Re-Collections: Images beyond the Archive

Abstract

In visual terms the ongoing war in Syria has been one of the most well-documented that the world has ever witnessed. Accordingly Syria has for long been established as a topos for global reflection and concern. Despite an excess of visual documentation of this war, the actual processes through which some images have come to capture, embody and produce what Syria was, is, and is to become still need further thought and engagement. The central claim of this Introduction is that Syria offers an exemplary case to reflect on the power of images and on how processes of archiving enable a grip, not merely on the past but also on the present and the future. At the same time we offer a reflection on various facets of Syrian engagement with collections and re-collections of images, and how these speak to a concerted attempt to keep the narrative of what has taken place in Syria open for posterity.

AN EXEMPLARY CASE

In visual terms the ongoing war in Syria has been one of the most well-documented the world has ever witnessed. Photos, videos and posts on social media have been an instrumental part of the war as well as of its documentation. Images of people taking to the streets, of slogans written on walls and banners, and later of destruction, dead and mutilated bodies, and refugees escaping havoc in great numbers, have long established the Syrian war as a topos for global reflection and concern. However, this turbid flood of visual images needs unpacking if we are to understand what Syria was, is, and might become beyond the immediate sense of death and destruction. Despite excessive visual documentation of the war, the actual processes through which some images have come to capture, embody and produce what Syria was, is, and is to become still need further thought and engagement. Our ambition for this Special Issue of Visual Anthropology is to open up an exploration of how Syria is being re-collected by various actors across personal, collective and institutional visual registers.

The Syrian war has not only laid bare the complex and problematic role of visual documentation in conflicts, but also pushed it to new frontiers (Boëx and Devictor 2021). Such frontiers and problems present a challenge for activists, politicians and scholars, and the general public in Syria alike, albeit from different vantage points. In particular there are pressing questions regarding the (re-)collection and use of graphic images of the war in a world where attention has now moved on and Bashar al-Assad and his regime have, at the time of writing, been reinstated in the Arab League. Given that this regime has been the main culprit for what has gone wrong in Syria ever since Syrians took to the streets with elated spirits in March 2011, the photographs of al-Assad being greeted and welcomed back to the table by the Saudi leader Mohammad Bin Salman speak volumes. Such photographs are visual tokens of attempted erasure, a renewed focus on normalization, and a discourse of reconstruction—even if war is still being waged in parts of Syria. Accordingly what is needed is an ongoing effort to unpack the work and circulation of images and to prevent any easy erasure from happening. In other words, the ongoing battle today is over narrative. This collection of articles, each of which addresses a different facet of Syrian engagements with the collection and re-collection of images, speaks to a concerted attempt to keep the narrative of what took place in Syria open for posterity.

The central claim of this Introduction is that Syria offers an exemplary case to reflect on the power of images and how processes of archiving enable a grip, not merely on the past but also on the present and the future. The collection and re-collection of images might take people back to the moment when these were originally captured and recorded. However, the capturing and preservation of what took place is rarely done merely for the sake of keeping that past alive: the future-oriented idea of posterity is critical to archival practices. Preservation affords the possibility of moving back to these images, but also of carrying them forward for use in the future. In this sense these images of Syria constitute archives of and for the future. Exploring the formation of these archives enables us to extend our focus beyond war, crisis and conflict to understand how justice, accountability and accommodation are also negotiated as future possibilities in the recreation and refiguring of a country moving through conflict (Elias 2018). A central contribution of this Special Issue is its rethinking of unstable temporal orderings of past, present and future to engage with the problem of how to theorize futurity in a Syrian context. Hence central questions to us are: How do archives come into being, and how do they shape, regulate and change perceptions, memories and potential futures? How is the image of Syria re-assembled, re-made, and re-mediated by Syrian actors across personal, collective and institutional contexts? And what might we learn from the problems and challenges that the Syrian case has raised about how to engage with images of painful pasts and graphic violence?

ARCHIVES, IMAGES, AND RE-COLLECTION

The process of archiving can be used productively as both an empirical and an analytical prism through which to explore the active construction of differing Syrian images and experiences, both inside and outside the country’s geographical borders. Following the anthropologists Marcus Banks and Richard Vokes, we take the archive in a physical sense to mean that “which refers to any set or collection of historical photographs, brought together with some purposeful intent, if only for storage” (2010, 338). As they argue, archives may be official or personal, and might even be accidental. As the Syrian case demonstrates, they might be in the form of a personal photograph album, a pool of images collected by activists for use in a political campaign, a media outlet’s image library, or an institutional state archive, among other possibilities. The “content” of archives extends beyond what is deliberately stored and preserved in them. Silences or absences can point to repressed or haunting memories. As Giorgio Agamben argues ([1995] 2005), the archive attests to both the sayable and the unsayable in terms of extreme horror, suffering and sorrow. But it can also point to imaginings of possible futures and future possibilities. In the Syrian context archiving has been a highly emotionally charged process, tied to sorrow, fear and anger, but also to nostalgia, hope and the pursuit of justice and retribution.

Where most studies to date have directed their attention toward archives already in existence (Zeitlyn 2012), the Syrian case allows us to explore archives that are in the process of formation, offering a tremendous opportunity to theorize how images are part of the reconfiguration of temporal orderings of past, present and future. Our hope is to forge a conversation between anthropological, historical and philosophical discussions on the figure of the archive, recent work on future-making, and conceptualizations of the power of images. As an analytical prism the figure of the archive was invigorated by Michel Foucault (1972), who saw it as a regulatory system for thought and expression. The archive in this conception becomes not merely a physical place to store documents and artifacts, but is also a productive metaphor for how storage generally functions in human memory and perception. In thinking about how discussions on the figure of the archive relate more specifically to visual documentation practices, we take our cue from the philosopher Henri Bergson’s work on perception, time and memory. According to him ([1889] 1913; [1896] 1988), the workings of memory (or what he refers to as human perception and recollection) highlight the critical role of images for affective investment and emotional attachment—in short, for how we are moved. Bergson also interrogates the impact of our temporal orientations critically, that is, our orientations toward the past, present and future, on emotional dispositions. Exploring these interrelated affective, emotional and temporal dimensions of archiving as a process is critical, since it allows us to interrogate practices of circulation, preservation and (re-)collection as matters of personal, collective and institutional importance. It also pushes us to attend to the different visual registers of personal, collective and institutional archiving processes, and thus how they evoke different meanings and sentiments around images. This might enable us to understand how once shared identities and realities can be re-collected in a disputed and unstable context, and how to unravel which forms of historicizing exist in the very act of preservation.

Both Jacques Derrida ([1995] 1996) and François Hartog ([2003] 2015) posit that over the last few decades we have seen an enormous increase in archiving; that an impulse to archive has become more and more pronounced, even amounting to a fever or obsession. In Hartog’s formulation, “We have become obsessive archivists, transforming everything into memory, in furtherance of the present’s immediate self-historicization” (ibid., 124). While this certainly has been the case in some contexts it is not universally applicable. In Syria before the uprising such an impulse or fever may not have had a firm grip on most parts of society. Rather, for many a lack of archiving was a more pronounced feature of everyday life. With the revolution however the feverish urge to preserve and document happenings that took hold of activists and journalists was also extended to a wider stratum of society.

As a result of this urgent archiving, documentation of the past twelve years in Syria has been excessive (a point to which we will return). At the same time, many Syrians have lost access to places, documents, albums or other material remains as a result of the massive destruction unleashed by the regime and by other actors who have waged war on cities and entire neighborhoods, in places such as Dera’a, Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus. While there has been an abundance and proliferation of certain images, most often graphic and explicit, there may be a scarcity of more personal images. In this situation, re-collecting might therefore traverse contexts of both excessive proliferation and lack and absence. As such, there is a need to think through the various technologies of the imagination along with material practices that might operate in discrepant personal, collective, or institutional registers, including those of transitional justice and human rights, of personal well-being, and of exile and personal trauma and reflection. In other words, we need to start asking what forms of historicizing are bound up in the process of archiving.

OPTIMISM RETRACTED: TEMPORALITY/IES OF THE IMAGE

In spring 2022 we hosted the Syrian documentarist Rami Farah for several days at the University of Copenhagen. Besides screening his magnificent film, Our Memory Belongs to Us, co-directed with Signe Byrge Sørensen, and engaging with our students in class, Farah took part in several important conversations with us on campus as well as in cafes or restaurants. His reflections encapsulate the temporal dimensions of the lives of Syrians in exile. The Syrian revolution had started as a collective moment, Farah posited, but people were now left on their own with their trauma. “It is a circle coming to an end!” he said with conviction. He then elaborated on life since 2011 among Syrians in exile, breaking it down into four different phases, namely: (1) denial, when people were expecting to return home in two weeks; (2) realization, when they comprehended that they would not be returning any time soon; (3) depression, when they acknowledged the gravity of their situation, leading to identity crisis and trauma; and (4) integration, as they accommodated themselves to their new circumstances, such as their place of residence and its language. He made the general point that the uprising had started with the formation of a novel Syrian “we” but that Syrians in exile today are dealing with the consequences as individuals, as an “I.”

For the time being at least, the war against the Assad regime has been lost, but Syrians in exile are now engaged in an ongoing battle of the narrative. What started as a collective fight against the regime has now become a battle over memories, images and the writing and rewriting of their history—a battle being waged by individuals like Farah and the other filmmakers discussed in the contributions by Elias and Tarnowksi, or groups of individuals like those engaged in the Syrian Archive’s Digital Memory Project discussed here by Saber and al-Jaloud. This fragmentation complicates the relationship between images, archiving practices, and the production of collective memory, in the sense developed by Maurice Halbwachs ([1952] 1992) when he emphasized the importance of social frameworks for memory. Hartog ([2003] 2015) argues that Halbwachs deliberately homed in on the collective aspects of memory, to move away from Bergson’s typically more personal focus. However, when reflecting on massive events such as war, revolution or conflict, it is important to stay attuned to the cracks and fractures that always linger between different social frameworks. We need to remain open to the ways in which memories move between these frameworks and the consonances and dissonances that evolve and grow out of the impact of a massive event like the Syrian Uprising. Moreover, we need to be attentive to how various actors’ interpretations keep on working on and with this event over time (Bandak 2023, forthcoming). This also provides a significant reminder of the violence of the archive, as Derrida pointed out ([1995] 1996, 7); and of the latent violence inherent in any retelling of such foundational events (Serres [1983] 2015, 57).

A different way of interpreting Farah’s insights about temporality is that the movement and jubilant feelings initially launched by the uprising have been easily recast and are re-collected differently today. The move from the collective to the singular—from a “we” to an “I”—bespeaks broader configurations of affect, mourning and loss that most Syrians have been exposed to, regardless of their political orientation. When people took to the streets in March 2011, first in Dera’a and soon in many parts of the country, the sense of imminent and urgent change was overriding. This was an urgency with consequences for the direction of the course of history itself, but also a collective mobilization of hope and possibilities not seen before (Wedeen 1999, 2019). Images and photos played key roles in both bringing the protesters’ defiance and actions out into the open and in capturing violence as it happened. The formative role of visual media for the revolution and as a part of warfare more generally should not be underestimated (Della Ratta 2018). But with the protracted nature of the conflict and the Syrian regime’s waging of a war on its own soil, the dynamics of hope, possibility and affect changed. We might say that as the optimism initially unleashed by the uprising receded, darker sentiments accompanied life in Syria as well as beyond the country for the great number of Syrians forced into exile. With the displacement of these Syrians to neighboring countries or locations further away, the image ecology also changed. Images of protesters and violence inside Syria were gradually complemented and even replaced by images of Syrian refugees undertaking the perilous crossing over the Mediterranean Sea to arrive on European shores dead or alive, or walking along highways to reach desired destinations north of Greece or Italy.

The role of visual documentation in conflicts has been the subject of considerable debate in cultural criticism and thought in both Europe and North America (e.g., Butler 2009; Sontag 1977). Susie Linfield argues (2010, 3–9) that critics have generally taken a skeptical if not venomous stance toward the photograph. But the promise of the photograph and other visual media to disseminate and convey what has happened and is happening is still strong. Photographs or videos of particular instances, persons and places can evoke strong reactions and emotions among people who would otherwise never have known them, as well as on those who relate to them. This is not necessarily due to the number of images collected, the excessively packed archive. It can instead be a result of the solicitation of images that are able to move across different personal, collective and institutional registers in ways that make us start to “listen” to them (Campt 2017).

It is not our intention here to make an argument for unfledged optimism about the potential of unruly images of the Syrian uprising-war to effect change. But we are making a plea for them not to be dismissed out of hand, and for persistent attempts to be made to re-collect and re-assemble them across personal, collective and institutional contexts. This is crucial if we are to keep open the visual registers that allow for these images to move across terrains of accountability or personal evidence, as marks of present absence and absent presence, of loss, of what needs to be retained for the future. We hope that with this Special Issue of the journal we are opening up for question which engagements—whether ethnographic, historical, documentary, artistic or journalistic—can help keep these visual registers open and thereby inform a sensitive as well as persistent conversation on Syria as it was, and as it is in a state of becoming for Syrians both inside and outside the country’s boundaries. For such conversations to be meaningful, we argue, requires paying attention to and engaging with how Syrians are raising, responding to, and dealing with these and other questions. For Syrians these are not matters of mere academic debate. When they discuss how to engage with these unruly images, they are dealing with how to remember their earlier lives, their friends and family, their homes, how to look at the bodies of their dead, and how to keep a record for their future generations.

“STOP FILMING!”

There has been a general consensus about the importance of photo documentation among Syrians, from the on-the-ground witnesses who Saber and al-Jaloud engage with, to the archivists in exile and filmmakers discussed here in the articles by Tarnowski and Elias. Not even the perpetrators of extreme violence who Üngör engages with seem to have disputed the importance of images. In many cases this has prompted urgent archiving (Crone and Mollerup, forthcoming), with images being produced and preserved in the moment without time for reflection on the legal and ethical challenges that such archives entail. There has been less consensus about how to engage with these images. Should graphic images only be shown in restricted expert communities, or should they be shared with broader publics to create awareness and exert political pressure? Whose rights and obligations should be taken into consideration when determining how to engage with archived images? In other words, what are the purposes, gains and costs of watching and engaging with these images? These questions have been important to the work of many Syrian cultural producers who now live in exile.

In our conversations with the veteran filmmaker, producer and educator, Mohammad Ali Atassi, he has constantly emphasized that he does not wish to see graphic images. While the foregrounding of violence is dominant in many of the Syrian documentaries that have received the most international attention, Atassi has always insisted that he personally did not have to see graphic images in order to understand the seriousness of the violence suffered by Syrians. In his perception the question of the rights to the image goes beyond the desire of each and every one of us to see or not to see violent images; it is a question of human dignity and people’s right over their own image, a part of their human rights. Atassi accordingly uses very different cinematic strategies.

In his film Our Terrible Country (2014), made with Ziad Homsi, their portrait of Syrian key intellectual Yassin Haj Saleh evolves into a story about two different generations and their stakes in the unfolding events, their hopes, despair, disappointment and defeat. By conveying touching images without yielding to graphic violence, Atassi’s work allows for a much deeper appreciation of the violence inflicted on Syrians, in the form of broken destinies and journeys.

Farah’s film, Our Memory Belongs to Us, reunites three Syrian activists who he then confronts with their own footage of the uprising (Figure 1). He addresses the dilemma of what to remember from their past, as well as whether or not to look at particularly painful images. Farah asks how to engage with them at later stages, as he wonders whether the memory of what happened is worth all the pain that it brings. This film is an intimate and sincere return to the memories of the early days of the uprising, which lead Farah to conclude, “I want to remember.” For him the question of remembering or forgetting is not only bound up in the ongoing Syrian tragedy but also relates to the intertwining of his own family history and regional geopolitical conflicts. Growing up as an internally displaced person from the Golan Heights, who never knew the personal and political story of why he was growing up in exile, the silence in Farah’s personal story mirrors that of many other Syrians—most obviously, the silence imposed by the Assad regime surrounding its brutal crackdown on opposition movements in Hama in 1982 (Ismail 2018). In Saber and al-Jaloud’s contribution to this Issue, it is precisely through the story of Hama that photographers argue compellingly for the importance of the archives today. The importance of memory in the face of a regime that readily constructs collective memory by building luxury hotels on sites of massacres and by engaging in counterfactual storytelling seems clear. Yet, in a discussion with us about the archives, Saber—who was the lead researcher on Our Memory Belongs to Us and who is dedicatedly working to preserve the important testimonies of those who are producing the archives (Saber and Long 2017; Tarnowski 2021)—Saber provocatively proclaimed “stop filming!”

Figure 1 Discussing the first day of the revolution. (From Our Memory Belongs to Us (2021), directed by Rami Farah; © Final Cut for Real).

Her exclamation was not merely a provocation. She knows intimately the human cost of looking through such material (cf. Koenig and Lampros 2023) and the dilemmas of the archives. These are by no means restricted to the risk of vicarious trauma. There continues to be a proliferation of issues relating to the images and their use, which concern the ethical and legal challenges of ownership (Azoulay 2008; Della Ratta, Dickinson and Haugbølle 2020), the legality of and rights to filming (Della Ratta 2018; Fan 2019), rights to a dignified image (Abounaddara 2015; de Angelis 2020), and the economic structures of image circulation (Gürsel 2016; Mollerup and Mortensen 2020). Furthermore the enormity of the archives of images from Syria itself poses problems. The Syrian war was for a time documented to an unprecedented extent. Existing video documentation of human rights violations alone constitutes not hours or days, but decades of footage. This presents activists, legal investigators and human rights workers with unparalleled challenges of how to practically collect, preserve and verify such vast amounts of data (Deutch 2020; Deutch and Habal 2018). The Syrian Archive—discussed by Tarnowski as well as Saber and al-Jaloud in this Issue—hosts over 40 years’ worth of video documentation of human rights abuses in Syria, most of which is likely never to be seen by a human eye. This excess of materials makes arguments for continued filming and archiving more complex.

Further dilemmas around these archives arise from the potential for images as evidence in accountability processes. Many Syrian images were produced with the intention of making them available for the pursuit of accountability at some future time. However, despite the vast visual documentation of perpetration in Syria, there is no indication that any high-level perpetrators will be brought to justice. In this situation, with the main culprit still in power, Saber’s contention to stop filming points to yet another challenge of the images. As the Syrian opposition is acknowledging defeat, the images and the memories of violence they enable increasingly thwart reconciliation. Documentation of violence can be counterproductive to forgiveness and make it more difficult to find ways of moving onward. The unresolved tension between the lack of accountability of the perpetrators and the evidence in the archives creates obligations that are difficult to free oneself from. So when Saber urged us to stop filming, she was pointing to the many unresolved questions around archiving that grow exponentially as more images get made and old images move through new contexts. Until we know what to do with the images perhaps we should limit endlessly creating more footage and start reflecting on what we already have.

FRAGMENTED MEDIA REALITIES

Since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, the role of images and the intentionality of image production have changed. In the first years of that uprising Syrian image activists and citizen journalists were documenting what was happening in order to bring people to the streets and to provide alternative news coverage which countered the Syrian state media’s skewed reporting of events. These images were initially intended mainly for a Syrian audience, but as the regime’s violence intensified and international news organizations ceased or were prevented from sending correspondents to Syria, Syrians themselves increasingly started providing international news organizations with images that dominated global news streams for a time. However, as the Syrian state army regained military control over large parts of the territory, perhaps most significantly the whole of Aleppo in December 2016, the intense global dissemination of visual documentation of atrocities in Syria slowed down. The long duration of the war in Syria combined with the emergence of new international conflicts diverted the attention of international publics, resulting in less support for photographers on the ground. Meanwhile many image activists and citizen journalists were forced to leave Syria, were imprisoned or killed (Badran and Smets 2018). Even those who remained active inside Syria had to acknowledge that their efforts to get the story out had not brought about the desired international political support or effects.

In contrast, during the early days of the uprising the Syrian state media tried to ignore or deny the protests were taking place around the country. They soon had to rethink this strategy, as the peaceful public uprising first grew in scope and later turned violent, escalating into a state of war. Thus, after a hesitant start that focused on media reportage of (unusually and counterfactually) empty central squares around Syria, purporting to document that nothing unusual was going on inside the country, Syrian state media switched to propagating a story about an international conspiracy against Syria, in accordance with official rhetoric (Galal and Yonus 2021). This narrative delegitimized the popular national uprising as a foreign-orchestrated attempt to destabilize Syria and destroy the nation. Once the Syrian state (backed by Russian air power and Iranian militias) regained military control over large parts of Syria, the state media shifted their attention to what could be characterized as an attempt to monopolize the writing of history. It did this through TV reportage, news coverage, and the continued production of famous Syrian TV dramas (Crone 2023a; Salamandra 2019). These productions have been aimed mainly at audiences inside Syria, but also broader Arab audiences and media outlets with a supportive agenda, based in other countries. The fact that the Syrian state media are, to a large extent, the only media able to operate inside Syria places them in a privileged position to narrate current developments and control the visual representation of contemporary Syria.

As the number of image activists inside Ba’athist state-controlled Syria is small and the possibilities of operating close to non-existent, efforts to counter the Syrian state narrative through continued engagement with images have largely moved outside Syria. In recent years a large number of Syrian documentaries have been produced, several of which have won prominent international awards. Many of these films are made by image activists who had to flee the country and have ended up in exile in Europe, bringing with them huge archives of images from the uprising and war (as detailed by Tarnowski in his contribution to this Issue). Their films offer detailed insights into the initial and hopeful phase of the uprising, as well as the horror of the following (primarily state-led) violence. These archives were in most cases not created as film material but rather as urgent documentation for news stories and social media and for future accountability processes. Given the limited international media attention to Syria and the lack of prospects of accountability in sight, documentary films have become an important means to engage with the battle over narrative. But despite the success and importance of Syrian documentaries they often reach only a limited, specialized and typically Western audience. The challenge of reaching a broader audience is not limited to the fact that these films can rarely be screened inside Syria; it has also proven difficult to engage audiences within the Syrian diaspora.

Since the uprising that started in 2011, Syrians have lived fragmented national realities, dependent on where they have lived in relation to the violence unfolding in the country. Unlike the early days, today every Syrian’s life has been fundamentally touched by the uprising-turned-war, while media experiences have become increasingly fragmented. Some of the highly symbolic images of the early demonstrations that were spread in Syria showed protesters toppling statues and tearing down huge posters of the Assads. As the regime has regained control of public space in most parts of Syria, such statues and posters have been reinstated (a process that Elias turns his attention to in his contribution to this Issue). This creates a particular framing of public space in the everyday lives of Syrians within these areas. State media are another inevitable aspect of the media scene in regime-controlled areas, but have a limited reach beyond these territories. As a result, the overall Syrian media scene has become much more pluralistic and precarious. As Yazan Badran (2021, 33) argues, “the territorial and political fragmentation brought about by the war since 2011 has meant that Syrian audiences are now divided across … different media spheres,” with very little interaction among them. This means that the ongoing battle over narrative is fought in different terrains, leaving Syrian audiences to navigate between fragmented and divided media realities. However, while Syrian audiences are fragmented, images provide one point of interaction between media spheres.

UP CLOSE

Given that they provide a point of interaction there is a lot to be learnt from taking a close-up view of particular images or sets of images and interrogating the terrains across which they have moved. We advocate for this refocusing of our attention on particular images not for the purposes of content analysis but rather in order to explore how different logics are constructed on the basis of an image’s appropriation and re-appropriation. We posit that concrete attention to specific images can help us to understand the ongoing battle over narrative and memory, and to focus on how actual re-collections attest to the malleability of positions, worldviews and sentiments as the Syrian war drags on. Importantly what we are thereby bringing into view is not simply the narrative battle over what happened in Syria, but also over how what happened will be understood in the future. The battle over images is a battle over how the next generation of Syrians will understand their past, so as to give form and shape to whatever futures are to be conceived, be those inside Syria or in some other land of exile.

To illustrate the productive potential of taking a close-up view of specific images, we have selected four examples that attest to the shifting terrain of the Syrian conflict in diverse ways: (1) an image from the besieged Yarmouk camp; (2) the documentary For Sama by Waad al-Kateab; (3) the artwork "Relentless Images" by Khaled Barakeh; and (4) the Syrian TV-drama Haris al-Quds. These four sets of images allow us to home in on different aspects of the battle over narrative and on how images can move between registers of personal, collective and institutional archiving. Each is exemplary in the sense that it reveals broader structures of relevance and salience over the course of the Syrian conflict (Bandak and Højer 2015). Each also exemplifies how images are seen differently, how they change meaning, and may be used to directly change perceptions of taken-for-granted positions and events as they are collected and re-collected. Finally, taken together, they attest to the importance of shifting our focus away from the sum total of images toward an engagement with single examples and the details and concrete stories they tell, and accordingly to the importance of not being lured by the promise of extensive coverage as significant in and of itself.

Case 1: Yarmouk

In February 2014, UNRWA released an image from the Yarmouk camp depicting a ruined street flooded with people waiting in apathetic despair for aid during the Syrian state’s siege and bombardment of this neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus. The camp had been sealed off by the Syrian state army for more than six months, and the UNRWA was struggling to obtain access to the area and provide humanitarian relief. The image was initially released as part of a UNRWA humanitarian social media campaign, and quickly hit the international media stream as an example of the Syrian state’s violation of its own population and of any human rights.

At the time of writing, however, the photo is being used simultaneously to document the Assad regime’s terrorization of its own population and as proof of the regime’s claim that it was fighting terrorist gangs in the camp. This struggle has resulted in two competing pieces of television reportage, both of which investigate “the story behind the image” but situate it within two fundamentally opposing narratives. “Picture Story: the Yarmouk Camp” (2021), produced by Syria TV, tells the story of state violence through interviews with people who lived through the siege in Yarmouk. “The Picture is a Story: The Yarmouk Camp” (2022), produced by al-Mayadeen, presents a very different reality, accusing al-Nusra and IS of having infiltrated the camp (Crone 2023b). Thus, while images can document an event, their fluidity lends them to opposing sides of the battle over narrative and shifts their meaning and relevance over time.

Case 2: For Sama

This fluidity of images begs for archival engagements that bind images to certain narratives rather than leaving them vulnerable to becoming open signifiers. In For Sama, the lead director Waad al-Kateab uses very personal—and very violent—recordings from within a hospital in besieged Aleppo to tell her personal experience of the siege on and then exodus from Aleppo, in the form of a narration to her daughter Sama. The film is a story for Sama to understand the personal and political history that frames her life while growing up in exile. At the same time it is a confirmation of the revolution and war being fought for the next generation. Images documenting the death and destruction inside Aleppo dominated international news streams for a time, with al-Kataeb being an important source in her position as local correspondent for Channel 4 News. By 2019, when For Sama was released, the type of image it showed was well known to audiences across the globe. However, unlike the ephemeral format of the news report, the documentary genre offers a coherent—and in this case, very personal—narrative, placing images within an edited story line that makes them less fluid and vulnerable to dispute. The film shows how images that have lost their original relevance can take on new purposes. However, each new use of images of violence poses new questions about why, where and to whom they should be shown and, not least, for whose sake they should be shown?

Case 3: Relentless Images

How to deal with the graphic images that have come out of Syria? Initially this question did not seem to be the most pressing one for many Syrians: what was important was to get photos out. Those showing death and dying were thought to have an immediate impact on the viewer, Waad al-Kateab’s For Sama being a case in point. Similarly images of the dead as well as of destroyed cities, towns and villages have readily been deployed in efforts to pursue accountability. With the protracted nature of the Syrian war, however, new questions relating to the use and circulation of violent images have arisen. This is evident in Khaled Barakeh’s artwork "Relentless Images" (2018). As a conceptual artist he engages with the materiality of death and dying in several of his works, including "Regarding the Pain of Others" (2013) and "Untitled Images" (2014). In those works Barakeh has used material artifacts that have carried the dead, and scraped the surface off parts of images to leave blank spaces where the deceased were formerly to be seen, thereby opening up a reflection on the dignity of the dead. In "Relentless Images" Barakeh pushes the question of dignity to another extreme through his conceptual engagement with the Caesar Files, a collection of 50,000 images documenting Syrians killed in the notorious Saydnaya prison. Barakeh engages with these images in order to question how to make use of them in ways that are ethically sound. Rather than rendering their importance through their graphic immediacy he displays names, meta-data and facts about the images rather than the images themselves. Here evidence and dignity go hand in hand.

Case 4: Haris al-Quds

Images of ruined Syrian cities, buildings leveled to the ground, and empty neighborhoods covered in dust have continued to circulate through international news media over the years. The location might vary but the grayish-colored images of disheartening destruction seem to tell the same story, namely how the bombings by Syrian and Russian air forces have destroyed Syrian cities and left them empty of life—as was also true of For Sama. Such images gained only limited space in Syrian state media before the conquest of East Aleppo. They have however since become central to the state’s ambition to propagate a postwar reconstruction narrative. This is exemplified in the state-produced TV drama Haris al-Quds, in which the female character, Rima, returns to “liberated” Aleppo. Shot on location, the rubble and ruins are not overlooked; on the contrary they seem to confirm the Syrian state narrative. In a central scene, Rima wanders the ruined streets of Aleppo. However, it is not her devastation over the destruction that stands out, but rather her styled hairdo, high heels, and elegant bright red jacket. As Rima reclaims the ruined streets of Aleppo, she not only confirms al-Assad’s victory as if a flag had been planted on conquered land, but also places the images of destruction within a state-sanctioned narrative. The deliberate attempt to overwrite the cause of the destruction of Aleppo and resignify the story as one of liberation is telling. It attests to the continuation of violence by symbolic and dramaturgical means.

CONCLUSION: MATTERS FOR THE FUTURE

There is no single way to engage with the unruly images coming out of Syria, and there is no simple way to re-collect or archive them. These images and our scholarly engagement with them present some formidable challenges, brought into focus by this Introduction and Special Issue. One of our central arguments is that we need to engage with the temporality of these images. Their unruliness is in part due to the discrepant landscapes of circulation through which they move. It is however also a result of the disjunctive nature of their moment of capture and moments of later re-engagement and re-collection. As Patricia Spyer and Mary Steedly argue:

In situations of social and political turmoil or profound change, images may be at risk not only physically but also conceptually. What images are, where they may or may not go, what they are expected to do socially, politically, esthetically, epistemologically, psychologically, ideologically, and so on, may become foci of attention and contribute to their revaluing and refiguration. (Spyer and Steedly 2013, 5)

The use, collection, and later re-collection of images reframes and reformulates the stakes of the initial engagements that produced them, allowing the images to move across visual registers and between what happened and what may be present only as latent possibilities for posterity.

The Syrian situation has taught us that beyond the burning need to capture, preserve, and collect images and have the world witness what has taken place, there is a much wider set of problems regarding the scope, scale, and salience of images as they continue to circulate or are later reappropriated or taken down or even erased. We see here a potential for scholars to think alongside the efforts and questions posed by Dima Saber, Rami Farah, Khaled Barakeh and Mohammad Ali Atassi as they have engaged with personal, collective and institutional visual registers and the challenges that these pose. In her challenge to “stop filming!” Saber asks us to consider what is being done with the images already in existence. Why persist in creating more footage before we have engaged with what we already have, or even know how to engage with it? Farah poses a slightly different challenge, raising the tension between the desire to maintain a distance from images that evoke a painful past and the need to keep a record for Syrian children, who will grow up in exile or with limited means to access this narrative. Atassi has raised questions about whether we too easily discard with the ethical demands of the image. In his conception this relates to the right to dignity on the part of the portrayed. A key issue here pertains to whether Syria risks being displaced and overwritten by voices and concerns that are not about Syria per se, and rather are linked to a globalized media and artistic market fueled by a quest for spectacle.

Through his creative engagements with graphic images of violence and death, Barakeh asks how we might maintain the dignity of those who have died but whose images still circulate. How might we re-collect photos and images through artistic means to allow for encounters that differ from those to which we have become immunized? Scraping off the image of a dead child from the surface of a photo heightens it by evoking a generic as well as a particular absence: this specific child who is no longer with us could have been anybody’s child. In Barakeh’s work we see a move from urgency to latency, from immediate action to pensiveness, from documentation to reflection.

The four contributions to this special issue help frame and substantiate the claims made in this introductory article. Dima Saber and Abdelrahman al-Jaloud’s contribution discusses the stakes of visual documentation and archiving for the Syrian photographers who operated inside the country over the course of the Syrian revolution and war. Here we hear about the motivations, concerns and interests that have driven the quest for both image documentation and archiving in relation to the Syrian Archive’s Digital Memory Project. The authors argue that this endeavor is related to the different kinds of potential that the archives hold, which they conceptualize as testimonial and historical value, evidentiary value and creative value.

In his contribution, Stefan Tarnowski engages with the two cases of Bidayyat and the Syrian Archive, both of which are Syrian activist organizations working to document and preserve image archives. Whereas the former works on the scale of history writing, the latter operates with the distinct idea of holding the regime accountable for its deeds. In both cases, Tarnowski argues, we are faced with image archives that provide activists with a horizon of expectation that lies beyond the current moment of impasse and defeat.

Ugur Üngör presents a case of extreme violence, namely an engagement with the perpetrators behind what has become known as the Tadamon massacre, a mass killing of at least 41 civilians by soldiers affiliated with the al-Assad regime in 2013. Central to this article is the argument that the Syrian regime and system has itself documented and even boasted of its brutality. Üngör’s contribution poses pertinent questions not only pertaining to what the world has to see and witness, but also addressing the logics that drive the machinery of violence and destruction from within.

In Chad Elias’ contribution, he foregrounds discussions about digital and material forms of erasure and preservation. He argues that we need to understand citizen videography of the Syrian Revolution as a multi-layered practice of historical documentation, while also being attentive to the tendency for this material to be taken down and erased. Elias focuses on the film Our Memory Belongs to Us as an example of efforts to avoid erasure by actively combatting the regime’s attempts at writing history.

By engaging with the diverse problematics, challenges and possibilities that the Syrian case has presented for a host of Syrian actors, these four articles illuminate the challenges that the Syrian case poses for anthropological and ethical engagement with images, archiving and re-collection more widely. By bringing these articles together, we hope to engage the reader and prompt questions that are at once urgent, unruly and pensive, and which invite a varied set of responses. The Syrian case is exemplary in its murky, eerie and violent transformation of popular hopes into war, conflict, despair and defeat. But far from this being an ending, it has opened up a new battleground over narrative that is being fought with images, archiving and re-collection. These articles, taken individually and as a collection, are thus not only about what happened in Syria, but also about what is ongoing, and what kinds of futurities—legal, collective or individual—we are able to envision. As such our engagement with Syria is now as ever a matter for the future.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by The Independent Research Fund Denmark for the project Archiving the future: Re-collections of Syria in War and Peace (ref. 9062-00014B).

Notes on contributors

Andreas Bandak

Andreas Bandak is Associate Professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, and Director of the Center for Comparative Culture Studies, at the University of Copenhagen. Currently he is Principal Investigator for two research projects on Syria. His most recent book is Exemplary Life: Modeling Sainthood in Christian Syria (Toronto, 2022). E-mail: [email protected]

Christine Crone

Christine Crone holds a Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen and is an Assistant Professor and part of a Postdoctoral on the collective research project "Archiving the Future: Recollections of Syria in War and Peace," at the Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (UCPH). She is the author of Pan-Arab News TV Station al-Mayadeen: The New Regressive Leftist Media (Peter Lang, 2020).

Nina Grønlykke Mollerup

Nina GrØnlykke Mollerup is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is a media anthropologist working with people who produce, archive, show and in other ways engage with images of violence. She is Principal Investigator of the Independent Research Fund Denmark Sapere Aude-funded project "Views of Violence: Images as Documentary, Evidentiary and Affective."