Ruins II

War of Images: Politics and Propaganda in Europe

If the images of ruins according to Romantic sensibilities were defined by an affective reverie of feeling that tethered the picturesque beauty of the slow march of time with the majesty of emotive affect produced, then the proceeding centuries would not only reflect more on the violent, destructive and immediate ruination of war, but this contextual lens would act to shorten the distance of time between the event of ruin and the experience of it, in turn providing a fertile ground for the forces of appropriation, censorship, propaganda and representational politics to take root. The age of an object and the historical distance between that and its attached demise has the effect of numbing the pain of violent destruction, allowing them to be caste in pleasurable, contemplative melancholy, whereas the condition of immediacy pertaining to the effects of war or catastrophe disrupts this scopic tendency.

Walter Hahn’s graphic images taken in the aftermath of the Dresden bombings presents a form of controversy to historians today.  Arguments that the the war was essentially already won for the Allies sit beside rebuttals that this was an important and necessary target to prevent a greater loss of life.  The bombing of Dresden, a largely civilian city, might be presented as a vindictive punishment of ordinary German civilians or a justifiable attack of a crucial military target, yet Hahn’s image reminds us that war produces a visceral and bloody suffering, regardless of whichever side one chooses to ordain their sympathies.

Chief Civil Architect of the Nazi Party, Albert Speer not only designed a host of gargantuan architectural plans for the municipal buildings of Third Reich Berlin, but a crucial facet of these plans were how they might be considered once found after the eventual collapse of empire.  Speer’s monumental visions were so designed with their inevitable and eventual demise in mind.  This curious concept asserts that imposing buildings might create impressive ruins, and this in turn, denotes the lasting legacy of empiric might.  Monumental architecture is made to affect the body, and in Speer’s overtly fascist example, this may be seen as a form of architecture that is ‘weaponised’. Just as a wall symbolises and so physically ordains division, and architectural projects of monumental scale are seen to imply the lasting presence of power, so might the skyscrapers of modern architecture similarly facilitate an ideological, affective response.

The Nuremberg rally grounds, an area of parkland on the South-eastern side of the city was developed between the wars to be used for the annual Nazi party rallies; massive propaganda exercises delivered from an iconic grandstand, designed by Albert Speer; the future of which in doubt as the city decides whether or not to spent the 70 million Euros necessary to prevent its crumbling facade. Since the Second World War, the Nuremberg rally grounds have transformed into a variety of different uses; becoming parkland once more, an indoor arena, as well as a football stadium and housing, and notably, a museum explaining Nuremberg’s role in the Nazi story.

The advent of photography in this dynamic becomes an essential referent in this chapter, where the medium is swiftly incorporated to document the destruction of Paris, it is too apparent that this documentation and the messages attached to the images are immediately prone to the forces of power and the representational politics of the photograph.  Photographs are open to interpretation, and with images of historical events, especially depicting or representing war, the context of an image may find itself contested, distorted or positioned outside the realms of accurate historical authority.

Stafford states that the Paris Commune of 1871 was not only the first revolution to be photographed, but also that it was the first instance where photography was used for purposes of repression and toward the realisation of power.  Images taken by Communard supporters would, when turned over to the hands of the State after the upheaval was thwarted, became a methodology to pursue and punish those found to be in allegiance, sympathy or involvement with the insurgency.  The State thereafter implementing photography as a means by which to identify, classify and subsequently control. These concerns speak of the battle of images; where the cultural history of images is defined less by what is depicted within the frame, but moreover what is ‘hijacked’, captioned, censored or contextualised through its presentation after the event.

Luxemberg mirrors this position in an analysis of French photographer J. Andrieu’s images [see Fig. 6] of the urban ruins during the aftermath of the Commune riots of 1871, arguing that the photographer’s images were appropriated, captioned and classified along consumerist and political lines and that the project, which the author claims to be an essentially aesthetic one, was from the point of authorial intention less concerned with any overtly political directives than it was with memory and nostalgia and the bold aesthetics of image capture. This inevitable ambiguity of message, and the questions it raises around authorship and artistic intent, once more reflects photography's long and contentious history of representation and classification.  The scenes depicted through photography of the destruction of Paris establishing themselves as forms of admonition and of moral instruction in the wake of violent struggle.

Gordillo points out that the creation of ruins during the Paris Commune uprising was a ceremonial destruction, where the overbearing architecture of Paris became a target of this affective relationship to the power, and that in the final weeks before the insurgency was thwarted that there is evidence that the Communards were unfazed and even revelatory despite impending defeat, and while the Parisian elites were horrified by the sight of the city of Paris in ruins, they themselves were less aggrieved by the genocide and mass graves about to be produced in reactive aggression by the State. The implication is that the struggles of representation in ruins demonstrates a viewpoint defined by class positioning, and that there is an inherent ‘fear of ruins’ expressed more fervently by power than by its counterpart. The traces of these struggles and destructions, as well as knowledge of those erasures, remain entrenched in the history of a city whose public perception belies that unsavoury underpinning.

John Bulmer’s image shows the modern city in apparent ruins, yet the city in this example is Manchester in 1976.  A figure in a heavy overcoat stands within the frame surveying a disorienting scene of urban ruination, while a metal incinerator burns debris in the foreground,  The immediate feeling from this is presentation is arguably similar to that portrayed in the aftermath to violent conflict such has been shown in the ruins created after a mobilised civil uprising, or the scenes depicted in photographs following the aerial bombardments of the Second World War. Bulmer’s photographs, however, sit within a period of relative calm in this regard, the context of this vista of urban Britain in 1970s is one produced by the town planner, as the visions and ideals of Modernist architects began a wave of change to the visual character of towns and cities, prompting mass clearance of older, outdated architectural orders in favour of a new conception of functional urban design. Bulmer recounts, “I was amazed to see that the old North… was still to be seen, but only just.  The terraced houses were being demolished and the demise of street life was about to take place”. Richard West, the writer of the piece in Geo Magazine within which Bulmer’s photographs were published, describes the changing landscape of the city as an ‘earthquake in slow motion’ adding that Manchester resembled “a place of fear, what a blessing if everything would sink into earth”. The anxiety and uncertainty created by these rapid processes of technological change found prominence in the work  of a range of documentary photographers operating in Britain in the closing decades of the twentieth century that tended to gaze at this clearance and redevelopment, through a lens that seemed increasingly cynical of the proposed utopian futures of post-war development, preferring instead to highlight the social unrest and implications of change to those caught in living amongst the transient ruins of modernity. Dillon goes as far as to suggest that dereliction and clearance is a necessary condition of modernity, dismantling the old forms to make way for the new.