From War Criminal to Abstraction

#18

As a photographer, how can an image make guilt visible again?

A portrait of Djakhan Abidova
A woman in the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, deliberately damaged as part of an effort to erase her in the nineteen-thirties. © Tate. Photograph by Samuel Cole.

Dear Michel,

Forgive me for leaving your question unanswered for so long. Over the past months, I withdrew from writing in order to devote myself entirely to photography, within a long-term project that will become visible in Brussels on September 4.

What I am sending you is not a direct answer to that exhibition, but one of its detours. Your question touches the same wound: what becomes of political responsibility when the image can no longer hold it?

Photography today exists in a paradox. War has never been more visible. Never have there been more cameras, testimonies, satellite images, bodies, ruins, executions, and grief passing across our screens. And yet the image seems to have lost much of its former political force. Hardly any photograph now arrives with the moral shock of Napalm Girl or The Falling Man. Not because we see less. We see too much. But seeing no longer leads, by necessity, to judgment.

The image still proves. It no longer compels.

That is why I returned to the archives. I gathered images from international war journalism: leaders at lecterns, men in uniform, bodies arranged behind power, microphones, flags, gestures of command, protection, and historical inevitability. Images that did not merely record public life, but helped manufacture the public eye.

From that material I trained a model through Replicate. The system, of course, understands nothing. It recognizes patterns. It does not refuse, judge, remember, or accuse. It transforms.

When I fed the model portraits of twentieth-century perpetrators, something remarkable occurred. The system did not make them invisible. Posture, uniform, historical aura, and bodily authority often remained intact. But the face itself became unreadable.

The perpetrator did not disappear. He became abstract.

Nicolae Ceaușescu during his final public speech in Bucharest; shortly before the collapse of his regime.
© BBC. Footage from Romania, 21 December 1989.

Slobodan Milošević speaking before the Yugoslav Tribunal in The Hague during his war crimes trial.
© AP Archive. Footage from the Netherlands, 2002.

Augusto Pinochet speaking in military uniform during an official public address in Chile.
© Archival footage. Chile, date unknown.

Saddam Hussein during the 1979 Ba'ath Party purge, shown in a televised address.
© Wikimedia Commons. Footage from Iraq, 1979.

This is a different kind of disappearance than Stalinist erasure. In the 1930s, the portrait of Djakhan Abidova, a woman crushed by the very power that later sought to erase her, was not simply removed from history. Her face was violently blackened, painted over until a person became a void. She was no perpetrator, but a victim: first of repression, then of archival murder. What remains is not absence, but the scar of destruction itself. Power did not merely silence her; it entered the archive to make her unknowable.

Today, the movement seems reversed. It is not the victim who is erased, but the perpetrator who is made elusive; dispersed into systems, procedures, and languages that protect him from the full weight of his own visibility.

What disappears is not the image.
What disappears is accountability.

There lies the crisis of the contemporary image. Power no longer needs to conceal itself. It has learned to remain visible without becoming answerable.

In modern war, in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and elsewhere, the old commandment thou shalt not kill is not abolished. It is reformulated. It appears in the language of risks, coordinates, targets, proportionality, collateral damage, and probabilities. Within this destructive algebra, violence is made legible, as though killing were finally nothing more than a pattern to be deciphered.

The architects of war use artificial intelligence to reduce target selection, once a matter of hours or days, to seconds. Step by step, the machine appropriates the most concrete act of which a human being is capable: killing.

But what fails here is not intelligence. It is understanding.

We have built machines that see everything, and produced leaders who do not understand what they see. A system can indicate where a man is located. It cannot say what his death will unleash in a people, a memory, a humiliation, a history. Such systems register behavior, not meaning. They track what an adversary does, but not what he fears, honors, remembers, or is willing to die for.

War cannot be reduced to information, calculation, or control. It is carried by resentment, sacred narratives, humiliation, grief, and revenge. These are not noise factors at the edge of conflict. They are the conflict. Clausewitz already saw through that illusion: war is never mere calculation. The algebra has become more refined, but the blindness remains.

Thus war today appears as a chain of operations, statistics, and probabilities, until killing is no longer experienced as an act but administered as an outcome. No one seems fully to act anymore; therefore no one feels fully responsible. What remains is an algebra of destruction in which the subject has not disappeared, but is systematically removed from the equation.

Within this perfected abstraction, violence becomes boundless. The dream of fully automated war is not a sign of civilization, but of metaphysical blindness: the delusion that conflict can be purified of its tragedy by being handed over to systems. But a war purified of tragedy does not become more humane. It becomes less human.

For what is transferred to the machine is never merely execution. The burden of conscience is transferred as well. And where conscience disappears from the act, the limit disappears with it.

Here Hannah Arendt becomes urgent once again. Her banality of evil concerned the moment when thinking stops and judgment vanishes. What emerges today goes further: the erosion of the conditions under which judgment can still have meaning.

The problem is not that we cannot see.
The problem is that what we see no longer obligates us.

Thus the deepest victory of abstraction lies not in its capacity to kill, but in its capacity to cleanse killing of guilt.

That is why the image of Benjamin Netanyahu is so important. He stands frontally before the camera, recognizable, almost classically positioned as a leader. His face is still there. His name is still there. Behind him stand masked men with automatic weapons.