that way. Get used to it. For an Arab to look at that image and then deny what it is saying is for that Arab to be left less free, less himself, than it found him. In the name of logic, enough.
- Arab News Opinion 1 May 2003
