Page 67 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

50 Johanna Sumiala

model, the process of mutual recognition is about constructing identities. It
is a crucial part of the reciprocal relation between subjects (see e.g., Fraser
2005: 243–51).
In the case of the two AG images, we can make the following observations.
First, the spectator may recognize that the two humans are men and that
they are portrayed as objects of torture. In this process, the men are given
an identity of victim. Second, the spectator may recognize that the ones
committing those acts were American soldiers. They are given an identity of
persecutor. However, this information is not in the pictures. The persecutor
is visually absent in the images, and the only person portrayed is the one
tortured, and we can not even be sure whether there are two different
men tortured or just one and the same in both images. So to recognize the
persecutor, a spectator requires contextual knowledge of the event. Without
it, one is unable to realize that the acts of torture were carried out by American
soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, that there were many of those tortured, and
that pictures were created to be further circulated among colleagues, friends,
and relatives of the soldiers.
Another, more complicated, argument draws on the assumption that the
tortured person and the persecutor are recognized, given identities of a victim
and a victimizer, but are nevertheless identified differently, depending on
the gaze of the spectator. Identification means here a psychological process
whereby the subject assimilates an attribute of the other and is transformed,
wholly or partially, after the model the other provides (Laplanche and
Pontailis 1973, 2006: 205). The spectator is offered the possibility to give
the tortured the identity of a sufferer—but not to identify oneself with his
position. As a result, the identity of the victim is recognized, but his social
status is misrecognized (see e.g., Frazer 2005: 247). It is my argument that
the blindness and passivity of the victim in both images emphasizes the
asymmetry in the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Neither
of the victims is gazing back. This fact underlines the tortured’s inability
to establish a reciprocal relationship with the spectator: to be able to give
the viewer an identity and a social status from a perspective of a victim
or actively refuse to identify himself with the identity given to him by the
spectator.
Luc Boltanski (1999) reminds us that the process of identification is
affected by the length of the mediated chain that is established between
the spectator, the one tortured, and the agent who causes the suffering.
According to Boltanski, the situation becomes more and more delicate as the
distance between the spectator, the persecutor, and his or her victim becomes
greater (1999: 62). This is especially true with the AG images. Owing to a
complex circulation process fragmented into different mediated spaces and
spheres, different kinds of physical, cultural, social, and historical distances