Photography In Focus: How Civil War Fails To Interrogate The Image

Civil War is a candidate for Alex Garland's most ambitious film. The scale is mesmerising, and some storming lead performances—particularly from Kirsten Dunst as war photographer Lee Smith—make Civil War a spectacle to savour. And yet, look behind the action and you are left with arguably something of a shallow film. Garland is trying to avoid taking sides in any real-life contemporary parallel. It is no accident that Texas and California—two states on distinctly different sides of the American political divide—somehow emerge as allies. Garland's reluctance to choose sides means that the political overtones, which on paper have all the subtly of a blunderbuss-wielding elephant, lack bite or even relevance. 

This is a point that raised often enough since the film's release, but there is another element to this too. Photography is central to Civil War, far more so perhaps than any of the trailers and (controversial) posters would lead you to believe. Much of the action is framed, shot, and captured through a camera lens, immortalising the conflict with the click of a button. Smith makes a point of stressing the camera's honesty and impartiality. “We don't ask. We record so other people ask,” as she puts it. The documentarian style of the film involves the audience in this process of image collecting and recording, but Garland's mistake is not to put photography itself under the spotlight.

Photography as a wholly impartial, immediate, and factual enterprise is a naive fantasy once peddled by the philosopher Roger Scruton (among others). He wrote that “the ideal photograph […] stands in a causal relation to its subject and ‘represents' its subject by reproducing its appearance.” In English, this means that whatever a photograph captures, that is how it is. Smith's entire mantra of journalistic impartiality hinges on the truth and accuracy of her images. If photographs are anything less than a direct recording and impression of what she sees, then any idea of being a neutral observer and fact collector goes out the window.

With the rise of AI and how image manipulation tools like Photoshop are available so widely, it is easy to cast doubt on this. But even without such new technology, the inherent honesty of photography is a myth. Garland becomes so enveloped in making a movie about war that he forgets to make a movie about truth. This is despite truth famously being described as one of any war's first casualties. If he did focus on truth, he may have come to realise that the history of photography exposes it as anything but an objective process of recording.

Garland doesn't address the fact that ‘being there' to record and photograph carries with it an assumption of authority. Photography was invented in 1822, approaching the peak of British and European imperial rule. During the colonial era, photography became a means of justifying the presence of Europeans and a way to demonise local populations. Deborah Poole wrote that because photographs could be mass-produced and disseminated so quickly, they became an origin point for racial discourse down the lines of visual and physical difference. Through photography, vast audiences could be invited to participate in a backwards process of ‘othering' by comparison to themselves and those behind the camera, an ideological activity fully intended by those behind the camera. 

The passivity and assumed savagery of the colonial subjects mean that the relationship was hierarchical. Photography here was less about factual recording or truth, and more about enshrining a power dynamic between the oppressor and the oppressed. The colonial era is a lesson in how images are always politically loaded representations. Figures of authority may claim that the photograph is as truthful a mode of data collection as it gets, but the portrayals of human life that photography makes possible are anything but impartial. 

Colonialism highlights that you cannot ignore the dynamics of who is allowed to record their own lives and the lives of others. This is as true of war photography as anything else. The Afghan Girl photo, taken by Steve McCurry in 1984 during the Soviet-Afghan war, was a photo reportedly taken without the consent of the subject, Sharbat Gula. CNN previously described this as the most famous photograph in history, with the apparent fear in Gula's eyes an emotive summary of the horrors of war. But what, exactly, was Gula afraid of? The conflict, or an older Western man pulling her out of school demanding that she uncovers her face (despite Pashtun culture requiring women to not show their face to anyone except family members)? When Gula was interviewed in 2002, her anger was apparent. 

Civil War is a relentless film, and as such it never stops to properly dwell on the act of photography that proves so central to its narrative. It considers the emotional toll of being a messenger of truth in a time of war, but not what gives these people the right to capture their truth in the first place. It does not stop to ask questions of subject consent or ethics. In her review for The Independent, Clarissa Loughrey states that Civil War “decontextualises violence and deliberately tosses the entire idea of power out the window.” In trying to make an on-the-fence war film, you could argue that Garland comes across as wilfully ignorant. Civil War film commits the same sin as uninformed photography; it ignores the ways that power and ethics embed themselves into the narrative of an image and the act of image collecting.

Garland does not question what gives the photographers the right to be there, how relations of power flow through the photographs that are taken, or how the images that they collect will fit within a wider narrative of the conflict once all is said and done. The characters claim to be the messengers of truth in a time punctuated by violence and division, and yet with such an incomplete portrait of photography, you cannot help but have a hard time truly believing them. The intention may be there, but the execution is not. 

This is a failure of methodology, more than anything. Eshal Zahur wrote that “the context of the shooting is crucial, if not there is a risk of isolating the photograph from the knowledge and surrounding information. The camera is in the hands of photographers—it is up to them where the gaze falls.” Susan Sontag insightfully made the same point in On Photography; that photography during times of war can divorce images from their power and context, producing a voyeuristic view of war and of its victims that concern themselves with fuelling the narratives of geopolitical power. Civil War places photographers and their craft at the heart of its pulsating story, and yet seems reluctant to inspect this with a sufficient awareness of photography's history. 

Garland's film cannot or does not grapple with how the act of picking up a camera and taking a photo is anything less than a politicised act that hinges on relations of power and difficult ethical decisions. For a film that promises so much, this is one of the reasons why Garland's latest entry feels frustratingly hollow compared to what it could have been.