Kaplan Chap5 Aerial Aftermaths Wartime From Above - (PG 211 - 237)

CHAPTER 5
THE POLITICS OF THE SENSIBLE

Aerial Photography’s Wartime Aftermaths
—
I speak here of curiosity, and above I spoke of attention. These are

in fact affects that blur the false obliviousness of strategic schemata;
they are dispositions of the body and mind where the eye does not
know in advance what it sees and thought does not know what it
should make of it. Their tension also points towards a different poli-
tics of the sensible—a politics based on the variation of distance, the
resistance of the visible and the uncertainty of effects.
—J ACQUES RANCIÈRE , The Emancipated Spectator
On the cusp of World War II, the opening scene of the film La Grande Illu
sion spoke to the enduring paradoxical imperative of the aerial image; unable
to decipher a section of a reconnaissance photograph of the World War I
Copyright © 2017. Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
western front, the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu insists that Lieutenant

Maréchal give up his scheduled leave and take him up for a fresh look to
“clear up the mystery.” In an exchange that instigates the travails and trag-
edies that ensue, three officers of the French Escadrille debate what can and
cannot be seen “below the road” in the “little gray spot” on the photograph:
“That’s a canal, not a road,” opines one; “No, a roadway,” insists another; “It
was misty,” declares Maréchal (who took the photo). De Boeldieu sums up the
dilemma wryly, “Such unanimity is a tribute to our photography.”1 The “illu-
sion” evoked by the film’s title recurs in conversation throughout the film as
the characters encounter situations that prompt them to question the mean-
ing of war itself along with the purpose of class, racial, ethnic, and national
divides as well as the politics of geography. In the last scene in the film, as
Kaplan, Caren. Aerial Aftermaths : Wartime from Above, Duke University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Maréchal and his companion Rosenthal, after a harrowing escape from their
final prisoner of war camp, approach the Swiss border and the promise of
sanctuary, they rather desperately half-joke about the absurdity of the visual
and the meaning of terrain. “You’re sure that’s Switzerland?” asks Maréchal
as Rosenthal consults their battered, homemade map. “I’m sure of it,” replies
Rosenthal. “It’s all so alike,” expostulates Maréchal, gazing out at the moun-
tains and valleys covered in snow that lie before them. “Of course,” replies his
companion, “frontiers were invented by men, not by nature.”
Reconnaissance imagery operates powerfully in terms of what Jacques Ran-
cière has linked to a “different politics of the sensible” (2011, 105)—variations
of scale and temporality, uncertainty, and the obdurate retention of some
thing or things unrepresentable or impossible to sense. These qualities are
not just pretensions of modernist abstraction, as in “art for art’s sake,” but
circulate throughout everyday life, in our instruments of work as well as our
forms of leisure. The aerial reconnaissance image that is so tied to instrumen-
tal realism, to scientific effort, and to a militarized pursuit of precise accu-
racy is, nevertheless, often mysterious. Like the reconnaissance photograph
that triggers the narrative in La Grande Illusion, aerial images act, produce
relationships, and construct evidence in constant tension with their peculiar
blind spots. Although reconnaissance photography is conventionally catego-
rized as a utilitarian, scientific, or mechanical form of representation—over
and against the aura of the auteur or personal image—it is nonetheless ani-
mated through attention and curiosity as well as by attachments to the “poli-
tics of the sensible.” Thus, reconnaissance photography does not simply sit
on one side or the other between studium and punctum (pace Barthes) or,
to use other terms, the division between evidence and affect, intention and
accident, fact and aura (Barthes 1981, 26–27).

Although reconnaissance imagery emerged as an organized military ap-
plication at the beginning of the twentieth century, the format has refused
to “stay put,” as it w
ere, moving around in culture and disturbing the par
ameters of the genre of aerial photography. Usually invoked as signs of the
objective truth of documentary evidence, like other geographical imaginar-
ies, aerial images have also pushed back against the strictures of “applied
realism.” Distant and abstract, requiring expert interpretation to become even
marginally intelligible, the aerial or satellite image most often requires the
kind of infrastructure that can only be provided by nation-states or major cor-
porations. But this does not mean that reconnaissance photography cannot
be marshaled for other politics—the “different” politics that Rancière pro-
vokes—or drawn into solely apolitical aesthetics or commodified contexts.
The Politics of the Sensible 181
Aerial reconnaissance photography has been used for all kinds of purposes
throughout the last century and, in an era of instant messaging and social
media, circulates in a dizzying array of iterations too numerous to catalog.
Reconnaissance imagery is all around us in the contemporary world, generat-
ing politics through the tension between evidentiary certitude and ambiguity.
This chapter explores three contemporary examples of cultural production
that engage the format of reconnaissance photography not only in formal
or thematic terms but also in relation to the status of visual evidence and the
operation of politics in forums of social justice. These are works that trouble
the boundaries that separate objective science, documentary realism, and au-
ratic art. Like Sandby’s aftermath aesthetics made palpable in a military survey
or Baldwin’s quarto of balloon perspectives, the contingent dispositions of
aerial photography draw together the instrumental power of the state as well
as the innumerable unruly ways in which that state power fails or is incom-
pletely achieved. The emotions generated by motion infuse these practices of
remote sensing; the image may be still but, like the panoramic painting or the
photograph itself, all the ways in which the image was created along with its
histories of reception and use reverberate insistently. The reconnaissance im-
age cannot be freed from historical context, but it can be opened up through
use to yield many more kinds of meaning than might at first seem evident.
DESERT S CREE N : TH E AESTH ETI CS OF D I SA PPE A R A N C E

IN THE PERS IAN G UL F WARS
“Is not the world just a magic lantern?” wondered Schopenhauer, nearly two
centuries ago. Due to the Gulf Crisis, a conjuring trick executed before our
eyes, for several months we have not seen a great deal of this world there on
our television screens. Obscured, on the one side, is the Saudi desert, with the
great black-out ordered by the Pentagon; on the other side is Saddam Hussein
and his army that has become invisible. But also obscured is all of what, from
near or far, could undermine the morale of the people concerning the conflict:
recession, unemployment, urban riots, the balkanization of Eastern Europe and
the almost complete disappearance of political debates.
—Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb
The war that is most often invoked as commensurate with the transforma-
tive logics of World War I is the first U.S.-Iraq Persian Gulf War of 1990–91.
In accounts of this brief but significant war, the technofetishism of newly
computerized networks of communication tend to dominate, obscuring
the critical forensic and politicized aesthetics that emerged simultaneously
182 Chapter 5
through the very same technologies. For example, addressing the 1990–91
war in both Desert Screen (2002) and The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991),
Paul Virilio called our attention to the transformative influence of visual
information technologies in an era of “desert wars.” In t hese and other works,
Virilio has argued that the innovation of televisual data along with their strate-
gic circulation by militaries for propaganda purposes has altered the political
landscape of modernity as much as the bombs that fell on Iraq destroyed
infrastructure and human lives. In the 1990s, Virilio charged, the most re-
cent “strategies of deception”—a pattern of disinformation—utilized by the
United States and its allies in the context of a relatively brief but relentless air
war w ere changing the contemporary battlefront yet again, sending it back
to Earth, even underground. In this reconfiguration of the field of war, Vir-
ilio singled out the desert—that space that seemingly provides no cover and
reveals all to the “eyes” in the sky—as the paradigmatic space of disinforma-
tion’s “known” lies. In the desert, he argued, stealth overcomes speed—the
status of visibility becomes renewed as paramount. Who can be detected
and who can escape such identification? Above all, stealth overtakes truth;
there is no possibility of “genuine knowledge,” he argues, when deception has
moved beyond conventional camouflage to operational virtuality.
As Virilio and other critics have argued, the First Persian Gulf War
inaugurated a new kind of conflict, one of total control not only over the
battlefield but also over public reception through televisual informatics.2
However, years after a second U.S.-led Gulf War and several decades into
the installation of digital platforms throughout commercial and military
domains, the hegemony of “electro-optic perception,” as Virilio put it, now
seems less totalizing and more unevenly practiced (2002, 107). In the sec-
ond decade of the twenty-first century, we know now that civilian airplanes
can be marshaled to bring down skyscrapers and that so-called irregular
warfare allows for even the most sophisticated drones to circle without
accurately sensing their intended target. The strategies devised for desert
or open spaces can be stymied or challenged by urban density or the un-
derground bunkers of contemporary war (Virilio 1994a; Weizman 2007; Gra-
ham 2010; Bishop 2011). Social networking both relies on globalized media
infrastructures and evades complete control (at least, so far). But t here is
yet another way these two wars that supposedly transformed perceptual
logics designated other possibilities as impossible. If the continuities of air
war over desert regions are made impossible in the narrative of the fields
of perception generated by the “Great War” at the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, then the ways in which empire operates through violence are
rendered unimaginable and unaccountable. When empire’s violence cannot
be known, its impossible nature structures the possible, our always unfold-
ing colonial present. But to acknowledge empire’s violence through mission-
ary information-retrieval or the substitution of one set of facts by another
will only reiterate representation as war (Spivak 1988).
In this nexus of representational critical engagement, the First Persian Gulf
War does serve as a meaningful example. Emblematic of the late twentieth-
century “revolution in military affairs” (rma) that signaled a shift to com-
puterized operations, it was the first U.S. war to incorporate the newly
coordinated satellite navigation and guidance systems with geographical data
banks: the global positioning system (gps) and the geographical information
system (gis).3 The conflict also remains notable for the limited release to the
public of imagery of “precision” bombing, footage that many of the mis-
siles themselves—the so-called smart bombs—produced as they attacked
targets. This next iteration of a “tv war” for a post-Vietnam generation
brought a seeming realism to t hose watching at home: simulated real-time
action with spectacular visual effects. As Douglas Kellner recalls, the videos
of attacks carefully edited and released by the military “were replayed for
days, producing the image of precise bombing and coding the destruction
as positive,” promoting the affective realization that war was “fun, aesthetic,
and fascinating” (1992, 159). Yet, thanks to severe limits placed on journal-
ist access, battlefield imagery was tightly controlled by the governments on
both sides of the conflict, offering a packaged “realism” that signaled the
limits of representation. Those journalists who w ere “embedded”—officially
attached to military units—found their actions heavily curtailed and infor-
mation managed by military public relations units. The entire edifice of
modern photojournalism, based on the exploits of iconic figures like Robert

Capa and which had reached its apex during the Vietnam War, was eroded.
For most journalists, the First Persian Gulf War was as “virtual” as for the
rest of us consuming media at “home.” As Ian Walker has observed:
For in many ways the journalists who w ere “there” were no more “there”
than we w ere in front of our screens. They either sat in Saudi Arabia, at-
tending press conferences being shown precision hits by smart bombs,
or they sat on ships in the Gulf watching the Cruise missiles being fired,
or they stood on their h otel balcony in Baghdad watching t hose missiles
come down the street and turn left at the traffic lights. Or they sat in front
of their television sets like the rest of us, and reported the war from t here.
In other words, they could not get at the war. (1995, 237)
184 Chapter 5
If the journalists could not get at the lived experience of the war as it was in
progress, their cameras could not get there either; there was no significant
photojournalism of, as Walker termed it, “the carnage” (237). Although esti-
mates of Iraqi dead in that war number in the hundreds of thousands, in the
West, at least, t here were very few “close-ups.” A war that was conducted pri-
marily as an air war offered mostly aerial images of remote, arid landscapes.
This war, then, unlike the heavily mythologized conventions of combat
photojournalism associated with World War II and Vietnam, presented U.S.
televisual spectators with a very different aesthetic mediascape: one of ab-
sence and distance rather than on-location proximity reporting accompanied
by spectacular or sentimental imagery to trigger the conventional national-
ist response. The quandary for critics of Gulf War representational practices
could be located right on the line between realism and abstraction, reportage
and art. W ere there advantages for critical thinking in the absence of what
had become expected genuflections toward the intimate view of the horrors
of warfare? Or, did the abstraction of the remote viewpoint only reinforce and
recuperate the perspective of the military? The politics of representational
practices were very much at the heart of the discussion on both a popular and
a scholarly level. It should not surprise us, therefore, that one of the endur-
ing artworks produced in relation to the First Persian Gulf War engaged the
war at a distance through the abstract properties of the aerial image.
THE DESERT T H AT I S N O L ON G ER A D ESERT:

SOPHIE RISTE L H UEB ER’ S FAI T
—Are we on Mars or what? . . .

—That’s just it; you can never work out the scale with her.
—But here, these roads, these fires, this black sky, this is Earth, alas, this is
definitely planet Earth.
—Bruno Latour, “Introduction: ‘She Leans Towards the Truth, Our Sophie’ ”
Sophie Ristelhueber’s photography troubles the quest for documentary

realism, certainty, and sentimental subjects that so often defines the repre
sentational practices of modern warfare in contemporary media. At the
close of the First Persian Gulf War, Ristelhueber, a French artist, traveled to
Kuwait’s border with Iraq and photographed areas she was able to reach by
helicopter or on foot. Out of this body of work, seventy-one photographs,
exhibited as Fait in Europe and as Aftermath in the UK and North America,
cite with subtle complexity the conventions of landscape and aerial imagery
of a wartime colonial present: ruins and reconnaissance, architecture and
target, vistas and maps. The distancing effect of these largely aerial photo
graphs places viewers in an aesthetic zone that can take some time to en-
gage. Ristelhueber’s photography emphatically avoids the representation of
embodied carnage and the conventions of realist documentary that struc-
ture conflict photojournalism. Drawing on the visual tradition of twentieth-
century aerial photography that simultaneously constructs and destabilizes
scientific certainty, Fait also references modernist art practices that trouble
both realist and picturesque approaches to landscape and the h uman form.
As Rancière has written of Ristelhueber’s photography, in Fait, she “effects a
displacement of the exhausted affect of indignation to a more discreet affect,
an affect of indeterminate effect—curiosity, the desire to see closer up” (2011,
104). In these images, the format of aerial photography grounds and also
releases histories of representation, offering political possibilities without all
the usual identitarian attachments.
Across numerous publications and interviews since the early 1990s,
Ristelhueber has reiterated a dual starting point for Fait that poses the ten-
sion between documentary realism and modernist aesthetics. As she has
related: “In February 1991, during the first Gulf war, I saw a photograph in
Time magazine showing the impact of French bombs on the Kuwait desert.
The idea of doing a work about this wounded land became an obsession. In
October, I finally got a visa and went out t here” (2010). The black-and-white
aerial photograph noticed by Ristelhueber accompanied a Time cover story,
“The Air War: How Targets Are Chosen,” written by Bruce W. Nelan and
published in the February 25 issue (see fig. 5.1). The article addressed the
“tragic” incident in which “laser-guided, 2,000-lb. bombs” fired from Stealth
fighter-bombers hit a bunker “filled with Iraqi civilians” who had “taken
refuge there from nighttime raids on the capital.” Since there is no question
that the munitions “hit their mark with pinpoint accuracy,” the controversy
around this event swirled around the problem of intelligence—was the bun-
ker an “ordinary civilian shelter,” as “the Iraqis insist,” or a “former shelter
recently converted to military use,” as the “U.S. command insists”? (Nelan
1991). The rest of the article described “painstaking” efforts on the part of
the U.S. military to achieve precision: “Fighter-bomber pilots have divided
the battlefield into small, lettered squares on the map called ‘killing zones.’
Working their way across the desert, sector by sector, spotters direct strike
planes onto specific targets on the ground. Electronic warfare planes black
out ground-based Iraqi radar, as airborne tankers circle lazily to refuel the
fighters that line up b ehind them. The w hole armada is choreographed by
controllers in awacs radar planes, who see everything in the air for more
186 Chapter 5
FIGURE 5.1 “TheAir War:
How Targets Are Chosen,”
Time, February 25, 1991, 27.
than 200 miles in any direction” (Nelan 1991). In this textbook description
of the God’s-eye control of the “field of the air,” as Douhet would have put
it, the painstaking nature of the compilation of priority targets appears de-
signed to assuage any doubt that civilian casualties were kept to a minimum.
The official line was that targets in this war were military. Thus, the caption
under the photograph that accompanied this discussion of “collateral dam-
age” reads: “French Jaguar fighters bomb Iraq’s Republican Guard.”
The photograph that struck Ristelhueber as so interesting as she was leaf-
ing through Time magazine at a newsstand in Paris was of a very different
nature from many of the other photographs from the Gulf War in that issue.
The other cover story, “War of Images,” presented seven color photographs
of both damaged buildings and bodies along with the following introduc-
tory text:
For weeks, the dominant image of the gulf b attle was a grainy video clip,
cross hairs bouncing slightly as a tiny bomb headed for a tiny building
and (slight pause) a tiny puff of smoke exploded across the screen. The
pictures make the war seem remote and bloodless. But last week Saddam
Hussein discovered the power of images. Photographers were allowed
access to the tragedy that resulted when the allies bombed a building
in Baghdad where hundreds had taken refuge. Th ose pictures—and the
ones on t hese pages from elsewhere in Baghdad and from Basra—put the
human impact of the war into focus. But they cannot tell the whole story.
They do not show Saddam’s destruction of Kuwait, where no photog
raphers can go. And they do not show the large areas of Baghdad (like the
mosque at left) that have remained untouched throughout the carefully
targeted air campaign. (Nelan and Dowell 1991)
Captions that accompany these full-color images include “A young boy

nurses his crudely mended leg after being injured by shrapnel after playing
on a Basra street”; “An Iraqi boy sells produce in front of bombed shops and
homes near Baghdad’s Ministry of Justice”; “Two survivors of a bombing
raid in Baghdad’s Aimer district that Iraqis said killed eight p eople”; and
“One of a row of shops flattened by allied bombs in Baghdad; across the
street, life goes on” (Nelan and Dowell 1991). Perhaps the black-and-white
aerial photograph of French Jaguar fighters dropping bombs in Kuwait—
“remote and bloodless”—was placed in relation to these other images to un-
derscore not only the participation of allies like France or the paradoxical
tension between extreme firepower and precision that exemplifies airpower
discursivity but another component of the “war of images” in modernity, the
co-constitution of documentary realism and modernist aesthetics.
Ristelhueber has related that the aerial photograph in Time magazine
immediately put her in mind of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s Élevage
de poussière (Dust Breeding), a Dadaist work from 1920 (see fig. 5.2). Dust
Breeding is an unruly work, playful and enigmatic. As the story goes, Man
Ray photographed the back of Duchamp’s famous piece The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even—also known as Large Glass (1915–23), which the
artist had left lying flat on its face for a year while he was out of the country.
The accumulated dust is captured in Man Ray’s photograph but then became
incorporated into Large Glass itself by Duchamp. Dust Breeding “exists only
in its photographic record,” thereby playing with the concept of the ephem-
eral while exposing the “ambivalence of representation” (Hindry 1998, 74;
Mayer 2008).4
When Dust Breeding appeared in 1922 in the Dadaist magazine Littéra
ture, Duchamp amped up the element of what we would today call “camp,”
signaling the presence of his cross-dressing persona Rrose Sélavy, her very
188 Chapter 5
FIGURE 5.2 Man Ray (1890–1976), Dust Breeding, 1920, printed ca. 1967.
Gelatin silver print, 23.9 × 30.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pur-
chase, Photography in the Fine Arts Gift, 1969 (69.521). Image copyright ©
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
name a play on both “eros” and c’est la vie.5 There are two sets of captions
under the photograph. The first, on the left, reads “Voici la domaine de Rrose
Sélavy; Comme elle est aride; Comme elle est fertile; Comme elle est joyeux;
Comme elle est triste!” (Here is the domain of Rrose Sélavy—how arid it
is—how fertile—how joyful—how sad!). The second caption, on the right,
“Vue prise en aéroplane” (View taken from an airplane), clearly links Man
Ray’s photograph of Duchamp’s dust to this still-new and compelling mode

of perception—the aerial photograph. As David Hopkins has noted, Man
Ray himself referred to the way that the dust on the work “resembled some
strange landscape seen from a bird’s-eye view” (Ray [1963] 1988, 78–79;
Hopkins 2013, 136). Only a few years a fter the “applied modernism” of the
images of “cubist” and “futurist” landscapes in the aviation manuals of World
War I, Dust Breeding engaged the problematics of aesthetics in a multidisci-
plinary mode, full of affect, irony, and, even, dirt. In this work, the complex
dispositions and materialities of joy, aridity, fertility, mobility, and the view
from above are drawn together for an arresting inquiry into the aftermath
politics of the sensible.
Dust Breeding is not a bloodless or cold engagement with remote sensing.
Even high modernist Kazimir Malevich, who pared down representation to
essential geometric forms, embraced aerial views not for their disconnection
from affect but for their figuration of the world as a “ ‘desert’ in which noth-
ing can be perceived but feeling” ([1927] 1959, 67) (see plate 21). The achieve-
ment of early twentieth-century art movements like Malevich’s “non-objective
Suprematism” would be based on an emptying out of the usual contextual
elements. “The appropriate means of representation,” Malevich wrote in 1927,
“is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such
and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects” (24–25). In this way,
modernists developed their own Orientalist figuration, drawing on the spa-
tial properties of the Westerner’s “desert” to connect the artist and the viewer
through feeling to sensory perception. This kind of fantasy of negative, open
space can only persist in an era that both literally and figuratively removed or
evacuated life forms from the terrain, filling the space with abstract geometri-
cal forms that served military as well as aesthetic or spiritual ends. By the late
twentieth c entury, this desert is a fully flattened ontology, a screen, a singular
Western world, drawing in and compressing everything modern to transmit
a surface image of emptiness. This “desert” is always already a component of
Orientalist discourse: highly aestheticized, powerfully negating, filling antici-
pated meanings in the context of asymmetrical warfare.
The First Persian Gulf War of 1990–91 both intensified and destabilized this
Western tendency to create fantastic deserts in order to control the terrain.
Without denying the historically constructed allure of such a space, the ambi-
guities and limits of representation became more apparent, less masked. This
moment drew Ristelhueber; as she remembered, “I was obsessed by the idea
of a desert that was no longer a desert” (Brutvan 2001, 129; original French
in Guerrin 1992). After trying for months to get a visa, Ristelhueber finally re-
ceived permission to enter Kuwait seven months after the official cessation of
warfare. Working her way toward the border with Iraq but unable to venture
very far into the country, Ristelhueber found herself among many photojour-
nalists all angling for stories and viewpoints. However, unlike the photo-
journalists, Ristelhueber turned away from action and narrative and toward
the stillness of near artifacts and remote perspectives. She hired helicopters
and walked the terrain on foot, recording very small instances at widely vary-
ing scales. As she has described this work: “I was not d oing something func-
tional. I was making a fiction. For me that work is not about information and
it’s not about that war. It’s only a work about scars” (2009). From the air, with-
out a horizon line or orienting landmarks, the eye is drawn to the marks, the
lines, the patterns on the ground. This perspective, akin to the aerial view,
infuses the photographs in Fait (see plate 22). As Marc Mayer has observed,
190 Chapter 5
“Fait refers to the brief and telling factuality of perishable marks in the desert.
The dumb fact of the willful mark, the elusive ur-sign of art and language, is
the point of departure for most of her work” (2008).
Although many of the images that comprise Fait are indeed aerial photo
graphs, the work also includes many examples of close proximity (see plate 23).
Ristelhueber has described the objects left behind in the sensorial aftermath of
both air and ground war at close range: “I found a collection of shaving brushes,
razors, and little mirrors that must have formed part of the soldiers’ kits. Th
ere
were personal diaries and tartan blankets like those of my childhood. I got the
feeling I could physically sense the soldiers’ crazed flight northwards. I was
deeply disturbed by this twofold abandon of both man and object. Such ‘still
lifes’ highlight the prosaic side of warfare. At the same time, once divorced
from their purposes, objects too become abstractions” (Brutvan 2001, 137, 147;
original French in Guerrin 1992). The physical separation of the possession
from the possessor transforms everything, abstraction signifying what comes
after death. In the photographs themselves it is hard to tell the difference be-
tween high aerial views and ground-level close-ups. Wandering through a bor-
der zone deeply marked by warfare, oil wells destroyed by the retreating army
and still smoking months later, produces a view off-kilter, out of whack. Death
is everywhere, palpable but unseen, filling the space. Empty trenches, cast-off
armaments, a lost shoe, ravaged landscape—these are not natural phenomena.
This is a terrain that has been forcefully and deliberately made, c’est fait.
In French, fait means “fact” and it also connotes the completion of an ac-
tion or “something that is done.” In considering the title of Ristelhueber’s
work, Walker has noted, as do other Anglophone critics, that fait does not
translate easily into English. Although fait and “fact” have the same Latin
root (facere: to do), the French word conveys the completion of a task while
the English term has come to signify stability and objective truth. Yet, Walker
cautions us, facts are made and not found; they have histories: “a fact always
has a cause, and one can hardly understand it without knowing how it came
to be a ‘fact’ ” (1995, 244–45). Ristelhueber’s Fait demands that we acknowl-
edge both the factual nature of the war and its unspooling, unruly ambigui-
ties, its “rogue intensities,” its aftermaths. Walker does not much care for the
English term aftermath that has come to be used as the title for installations
of Fait outside France—“sounds rather doom-laden and elegiac”—preferring
“evidence” in an open-ended sense of the word: “Here is the evidence, Ristel-
hueber’s images seem to say; work out what happened—if you can” (245).
James Ketchum has pointed out that by invoking aerial photography,
Ristelhueber chose to work with a format that raises the expectation in the
viewer that they are “about to see more and with greater clarity” (2005, 187).
Drawing most heavily, although not exclusively, on the view from above,
Ristelhueber’s work triggers cultural assumptions about what can and cannot
be seen by the human eye as well as through the mediation of the camera.
David Joselit has commented that the format of an artwork is part of the
“strategy for activating the space between what an image shows and what
an image does.” That is, the format of the work is more than the medium,
signaling “how an image is situated within a set of relations,” its “heteroge-
neity” of “components” (which can include “the means of production of the
image, the human effort that brought it into being, its mode of circulation,
the historical events that condition it, etc.”). In arguing that formats “attract
attention and exercise power,” Joselit reminds us that an artwork “almost
always contains vestiges of what might be called roots—or infrastructural
extensions—of its entanglements in the world” (2015). The aerial image is an
active format, making visible the “connective tissue” between the “entangle-
ments” of artwork and world.
These two “components”—modern military imagery and high modern-
ist abstraction—could be situated as antinomies in a social field of disci-
plinary divisions in media studies. But these divisions do deliberate work
in Ristelhueber’s photographs, establishing relations of representation that
operate not only within the images but as supplemental excess. That is, to
paraphrase Joselit, if one must think about what is folded into images as well
as what extends out from them, then Fait’s compelling force can be linked to
its active engagement with its format. Violence wells up from these images
in insidious ways, as the viewer strains to see while dreading the sight. The
evacuation of photojournalistic conventions—no blasted bodies, no keen-
ing figures—forces the viewer to try to make sense out of abstractions and
ambiguities, to figure out not only what is there to be seen but “what it is to
see” (Latour 1990, 30). The disappearance of human scale in these images
also mirrors the difficulty faced by war correspondents to record the events,
places, and people involved in current conflicts. Both Margot Norris and
Sarah James have pointed to the paucity of images of war dead in the record
of the First Persian Gulf War as part of its amorality; its transformation in
perceptual logics, they argue, resulted in multiple complicities with the war
machine, a situation in which aesthetics is posed over and against evidence
(Norris 1994, 290; James 2013, 127). Building on Elaine Scarry’s argument in
The Body in Pain (1985) that distance dehumanizes and undermines capaci-
ties for intimacy, in relation to work like Ristelhueber’s, James critiques the
“beautiful” emptiness of Ristelhueber’s imagery: “Picturing a depopulated
192 Chapter 5
military sublime can only perpetuate the myth that the sublime, and there-
fore terror, is inhuman, something neo-liberal states and technocrats want
us to believe” (2013, 125).
Remote abstraction is the culprit in these critiques. But a classic, ideal-
ist notion of aesthetics is also adjudged to be a problem in relation to the
“intolerable image” of war. In particular, critics like James charge that Ristel-
hueber’s images are so beautiful that they evacuate any possibility of the po
litical critique that should be raised by the site and subject of the photog-
raphy. Documentary conventions are hardly devoid of aesthetics but they
openly participate in the arena of high art at their risk—only select photog
raphers produce work that enters the marketplace of museums and galleries
without losing their association with human rights social movements, usu-
ally through appeals to universalist, humanist values. The twentieth-century
documentary tradition incorporates photography to see more, deeply and
thoroughly, as if to vanquish time by recording everything. This version of
“seeing all” meets the histories of aerial viewing with ambivalence. The dis-
tancing effects and even automation of parts of the mechanical process of
capturing the image do not always fit comfortably with the ethos of h uman
rights or social justice documentation.
In Fait, as in other works, Ristelhueber tries not to document this war but
to “make a statement about how little we see” (Monegal 2016, 261). Turning
away from historical reportage seems to be a choice that firmly links the
artists to an apolitical artistic tradition. Produced slowly, requiring thought-
ful, close examination even in a gallery setting, the photographs in Fait are
without a doubt insistently aestheticized. They appeared at first in a small
chapbook (part of a series of such books full of photographs of conflict zones
that Ristelhueber has published over many years) and then entered a spe-
cific installation context that is often discussed as much as the photographs
themselves. To see the images in person is to view them in an intentionally
created aura, an almost panoramic immersion. Ristelhueber has explained
that she gilded by hand the boxes that frame the photographs, turning them
into “objects that were at once precious and much like camouflage,” such
that it appears that the images are “linked together by a set of glowing halos”
(2009). The seventy-one “glowing” photographs that comprise Fait are dis-
played in ways that trigger embodied responses. Mayer links the exhibition
experience of Fait to a panorama that overwhelms the senses of the viewer:
“A dizzying array of flat images arranged in a way that fractures our point of
view, it might cause a kind of artificially induced vertigo akin to the Stendhal
Syndrome: a map-de-mer view of a war-riven desert” (2008). Fait’s instigation
of vertigo is referenced as well by Cheryl Brutvan in her discussion of the
installation: “Enveloped by the shifting planes, confused by the absence of
recognizable scale and loss of perspective in these intentionally abstract de-
tails, the viewer is left to his own conclusions” (2001, 151).
Mayer emphasizes that the “aerial views” are never any one t hing, demand-
ing that the viewer constantly “reorient” in relation to the ground, a lateral
distance close-up (2008). The aerial perspective at work in Fait, then, is nei-
ther fully militarized nor purely aestheticized. Rather, Fait calls attention to
the space between, the historical construction and highly mediated objective
reality of photographic representation in the age of aerial reconnaissance
imagery. Fait shows us the ground from above as historical evidence, but it
reveals a topographical nightmare of evacuated meaning. In these photo
graphs, flattened landscapes of violent acquisition engage wartime aftermaths,
recalling the ways colonial maps emptied deserts and created wastelands in
the quest for oil and archaeological treasure. In the context of photographic
exhibition, however, Fait spurs us to distrust or become curious about scale,
to try to discern what has happened, to register the difficulty of seeing a loss
that cannot be fully perceived—the physical challenge repeating the ideo-
logical politics of the history of representation of these places and times.
In Fait, what do we see? A moonscape? A line of fortifications? Grids of
landscapes? Burning oil wells? Tracks in sand? This photography flattens
its views and disturbs the relations of scale and proportion. The images re-
mind us of the continual emptying and loss of presence and meaning that
any representation entails, always dividing between this thing and that to
develop legibility. All representation relies on a difference between what will
or can be seen and what will not or cannot be viewed, filling the scene with
information of all kinds. The tricky element of this process is that we do

not know how to sense what has been left out by framing, by focus, among
many techniques, and even by our own optical and interpretive capacities.
Fait’s sparse landscapes are brimming with interdisciplinary historical and
cultural references and citations that draw us beyond the frame, as it w ere,
while also drawing us in closer. These images are not just floating in ahis-
torical time and space, celebrating a nomadic alterity. Rather, Ristelhueber’s
photographs are so full of possible meaning that many kinds of connections
are generated. In Fait the flattened logic of the fact mingles with the un-
spooling history of the photographic artifact to generate the disturbances
of time and space of wartime aftermaths. If Fait’s aerial perspective evades
the fascist sensibility that accompanies the sublime spectacularization of
war as well as the sentimental nationalisms that are incorporated into the
194 Chapter 5
realist documentary conventions of war reportage, it remains committed to
negotiating distance and destabilizing relations of scale. As Walker argues,
Fait’s “post-reportage” strategy “suggests not what photography cannot do,
but what it can” (1995, 240).
SHADOW SITE S: J AN AN N E AL - A
N I ’ S AERI A L PE R S P E C T I VE S
In their indeterminacies, these surfaces anchor vectors of looking and those of

seeing. They cohere objects, directing movements, specifying positions and
distances. They frame places, locating and affecting their viewing and their
views. Through the shadows cast upon them, surfaces mark time. In singulari-
ties of contact, points of impact, memories come into view, sudden moments of
insight surface to attention.
—Ella Chmielewska, “Vectors of Looking”
In London-based artist Jananne al-Ani’s most recent multipart project, The

Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land without People, she has moved into film-
ing from the air, focusing on the southern Jordanian desert.6 She has de-
scribed this frontier zone as “an extraordinary place” that draws her because
of its “pivotal position, in-between incredibly contentious and contested
locations—just east of Israel and occupied Palestine, and sharing borders
with Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria.” This desert “crossroads” is a site full of
traces of past events and inhabitants, liminal presences that can be sensed
from various angles and in different lights (see fig. 5.3). Past events and ab-
sent presence operate on multiple levels in al-Ani’s work. As she has stated
in a recent interview, she is preoccupied with the “ways that the evidence of
atrocity and genocide haunts the often beautiful landscapes into which the
bodies of victims disappear.” Her work, she argues, “needs” to “represent
that subtle underlying presence and not make a travesty of it” (R. Withers
2011). Survival, redemption, living become possible in the sensory imaging
of landscape as affective material.7
Al-Ani’s engagement with aerial reconnaissance photography is not hap-
hazard. She borrows “Shadow Sites,” the appellation of a two-part moving
image component of The Aesthetics of Disappearance, from the title of Kitty
Hauser’s book on the influence of aerial photography on British archaeol-
ogy and national landscape. In her work, Hauser reminds us that “sites” are
places “where things have occurred” and in which “individuals or groups
have inhabited or passed through” (2007, 2). Like O. G. S. Crawford and the
other aerial archaeologists who are discussed in Hauser’s text, al-Ani is drawn
to the project of detecting “where something once was,” the “agglomeration
FIGURE 5.3 Jananne al-Ani, “Aerial V,” production still from Shadow Sites II, 2001, single-
channel digital video. Courtesy of the Artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Photography by
Adrian Warren.
of traces of past actions, processes, and occurrences” (2). Shadow sites re-
veal just such agglomerations, but they can only be seen when the slanting
rays of the sun early or late in the day cast shadows across the landscape.
As Hauser explains, the basic principle of aerial archaeology “rests upon
the fact that once soil has been disturbed . . . that disturbance is essentially
virtually ineradicable, no m atter how long ago it took place” (163). These
disturbances can be discerned by the aerial camera in specific ways, as soil
and crop marks that become visible “after-math”—that is, in specific times
of year after harvests or at times of low growth or at particular times of day
as shadow sites. As al-Ani writes: “When you are up in the air and the sun
is just rising or setting in the sky, these very slight undulations that wouldn’t
be present on the ground reveal the site as a drawing from above b ecause of
the shadows. The ground itself becomes a kind of latent photographic im-
age of a past event embedded in the landscape” (Binkovitz 2012). Thinking
of the “ground itself ” as a “latent photographic image” of past events creates
a powerful relationship between al-Ani’s aerial camera and arid terrain. In-
spired by the forensic archaeology of Margaret Cox, who has been called on
to detect mass graves, al-Ani has remarked that often in war’s aftermath the
“bodies of civilians or victims have disappeared into the landscape” in ways
that are “subtle and hard to find” but that traces of this absence are always
discernible in the disturbance of the surface of the ground viewed from the
air (al-Ani 2011).8
196 Chapter 5
Although the techniques of aerial forensics inform al-Ani’s practice, like
Ristelhueber, she is drawn to the “scars” and traces of life that can be discerned
in the desert filmed from above more for their abstraction of form than
as an operation of forensis. C ounter to the Orientalist myth of the desert
as an empty space promulgated by O. G. S. Crawford and so many o thers,
al-Ani approaches this landscape as full of traces of occupation, presence and
absence—all signs that can be sensed, even partially, from the air. Maymanah
Farhat has described this effect in the installation of al-Ani’s Shadow Sites II
at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 2012:
A large, suspended screen shows a sequence of barren aerial shots that

ere taken from multiple altitudes. As the camera moves in for close-
w
ups of what little evidence of human activity is shown, edifices begin
to morph into different compounds, signaling the passage of time (in
reverse) or a visual excavation that unfolds before the artist’s lens. A mili-
tary base vanishes as the outline of a home emerges, which then dissolves
when ancient ruins begin to surface. Ambient visuals continue as new
items are introduced, including sprawling livestock facilities and agricul-
tural fields. Positioned from such elevation, the camera captures a land-
scape that is nearly abstracted, alternating between the gray and white of
shadows and light, stark but always yielding to life. An added key com-
ponent is the loud hum of a plane’s motor, which tends to resemble the
sound of a drone overhead. (Farhat 2012)
The Sackler Gallery placed Shadow Sites II in counterpoint to an exhibi-

tion of Ernst Herzfeld’s early twentieth-century photographs of archaeo-
logical sites in Iraq. Herzfeld was a German archaeologist, surveyor, and
expert on Islamic art who was stationed in Iraq during World War I. In his
iconic panoramic photograph of Ctesiphon, his shadow can be seen rising
in an ephemeral but definite manner in the center of the image. Frederick
Bohrer has commented that in this photograph, Herzfeld, a “paradigm of
the scientific, object-minded inquirer,” has created something more akin to a
portrait that conveys a “point of view” (2011, 18). When the image was pub-
lished, however, the shadow figure was removed, leaving a pristine, empty
landscape marked only by a ruin. Al-Ani’s engagement with aerial archaeol-
ogy places her imagery in a dynamic counterpoint to Herzfeld’s present
absent and absent present self-portrait. Commenting more broadly but in
ways that could also address Herzfeld’s own aesthetic of disappearance, she
has stated: “I was interested in the idea of the disappearance of the body
in the landscape through crime, genocide and massacre but also in the
idea of the artist trying to remove himself or his presence from the image”
(Binkovitz 2012).
In a similar vein, Bohrer has written that archaeological ways of see-
ing produce “crime scenes,” “photographed to understand the dynamics of
destruction” and to “allow a reconstruction of the object” (2011, 11). Along
these same lines, Hauser argues that aerial archaeology constitutes a redemp-
tive historiography since it provides evidence that the past is recoverable.
Latent traces can always be discerned if the right conditions, subjects, and
technologies are brought together. The “romance” of aerial archaeology,
Hauser admits, is based on its transformation of culture into nature; that
is, the image of the past reappears only through the natural cycle of agri-
cultural aftermath—the site must be viewed at specific times of year in cer-
tain light, and so forth (2007, 176–77). Al-Ani’s concern with the recovery
of what has disappeared, however, is always subverted by the limits of aerial
photography and the ambiguities of evidence. Rather than being redemptive
in a humanist framework, al-Ani’s aerial imagery engages wartime after-
maths, committed to a past that can only ever be partially known if at all but
marvelous in its sudden appearance in certain light in the right season. As
Virilio has written of Georges Méliès’s first experiments in stop-motion pho-
tography, “what he shows of reality is what reacts continually to the absences
of the reality which has passed” (1991, 17). Al-Ani’s drawing together of air-
plane, camera, air, and ground makes possible the “in-between state” that
makes forms visible, illuminating the “non-seen of the lost moments” (17).
AERIAL IMAGE RY AS CRI TI CAL FOREN SI S: S H E I KH

AN D WEIZMAN ’ S TH E CON FL I CT SH OREL I N E
Politics starts in the animated inhabitation of things, not way downstream in the
various dreamboats and horror shows that get moving.
—Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects
Can aerial imagery assist social justice projects by providing topographical

evidence of displacements, occupations, erasures, and unlawful habita-
tion? Does the abstraction of the aerial image, its “unnatural” perspective,
make possible new meanings or foreclose historical analysis? Along these
lines, John Beck has considered the “slippery” nature of aerial imagery’s
abstraction, its “ambiguity and indeterminacy,” in relation to its links to the
“military-industrial optic of capture and command,” to ask whether this
technology screens or camouflages “content that is best hidden” or exposes
and interrogates the ways remote sensing works (2013, 47–48). Since the aerial
198 Chapter 5
image generates a tension between ambiguity and certainty, it calls attention
to its construction—it is a t hing, like the Swiss border that the French sol-
diers in La Grande Illusion could not “see” but knew to be a real and trans-
formative force in their lives if they could survive to cross it. Ryan Bishop
and John Phillips refer to this tension as the “hinge” between the aesthetic
and the functional, an animated and dynamic division that “creates new
ground and new conditions that in turn force new divisions” (2011, 7–8).
This particular divide, they argue, stretches back through the Western clas-
sical tradition’s opposition between praxis and poiesis. Aristotle delineated
poiesis as the end product of the making of something and praxis as the ac-
tion itself. Bishop and Phillips note that in the modern period, the action of
making inherent to aesthetics has been narrowed to a connotation of “use-
less beauty” while the functional has become dominant through a “range of
calculative, pragmatic, techno-logical principles” (7).
The problem of perception in modernity, then, is not so much a conflict
between abstraction and precise identification in representation but that the
construction of this division is mystified. The “hinge” allows for the manage-
ment of this dynamic oscillation; as Bishop and Phillips put it: “The hinge
thus offers a choice: the reality behind visible things can be made visible or
the making visible of the reality behind visible things reveals that it cannot
be made visible” (2011, 9). The conceptual tool of the hinge allows us to un-
derstand the simultaneous aspects of technologies like aerial imaging then
not as reducible to e ither the same or radical difference but as deeply con-
nected. Spectatorship proceeds as if there is no crafting, no poiesis, and thus
the possibility of innumerable t hings unseen or unsensed in the visual object.
In the logic of the hinge, which allows for both connection and disconnec-
tion, seeing and unseeing, presence and absence, the military “operates with
an aesthetics it often refuses to admit”; “the very constitution of the aesthetic
is what makes the military and its functional instrumentalism possible” (15).
Along similar lines, Beck concludes that the aerial photograph, whether pro-
duced by and for the military or for completely different uses, holds all t hose
practices in tension with each other. As he writes, “it is the awareness of
hiddenness that the aerial photograph makes possible by generating the os-
cillation of perception between the indexical and the abstract” (2013, 65).
In a series of linked projects over the last several years, Fazal Sheikh and
Eyal Weizman have drawn on aerial imagery in just this hinged, connec-
tive sense to delve into layers of landscape in violently militarized spaces
(see plate 24). In 2010 American-born artist Fazal Sheikh began a five-year
photographic project in Israel and the West Bank. This work, which was
published in 2015 as The Erasure Trilogy, began as an inquiry into the “events
and legacy of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War” and continued as a kind of archaeo-
logical search for the sites of “former Palestinian villages” (Sheikh 2015). In
Sheikh’s introduction to the notes that accompany the aerial photographs
compiled as Desert Bloom (one of the three works in The Erasure Trilogy), as
well as in Eyal Weizman’s lengthy essay published in The Conflict Shoreline
(a work conceived collaboratively with Sheikh that includes many of his
photographs), the powerful dynamics of aerial imagery are fully considered
and utilized. Particularly in the northern Negev Desert, which has been
emptied of Bedouin inhabitants by the Israeli government and which is now
slated for significant development, documentation to support indigenous
land claims is e ither lacking or exists in formats that are not recognized by
the Israeli legal system. Sheikh explains his recourse to aerial photography
in the following context:
Frustrated by my ability to fully visualize the situation on the ground, I

decided it was necessary to see the land from above. I wanted a sense of
how this area of radical upheaval fitted into the broad sweep of the desert. I
hired a small plane to overfly the area and began to study the land, attempt-
ing to isolate the clues it had to offer. I was fortunate in having an Israeli
pilot who was willing to share his knowledge of the desert’s history with
me. Gradually I began to assemble the pieces of an interconnected puz-
zle. From above, the desert offered multilayered evidence of its geograph
ical, historical, and political evolution. I could distinguish closed military
zones, the traces of former unrecognized villages, the spread of afforesta-
tion, and the fields and buildings of Bedouin villages u nder threat, as well
as the growing sprawl of Israeli settlements and the new military training
camps and bases that had been moved to the area to protect them. (2015)
In their collaborative project The Conflict Shoreline (2015), Sheikh and

Weizman bring to our attention the struggle of one Bedouin community,
the al-’Uqbi tribe, to inhabit the land they have considered to be their own
for generations, land that is now denied to them under Israeli law. Follow-
ing the creation of the state of Israel, the al-’Uqbi were ordered to leave their
village of al-’Araqib and its surroundings for what was supposed to be a tem-
porary displacement to accommodate a military training exercise. When the
Israeli authorities refused to allow the community to return a fter the train-
ing period ended, they moved back anyway, initiating a staggering num-
ber of returns and expulsions—almost seventy between the late 1940s and
today. As the army demolished any al-’Uqbi tents or built structures, the
200 Chapter 5
tribe, under the leadership of Sheikh Suleiman Muhammad al-’Uqbi, would
return and try to rebuild—a process that has been less than peaceful.
The case of the al-’Uqbi and the village of al-’Araqib revolves around the
history and meaning of “Bedouin,” “cultivation,” “desert,” and “dwelling,” to
name only a few of the complex elements at work in this biopolitical contest.
Weizman stresses the politics at work in this “systematic state campaign”
that seeks to remove an entire inconvenient population from the “fertile
northern threshold of the desert” and relocate them to areas far more arid
(2015, 9). The line of contest is only visible as a “seam between two climatic
conditions”—the “subtropical Mediterranean climate zone” and the “arid
belt”—a “climatic threshold that stretches continuously for more than 7,500
kilometers, from along the northern edge of the Sahara over the g reat Ara-
bian Desert to the Gobi” (9). The al-’Uqbi tribe is not the first or the last
group to fight against the colonizing tactic of removal backed by military
force. They join approximately eighty thousand Bedouins who have refused
to be settled into townships far away from the lands to which they seek to
return. Their case has been adopted by the Forensic Architecture group and
other nongovernmental organizations for adjudication in the European
High Court. Aerial photographs are at the heart of Sheikh and Weizman’s
efforts to assist the al-’Uqbi’s case.
Aerial photographs have been an important part of the debate about con-
tested land in the Negev Desert and elsewhere in Israel/Palestine. For exam-
ple, Neve Gordon’s website (2016) linked to his 2008 book Israel’s Occupation
includes aerial imagery as documentary evidence along with maps, reports,
and other artifacts. Sheikh’s photographs in The Conflict Shoreline provide
a more continuous and considered record than the haphazard collection of
disparate artifacts that usually comprise the social justice archive, bridging
the museum/gallery zones where work like Ristelhueber’s Fait would be in-
stalled and the more haphazard print and online activist spaces. His beauti-
fully rendered photographs, shot at specific times and in designated locations
(not unlike their military counterparts), develop an aesthetic strategy to
inform us of the ways late industrial changes in climate have contributed
to the dispossession of Bedouin land, as terrain on the threshold of arid-
ity first became designated as “dead land”—uncultivated—while its inhabit-
ants became labeled as “nomadic” in stereotypical ways that belied their
patterns of habitation and cultivation. The layers of inquiry that the photo
graphs make perceptible include the artificial irrigation of confiscated land
that made the desert “bloom” so famously post-1948, dividing the terrain
between arid wasteland and state-sponsored garden. Engineering climate as
well as populations, the Israeli state’s colonizing project fixed what had been
“a shifting and elusive meteorological borderline” into a “fixed cartographic
line,” producing a “zone of expropriation” through “cartographic and terri-
torial violence” (Weizman and Sheikh 2015, 10). Sheikh’s aerial photographs
make these events legible through the very components of the format itself.
As Weizman writes:
For those willing and able to read the photographs closely, the surface
of the desert at this time can reveal not only what is present, but also
the subtle traces of what has been erased: traces of ruined homes, small
agricultural installations to fields that are no longer, watering holes, and
the stains of long removed livestock pens. . . . In these images the surface
of the earth appears as if it was itself a photograph, exposed to direct and
indirect contact, physical use, and climatic conditions in a similar way in
which a film is exposed to the sun’s rays. Sheikh’s aerial images must thus
be studied as photographs of photographs. (14–15)
These aerial images operate in multifarious ways: as evidentiary artifacts

in Bedouin land claims and other legal cases, human rights projects, and eco-
logical assessments. As “instrumental artifacts” they link historical, cultural,
legal, and economic components to a political process that works inside
but also outside and beyond the state, resonating with Ariella Azoulay’s
reworking of the “civil contract” of photography as relations of governance
under conditions of inequality (2008, 17). Weizman’s aim is to “bring new
material and aesthetic sensibilities to bear upon the legal and political
implications of state violence, armed conflict, and climate change” across a
“multiplicity of forums, political and juridical, institutional and informal”
(2014, 9). In fashioning a critical instrumental practice of “forensis” as

distinct from the forensic activities of the state, Weizman recognizes that
“things” like a landscape can be brought into dialogue in the populist “fo-
rum” of politics and given form through imaging in ways not completely
outside yet not reduced solely to judicial, legal, and legislative require-
ments. Acknowledging the limits of h uman rights legal frameworks and
the ambiguities of h uman testimony, a critical practice of forensis may
embrace remote sensing in its widest sense as a variety of historical and
contemporary methods and genres, not as an ideal alternative but as a prag-
matic tactic. There is no benevolent liberal state in this formulation, only
powerful combines of government, industry, and academia that act together
to “inflict violence and deny that they have done so” through “forensic war-
fare” (11–12).
202 Chapter 5
Weizman focuses his analysis on the “frontier zones” that are “outside
established state jurisdiction and established frames of criminal justice, where
sovereign jurisdiction is unclear . . . disintegrated . . . or suspended and
under siege” (2014, 11). In other words, Weizman identifies the areas dis-
rupted and now defined by colonial occupation that continue to be subject
to violence in the “colonial present” as sites where critical forensis is needed
to c ounter the long war of imperial state forensics. In this kind of aftermath
project, often urgently initiated under conditions of extreme or even muted
but persistent violence, aerial imagery is artifactual, indexical, and fully en-
gaged in a politics where its limits and possibilities matter. Thus, the war
time aftermaths politics of the colonial present can participate in a process
of forensis by drawing on both the archival material of over one hundred
years of remote sensing in the “frontier zones” of deserts, tropics, and high-
lands along with the forensic investigation of more recent aerial images.9
Warfare leaves artifactual materials that can be repurposed and drawn into
new registers of sensory interpretation. In areas marked by intensities of
violence over so many years, remote sensing can reveal strategies of under-
reporting and suppression of data, as well as assertions of rupture or new-
ness (that resemble what has been termed in the field of literary analysis
“strong misreadings”).10 These gaps, erasures, and misprisions can be rec-
ognized and engaged by collaborative aesthetic practices that do not rely
solely on h uman witnesses but on the “sensorial capacity of m atter itself,” or,
according to Weizman, “the ways in which “matter can detect, register, and
respond not only to contact and impact, but to influences in its environment
and to remote presence” (14–15). In this way, historical and contemporary
maps and aerial photographs can be animated in relation to each other, re-
making connections as temporal and spatial elements become visible in new

coordinates and configurations.
A primary challenge for Sheikh and Weizman lay in the nature of the
material traces of h uman usage of desert places and the limits of representa
tional technologies. As Weizman explains: “Mobilized against the claimants
was the fact that Bedouin life leaves only gentle marks on the territory, and
the inability of film to render these marks clearly” (Weizman and Sheikh
2015, 77). This dual dimension—the very light impression left on the ecol
ogy of the terrain in question and the representational capacities of remote
sensing—leads Sheikh and Weizman to work with the format of aerial im-
agery, layering contemporary imagery with historical documents, includ-
ing military photographs and maps. There are two time zones of particu
lar interest: the summer of 1918 and the winter of 1945—toward the end
of the declared world wars, in different seasons (“arid and in bloom”) (15).
Layered or superimposed over Sheikh’s contemporary images, much can be
gleaned: “Taken together, these photographs present us with a palimpsest
in which evidence of earlier patterns of habitation and agricultural use have
been overlaid by successive settlements, military zones, and areas of cultiva-
tion” (16).
The layered aesthetics of the “before” and “after” photographs resurrect the
early practices of the technology in the nineteenth c entury when the length of
time needed for a successful exposure required absolute stillness on the part of
human subjects. Photographs of live “events” would entail several exposures;
the event itself could not be captured rapidly in a legible form. For this very
reason, from the beginning, war photography was always already “aftermath.”
Fenton’s Crimean battlefields are eerily empty of humans yet not devoid of
the aura of danger—Richard Pare reminds us that these still and s ilent land-
scapes could be photographed only over a relatively long exposure that left the
photographer in the “same deadly circumstances” of risk from enemy fire
(1987, 8). For similar technical reasons, American Civil War photographs
show only the landscape of the already slain. In relation to this limitation of
mid-nineteenth-century photography, Anthony Lee has argued that photo
graphs are like “dead things” in that they are “representations of past or even
lost things,” triggering our melancholic recognition that “we can only see,
very provisionally, the ghostly things within them” (2007, 31). Or perhaps,
nineteenth-century photography reminds us that “ghostly things” remained
in between the iterations of images as well as within them; the shadows and
traces of past events and lives disappeared and reappeared, never fully u nder
the control of the photographer or the viewer or the photographic medium.
Aerial imagery assists in the persistent fantasy that the truth lives on—
that anything can be revealed by the retrieval of a view in “real time.” In their
chapter “Before and After,” Eyal and Ines Weizman suggest that this fantasy
also wishes for the “reversibility of time,” to show what happened, to hold per-
petrators accountable and provide justice for t hose harmed (2014, 122). In be-
tween the two images—one taken in an everyday moment “before” and the
other, perhaps more purposely, produced “after”—the event itself is always
already missing from representation. The record of the event, then, remains
incomplete, indeterminate, ambiguous. In the case of violent events, trauma
and grief reverberate inside the interval between before and after, disturbing
time and space. In this “reservoir” that is sometimes actively forgotten while
at other times partially recollected, some histories become sensible or legible
as they are placed into new contexts and conjunctions (109). Photography
204 Chapter 5
appears to offer a perfectly realized moment—the past captured in a full
and complete manner. But the photographic image is always disturbed by
literal or figurative “befores” and “afters” that disturb any satisfaction with
the image. The absences and ellipses that characterize analogue photog-
raphy also operate in more contemporary processes; for example, techni-
cally sophisticated satellite images are limited by orbit times, introducing
inevitable gaps in coverage in remote sensing. Even newer aerial observa-
tion platforms like drones and powered reconnaissance balloons that can
hover over scenes rather than proceed through geostationary orbit cannot
be everywhere all the time (and their images are also hybrid combinations
of various formats).11
No matter how critically staged, to engage in critical forensics via some-
thing like an aerial photograph is to assume that evidence can be sensed, that
“things happen, traces are left behind, and disputes ensue about the meaning
of those traces,” what they “testify to” (Keenan 2014, 52). But evidence is not
waiting, fully and perfectly formed, to be viewed as if through a telescope.
Evidence is, Thomas Keenan reminds us, not in and of itself a fact, or “true”
(44). In his introduction to Forensis, Weizman has argued that artifacts
like aerial photographs serve as instruments in a critical inquiry into both “the
production of evidence and the querying of the practice of evidence making”
(2014, 12). This self-reflexive capacity of aerial photographic evidence can-
not be fetishized as naturalized truth. As Weizman notes, “Photographs are
not an unmediated copy of the world, they are a relation between material
objects—one celluloid (plastic coated with gelatin emulsion containing silver
halide crystals) and the other of stone, earth, and vegetation—mediated by
the climate between them” (Weizman and Sheikh 2015, 77).
Projects like The Conflict Shoreline demonstrate that the format of aerial
photography can provide a specific kind of evidence in investigative projects
intended for public deliberation, official and unofficial. This kind of evidence
seeks traces of presence but inevitably marks absence as well. That is, when
something is sensed remotely and therefore can be recorded, it moves into
perceptibility but does not lose all of its properties of imperceptibility. Evi-
dence is always moving around in the space created by “before” and “after,”
drawn into intensities of disputes as needed only to recede into banality or
the status of the nonuseful. This character of the reconnaissance image only
underscores the use-value of this kind of material evidence. As the hinge
swings between figurative and nonfigurative, decidable and undecidable,
clear and abstract, near and far, useful and nonuseful, even the hinge becomes
perceptible as a necessary figment, a device that keeps tenable the illusion of
a unified world. The violence of the operations of representation that have
brought us such a powerful instrumental practice as aerial imagery pre-
cludes anything but the either/or, the before and after, pulling matter into
endless divisions, an infinity of sets of twos. Yet we sense something (or
somethings)—ghostly, multiple, past, future, simultaneous—in the remote
that also exists in the here and now.
If the First Persian Gulf War ushered in an era in which the documen-
tary representation of warfare underwent a crisis, inducing critics to decry
the simulated illusion of digital imagery and the evacuation of human sub-
jects from the “desert screen,” the use of the format of aerial reconnaissance
photography by artists and cultural critics is worthy of note. The areas that
have been photographed and engaged by Ristelhueber, al-Ani, Sheikh,
and Weizman have been deeply disturbed by the actions of human beings,
changing over time as successive wars and occupations have left layers of
evidence in the ground itself. Drawing on the apparatus of the military, the
governmental and academic surveyors, and the conventions of landscape
representation linked to aerial views, these photographic works neither re-
cuperate nor repudiate such historical conventions and techniques. Work-
ing with the format of aerial photography, the range of their approaches
recognizes the import of events and makes sensible their evidentiary traces
to make possible historical and political accountability. In their different
but linked ways, Ristelhueber, al-Ani, Sheikh, and Weizman probe the si-
multaneous eradication and evidentiary traces of life forms in arid zones
at geopolitical, climatic, and cultural risk. In their choice to sense remotely
they acknowledge that, as Rancière has put it, “every distance is a factual
distance” (2011, 11). To see “all” is impossible. In the space between igno-
rance and knowledge, the format of aerial photography generates evidence

of worlds imperceptible and potentially sensible.
206 Chapter 5

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CHAPTER 5

THE POLITICS OF THE SENSIBLE

I speak ­here of curiosity, and above I spoke of attention. ­These are

western front, the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu insists that Lieutenant

accident, fact and aura (Barthes 1981, 26–27).

The Politics of the Sensible 181

DESERT S CREE N : TH E AESTH ETI CS OF D I SA PPE A R A N C E

The Politics of the Sensible 183

modern photojournalism, based on the exploits of iconic figures like Robert

THE DESERT T H AT I S N O L ON G ER A D ESERT:

—­Are we on Mars or what? . . . ​

Sophie Ristelhueber’s photography trou­bles the quest for documentary

The Politics of the Sensible 185

The Politics of the Sensible 187

Captions that accompany t­hese full-­color images include “A young boy

Ray’s photo­graph of Duchamp’s dust to this still-­new and compelling mode

The Politics of the Sensible 189

The Politics of the Sensible 191

The Politics of the Sensible 193

information of all kinds. The tricky ele­ment of this pro­cess is that we do

In their indeterminacies, ­these surfaces anchor vectors of looking and ­those of

In London-­based artist Jananne al-­Ani’s most recent multipart proj­ect, The

The Politics of the Sensible 195

A large, suspended screen shows a sequence of barren aerial shots that

The Sackler Gallery placed Shadow Sites II in counterpoint to an exhibi-

The Politics of the Sensible 197

AERIAL IMAGE RY AS CRI TI CAL FOREN SI S: S H E I KH

Can aerial imagery assist social justice proj­ects by providing topographical

The Politics of the Sensible 199

Frustrated by my ability to fully visualize the situation on the ground, I

In their collaborative proj­ect The Conflict Shoreline (2015), Sheikh and

The Politics of the Sensible 201

­These aerial images operate in multifarious ways: as evidentiary artifacts

(2014, 9). In fashioning a critical instrumental practice of “forensis” as

making connections as temporal and spatial ele­ments become vis­i­ble in new

The Politics of the Sensible 203

The Politics of the Sensible 205

rance and knowledge, the format of aerial photography generates evidence

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I speak here of curiosity, and above I spoke of attention. These are

—Are we on Mars or what? . . .

Sophie Ristelhueber’s photography troubles the quest for documentary

Captions that accompany these full-color images include “A young boy

Ray’s photograph of Duchamp’s dust to this still-new and compelling mode

information of all kinds. The tricky element of this process is that we do

In their indeterminacies, these surfaces anchor vectors of looking and those of

In London-based artist Jananne al-Ani’s most recent multipart project, The

Can aerial imagery assist social justice projects by providing topographical

In their collaborative project The Conflict Shoreline (2015), Sheikh and

These aerial images operate in multifarious ways: as evidentiary artifacts

making connections as temporal and spatial elements become visible in new