‘What I always told my students about war photography is that the last
place to go is the battlefield.’ Fred Lonidier
What does it mean to oppose warmongering?
Realists like the photographer and teacher Fred
Lonidier think the opportunism that leads to
war cannot be opposed merely by showing its
devastating consequences. He is right. We have to
look beyond the spectacle of destruction or, in other
words, the ‘shock and awe’ which is now a fully-fledged
part of military strategy. We must consider the history
and nature of the civil peace. The very opposite of civil
war, this peace is still a socio-economic and political
state of affairs largely imposed on society from above.
Hence the old fashioned, but still legally binding, term
we have taken as our title.
To this day, in a tenuously United Kingdom, if the
Crown admits it has failed in its duty to maintain
society’s internal peace it must bear the costs. Insurers
are not willing to provide the cover. Among other
things this legal nicety meant that reading riot acts
could be a costly admission for the public purse and
so this formal signal of civil unrest has fallen out of use.
In The Civilizing Process, the historical sociologist and
refugee from Nazi Germany, Norbert Elias (1897-1990),
charts the way modern statecraft came about through
the elite control of the internal peace, reaching down to
the norms of ‘civilized’ behaviour and the development
of a polite culture. Relative peace at home was the payoff for the recognition of new and socially complex
inter-dependencies. ‘Social contracts’ between rulers
and ruled were intended to promote this civil peace.
Yet from medieval times on, this process of domestic
pacification gave the modern nation-state and
‘civilization’ itself an increasingly Janus face. In
many parts of the world people have benefited from
a decrease in the sort of noble feuding which, for
example, turned into England’s War of the Roses (14551487). But this internal pacification has gone hand in
hand with an increased permissiveness and lack of
restraint when it comes to the use of violence against
external enemies. Over time historians and political
theorists like Elias have observed that governments,
elected and unelected alike, in monarchies and
republics, have periodically sought to establish internal
order and relative unity by pursuing war against
foreign foes.
[Fig. 1] Owen Logan, Pro-war and Anti-war Demonstrators, Aberdeen (2003) Courtesy of the photographer
Although going to war has often been used rather
blatantly to suppress divisions and whip up a
sufficient degree of consensus for the order of things,
warmongering is certainly easier to perceive from
the outside, or from academic standpoints of relative
disinterest, than from within. From the inside war
is always an emergency of one kind or another
and events – both real and manufactured – call for
executive decisions. As the slogan ‘support our troops
or shut your mouth’ on a pro-war placard makes all too
clear, leadership takes precedence over public debate
[see Fig. 1]. Few of the politicians responsible for the
illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 want to be associated
with that war now. Year on year the death toll arising
from their lack of restraint against an external enemy
grows. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was one of the more
obvious examples of an oppressive civil peace yet
it was successfully turned into a profitable civil war
for some. It is these compounded layers of political
seeing things from working class point of view, it was
argued. Second, that in representing social relations
as a product of the economic system, the broad
public could not only see its own position as a class,
but imagine new egalitarian inter-dependencies
freed from the power of the ruling classes and from
their conflicts.
Consciously or unconsciously much of what we may
recognise as realism today, in photo-essays and films
about what people do to one another, is indebted
to the anti-naturalism of the workers’ movement.
However, even if they accept the label or the historical
debt, few of today’s realists would be comforted by
Franz Hölerring remarks to the German workerphotographers in 1928; ‘don’t let yourself be misled
into playful trifles which some try to play up by falsely
alleging you are an artist of great dimensions – which in
fact you are not. You are a worker. Be proud of it.’
‘Don’t let yourself be misled into playful trifles which some try to play
up by falsely alleging you are an artist of great dimensions – which in
fact you are not. You are a worker. Be proud of it.’ Franz Hölerring
meaning and economic significance which have
called for a new kind of realism assembled through
images and text rich in critical analysis. This demand
was first articulated by the international workers’
movement and made accessible in publications like
the AIZ in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. The
magazine Workers Illustrated News emulated this
approach in Britain, as did many others elsewhere
in the world [see Fig. 2]. It is no accident that
this articulation of realism came about after the First
World War.
[Fig. 2] Page from Workers Illustrated News, December 1929.
Courtesy of Gallacher Memorial Library, Glasgow Caledonian
University Research Collection.
Unlike the naturalism or ‘naïve realism’ of the 19th
century which gazed at the lives of poor or humble,
the realism of the workers’ movement in the 1920s
and 30s hinged on two key ideas. First, that a
sequence of pictures and words could show how
certain social phenomena, unrelated in bourgeois
culture, were in fact deeply connected when seen
through the prism of class consciousness. Party
politics and affiliations were less important than
What sort of realism and social practice is produced
by the entrepreneurial mentality and the ‘artistic
critique of capitalism’ today is no moot point. The
question goes to the very heart of how we evaluate
civilisation. Asked what he thought about Western
civilisation Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi (18691948) famously responded that ‘it would be a good
idea’. The self-serving idea of civilisation critically
examined by scholars like Norbert Elias and targeted
by Gandhi, went hand in hand with the spread of
ideas garnered from the European Renaissance about
art as an arena of political autonomy rather than
dependency. The actual history of inter-dependency,
forged through public and private patronage as
well as artistic ambition are long-standing issues
which we will not fully capture here. However, it is
worth stressing that the separation of art and society
into separate categories of thought and being is an
invention of European discourse and a key to the
spread of modern Western ideas of civilisation.
In the 18 th and 19 th centuries aesthetics became an
alternative expression of radical consciousness,
truthfulness and, ultimately, a substitute for religion.
A parallel universe was created which could be judged
by certain unconventional or Bohemian aesthetic
standards. A mutual respect developed and some
repair fractured notions of civilisation. At the most
straightforward level realists have tried to critically
reconnect images and words. A range of the results are
exemplified by different projects in this exhibition. They
include: The Greatest Show on Earth: A Photographic
Story of Man’s Struggle for Wealth (1938) by S.A.
‘When there are people who reveal through their every word and
action that property is more important to them than life, truth,
beauty, justice, wisdom, or democracy – the only appropriate
moral response is to break their windows.’ Emmeline Pankhurst
unlikely artistic figures became icons of the political
establishment. Aesthetic achievements were often
used to promote the belief that the material culture
produced by free-thinking artists and writers was also
evidence of a superior civilisation destined to hold
sway over the globe, using violence if necessary. Before
becoming Britain’s great wartime defender, Winston
Churchill (1974-1965) thought British parliamentarians
were far too ‘squeamish’ when it came to the use of
poisoned gas against ‘uncivilised’ tribes. Bolshivick
villages in Russia were targets for British gas attacks
in 1919.
We may well ask what it means to follow in the
footsteps of pacifists like Ghandi or Martin Luther King
Jnr. (1929-1968). Both were strategic pacifists. They
opposed violence because they believed non-violence
worked better. Both were assassinated at great cost to
the causes they led. The violence that is seen in every
episode of history that involves the moral reordering of
society is never far from the surface of the civil peace.
As the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928)
said: ‘when there are people who reveal through their
every word and action that property is more important
to them than life, truth, beauty, justice, wisdom, or
democracy – the only appropriate moral response is to
break their windows.’ The suffragettes were ‘guerrillists’,
according to Pankhurst and were warranted to use all
the methods of war stopping short of taking human life.
Realism is one of the ways that people have tried
to bridge the division between art and society and
Spencer (pseudonym) and Leslie Beaton, in support
of the New Deal policies in the United States; and
Un Paese, Portrait of an Italian Village (1955) by Paul
Strand (1890-1976) and Cesar Zavattini (1902-1989)
[see Fig. 3], who offer an ethnographic microcosm
of Italy’s post Second World War political economy.
Like the more recent works on show these are wordladen projects only by modern standards, certainly
not by medieval ones [see Fig. 4]. The almost total
disconnection of images and words which lies
behind the phrase “no caption needed” is often
thought to apply to the greatest pictures of human
suffering in today’s world. However, this is not simply
a benign expression of the arrival of a universal
v i su a l i mag i nat i o n ma d e p o ss i b l e by m o d e r n
communications. It also reflects various attempts
to homogenise and industrialise the production of
photo-essays which can be produced and consumed
with the minimum amount of critical understanding.
By presenting pages from the Workers Illustrated News
as evidence of working class self-representation in the
inter-war period of the 20th century alongside various
expressions of realism up to the present time, we offer
our audience food for thought in this regard.
The borderline between the sophistication of realism in
images and the artistic mannerism that plays a crucial
role in the homogenisation and industrialisation of
reportage and documentary work is an uncertain one.
It may be easier to mark out in relation to the sort of
humanist work not included in this exhibition. World
famous photographers like Don McCullin or Sebastio
[Fig. 4] Anon, The Martyrdoms of the reign of Mary I (detail) (1555).
An anti-Papal satire directed against Stephen Gardener, the Bishop
of Winchester. Mary’s Bishops appear as wolves, dead lambs
symbolise Protestant martyrs of the time. Before the advent of
photography text was often integrated within the image.
Salgado succeeded in making a certain ‘gritty realist’
style both more marketable and more widely emulated
than the issues of realist analysis and content or
its production and consumption. But it would be
disingenuous to pretend that the works we do present
here are unaffected by the mixed blessings of capitalism
and the trials and tribulations of the organised
working class as the main countervailing force against
the economic system. By definition capitalism is an
economic system which gives power to capitalists and,
as some photographers admit, this power not only has
direct impacts on image-making, but has more subtle
effects too.
T H E E N D O F A M O R A L LY
N E U T R A L A F FA I R
For most of history war has been a morally neutral
way of settling disputes over territory and power. In
this sense the wars of the old feudal system in Europe
were rather like duels between gentlemen who did not
wish to discuss their differences at great length. More
than any other single figure Napoleon Bonaparte (17691821) challenged these aristocratic mores which are
still expressed in the sentiment: my-country-right-orwrong. The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) in Europe
were won and lost on the basis of territorial control but
they were also self-declared ideological wars fought
out between the Enlightenment values of the French
Revolution and the god-appointed rulers of the ancien
régime. The historical irony is that such pivotal conflicts
occurred after Napoleon announced that the French
republic born from the Revolution was politically and
morally defunct. This was used as a justification for the
coup d’état he helped orchestrate 1799 and he declared
himself Emperor of the French in 1804. According
to Karl Marx (1818-1883), the failures of the class
struggle in France created circumstances ‘that made
it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s
part.’ Napoleon may still be seen in these withering
terms but, on its own, Marx’s condemnation risks
belittling Napoleon’s role in creating a type of public
consciousness which became a new weapon of war.
The will to win was something the old aristocratic order
could not purchase from the mercenary armies and
the press-ganged peasantry recruited to their cause.
[Fig. 3] Paul Strand, The Family, Luzzara, Italy (1953) © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive
[Fig. 5] Philip Jones Griffiths, from the book Vietnam Inc. (1971) Courtesy of Magnum Photos and Phaidon. Jones Griffiths’ caption reads: ‘MOTHER AND CHILD, shortly before being killed. A unit of
Americal Division operating in Quang Ngai Province six months before My Lai. The resentment was already there: this woman’s husband, together with the other men left in the village, had been killed a few
moments earlier because he was hiding in a tunnel. After blowing up all tunnels and bunkers where people could take refuge, GIs withdrew and called in artillery fire on the defenceless inhabitants.’
Napoleon understood the lack of legitimacy on the
part of the ancien régime and exploited it ruthlessly.
France’s fatal defeats in Spain and Russia appear
as exceptions partly because they were societies so
backward and inclined towards the rule of kings that
they were largely immune to the subversive ideas of the
European Enlightenment. In Spain especially guerrillas
rallied to known rulers and their political codes.
Napoleon’s ultimate defeat and capture at the hands
of the alliance of European powers defending the old
order ushered in the era of Pax Britannica (the type
of peace – or pacification – imposed through the
largely unchallenged military dominance of the British
Empire). Nevertheless the philosophy of modern
war was thereafter forced to integrate Napoleonic
logic. Thus, undermining an enemy’s capacity to fight
involves a struggle to win over “hearts and minds”
to certain codes of civilization, regardless of their
actual status and practice either at home or in the
conduct of war abroad. Napoleon avowedly fought
for human emancipation whilst cancelling the French
Revolution’s commitments to it, going so far as to
re-legitimate slavery in some of France’s dominions.
The military and economic rise of the United States
after 1945 to the status of main arbiter of democracy
and world security – Pax Americana – is marked by
the same double standards concerning freedom and
democracy. From Argentina to Zaire (now Democratic
Republic of the Congo) the list of dictatorships and
military takeovers supported by the US is a long and
tragic one. Interventions in Latin America included
support for dictator General Juan Carlos Onganía who
came to power via a coup in 1966 and ruled until 1970.
Close ties between the two countries not only helped
to train and arm the coup plotters, they also ensured
that the US was given advance warning. Onganía’s
speedy dismantling of democratic infrastructures
included repressive press censorship: “If a free press
would make it possible for Communists to take over
Argentina,” he stated, “then I would be proud to say
that there is no free press in Argentina.” Thoroughly
integrated into the US Cold War alliance, Onganía
championed anticommunism, moving well beyond
counter official state propaganda. Theirs was a reaction
against the realities of the ‘stability’ required by the US
and the civil peace imposed by Onganía.
The same political and moral hypocrisy was targeted
by Philip Jones Griffiths (1936-2008) in his 1971
book Vietnam Inc. through the critical sequencing of
images and words. Unlike many of his colleagues in
the Magnum photographers agency, Griffiths resisted
the fashion for gallery-style photography and adhered
Governments have periodically sought to establish internal order
and relative unity by pursuing war against foreign foes.
military dominance to implement a type of ‘national
security’ which involved extensive social, cultural and
economic control. President Richard Nixon described
him as “one of the best leaders I have known.” The
1968 Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Burns) project by the
Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia (Group of AvantGarde Artists) was a collectively realised response to
the dictatorship’s repressive rule and the imposition
of catastrophic neoliberal economic policies. Artists,
union members, sociologists, economists, students,
filmmakers and photographers came together
to document and publicise the deplorable social
conditions in Tucumán, a province located in the
North of the country, impoverished despite its wealth
and established sugar production industry. Operating
in a context of civil uprising and in connection with
workers’ struggles, the group explicitly rejected the
traditional sites of culture as ‘useless’ and instead
aimed to set up an alternative information circuit to
to the more journalistic photo-essay form. However
Griffiths also goes beyond journalistic norms of the
period. Using extended captions he shows us that
what we see in photograph may be very deceptive
and that the context is quite literally everything. In
one of his pictures a US soldier looks benignly at a
Vietnamese woman cradling a small child in a village
[see Fig. 5]. Yet the Madonna and child symbolism
and the semblance of relative peace and equanimity
conveyed by the scene is betrayed by the caption.
Griffiths tells us that the woman’s village is soon
to be destroyed by an aerial attack called in by the
soldiers’ unit. On reading this caption not only does
the soldier’s gaze seem to border on the psychopathic,
but his look of interest becomes an indictment against
our consumption of images as an alternative means
of understanding and witnessing what happens in
the world. A picture is not worth a thousand words
and indeed explaining the content of an image for
ourselves or others can take up many thousands of
words. Pictures can begin discussions; they never
end them.
Notwithstanding its occasional utterance, mycountry-right-or-wrong is an unpopular sentiment.
A conflict over territory or resources with no moral
or ideological justification, no matter how thin, is
virtually inconceivable. Invaders, partisans and
foreign supporters in a civil war situation all proclaim
noble and humanitarian causes. In this sense a state
of war is a heightened state of discourse; or, in other
words, language in action. Whether coming from
within or without, the first targets of regime change in
a modern nation are no longer the economic centres
or the symbolic sites and institutions of political
partly through the geographical distribution of jobs in
the defence industries. Another film worth mentioning
here which operates in the same dialogical tradition
is Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity released
in 1969. It concerns France’s relative passivity and
capitulation to the Nazis during the Second World
War – a political and moral accommodation with
genocide that was glossed over after the fall of the
collaborationist Vichy government in 1944. Ophuls’ film
brings out the class character of France’s capitulation
to the Nazis. Pierre Mendès France (1907-1982) was a
minister in the 1936-1937 Popular Front government
of Léon Blum (1872-1950) and Prime Minister of
France from 1954–1955. Interviewed by Ophuls,
Mendès France recalls that ‘preferring Hitler to Léon
Blum was an attitude that had become very popular
A picture is not worth a thousand words and indeed explaining
the content of an image for ourselves or others can take up
many thousands of words. Pictures can begin discussions;
they never end them.
power, but media and communications. Almost
everything else can take second place to the mastery
of public relations. The technological development of
warfare and the increased dependency of information
technology and computerised systems seen amounting
to a ‘revolution in military affairs’ will only heighten
the importance of ideology. Therefore there is much at
stake in the capacity of realists to tackle war as a whole
political, economic and ideological state of affairs. It
is an essential task in any democracy which deserves
the name.
This task is taken up by film makers like Eugene Jarecki,
director of the 2005 documentary Why We Fight. Jarecki
explores the political and cultural naturalisation of the
‘military-industrial complex’ which the US President
Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) warned was a danger
to the country’s democracy when he left office in 1961.
Throughout his film Jarecki asks a range of Americans
why the United States is continually at war. His film
gradually reveals the uncertainty and moral ambiguity
of ready-made opinions and points to the economic
manufacturing of an aggressive political consensus
in bourgeois circles’ in the France of the 1930s. Such
divided loyalties may be harder to perceive in a world
no longer occupied, as it was during the Cold War,
by two political camps starkly divided on the socioeconomic meaning of equality. Since then, rhetoric
coming from the United States attempts to resurrect
a similarly imposing justification – by conjuring up a
‘clash of civilisations’ and ‘the war on terror’ – and has
been widely criticised for its warmongering intentions.
But the underlying and recurring idea that replaces
class analysis is the Hobbesian one that war is the
natural state of affairs. By exposing the ideological
fabrication of conflict, by revealing the underlying class
interests both in victory and defeat, realist photo-essays
and film show us this is not the case. The differences
between photography and film are a perennial topic of
discussion. But the similarities between the two media
seem to outweigh the differences when it comes to
realism as a challenge to this notion of war as natural
and therefore to any compliant public discourse
which attempts to bring about a natural political unity.
Realism can tell us this unity never really exists.
The foundational ideology of United States
expansionism, the dogma of the nation’s ‘Manifest
Destiny’, still informs visions of a new world order
spearheaded by the world’s ultimate guarantor of
private property rights, the United States itself. As
Edward Said (1935-2003), the Palestinian scholar who
lived in exile in the United States pointed out, there
is no longer a movement like the American AntiImperialist League founded in 1898 to oppose US
expansionism. The league recruited diverse supporters
and benefactors including the writer Mark Twain
(1835-1910), the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (18351919) and labour leader Samuel Gompers (1850-1924).
In the absence of such a broad based opposition, antiimperialism in the US today is, according to Said, far
too dependent on individual dissenters. Suggesting
that this is a weakness, partly because imperialism also
hinges on individuals, Said says it carries on through
their self-advancement in ‘the marketplace of ideas.’
The trading of oil and other major commodities in US
dollars is one such idea. The petrodollar settlement
which emerged in the 1970s after the US abandoned
the gold standard gave the country a flexibility
and power in financial matters far in excess of its
productivity and trade. In the photo-essay Masquerade:
Michael Jackson Alive in Nigeria, Owen Logan and
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu satirise the neo-colonial politics
of Nigeria, a major oil producing country fashioned
by a combination of British rule in the past and US
dominance in the present [see Fig. 6]. Both have lent
support to feudalism in Nigeria and received support
in return. Although anti-imperialism remains an
important component of Nigerian labour movement,
the opposition to Nigeria’s subservience and lack
of sovereignty (especially when it comes to the
control of the nation’s natural resources) is usually
visualised according to the humanitarian mores of
the international aid community. Among other things
this downplays the real social complexity of a nation
still stitched together by the imperial imagination.
Above all, Masquerade is a realist experiment using a
mixture of straight photographs, photomontages and
text, designed to escape the humanitarian marketplace
of political goals and organisational ideas which look
good only from a distance. Under those influences
which belittle class politics and self-organisation, and,
[Fig. 6] Owen Logan, The National Anthem Band, from the series Masquerade: Michael Jackson Alive in Nigeria (2001-2005) Courtesy of the photographer
as the memory of Nigeria’s civil war from 1967 to 1970
fades, the country regularly appears to be on the brink
of another one.
The anti-imperialist malaise Said pinpoints in the
United States can also be detected in Martha Rosler’s
photo-montages House Beautiful: Bringing the War
Home, New Series (2004-2008) [see Fig. 7]. These works
renew an earlier project in which she spliced together
images of imperial violence in Vietnam with domestic
scenes taken from the pages of lifestyle magazines.
The resulting images were distributed via the pages of
Women’s Movement grass-roots publications and as
photocopies at demonstrations. This time the subject
is the invasion of Iraq. Again she uses vernacular
‘pop’ forms to suggest linkages between aggressive US
foreign policy and a privatised cultural consciousness
in her home country. Rosler’s use of fragmentation
and dislocation as a means to disrupt the usual flows
of mass-media image consumption and reveal hidden
connections has been related to the realist strategies
of the German theatre-maker and writer Bertolt
Brecht (1896-1956). His own book, War Primer, also
appears in this exhibition, appropriated and re-worked
by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.
First published in 1955, it juxtaposes a collection of
photographs of the Second World War gleaned from
newspapers and magazines with his own short poems.
The result was intended to offer both a critique of the
conflict and prime readers in how to read images, or,
what Brecht called ‘complex seeing’. Superimposing
their own low-resolution web-clippings representing
the ‘war on terror’, Broomberg and Chanarin updated
100 copies of the original for display. Yet the efforts
of radical scholars like Said and contemporary
realists, who in their different ways address the same
malaise, would be naïve if they did not recognise that
opposing the drift to war also demands the provision
of socio-economic alternatives to a military industrial
complex. Therein lies the political problem. What is
the alternative to a war economy?
DIVIDE AND RULE ?
At the time of writing this essay (June 2014) Scotland’s
independence is to be put to the vote. Many people
voting for Scottish independence in September of this
year will be doing so because they see the break–up
of the United Kingdom as the only real halt to British
imperialism. Britain’s investments in its armed forces
and defence-related-industries suggest that the
imperial mentality certainly outlived the Empire’s
formal political character and survived as something
more than a mere support act for the financialised
‘super-imperialism’ of the United States. On the
other hand, those who would discount the ongoing
significance of Britain’s imperialism may point to the
frailty of the country’s other industries as a sign of
its demise. Yet looked at overall, the British Empire
project has never been particularly interested in
making things. It has been much more concerned with
money-making. Advanced capitalist economies with
failed empire projects (e.g. Germany, Italy, Japan) have
to make things. Moreover, the resistance on the part
of Anglo-American capitalism to transform weapons
industries into socially useful production may even
defy normal business logic. As the shop stewards at
Lucas Aerospace in England discovered in the 1980s,
management preferred closures and job losses to the
benign and profitable use of the company’s hi-tech
engineering capacity which the workers had gone
a long way to developing. Among the opportunities
management turned down was an order for 2000
mobility aids (hobcarts) for children with Spina Bifida.
For some independence looks like a potential escape
from such dispiriting experiences and a way for
Scotland to become more like a classical Scandinavian
social democrac y w ith a dynamic, productive
economy. We cannot say whether such hopes for
transformation to a more peace-loving society are
justified in Scotland or elsewhere. A much clearer
[Fig. 7] Martha Rosler, Photo-op, from the series: House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series (2004-2008)
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne
political reality is the global ascendancy of so called
free-market capitalism and the political far-right. This
has meant that nationalism, religion and ethnicity
are increasingly becoming political and ideological
vehicles which temporarily accommodate traditional
socialist desires for egalitarian socio-economic
development. Although they are politically latent in
most countries, arguably these desires are stronger
than ever because of the harshness of global
competition which business leaders use as an excuse
for unemployment, lowering progressive taxation and
the privatisation of public sector provision. On their
reasoning, the labour rights and relatively strong
welfare systems still entertained in Scandinavian
countries or in the German social market, if not
already outmanoeuvred by capital flows, should be.
In so many words business leaders tell us social
democratic goals are luxuries we can’t afford.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of the
German Communist Party’s 1848 manifesto, called
on the workers of the world to unite. Realist messages
in film and photography often imply that same goal
of solidarity in the face of a multi-faceted system of
exploitation. Today, more than ever before, the most
effective international institutions and networks
function for capitalists not for the working class as a
whole. Very few of these institutions and networks are
accountable to the broad public. Ours is an epoch of
divide and rule. In his motivational talks, Digby Jones,
the former Director General of the Confederation of
British Industry (who is currently represented by the
agency Military Speakers) often remarks to his British
listeners that “China wants your lunch and India
wants your dinner.” To meet such a challenge thought
to come from the hungry and downtrodden Asian
masses, Britain must stop being what Jones calls a
‘Gimme Society’ supported by weak and misguided
politicians. The general remedy recommended by the
business lobby is lower taxes, more hours and years
at work (for those that have it), welfare cuts, means
testing and the monetary rationalisation of the public
sector so that business is free to create wealth. And
unless environmental challenges can be turned into
profit-making opportunities they too must take second
place to growth measured according to monetarist
criteria. The dominant ideology today tells us that
business is all about wealth creation. It is no longer a
sphere of human activity based on the exploitation of
labour and nature as it is regarded in classical political
economy analysis.
An increasing number of economists are trying to
challenge the airbrushing of public discourse and the
capitalist-friendly development of their own discipline.
Their perspectives contrast strongly with the sort
of remedies recommended by business leaders like
Digby Jones. Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean professor
of economics at Cambridge University, points out
not only that the causes of business failures and
inefficiencies are not confined to state interference
in markets but many Asian corporate success stories
arose from political rather than entrepreneurial
leadership. Business leaders were politically managed
and deterred from following their immediate interests.
Chang also shows that the history of communist and
capitalist economic planning shares many of the same
faults in so far as both strategies have concentrated
the levers of accumulated wealth and investment in
the hands of the few – whether in big business or in
big government. Captains of large-scale enterprises
know little about their complex functions and the
wisest readily admit their ignorance and the limits
of their managerial role before dramatic downturns
and catastrophes occur. Success and failure through
either avenue of ownership actually hinges on human
capacities to co-operate on moral grounds and on the
development of skills and technology, not cut throat
competition within societies or between them.
According to Chang, the glorification of the activities
and ingenuity of business leaders, not to mention their
increasingly astronomical salaries, bears no relation
to the success of large-scale enterprise whether in
public or private hands. Moreover, rather than seeing
generous education, health and welfare systems as
outmoded drains on the public purse, such dissident
economists argue persuasively that the combined
effects of equality and welfare have been a vital
catalyst in the development of the dynamic industrial
base essential for a nation’s prosperity and economic
self-determination. It is one thing for professors of
economics, or writers and artists to propose such ideas
(and even produce best-sellers) but the capacity for
people who work in ‘the left hand of the state’ which
provides education, health and welfare services to
also articulate a broad collective interest in equality
is almost always taken as a political threat. Hi Ho
Giro, a slide-to-tape video produced by the Snapcorp
photography group in 1994, retells the Disney story
of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, this time trying
to get by in Wester Hailes, a public housing estate in
Edinburgh [see Fig. 8]. The project mocks a declining
welfare system and opportunistic local politicians. It
emerged not from a left-wing political party or trade
union but from community education ser vices.
United States has so far depended on the willingness
of African-Americans and immigrant groups to
embrace the values of this white protestant culture,
now under threat as a result of the growth of Latino
communities. Concerned with maintaining the civic
status quo Huntington also sees the transnational
character of corporations undermining the sense of
national identity he defends. Another angle on the
same demographic phenomenon of ‘hispanization’
comes from the cultural philosopher Oscar GuardiolaRivera, the author of a 2012 book What if Latin
America Ruled the World? The answer is not more
military juntas, gangsters and murderous repression,
as one may have supposed until the election of leftwing leaders in countries such as Venezuela and
Brazil. In Guardiola-Rivera’s view the politics that
brought left wing leaders to power reflects the cause
of social justice and tolerance which he sees deeply
rooted in the continent’s pre-colonial history and
indigenous cosmologies. Even more optimistically,
[Fig. 8] Snapcorps, Hi Ho Giro (detail) (1994) Courtesy of the photographers
However in Stuart Platt’s film about the making of Hi
Ho Giro, some of its originators express their strong
doubts that local community services would tolerate
the production of such a collectively minded project
now. In line with entrepreneurial ideology, the order
of the day is the nurturing of individual creativity not
collective critique.
AR G U M E NTS OVE R
H E AV E N A N D E A R T H
The influential US political scientist Samuel P.
Huntington (1927-2008) is best remembered for his
1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order. As we mentioned above Huntington’s
critics recognised his thesis as an attempt to legitimate
US hawkishness, especially in relation to Islamic
countries and China’s rising influence in the world
economy. Cultural scholars like Edward Said, criticised
Huntington’s notions of civilisation as simplistic and
based on one-dimensional stereotypes. In countering
Huntington, Said argued restlessness and social
change are integral to all major cultures. Among
other things, Huntington took too little account of
political internationalism, cross-cultural interaction
and multi-cultural society. For Said, his arguments
about culture were a clumsy attempt to maintain the
United States military dominance by fixing sights
on new enemies after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Huntington’s riposte to such left-wing criticism came
in the form of a reassertion of conservatism in the
2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s
National Identity. According to Huntington Angloprotestant culture of America’s original ‘settlers’ was
unlike that of later ‘immigrants’ and the success of the
given the persistence of Latin American conservatism,
Guardiola-Rivera envisages this social movement as a
progressive force in the US thanks to the growth of the
same Latino communities which Huntington regards as
a danger to US civic values.
What we have here are two competing views of
capitalist development coloured by ethnic and
religious ideas. From their different standpoints
both Huntington and Guardiola-Rivera see ethnoreligious diversity as a challenge to the global status
quo. Looking at the US in particular, both regard
immigrants as a destabilising force coming from
below. However much less rosy eyed than GuardiolaRivera, Huntington sees increased competition for
jobs and business coming from bilingual Latinos and
he conjures with the potential troubles of a political
backlash. What is instructive about this discursively
engineered clash of civilisations on the part of two
intellectuals – Guardiola-Rivera the avowedly a
progressive anti-imperialist and Huntington the archconservative and one time advisor to South Africa’s
apartheid government – is that neither envisage
education as a means of diffusing divisive competition
between social groups and cultural chauvinism.
Both cosmological political visions overlook the
classical social-democratic aims in education and
the need to abolish education as a social enterprise
that reproduces inequality through the generations.
It is hardly surprising that Huntington should ignore
policy options designed to establish forms of social
solidarity and mutual respect between different social
groups which would impinge on the business ethos
he holds dear. It is much more remarkable that the
left-wing character of contemporary Latin American
politics is very rarely questioned on the basis of its poor
performance in terms of educational policy. Even the
Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, widely thought to
have produced Latin America’s most radical socialist
State outside Cuba, continues to reproduce great
educational inequality. Around 20% of secondary
school pupils go to private schools in Venezuela
compared to around 7% in Britain and none in Finland
– the country with the most highly-rated education
system in the world which has also retained one of
the most strictly egalitarian systems. These issues of
educational policy are not tangential to the issue of
war and peace. Indeed they will appear to be central
ones when we recognise that wars are often fought to
instil social solidarity in societies which have few other
means of achieving a politically and economically
productive order of things. As Fred Lonidier argues
in his video Confessions of the Peace Corps (1974),
imperialism today is politically and ideologically
complex and ‘that is why the capture of a nation’s
educational system becomes the major objective of the
imperialist strategy’. Guardiola-Rivera, and many other
proponents of the left-turn in Latin American politics,
pay little attention to the issues of egalitarian education
and much less to its actual implementation as a matter
of government policy. Left leaning governments and
sympathetic intellectuals like Guardiola-Rivera instead
stress the education of the poor. But in itself this can
never counter the reproduction of inequality. Indeed
from this critical perspective, the rise of the political left
in Latin America – after decades of repression which
can no longer find justification in the fight against
world communism – looks much less radical and more
like a concession on the part of Latin American elites.
However, in most countries the elites still hold sway
over the military it should be remembered. In other
words, what can be seen in South America may well be
a necessary but tenuous expression of the King’s peace.
The cosmological visions which partly inform
contemporary Latin American politics are
little reported by comparison with the Western
media’s interest in political Islam. In the eyes of
the West it appears inconceivable that Islamic
c o u nt r i e s may p ro d u c e a p o l i t i c a l f o r mat i o n
roughly equivalent to Christian democracy. The
‘A rab Sp r i ng ’ a n d d e m o c ra c y i n Eg y p t wa s a
short lived affair thanks to Western support for
the removal of Egypt’s first elected President, Dr
Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt
is now beset by multiple forms of political repression
which, in their gruesomeness, surpass those of the
deposed military regime of Hosni Mubarak (19812011). It cannot be overstated that political repression
and institutionalised gender inequality is not a special
characteristic of Arab countries or the Islamic world;
however, it is frequently made to appear that way.
A truer picture of repression in the Middle East shows
the role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in militarising
the politics of the whole region. This came at a great
cost to the development of civil liberties in societies
that were accustomed to colonial rule. When the UN
decided to hold a conference on the question of
Palestine in Geneva, Edward Said was asked to compile
a dossier of historical articles for the conference.
Most were vetoed by member states with no reasons
given. Said then suggested mounting an exhibition at
the conference of Jean Mohr’s photographs taken in
Palestine over many years. This was allowed but the
descriptive captions Said wrote to accompany the
photographs were also vetoed. As Said recalls ‘it turned
out at this conference that it was impossible to actually
talk about Palestinians as a group, everybody had
some objection to it. It was thought of as infringing on
sovereignty in Jordan or in Syria or Turkey etc etc so as a
result of this quite (...) bizarre decision Jean and I got the
idea of doing a book together’.
The result, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives was
first published in 1986. It is another example of what
is at stake in realism as mode of communication
that can unearth the complex meaning of images
which may appear deceptively simple in the first
instance. There are of course many ways to question
the naturalism inherent in photography and artists
have adopted many strategies such as photomontage
and staged photographs to suggest their artifice
and ambiguity. Arguably, the real ambiguity of
images can never be built into them in the same
way that truth, or at least the whole truth, cannot be
miraculously conveyed by photographs. The actual
space of truth and ambiguity is found in the political
(with a small p) relationship between the production
and the reception of images. In other words, images
are produced for people. They are reached through
markets, through institutions, the leagues of interested
parties, and more and more through the internet with
its more unknown destinations. It is almost impossible
to regulate the interpretation of pictures. In time
a photograph that begins life in support of one thing
may be recruited and turned to the cause of its
opposite. This is the real ambiguity and unreliability
o f p h o t o g r a p h s re g a rd l e s s o f t h e d e g re e s o f
technical accuracy or poetic licence that different
image makers may aspire to. Nermine Hammam
is an Egyptian born artist educated in the UK and
trained in the US, who handles this ambiguity and
unravelling of meaning by taking an extreme antinaturalist approach which lies beyond realism while
still owing much to realist awareness. Hammam
has sampled Japanese decorative screens to beautify
photographs of police brutality in Egypt during the
eighteen day revolution in 2011 [see Fig. 9]. Her
images are said to ‘mock the artistic industry forming
around the revolution.’ The thought that may be
provoked by Hammam’s tactic of juxtaposing signs
of brutality with motifs of great beauty is that the
media spectacle of the Arab Spring can be compared
to a decorative screen. According to her, this screenlike spectacle hides stories that standard journalistic
reporting fails to capture. However, the works do not
tell us what these other stories might be.
PI LLAR S O F LI B E RTY
Though some works in The King’s Peace have attempted
to find different audiences for their direct social
commentary, Hammam’s artworks remain within the
institutions of culture. They inhabit an uncertain space
of critical autonomy that has been carved out as an
alternative to various degrees instrumentalisation and
creative servitude. The Western belief that propaganda
falls short of the status of art, and that artistic
autonomy is a pillar of liberty, has allowed many
free-thinking artists and writers to take on a highly
symbolic role for liberalism. Indeed figures including
the American philanthropist Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
(1874-1948) regarded the support of individual leftwing artists and writers as a means of forestalling more
serious articulations of socialism. Using public and
private monies the funding system that the power elite
created now amounts to an international institutional
formation based on the politics of self-expression.
As we have argued the real pillars of liberty are
elsewhere. They were built collectively from the
struggles of workers connected to broad social
movements like that which leveraged the New Deal in
the United States of the 1930s.
The development of realism is a fraction of that larger
and complex story of modern egalitarian struggle.
It began in the Parisian salons of the 18 th century
where women hosted some of the discussions of the
Enlightenment which led to the French revolution.
Yet the revolution which radicalised democratic
thought across Europe failed to secure equal rights for
women in its own epoch. Similarly many expressions
There is much at stake in the capacity of realists to tackle war as
a whole political, economic and ideological state of affairs. It is
an essential task in any democracy which deserves the name.
[Fig. 9] Nermine Hammam, Press, from the series Unfolding (2012)
Courtesy of Rose Issa Projects
of realism in art and literature reflect their creativeentrepreneurial origins and pay scant attention to
workers’ rights and the everyday politics of organised
labour. This may be one reason why, as a commodity
among others, realist projects have failed to counter a
wholesale privatisation of cultural life. In this regard
scandals about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire seem
to be the tip of an iceberg. Evidently much more is
required of realism in the 21st century.
In his 2010 book The Return of the Public, Dan Hind
charts the misinformation and distorted facts that
passed for good journalism in relation to both the
invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the banking crisis which
began in 2007. Hind believes that the public is
substantially misguided by news and entertainment
industries managed by the great and the good. Like
the economist Ha-Joon Chang mentioned above, Hind
sees private and public corporations mirroring each
other’s faults and playing down some of the deeper
implications of their different ownerships. Hind argues
for a new system of commissioning for research and
journalism so that the general public is directly
involved in considering and selecting investigative
projects to be done in society’s interest. He thinks
political ideas such as the ‘public interest’ and the
‘common good’ can only be put into effective practice
through active participation. Many technocrats would
argue of course that such a democratisation of cultural
production would be inefficient and time-consuming,
not least because reaching funding decisions could
involve various rounds of public debate. Suitably
qualified or experienced people in business, public
organisations and politics should – it is conventionally
objected – take care of these matters on behalf of the
public. But for Hind and other believers in cultural
democracy the process is just as important as the
outcome. It is only as a result of such processes that
we can truly talk of the existence of the ‘public’ that
the European enlightenment brought into being as a
political body – what is often called civil society. It is
still too early to judge the revolutions that have been
based in the ideas of the European Enlightenment.
History has not ended. Meanwhile the aesthetic patina
of realism now largely cut loose from popular social
movements may circulate in a marketplace of ideas,
a cultural commodity among others. But, despite this
reality, we have argued that realism in photographs and
film does have a role to play, especially in countering
the subversion of democracy that takes place when the
system is used as a justification for war-making.
By Owen Logan with Kirsten Lloyd
Sources and Further Reading…
Babeuf, G. (1967) (Scott, J.A. Translator) Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before the High Court of Vendome
(Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts)
Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso)
Chang, H.J. (2011) 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (London: Penguin)
Cooley, M. (1987) Architect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology (London: Hogarth Press)
Enzensberger, H.M. (1982) ‘The Industrialisation of the Mind’ in Critical Essays Grimm, R. & Armstrong, B. (eds)
(New York: Continuum)
Guardiola-Rivera, O. (2010) What If Latin America Ruled the World? (London: Bloomsbury)
Huntington, S. (2004) Who Are We? America’s Great Debate (London: Simon & Schuster)
Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J.L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy
(London: University of Chicago Press)
Hirst, P. (2003) War in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity)
Hind, D. (2010) The Return of the Public (London: Verso)
Marx, K. (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (Last Accessed July 2014)
Motton, G. (2009) Helping Themselves: The Left Wing Middle Classes in the Theatre and the Arts (Deal: Levellers Press)
Logan O. (2012) ‘Where Pathos Rules: The Resource Curse in Visual Culture’, in Flammable Societies:
Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas, McNeish, J.A. & Logan, O. (eds.) (London: Pluto Press)
Logan, O. (2010) ‘Comment “Art Workers Don’t Kiss Ass”’, Variant Magazine Issue 37 (Glasgow: Variant)
Said, E. & Glass, C., (2003) Edward Said, The Last Interview,
https://archive.org/details/EdwardSaid-TheLastInterview-2003 (Last Accessed, July 2014)
Saunders, F.S. (1999) The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press)
Tilly, C. (1975) The Formation of Nation States in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press)