How can something presumed to be representational — intended to be representational — lie to us? Yet this is the work of images, still and moving. They are a medium that cannot do more than represent the real and in this sense they deceive, by virtue of what they omit, and in the proximity of certain images over others to a captive and ideologically malleable audience. This mendacity of images merits further, closer attention during times of war.

Eduardo Cadava (Princeton) reminded us — thirteen times — of this imperative to look at the lie embedded in the image in a keynote lecture entitled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Image” and given at the Townsend Center ahead of a two-day symposium on the work of the Syrian film collective Abounaddara.

Even if we feel we have a good sense of “media literacy” and are predisposed to skepticism as witnesses to images of war, we are probably less skilled as readers — and objectors — than we imagine ourselves to be. This sentiment, implicit throughout Cadava’s talk, felt intuitive to me, but I realized I had few specific examples to ground it. The example that Cadava employed, the work of Abounaddara, suggests that we live among a dearth of alternative images — images that resist propagandizing, or ownership by anyone other than those they represent. 

This is the gap that Abounaddara’s films, posted weekly on Vimeo since the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011, seek to fill. Most of their work is short; the films curated by UC Berkeley professors Stefania Pandolfo and Anneka Lenssen, which screened at BAMPFA last year, are all under 20 minutes. In addition to eschewing traditional modes of wartime image production and dissemination, the films resist replicating the visual language of the wartime images we are used to — what we might encounter on Instagram or within the first few pages of Google Images.

Cadava, with help from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” dissected what it means to partake in “Emergency Cinema” as Abounadarra claims it does. Filmmaking and viewing generally involve some sense of emergency because, as Cadava put it, there is “no reading of an image that doesn’t expose us to danger.” The danger he and Benjamin both speak of is the product of ephemerality. It is in this way that images always live in a state of “ruin.” According to Cadava, it is this property of ruin that “wounds the form.” Along with the image, all that we think we know — all that we feel familiar attachment to — will soon disappear. 

I thought back here to the question of alternative images. If they are formally more suited to evoking this idea of ruin in an abstract sense, are they also more adept at speaking to ruin in the traditional sense we often associate with war, given that they can dilate the geography, demographics, and — maybe most importantly — time frame of violence?

There is a sense in which trying to understand disappearance and loss as a linear, chronological process is a fool’s errand. “Now is never simply now,” Cadava said, “Benjamin’s ‘now’ does not name a present.” Images, though they claim the “now,” mislead us in their ability to do so. 

Cadava goes on to offer us a model to use the image of war to cut through its own deceptions. Images always depict but are not identical to their referents — this is what generates their “enigmatic” character. When we read representations of violence and destruction, our ability to recognize them as such testifies to our ability to perceive what is concealed or interior. In turn, the “interiority of violence” is the quality that makes possible its disintegration.

The accompanying visual for this portion of the talk, taken from an Abounaddara short, shows two stills of a man’s face, cloaked in shadows in opposing directions. For Cadava, these faces of Abounaddara evince a kind of “de-subjectivization” useful to reconstituting hope. Augmented by the style of the collective, each face reads as “the negative of a face,” or coaxes us to think about the “reaction these faces have had to other faces.”

When I made a visit to BAMPFA the following day, I understood better what Cadava meant. On the first floor, the museum was screening The Imagemaker, a three-channel film installation developed by Abounaddara in 2024. The Imagemaker expends considerable effort drawing focus to the face  — the face of the textile maker Abou Diab specifically. The film trains us to split this focus between the three frames, which often center, if not Diab’s face, some other token of his subjectivity, usually his work and the way he embodies it.

Diab’s Damascus workshop forms an enclave separate from the war-ravaged city. If we are to imagine two additional screens flanking the outer panels of the video installation, would they show more fabrics draped over lines strung twenty feet in the air or more cluttered surfaces strewn with Diab’s tools? Or would they show us something else — something too explicit? 

What is explicit or made central in an image can often be greatly affecting. So many of us have encountered unambiguous images of war that stay with us for weeks or months — and they are unambiguous in part because there are so many of them. But the explicit image fails at visualizing a future or a past because it erases the traces of its making. 

Somewhere around the twelfth or thirteenth way of looking, Cadava expressed what I found to be one of the most useful formulations of how the logic of the world and the logic of the image relate. What matters for both of these logical systems is the “impossibility of experience”; in the context of the image, the impossibility of experience is analogous to the impossibility of complete representation. 

“The task of defining and realizing human rights is infinite,” Cadava continued. This is achievable (of course only partially) through the production of images — but they have to be the right kind of images. Abounaddara argues for the “necessity and responsibility of producing images that give life and dignity to those who lack it.”

Reflecting on the talk, and also on the talk’s introduction by Professors Pandolfo and Lenssen, in which they used the phrase “tyranny of the visual” to describe the digital reality that has spilled over into our entire reality, I began thinking about how much of our crises of representation are equally crises of quantity. How many images exist that no one, besides maybe their photographer, will ever see?

Images of war have evolved. The media ecosystem that Abounaddara began as a reaction to in 2011 no longer holds. The rise of short form video content, and platforms to support it, have aided in the further dissolution of the broker role once occupied by established media outlets. A person living in the US, for example, is far more likely to encounter a video or photo captured and posted by a person experiencing geopolitical violence now than they might have been fifteen years ago. 

Still, as is often the case with war, more is the same than is changed. Few images from the war in Gaza strike me as non-explicit, or lend their subjects much “life” or “dignity,” even those distributed by more grassroots sources. The impulse to shock is another interpretation of what it means to engage in the production of “emergency” images. But as Abounaddara suggests, it cannot be the only one, and it often is not the right one.

The emergency being responded to through the image is less about the prevention of future destruction and violence. Images cannot do this. Rather, preservation, through the image, is a worthy enough object of the emergency in and of itself. 

Image: The Imagemaker, Abounaddara, 2024, (installation view at BAMPFA)