Abstract
This article considers the practice of witness in the world—witness to the world—in particular the character and temper, nature and purpose, significance and resonance of “moral witness,” a kind of ideal type, as conceived by the philosopher Avishai Margalit. It proposes that the artist plays an important role as a moral witness and that the work of art itself performs the same function, even after the fact—the phenomenon of “postwitness.” In this context, it identifies an ethics of precision or exactitude and adduces a variety of exemplars, ranging from poetry to photography, including Shot at Dawn (2014), a suite of landscape photographs which are also war photographs and memorial photographs, and acts of moral witness, by Chloe Dewe Mathews.
witness Attestation of a fact, event, or statement; testimony, evidence; evidence given in a court of justice … Applied to the individual testimony of conscience; after 2 Cor[inthians] i. 12 [‘For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity … we have had our conversation in the world’.] … One who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation; one present as a spectator or auditor (cf. eye-witness, ear-witness) … Something that furnishes evidence or proof of the thing or fact mentioned; an evidential mark or sign, a token … One who testifies for Christ or the Christian faith, esp. by death; a martyr.
Oxford English Dictionary
It is often remarked that artists bear witness. They have done so since the beginning of time. It is less often remarked that works of art themselves bear witness. The most celebrated example in recent memory may be Picasso’s Guernica (1937), reproductions of which were worn as a badge of honor by antiwar protestors on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003: warning and witnessing at the same time. Another example is Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920)—Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—a survivor who bears witness to the terrible twentieth century. Ironically, when it comes to witnessing, the testimony of the author of the act is not always to be trusted. Artists and other makers of graven images are rarely explicit or programmatic; often they obfuscate their purpose. Occasionally, someone makes a statement. The mottos of Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1820) are legendary: “One cannot look at this.” “I saw it.” “This is the truth.” In the Western canon, or the Western way of witness, Goya is the gold standard. He testifies from personal observation, as prescribed. His testimony is to all intents and purposes irrefutable; it is etched in the cultural memory of an entire continent. Goya is Paul Celan’s Breathcrystal, your unannullable witness.
2
McCullin’s counterpart James Nachtwey is perhaps the most exacting ethical professional in the business. He is remorseless. At the beginning of his signature collection, Inferno (1999), he quotes Dante: “Through me is the way to join the lost people.” Nachtwey has been to hell on our behalf; he is intimately familiar with the place, all nine circles of it. He keeps going back to tell the tale—to bear witness—whether we like it or not. “Nachtwey’s photographs are an odd, compelling combination of misery and serenity, of horrible content and stylized form,” observes Susie Linfield. “But the perfection of their compositions—their so-called beauty—should not deflect us: Nachtwey’s photographs are brutal, and they show us more than we can bear. But not more than we need to see.” 4
There are many ways of witnessing and a degree of fuzziness to much of the thinking about it. Despite a vast outpouring of historical studies, cultural studies, memory studies, and even philosophical studies, it remains a rather elusive subject, as to the basics of who, and when, and how, and why, and larger questions of equal pertinence: to what end and to what effect? Part of the problem may be its excess baggage—juridical, ethical, and even spiritual—as the Oxford English Dictionary serves to reveal. “Applied to the individual testimony of conscience,” it records, citing the magnificent formulation from the Book of Corinthians, “we have had our conversation in the world.” Witnessing may not change the world but having that conversation marks it, tempers it, and occasionally rubs it red raw. The act of witnessing is not a neutral act. It does not leave things as the witness finds them. It does not spare feelings. The witness spares nothing and nobody, not even the witness. That is the idea—to prick the conscience, to lodge in the memory, or to stick in the throat. Here is where art finds its place. “Art as freedom from moral narrowness and corner-perspectives,” as Nietzsche says, “or as mockery of them.” 5 In this sense, the witness is more akin to an agitator than a bystander, but also more purposive, more principled, and more pure. If the bystander is a deeply compromised figure, the witness is a profoundly elevated one. Put differently, the witness is an historical agent with a moral purpose and a militant faith, in Avishai Margalit’s words, “that in another place or another time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony.” 6
Margalit’s exposition of the “moral witness” is a scrupulous and suggestive treatment, deservedly influential. His moral witness has a lot to live up to, however, being at once special case and ideal type. Margalit applies strict criteria for admission to this select company. The only ones who qualify are those who have direct, personal experience of radical evil and its consequences, those who have “knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering,” as he puts it.
7
The paradigm case is probably a survivor of the camps, like Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel, or the Terror and the Gulag (Vasily Grossman and Alexsandr Solzenhitsyn), or prolonged torture (Henri Alleg and Jean Améry).
8
Somewhat weaker cases might include those with knowledge by acquaintance of systemic persecution and incarceration in the Eastern Bloc in its Cold War heyday (Václav Havel and Adam Michnik), or the multiple degradations of military dictatorships (Ariel Dorfman and Wole Soyinka), or—bringing it all back home—Guantánamo (Moazzam Begg and Mohamedou Ould Slahi).
9
Astonishingly, Slahi wrote 122,000 words of his Guantánamo diary in a single-cell segregation hut in Camp Echo, in 2005, after he had been put through a “special interrogation plan” personally approved by Donald Rumsfeld. The diary was published ten years later, after a long legal battle. The author remained in captivity, but his book was free at last—though heavily redacted. Slahi’s account is untutored and surprisingly measured; often decoded by sympathetic editing, the redactions function as a kind of silent reinforcement. On one occasion, as the special interrogation plan is in full swing, he is undone by a kind word: “How you been?” said one of the Puerto Rican escorting guards in his weak English. “I’m OK, thanks, and you?” “No worry, you gonna back to your family,” he said. When he said that I couldn’t help breaking in [redacted].
10
Slahi is insistent on only one thing: he must make himself heard. He must testify. “Please,” he tells his administrative review board, “I want you guys to understand my story okay, because it really doesn’t matter if they release me or not, I just want my story understood.”
11
As a witness, he has a conspicuous virtue: he is eminently capable of imagining a moral community that will listen to his testimony. He addresses that community in his summing up: I don’t even know how to treat this subject. I have only written what I experienced, what I saw, and what I learned first-hand. I have tried not to exaggerate, nor to understate. I have tried to be as fair as possible, to the US government, to my brothers, and to myself. I don’t expect people who don’t know me to believe me, but I expect them, at least, to give me the benefit of the doubt. And if Americans are willing to stand for what they believe in, I also expect public opinion to compel the US government to open a torture and war crimes investigation. I am more than confident that I can prove every single thing I have written in this book if I am ever given the opportunity to call witnesses in a proper judicial procedure, and if military personnel are not given the advantage of straightening their lies and destroying evidence against them.
12
In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody “identified” me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes, I can.” And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.
13
No one bears witness for the witness.
14
The thrust of the argument about insider and outsider is surely right—witnessing is not a spectator sport and witness tourism is no more palatable than war tourism—but the distinction is not so simple to maintain. During the occupation, for example, the artist Jean Fautrier moved in Resistance circles in Paris; his studio was a rendezvous. In 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo and briefly imprisoned. After his release, he went into hiding in a sanatorium on the outskirts of the city, where he began work on a series of abstract, headlike forms called Hostages (1943–1945), a response to the sounds he could hear from his window: the screams of torture and the shots of executions. Fautrier was an earwitness. Ostensibly, he had nothing to say—he was famously closemouthed—but “Fautrier l’enragé,” as Jean Paulhan called him, was impelled to act. “One can’t be painting apples while heads are rolling,” he declared. 15 His testimony, in his own idiom, was as searing as any. The Hostages were exhibited in 1945, immediately after the Liberation; they achieved mythic status. 16 They testified eloquently to man’s inhumanity to man. At the same time, they were an attestation of human dignity, claimed by André Malraux as “the most beautiful monument to the dead of the Second World War.” 17 They were also an affront, an outrage. The hostages demanded a response—an ethical response. “How should we respond when confronted with the idea of the Hostages?” asked Francis Ponge. “One might say that here is one of the fundamental questions of our time.” 18
Fautrier was an insider of a kind. So, too, is Sebastião Salgado, the photographer of famine in the Sahel and other battles in other wars. As Eduardo Galeano underlined in a brilliant appreciation, “Salgado photographs people. Casual photographers photograph phantoms.” As an article of consumption, poverty is a source of morbid pleasure and much money. Poverty is a commodity that fetches a high price on the luxury market. Consumer-society photographers approach but do not enter. In hurried visits to scenes of despair or violence, they climb out of the plane or helicopter, press the shutter release, explode the flash: they shoot and run. They have looked without seeing and their images say nothing. Their cowardly photographs soiled with horror or blood may extract a few crocodile tears, a few coins, a pious word or two from the privileged of the earth, none of which changes the order of their universe. At the sight of the dark-skinned wretched, forsaken by God and pissed on by dogs, anybody who is nobody confidentially congratulates himself: life hasn’t done too badly by me, in comparison. Hell serves to confirm the virtues of paradise. Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps. Salgado photographs from inside, from solidarity.
19
Witnessing (moral or otherwise) may be done after the fact. Paradoxical as it may seem, the act of witness need not be instantaneous or contemporaneous. Robert Capa’s celebrated dictum, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” does not apply, if the burden of that dictum is to prescribe a kind of action shot, a close-up in the moment. Unquestionably, “I was there” can deliver a visceral charge. Capa’s D-Day landings are sufficient proof of that; and McCullin’s shell-shocked soldier returns to haunt us at regular intervals. But powerful witnessing happens after the battle—after the war—sometimes long after. Simon Baker has noted “the capacity of photography to bear witness even (or especially) at removes of several decades.” 22
This form of witness we might call postwitness, by analogy with “postmemory,” the term proposed by Marianne Hirsch to comprehend the folk memory (or family memory) of successor generations, whose connection to the original event or source is not through recollection, as she says, but through “imaginative investment and creation.” 23 Postwitness is exemplified in a recent project, which is also an anniversary project, by Chloe Dewe Mathews (born 1982), Shot at Dawn (2014). 24 Arresting alike in its clarity and its humanity, Shot at Dawn is not immediately recognizable as an act of witness or indeed as a morally cogent act at all. It is at first sight a suite of landscape photographs: bucolic scenes, for the most part: a path beaten through a field; a snow-covered wood; and a stream. They are plainly titled, as if marked on the map: “Vanémont, Vosges, Lorraine;” “Verbranden-Molen, West-Vlaanderen;” “Klijtebeek stream, Dikkebus, Ieper” (Ypres or “Wipers” to the Tommies who had the misfortune to fetch up there). They are big—big enough for the viewer to lose himself, or his bearings, but not his moral compass. These are the sites at which British, French, and Belgian soldiers were executed for cowardice and desertion during the Great War.
The complete series comprises twenty-three photographs, of which a sample may be inspected in various exhibitions. Inspection is invited, or incited, by a gnawing awareness of their backstory—the slow realization of their slow realization—and by the deadpan data accompanying each one. At Vanémont: time 06:30/date 07.09.1914 Soldat EUGÈNE BOURET Soldat FRANCISQUE JEAN AIMÉ DUCARRE Soldat ERNEST FRANÇOIS MACKEN Soldat BENOÎT MANILLIER Soldat FRANCISQUE PITIOT Soldat CLAUDIUS URBAIN time 07:45/date 12.09.1914 Soldat JULES BERGER Soldat GILBERT GATHIER Soldat FERNAND LOUIS INCLAIR At Verbranden-Molen: time 17:00/date 15.12.1914 Soldat ALI BEN AHMED BEN FREJ BEN KHELIL Soldat HASSEN BEN ALI BEN GUERRA EL AMOLANI Soldat AHMED BEN MOHAMMED EL YADJIZY Soldat MOHAMMED OULD MOHAMMED BEN AHMED At Klijtbeek: time 05:50/date 10.04.1918 Private HENRY HUGHES
In an era of the “global war on terror,” the naming itself is an act of witness. Shot at Dawn, it transpires, is a resurrection—not a body snatching but a revisiting, an investigation of the record, and an invitation to think again.
The record was deliberately concealed for a long period; the story remained untold until very recently. In 2006, the Ministry of Defence announced that 306 soldiers convicted of desertion in the face of the enemy and executed during the Great War were to be posthumously pardoned. Each of the countries immediately involved is wrestling with its own painful history, though in each case the brutality of summary justice was leavened with a certain residual compassion (or caution). In Britain, the vast majority of those sentenced to death were pardoned at the time; of over 3,000 convictions for capital offences, 346 were carried out. In Belgium, the proportions were somewhat similar: of 220 convictions, 18 were carried out. In France, of 412 convictions during a summer of mutinies in 1917, 55 were carried out. The names, dates, and times of these executions appear in courts-martial proceedings. The locations, however, are difficult to establish with precision. Dewe Mathews is the first person to explore them systematically, camera at the ready.
Shot at Dawn is a documentary project, first and foremost, but there is more to it than that. The photographs bear witness, one hundred years after the event. Like her distinguished forebears, Dewe Mathews is not merely a shutter operator but a thinker photographer. “These places have been altered by a traumatic event,” she reflects. “By photographing them, I am reinserting the individual into that space, stamping their presence back onto the land, so that their histories are not forgotten.” 25 Every photograph is a certificate of presence, as Roland Barthes pointed out. Fundamentally, this is a moral position. Dewe Mathews is a moral witness. Shot at Dawn is excavatory, testamentary, and perhaps even reparatory. In every sense, the plot is subject to scrutiny. Those bucolic scenes, soaked in meaning, are sites of memory, certainly, but also sites of self-examination, for spectators of all sorts. In the final analysis, these photographs are little histories of conscience—a centenary of conscience—inventories of its excitation and reinterpretation over time.
They are also examples of exactitude: an ethical attribute. 26 Witnessing imposes its own exacting requirements. For Paul Celan, it was the date—he urged “a concentration that remains mindful of all our dates.” 27 In the case of Shot at Dawn, an approximate location or an approximate time of day would nullify the core concept. Shot at Dawn is the very opposite of shoot and run. Similarly, for Simon Norfolk, a photographer who follows the wars and the massacres, inspecting the ground and the guilty secrets sown there, precise knowledge of the gravesites and the killing fields is of vital importance, for the credibility of the work and the veracity of the witness. 28 As Mr Cogito knew, in these matters, accuracy is necessary. From “Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision,” in Zbigniew Herbert’s Report from a Besieged City (1983), which is among other things a witnessing of Warsaw under martial law:
The work of witness stands against indeterminacy and ignorance. “An evidential mark or sign” offers the OED, “a token.” On the battlefields of the Great War, the lost are still missing. The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (1928–1932) is one such sign, inscribed with the names of the 72,195 officers and men who died there between 1915 and 1918, who have no known grave. Memorials, too, bear witness. Lost and found, we have need of this token. Witnessing does not right wrongs; it makes possible their reappraisal.
Witnesses seem to whisper among themselves. “I should have liked to call you all by name,” recorded Akhmatova in Requiem, “but they have lost the lists.” Ingeborg Bachmann salutes Anna Akhmatova:
Zbigniew Herbert salutes Jean Améry:
Witnessing is intimately bound up with suffering. Loss is the common currency. “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” as W. G. Sebald reminds us. 32 Bearing witness is good, it appears, but on occasion it is too much. After 9/11, public witness to the “jumpers” from the World Trade Center was disallowed, and the photograph of the famous “falling man” effectively suppressed; the deaths are recorded as homicide due to blunt trauma. Suicide (on our side) is indeed more than we can bear. The reality of the world is difficult to stomach. “We cannot bear reality,” muses David Levi Strauss, “but we bear images—like stigmata, like children, like fallen comrades. We suffer them. We idealize them. We believe them because we need what we are in them.” 33 Sometimes, we refuse them. Yet they have a way of getting under our skin. In the preamble to the remarkable work of witness to the lives of the poor sharecroppers of Alabama in the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), in collaboration with the photographer Walker Evans, the writer James Agee poses a series of unforgettable questions. “Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?” 34
Every act of witness asks the same.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.