Photography & Culture

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2010 pp. 6572

DOI:
10.2752/175145110X12615814378234

Reprints available directly from the publishers Photocopying permitted by licence only Berg 2010

Review Essay Search and Seizure: The Ambiguity of Mediation in Sean Snyders Untitled (Archive Iraq) Series
Chris Clarke
Abstract
The dissemination of images through online circuits of communication has altered our understanding of photographic representation as well as attendant issues of authenticity, provenance, and originality. In the American artist Sean Snyders Untitled (Archive Iraq) series of digital photographs, images gathered from various websites are organized and re-presented as artworks, providing a subjective and provocative examination of photographic veracity and its role in contemporary warfare and propaganda. This essay looks at the series in relation to Snyders wider artistic practice and its use of imagery appropriated from news agencies, satellite television, and online sources. In addition, the series raises the question of who owns representation in a highly uid and contestable medium, and asks what purposes such images can be said to serve.

Keywords: Appropriation, Archive, Index, Iraq, Online, Propaganda, Website, Untitled

Despite the ever-increasing amount of images we are exposed to, it could be conjectured that we see less. We see less of the image itself, overpowered by the meaning imposed by the discursive context in which it appears. But what if we displace an image from its reception on a screen or printed matter, blow it up and examine it? Sean Snyder, Optics, Compression, Propaganda (2007) In Sean Snyders series Untitled (Archive Iraq), of 20035, the artist re-presents amateur photographs taken by coalition soldiers and
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Fig 1 Sean Snyder. Untitled (Archive Iraq). 20035. Lightjet print, mounted. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

contracted staff in Iraq as digital prints (Figures 1 and 2). The imagesof the city streets taken from the view of a rie turret, or of improvised explosive devices, or local civiliansprovide a seemingly eyewitness account of the conict and occupation, yet Snyders appropriation of these pictures from internet le-sharing sites emphasizes the level of trust inherent in accepting even photographic documentation as authentic. Despite the initial resemblance to reportage, the series instead serves as an investigation into methods of propagation introduced by webbased media, and, as such, continues the themes and interests of Snyders wider artistic practice. As in his other works, which have utilized images acquired from news agencies such as Associated Press and Reuters, Snyder takes on
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the position of the critical observer, cataloging and exhibiting extant imagery and information as his own.1 However, this gesture, while clearly in the tradition of the Duchampian readymade and the appropriation art of Sherrie Levine or Louise Lawler, differs in the absence of acknowledgment. The work is neither antagonistic nor ironic; Snyders practice claims this material as his own and, in doing so, not only questions notions of authorship but of factual truth. As Daniel Birnbaum has written in relation to his work:
Entering what might seem to be a hermeneutical labyrinth as puzzling as the hieroglyphs were before the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, we question whether we should take what the artist has excavated as

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factual or ask further questions. Or should we question the source from which the references are extracted? Do we even want to look for the source of the reference, or could we even nd it? (Birnbaum 2005: 4)

The key difference comes back to content, and, particularly, to this model of the death of the author (a major inuence on appropriation arts re-presentation of seminal artworks by Jasper Johns and Marcel Duchamp) when applied to real-life (and -death) situations. Whereas the remit of those earlier artists rarely extended beyond the art marketplace and its concomitant obsession with authenticity, Snyder is more interested in the realization of postBarthesian notions of relativism in mediated circuits of dissemination. While the internet is often praised for accessibility, openness, and a capacity to represent any number of dissident perspectives, the dominant players tend to be offshoots of established media channels, or, more recently, upstart sites that have broken through to become reliable, recognized purveyors of information in their own right. Snyders method of trawling through disparate sources operates within this uneasy balance, where factual reportage and conspiracy theory coexist and, inevitably, inuence one another. The ambiguity of the images indicates several possible readings; interpretations which can be seen as contradictory or subjective, while nevertheless remaining true to the uncertainty that pervades all such representations of conict. While Snyders use of digital le-sharing sites and the anonymity of his sources leave the authorship and veracity of his images unveriable, he does reveal that they are taken by soldiers. The series thus envisages the military as a faceless multitude, an interchangeable mass of bodies and sites. This objectifying gesture corresponds to the techniques of our side, where the identities of innocent civilians and active insurgents remain undifferentiated, where

American fatalities are rigorously tallied while Iraqi deaths are given a ballpark gure. Furthermore, the public acknowledgment of American deaths is rationed out, each casualty accompanied by a heroic portrait that individualizes the victim, and their sacrice. As in images of Abu Ghraib or the return of ag-draped cofns, representation is paramount. However, while the original intention of the appropriated images is unclear (travel snapshots, personal mementoes, proof of proximity or participation), judging by their unprofessional, snapshot-like appearance and eventual dissemination through the internet, they nevertheless indicate a newfound strategy of bypassing mainstream news sites in order to present a more realistic, unmediated depiction of the Iraq war. In place of accredited journalists, operating from embedded positions that rely on the militarys allocation of access, these images come straight from frontline soldiers and staff, and therefore imply a lack of public relations spin and political maneuvering. This perception sees the informal, amateur photograph as inherently genuine, and would read these pictures as representing a desire for self-representation. Snyder frustrates and preempts this desire, ascribing their efforts to his own practice and bringing it back under the aegis of the aesthetic. Untitled (Archive Iraq) also points to the alignment of the different strands of occupation, documentation, and appropriation; the image indicates ownership of the subject and the opportunity to inuence its interpretation. Take, for example, one of the pictures: a car boot opened to reveal a stash of ries and ammunition. The photograph immediately implies a search-and-seizure operation, and an image that, if perhaps not actually intended to be used as evidence, could only have been taken by someone with the authority to pull over a suspicious automobile. Similarly, in another work, the view from behind a machine gun, afxed to the roof of a military vehicle and peering out over lanes of trafc, is parallel to the position of

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the camera itself. The scope and the lens are combined, suggesting not only the prevalence of surveillance in security maneuvers, but also the essential visibility of such tactics. The military presence portrays itself as omniscient, with a capacity to either kill or capture (the image of) any insurgents. This message is naturally relayed to the general population, in the hope of proving an effective deterrent when dealing with enemies who are often indistinguishable from civilians. One cannot help but put oneself in the position of the soldier/cameraman, scanning the breadth of the photograph and recognizing the sheer practical futility of anticipating an attack. As a strategy against insurgents, presence precedes pragmatism. What does it mean then to take and disseminate pictures that are, at best, problematic, and perhaps even counterproductive? Is there simply a lack of awareness of the connotations of the images, or does the soldiers instinctive need to stamp their own personal touch on representations of conict merely propagate the militarily approved perception of our soldiers as individuals, fathers, heroes? Is it just another example of web 2.0 culture, of a common tendency to upload every snapshot, observation, taste, and opinion onto social networking sites? Some notion of people power, of individuals subverting traditional authorities in order to express their own point of view (a reading that would see the occupying soldier as analogous to protesters and, perversely, align their position with demonstrations against the G20 in London, the Iranian election results, and the Iraq war itself)? The image, isolated from text and context, seems to hold all possibilities simultaneously. Snyders appropriation effectively realizes the internets capability to contain this variability. As Lev Manovich has noted, in relation to the reappearance and recycling of images on pornography sites:
There is hardly a Web site which does not feature at least a dozen links to other sites,

therefore every site is a type of database Only rare [pornography] sites featured the original content. On any given date, the same few dozen images would appear on thousands of sites. Thus, the same data would give rise to more indexes than the number of data elements themselves. (Manovich 2001: 199)

The proliferation of images through various sites (and the attendant uncertainty about whether that site is the space of origin) disconnects them from any stable or xed reading. They are freely picked up, reused, turned against their initial function, and claimed by others. This is essentially what Snyder is doing, yet without furthering a particular ideological agenda; he merely draws attention to their susceptibility to manipulation. The artist acts as a cipher, a conduit, and it is in this role that a precise political statement is emphasized. To x the uid, endlessly transmitted images of online dissemination is to renew focus. Snyders practice therefore initiates a conversation about our conditioned detachment from such representations (and what such detachment might mean, who benets from it, and why it is deemed necessary), deliberately illustrating the ordinariness of an ongoing occupation, its casual, quiet aggression. It is not necessarily the stuff of war photography or news headlines. In this way, he puts forth the proposition that the spectators disconnectedness or alienation from the reality of war involves a lengthy and premeditated process of editing, selection, estrangement, and obfuscation. There is nothing new about this (one can point to Baudrillard and his contentious reading of the 199091 Gulf War and its depiction as a simulation of real war), yet Snyders appropriative gesture offers a counterpoint to the strategic propaganda of ofcial channels. It extends the range of information available and, in presenting an apparently objective representation, emphasizes

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Fig 2 Sean Snyder. Untitled (Archive Iraq). 20035. Lightjet print, mounted. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

the subjectivity of its exhibition; chosen and arranged by the artist according to his own, private, logic. The thematic grouping of images implies another narrative at work, analogous to the strategies of mass media broadcasting. In pursuit of a good story, discordant and anomalous pieces of information are molded into a concise, linear structure. Where the military leads, the media follows. Snyder, in reorganizing an array of images of different scenarios and contexts, demonstrates the artistry at work in such representations. Certainly, the subject matter and presentation of the artists previous works reveal a preoccupation with the inauthentic and the transference of cultural signs: a project on the reconstruction of J.R. Ewings Southfork Ranch

by a Romanian billionaire; photographic collages of Luxembourg and Gibraltar that render the two cities indistinguishable; an investigation of the media focus on consumer items found in Saddam Husseins hideout. The general consensus seems to be that the circulation of these signs increasingly renders our globalized world homogenous, yet Snyder draws attention to the distortions and misrepresentations in such acts of transference. Again, he alludes to propaganda Soviet-era societies imagining the television drama Dallas as an accurate representation of American society, or news programs delighting in the Iraqi dictators possession of candy bars and soft drinks. The representation has done its work, becomes accepted as factual, and, in the process, distorts and effaces the original reality.
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Signicantly, Snyders practice has incorporated elements of obfuscation and redaction in its own right. His 2009 exhibition Index, at ICA, London, revolved around the artists process of digitization and destruction of his physical archive, a project that effectively wipes out all traces of provenance. The virtual is therefore dislocated, detached from context. In a similar way, his 20034 lm Analepsis (a cinematic term that relates to the disruption of narrative) uses establishing shots and zooms from satellite news broadcasts to create a uid montage of anonymous places: shipping containers, apartment blocks, scrub and brush, cranes, an airport runway, guard towers, oil elds, mountain ranges, ofce grids. The brevity of the segments (14 seconds each) and the widescreen format (which covers any textual information about the locations involved while simultaneously resembling the cinema screen) seem intended to frustrate any recognition of the specic geographical settings. The spectator is swiftly whisked through various sites of importance (they must be importantafter all, theyre taken from the news) without explanation of where and when these scenes occur. In both of these works, found footage and imagery is excavated, coded, and cut off from a prior meaning. They have been completely appropriated. Snyders gesture has obvious parallels with tactics of redaction and sanitization in government policy. The removal of sensitive or incriminating evidence from documents has been a recurring theme of the Iraq war and its investigation (where those documents have been made available at all).2 In this way, the specic machinations used to instigate warfare are rendered unattainable, as is the possibility of consequence or punishment. The political struggle over the release and classication of sensitive materials, and what the corollaries of transparency might mean, are issues that have carried over from Bush into the Obama administration. As ever, their exposure (or lack thereof) and attendant threat of prosecution is offset by an appeal for obfuscation. Such

documents might serve as propaganda for the enemies, may put soldiers in danger, may damage morale in the battleeld or at home. One is forced to preserve representation over reality.
Were an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while youre studying that reality judiciously, as you will well act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and thats how things will sort out. Were historys actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. Unnamed senior advisor to George W. Bush (Suskind 2004)

The above quote reveals exactly what is at stake in mediated representations of conict. In place of outright propaganda, there are less obvious tactics: deception, insinuation, redaction, various unknown unknowns. The incorporation of the internet as a channel of (intentional and accidental) dissemination introduces an entirely new set of problems. The excessive quantity of images online ensures the practical impossibility of effective policing by interested parties, yet also buries any pertinent facts in a barrage of unveriable and conjectural perspectives. Snyders digital prints are acknowledged to be from contracted staff and soldiers in Iraq, but can the viewer be so certain? In fact, can even Snyder be sure? The expansion of scale in these images leaves one searching for clues, indications that snapshots of an automobile, a street sign, a smiling child, are actually located in Iraq. Is Snyder another propagandist, then? Does the leveling out of difference and context simply acknowledge a contemporary truism, or does the artistic process itself hint at a subtext of informational colonization? After all, it is the occupiers in Untitled (Archive Iraq) who have the cameras, who are linked up and able to trade their travel photos. The ordinariness of the images is compounded by Snyders grouping of

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them according to theme and genre, anesthetizing their political content through aesthetic, arthistorical presentation. One sees, amid the numerous snapshots of city streets and everyday objects, the occasional glimpse of a rie or an explosive device. This juxtaposition neutralizes any sense of wrongness or alienation in the series; these are simply regular people, at work, in a country that isnt so different after all. To return to Snyders statement, at the opening of this essay, that one could conjecture that we see less of the image, his working method is, in turn, grounded in the visual, eschewing content in favor of aesthetics. However, this doesnt necessarily mean a supercial reading; rather, one is activated to scan and search through the images, to become less reliant on the received information accompanying representations of conict and to question their formation, their relation as a series, and the very absence of explanatory text.

2 In a similar way, the malleability of internet sources can be seen as a motivating factor in the war itself, with the British governments verbatim appropriation of an online essay by a postgraduate student (complete with spelling mistakes) and its citation by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell as proof of Iraqi efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

Chris Clarke is an artist, critic, and Curator of Education and Collections at Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Republic of Ireland.

References
Birnbaum, Daniel. 2005. Sean Snyder. Kln: Walther Knig. Eichler, Dominic. Stranger Than Fiction. Frieze, Issue 99, May 2006: 1425. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Snyder, Sean. 2007. Sean Snyder: Optics, Compression, Propaganda. London: Lisson Gallery (pages unnumbered). Suskind, R. 2004. Without a Doubt. The New York Times, October 17, 2004. Available online at http:// www.cs.umass.edu/~immerman/play/opinion05/ WithoutADoubt.html

Notes
1 An obsessive researcher and private investigator, [Snyder] uses every possible means including news agencies, picture archives, cold-calling, faxing, his 1400-channel TV satellite dish and, of course, the Internet to gather information (Eichler 2006: 145).

Photography & Culture Volume 3

Issue 1

March 2010, pp. 6572