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1

Domesticating War in Kosovo

Media Witnessing and Transnational Motherhood

In April 1999 American news media extensively reported on the NATO bombings in Serbia and Kosovo/a,1 a seventy- eight- day military effort led by the United States to force the regime of Slobodan Milošević to end the persecution of the Albanians in the previously autonomous region of Kosovo/a. Throughout the 1990s, news media reported on genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, including stories of rape, tor-ture, concentration camps, and mass killings by Serbian forces against vari-ous ethnic groups, including Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims. In Kosovo/a, a campaign by Serbian military and paramilitary forces against ethnic Alba-nians (who made up 90 percent of the population in the province) began in 1998 and intensified through 1999. In that year, militarized violence re-sulted in an estimated four hundred thousand refugees and internally dis-placed persons (Hehir 2010a, 7).

The U.S.- led NATO bombing campaign ensued in the aftermath of failed European and American diplomatic efforts to stop the Serbian re-gime’s program of ethnic cleansing. Supporters of the NATO operation advocated for international intervention to avoid a genocidal catastrophe similar to what occurred in Bosnia (Hehir 2010a, 7). Scholars have sub-sequently identified this campaign as a “watershed moment in contem-porary international affairs,” the first international military operation against a sovereign state on humanitarian grounds (Ker- Lindsay 2010, 168; see also Chandler 2006 and Bellamy 2010). President Bill Clinton, for in-stance, stated that the United States, along with the rest of the NATO al-liance, had a moral imperative “to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive. . . . By acting now, we are upholding our values, protecting our interests, and upholding the cause of peace” (quoted in Lyon and Malone 2010, 24).

24 · DomEStICAtIng WAr In KoSoVo

Since most acts of torture and repression remained hidden from Western news cameras, photojournalists visualized the mounting crisis through pictures of fleeing Albanian Kosovars and crowded refugee camps. Pic-tures of women with small children were especially prominent in this coverage. The April 12, 1999, cover of Time, for instance, shows a young woman in the foreground walking toward the camera while staring blankly ahead of her (Figure 3). A white headscarf draws attention to her face, while her heavy coat underscores the adverse weather conditions made visible by the snow on the ground. Slightly out of focus, a line of refu-gees appears behind her, but nothing else distracts the viewer’s gaze from the woman. Significantly, the woman’s light skin and contemporary cloth-ing encourage a reading of her within a Western racial logic of whiteness, while the baby nursing at her partially visible breast narrows the perspec-tive on this conflict and its impact on noncombatants to a gender ideal of maternal suffering. The headline, “Are Ground Troops the Answer?,” as-sumes that the question is how, not whether, to rescue this “white” woman, the nursing baby, and, by extension, the other innocent victims of this war.

American news media made the case for NATO intervention through compelling pictures of Albanian Kosovars fleeing in mountainous land-scapes and huddled together in crowded refugee camps. The camera’s gaze in the Time cover photo, for instance, pulls the viewer into the space of the mother and baby through the close- up shot. The intimacy of this gaze hails viewers to look closely at this representative figure group. Visualizing desperate conditions through an iconic figure of maternal vulnerabil-ity frames affective intensities within a familiar narrative of domesticity.2 Other articles in the issue use a storyline of innocence and guilt to de-scribe the growing crisis in Kosovo that deflects attention from the histor-ical causes of war, including the integral role of American and European economic and political interests in the persistent instabilities in this region (Chomsky 1999; Žižek 2000; Kaldor 2007).

The Time cover portrait of the mother and child belongs to one of the most recognizable tropes of civilian vulnerability in the history of conflict photography (Taylor 1991; Kozol 1994; Brothers 1997). Associations between childhood, maternal care, and political innocence in the mother– child dyad overtly echo the Christian visual tradition of the Madonna and Child. In the case of Kosovo/a, a racial logic of whiteness structuring this domestic ideal also occludes racial or ethnic differences. Elsewhere categorized as non- Western people of color, media representations of Albanian Muslims here (mis)represent them by featuring white- looking victims in need of rescue.

DomEStICAtIng WAr In KoSoVo · 25

Photojournalists routinely note that their photographs publicize con-flicts that would otherwise remain invisible to Western audiences.3 Such assertions derive from over a century of using the camera as a tool for bearing witness to violence and war (Sliwinski 2011). News coverage of

Figure 3. “Are Ground Troops the Answer?” time cover, April 12, 1999, with a photograph of an Albanian Kosovar mother and child fleeing to Macedonia.


the conflicts in the Balkans continued this tradition of bearing witness by turning the camera’s gaze to its victims. The moral imperative for conflict photographers to bear witness privileges the camera’s presumed mechani-cal objectivity as the transparent means to “never forget.” Recognizing that survivors surely will not forget, Andrea Liss (1998) instead calls attention to the problematics that arise when photographers and viewers rely on visual media to witness and to remember. In her discussion of representa-tions of the Holocaust, she “issues a warning to those, including me, who step into this shadowy realm of ghosts and photographs, whose steps inevitably trespass into the sites and traces of death, of lives effaced, of genocide” (xi). I am deeply mindful of Liss’s concerns about the violence that accompanies the inevitable “trespass” in pictures like Time’s refugee mother and child. At the same time, news media often remain the only ac-cess for many viewers to visual knowledge of distant suffering.

The profound challenge for viewers and scholars is to balance the so-cial and political value derived from this affective visual economy with recognition of the news media’s reliance on spectacular, overly simplified, and often ahistorical representations. Photographs like the Time cover may convey dire suffering, but they also mobilize racial, gender, and sex-ual logics of domesticity in ways that perpetuate a Western gaze at a re-gion historically imagined as a site of premodern and intractable ethnic conflict (Žižek 2000, 3– 5; Hehir 2010a, 2– 4). Moreover, U.S. news media cannot be disaggregated from their broader corporate structures that are invested in maintaining American global economic and political domi-nance. Not surprisingly, then, news representations of crises outside the United States, as in the case of the NATO bombings, typically configure conflicts through the lens of national security concerns (see, e.g., Koshy 1999; Mirzoeff 2005, 2011).

This chapter analyzes news coverage by Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, the three highest circulating American newsmagazines at the time, of the first two weeks of the NATO air strikes.4 In the first sec-tion, I address the historical development of the now- common demand for international publicity about humanitarian crises. I consider this de-mand for visual representations of human suffering in light of affects and ideological framings that ambivalently position viewers in relation to the nation- state, its foreign policies, and, importantly, the noncombatants at the center of this violence. In the next two sections, I look more closely at how ambivalence shapes media witnessing in these newsmagazines’ cover-


age of the NATO bombings. Recognizable markers of identity such as race and gender, along with narrative structures, production practices, and po-litical contexts, are among the many factors that complicate the witness-ing encounter with distant suffering. Witnessing is never a stable site but one in which various actors, institutions, contexts, and texts interact “to authorize one kind of witness over another” (Blocker 2009, xiii). Analysis of these magazines’ rhetorical efforts to produce an “authoritative witness” takes up the question of what work photographs “do” in order to inter-rogate the possibilities of ethical spectatorship within mainstream media’s coverage of U.S. military actions.

Looking elsewhere, as I suggested in the introduction, can reinforce nationalist logics, but it can also explore an alternative optics for repre-senting war, trauma, and suffering. Photojournalists, photographers lo-cated outside media corporations, and others invested in producing visual representations of humanitarian crises widely recognize the problematics of spectacle endemic to news coverage of conflict zones (Hesford 2011, 189). How, though, to visualize trauma without replicating a Western gaze that bears witness through a spectacular gaze at the gendered victim? How, in other words, can reparative projects disrupt or reconfigure the problemat-ics of gazing at suffering?

In the last section of this chapter, I turn to a photo- testimonial proj-ect by Melanie Friend, Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible, 1994– 1995, which renegotiates the lens of domesticity by refusing the embodied spectacle of conventional photojournalism. In this installation project, an audiotape replays oral testimonies about early morning raids on houses, brutal attacks of family members, and other violent acts com-mitted against Albanian Kosovars by Serbian forces in the 1990s. Friend juxtaposes this oral register of torture with photographs of tranquil do-mestic scenes largely absent of people. This juxtaposition between visual and verbal registers destabilizes expectations about what can or should be made visible in news depictions of militarized violence. Friend’s reparative project fosters an ethical spectatorship by confronting the endemic issue of spectacle in conflict photography while insisting on the political value in documenting social violence.

Analyzing Homes and Gardens alongside photojournalists’ coverage of the NATO bombing campaign provides an opportunity to explore the ethico- humanitarian imperative within media witnessing. In looking else-where, Homes and Gardens raises an important, if perhaps unresolvable,


set of questions about the ethical challenges of visualizing the suffering body. Friend’s denial of the visual spectacle of injury and victimization critiques the scopic desires embedded in photojournalism, yet the absence of bodies is not without its own cultural and political risks. What, in other words, are the consequences for ethical spectatorship of not representing traumatized bodies?

War, Humanitarianism, and media Witnessing

Throughout the 1990s the American news media represented the Balkans as a bewildering region rocked by ethnic violence after the collapse of communist regimes. Covering the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, report-ers described concentration camps, torture, mass murder, and the expul-sion of thousands from their homes. By mid- decade, reporters also began to discuss the extraordinarily high levels of sexual violence by Serbian forces in this region, especially in Bosnia. Statistics vary widely, but con-servative estimates of women raped in Bosnia range from twenty thou-sand to fifty thousand (Boose 2002). Groups fighting Serbian forces, in-cluding the Bosnians and later the Albanians, also committed rapes and other atrocities, although never at the scale of the Serbian violence.

Efforts by humanitarian and feminist groups to publicize rape camps, massacres, and other genocidal acts garnered international political and media attention to the region. Feminists, for instance, emphatically insisted that rape was not an aberration by individual soldiers but rather a po-litical and military tool of ethnic cleansing (Milic 1993; Allen 1996; Rejali 1998). Lynda Boose (2002, 74), for instance, argues that the sexual sadism of Serbian brutality was crucial to this “orgy of nationalism.” Growing out-rage at evidence of systematic sexual violence, torture, and mass killings in Bosnia led to a UN peacekeeping mission and, subsequently, NATO in-tervention. To many, though, these actions came too late to be effective. Hence, when Serbian violence escalated against Albanian Muslims in the late 1990s, U.S. and European media attention quickly turned to Kosovo/a. After the breakdown of diplomatic efforts, mounting pressure from vari-ous constituencies to avoid what they perceived to be another potential failure of the international community (after both the Bosnian and the Rwandan genocides earlier in the decade) led to widespread support for military intervention (Chandler 2006; Hehir 2010a).

For American viewers, the moment of most intense interest in the re-


gion came in April 1999 when American television, newspapers, and the major newsmagazines all provided extensive coverage of the seventy- eight- day bombing campaign. U.S. leadership in this humanitarian inter-vention provoked debates about sovereignty, international obligations, and appropriate military actions. In addition, political leaders and social commentators perceived this as an opportunity to demonstrate the ratio-nale for NATO’s existence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Lyon and Malone 2010, 18; Hehir 2010b, 187). In a statistical analysis of public opinion data, Lyon and Malone (2010, 19) found that public support in the United States was fairly low prior to the start of NATO operations but quickly rose to 70 percent once the bombings began.

Photojournalism continues to be a primary venue for the visual representation of military conflict even as televisual and digital media increasingly compete for consumers’ attention. Belief in objectivity in news reporting and faith in the mechanical qualities of the camera have long supported assertions about photojournalism’s ability to bear wit-ness to human suffering. Until the 1920s, photographers were typically confined by heavy equipment and slow shutter speeds to posed portraits and aftermath scenes of military conflicts and other forms of social violence. In the late 1920s, the development of small- format cameras that used 35 mm roll film enabled photographers to expand coverage to can-did shots, including on the battlefield. In Europe, weeklies such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung experimented with layout and incorporated photographs into series to tell a visual story, the precursor to the photo- essay (Kozol 1994, 29).

Photojournalism gained further credibility with coverage of the Span-ish Civil War when European and American newspapers and magazines publicized this conflict through photographs of the bombings of villages, civilian casualties, and fleeing refugees, including mothers and children (Brothers 1997). In a compelling contemporary response to these atroci-ties, Virginia Woolf writes in Three Guineas (1938) about the affective impact of viewing pictures of a recent civilian massacre in Spain. At the center of this visionary feminist antiwar critique of patriarchal privi-lege, Woolf contrasts five photographs of British public figures, including a lawyer, church leaders, and an army general with the narrator’s visual memories of looking at pictures of dead women and children. As Maggie Humm (2003, 647) explains, “Three Guineas displays photographs as both index and icon: narrator memories of absent photographs of the Spanish


Civil War, memories to which the narrator continually returns, together with published photographs of the public, patriarchal world, a world that Woolf attacks in the argument of the text.” In choosing not to reproduce the atrocity photographs, Woolf ’s memory work addresses gendered si-lences in public cultures about the impact of war on civilians, especially on women and children. Three Guineas is an exemplary moment in the long history of debates about photographic spectatorship and visual ethics.

In the 1930s, technological innovations in printing and communica-tions enabled faster transmission of photographs and the development of picture magazines such as Life and Look. As National Socialists accrued greater power in Germany and war grew increasingly likely, a number of influential photographers and editors immigrated to the United States and Britain, contributing further to the development of picture magazines in those countries. Increasing popularity of documentary photography, newsreels, and the new picture magazines furthered the growth of pho-tography in news publications (Kozol 1994; Zelizer 1999).

Established in 1936, Life gained national prominence during World War II when it published two to three war stories per week. American au-diences could regularly follow the progress of the war through pictures taken in battlefronts all over the world, often by world- renowned pho-tographers like Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith. Visual representations of the war linked masculinity to national ideals in photo- essays that featured ordinary but courageous soldiers fighting to pre-serve American values (Kozol 1994). Life’s comprehensive coverage of all theaters of operations during World War II secured photojournalism’s role as the preeminent genre for visual witnessing of conflict zones prior to the development of television news in the 1960s.

In subsequent decades, newspapers and magazines continued to rely extensively on photojournalism to report on American military conflicts. During the Vietnam War, especially after the Tet Offensive, photographers like Larry Burrows and Nick Ut took compelling and often horrifying pic-tures of the effects of napalm on civilian victims, the execution of prisoners, and other atrocities. Commentators still debate whether Americans’ op-position to the war stemmed from seeing such pictures or if photojournal-ists’ increasingly critical gaze was a response to the growing antiwar move-ment in the United States.5

In 1963 television news programs changed from fifteen to thirty min-utes and began to include extensive coverage of the Vietnam War. As more Americans turned first to television and then to the Internet, many picture


magazines closed, and newspapers today struggle to maintain their reader-ships. Despite these developments, photojournalism remained a vital re-source at the turn of twenty- first century, evident in the extensive photo-graphic coverage of the NATO intervention provided by Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. These newsmagazines continued to have broad influence because “nearly every high school, public and academic library” purchased them (Ulrich’s Periodical Directory 2003).

Because of publishing deadlines, weekly newsmagazines operate as a “news digest” that recapitulates television and newspaper reports on events of the previous week. In these news digests, photographs func-tion as visual “highlights” less significant for their factual reportage than for their symbolic functions (Griffin and Lee 1995, 814). Like other news genres, newsmagazines rely on a narrative framework that envisions the United States as a powerful yet benevolent intercessor in global economic, political, and social conflicts (Koshy 1999). Major media conglomerates that own Time (Time- Warner) and Newsweek (Washington Post, Inc.)—U.S. News is independently published— are part of a powerful network of American media that controls the flow of information and frames in-ternational events within a U.S.- centric worldview such that coverage of foreign affairs is “less about the world than about America in the world” (Magder 2003, 33; see also Shulman 1994). In the case of news coverage of Kosovo/a, pictures of innocent refugees and demonized Serbian leaders provide a visual rationale for NATO intervention as an act of international humanitarianism led by the United States.

Since the eighteenth century, visual culture has been a crucial com-ponent of international human rights discourse, along with political phi-losophies, legal policies, and social efforts to ameliorate suffering. Sharon Sliwinski (2011) contends that images of trauma, violence, and suffering, more than the abstract concept of rights, have been instrumental in foster-ing an international community of spectators around the political tenet of universal humanity. Discussing a foundational moment of visual engage-ment with distant suffering, she argues that visual culture in the eighteenth century encouraged the spectator to embrace the “fragile but critical task” of judgment, that is, of recognizing the other as human (47).

At the turn of the twentieth century, human rights reformers who took up this “fragile task” turned to photography for the first time to provide visual evidence of atrocities committed in the Congo Free State, the per-sonal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium (Sliwinski 2011). Subsequent activists increasingly used the camera to draw attention to other human


rights abuses. Most prominently, photography solidified its importance to human rights discourse at the end of World War II, as photographers responded to General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s command to the press to “let the world see” the horrors of the Holocaust. Barbie Zelizer (1999, 102) argues that this mandate to bear witness “imposed a moral obligation on those recording the camps’ liberation that went beyond the professional mores surrounding either journalism or photography.” Generalized pho-tographs of concentration camp survivors that took precedence over fac-tual specificity about particular places or people resulted in a highly influ-ential visual rhetoric of human rights.

The Holocaust was a pivotal moment in media witnessing, as the enor-mity of this genocide legitimized the charge to the Western news media to bear witness. Contemporary media continue to take up this injunction to witness distant suffering.6 The accessibility of visual witnessing has wid-ened significantly in recent decades with the expansion of telecommunica-tions systems, including twenty- four- hour cable news programming, and the increasing accessibility of the Internet. Humanitarian organizations as well as mainstream and independent media outlets produce and circulate a wide range of pictures of social violence occurring in places typically distant from the spectator.7 The reliance on visuality in human rights dis-course presumes, as Thomas Keenan (2004) argues, that images will not only outrage viewers but, equally important, shame perpetrators into end-ing the violence. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) routinely mobilize this logic in websites, annual reports, and documentary photography and film.

Far from being distinct entities, the intertwining of rights advocacy and news media has been crucial to public awareness about humanitarian crises. Human rights and media scholars have long debated whether television, photojournalism, and other visual media have the potential to mo-bilize empathy and action or if they simply produce spectacles that lack the critical insights necessary to foster political engagement. Many insist that the experience of seeing other people’s suffering can motivate viewers to move beyond personal or national self- interest to a social justice activism. On the other side, critics have long decried mainstream news reporting for its voyeurism, commodification of suffering, reliance on spectacle, and promotion of corporate and statist agendas.8 Media personnel and human rights activists find themselves negotiating between the urgent need to publicize human rights crimes and the risks of creating spectacles of suf-fering, especially since state- sanctioned violence persists unabated today.


Media witnessing, as a term, refers to the dialogic processes of knowl-edge production and affective investment that occur as viewers interact with representations of contemporary events and crises. Rather than en-gage in a debate about the veracity of truth- telling discourses, Paul Frosh (2009, 55) suggests, media witnessing is “a form of communication” and “cultural achievement to be explored.” More broadly, Jane Blocker (2009, 123) insists that representation is by definition a form of witnessing; that is, “to depict, to show, to speak on behalf of, is to stand as witness to some-thing else, real or imagined, empirically knowable or accepted on faith.” She goes on to suggest that, “if this is true, then it must also be true that witnessing must share, as a consequence, in the internal contradictions by which representation is riven” (123). Media witnessing captures the ambiva lence that marks mainstream photojournalism’s often compelling ability to visualize human suffering contained within narrative frames that privilege Eurocentric perspectives.

Media witnessing, like other forms of witnessing, is not simply a task of documentation, for myriad institutional and situational factors shape and constrain the capacity to bear witness. This term references the vari-ous participants in acts of witnessing, including witnesses within news reports; reporters, photojournalists, and other media personnel who them-selves function as witnesses; and, of course, audiences hailed to act as witnesses to multifaceted reportage about humanitarian suffering (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009). As Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski (2009, 135) argue, “Witnessing is a field in which various forces, resources, and agents compete. In other words, witnessing is to be regarded as subject to contest and struggle, and hence as a genuine political arena.” Media witnessing en-compasses but cannot be reduced to a political critique of the news media as a functionary of national or global political economies, or if you will, merely a technology of panoptical vision (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009, 11). Rather, within the neocolonial spectacle of U.S. military power and politi-cal dominance, as in the coverage of the NATO bombing campaign, pic-tures ambivalently hail viewers to witness the suffering of distant others.

Authoritative Witnessing

Today, scholars regard Kosovo/a as the first international military inter-vention in which the stated objectives were humanitarian aid and defense of human rights, not interstate conflicts over sovereignty. Since then, hu-manitarian principles have legitimized other U.S. military interventions,


including Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 (Chandler 2006). Premised on claims of universality, Western ideals of humanitarianism today con-tinue to operate as a discursive tool through which NGOs, activists, and governments promote aid programs and encourage military intervention in defense of human security.9

News photographs intended to activate emotions such as sympathy for distant others have been instrumental in generating support for interna-tional humanitarianism. Realist forms of photography, as John Tagg (2009, 80) argues about 1930s documentary photography of the Depression, often have less “to do with the poor and dispossessed, those objects of documen-tary, and so much more to do with the recruitment of subjects as citizens, called to witness, called to reality and coherence.” Representative of an approach to visual culture that attends to the panoptical power of docu-mentary photography, photojournalism, and other forms of realist visual media, Tagg explores how the state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century sought to deploy visual technologies to produce a “believable pub-lic language of truth that would restore the logics of social sense, call out to a cohesive community, and relegitimize the corporate State as its pater-nal representative” (xxxiii). Taking this concern for the panoptical power of visual culture into the field of human rights discourse, Hesford exam-ines how a visual economy of victimization privileges Western viewers as world citizens of a “global morality market.” Spectacular rhetorics of suf-fering, she argues, consolidate identities and configure “material relations of power and difference to produce and ultimately govern human rights subjects” (Hesford 2011, 9). In so doing, visual news media hail viewers to bear witness within a discursive framework of Western liberal sentimen-tality (156– 58; see also Berlant 2002).

At the same time, the polysemic and unruly nature of representation, or what Zelizer (2010) labels the “subjunctive voice,” can exceed these disciplining logics. What, then, accounts for differences between a disen-gaged viewing experience and an ethical encounter? Sliwinski (2004, 159) suggests that visual images of suffering position viewers within a space of responsibility through the “painful labour of attending to others’ suf-fering.” Ariella Azoulay (2008, 130) similarly argues that the triangulated relationship between photographer, subject, and viewer constitutes a civil contract that engenders possibilities for political recognition of those dis-enfranchised from the state. As she argues, the photographic encounter can provoke “an ethics of the spectator” in which viewers confront their responsibilities toward what is made visible in the photographs.


Balancing between these two persuasive critiques, as I explained in the introduction to Distant Wars Visible, my use of the term ethical spectatorship is an effort to make each term in this concept do more work in relation to the other. How, in other words, do news media call on viewer- witnesses to confront their social and political responsibilities, and importantly, how do these narratives define responsibility in relation to the “global moral-ity market” produced through a paternalistic and sentimental gaze at the suffering other? This section analyzes how visual highlights in the news-magazines’ coverage of the NATO campaign configure the space of re-sponsibility to consider the strategies used that seek to “authorize one kind of witness over another” (Blocker 2009, xiii).

The first two weeks of the NATO campaign in April 1999 were a crucial period during which the news magazines established narrative conven-tions for reporting on this military campaign. Similarities in storylines, narrative strategies, and visual tropes, including some repetition of specific photographs, occur across all three magazines. My findings are similar to Michael Griffin and Jungsoo Lee’s (1995) data on the three newsmagazines’ coverage of the Gulf War, in which they too found relative uniformity be-tween the three newsmagazines. This uniformity is indicative of how pho-tographers, reporters, editors, and other production personnel conform to long- standing conventions of war presentation. Moreover, as Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (2003), an influential directory read by librarians, explains, “the choice between Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report is largely one of personal preference. These three publications are similar in format and content (frequently all three have the same topic as the cover story).”10 The first week’s coverage featured lengthy discussions of U.S. military and political strategies, reports on ethnic cleansing, and articles on Milošević as the progenitor of nationalist violence. Coverage in the second week focused more extensively on the refugees, with numer-ous photographs of people walking along roads or railroad tracks and in refugee camps.

Reporting on the U.S.– NATO campaign provided American viewers with an easily identified enemy, an us versus them narrative structured on both racial logics and historical associations with past violence. Identifi-cation of Milošević as European precluded the intense racism that char-acterizes media representations of other demonized figures like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Rather, the media vilified the Serbian leader by associating ethnic cleansing with the Holocaust and Milošević with Hitler.11 Linking the current conflict to this historic genocide in turn


located the Serbian leader, and by extension Serbia itself, as outside civi-lized nationhood.

Reporters paid little attention to the reasons for the conflict, except to blame the violence on the nationalist ambitions of Milošević, whom one U.S. official referred to as the “tinhorn dictator of Serbia” (McGreary 1999, 40). Like news reportage of Saddam Hussein during both the ear-lier Gulf War and the later war in Iraq, focus on the Serbian leader turned this conflict into a personalized fight against the excessive evils of national-ism. News reports describe Milošević as a dictator, a thug, a Communist Party hack, and a man of no political convictions except to stay in power. Narratives that address only political and military leaders in discussions of the Balkan conflicts, of course, ignore the collective and localized di-mensions of political violence, including European and U.S. historical in-volvement in this conflict.12

All three magazines promoted a popular narrative of American sol-diers rescuing innocent victims in a dangerous and unstable region. Ar-ticles and images presented rescue as a clear moral imperative based in a humanitarian discourse that has long served to legitimize Western po-litical, economic, and military agendas (Kennedy 2009; Hesford 2011). An April 12 photograph from U.S. News, for instance, shows a white, male American soldier in full combat gear in the extreme foreground. He frames the picture so that the viewer looks with him into the background at several cars on a desolate road. The viewer thus “sees” what the soldier is there to protect (presumably these are civilian refugees, although the people in the cars remain unidentified). Above the photograph, the head-line “Can the cavalry ride to the rescue?” invokes a colonialist imaginary of the U.S. cavalry protecting white settlers from dangerous Indians. Both the picture and the headline connect whiteness and masculinity to the res-cue narrative through a mythic temporality in which social actors enact historically defined roles (Fabian 1983). Although the question mark sug-gests ambiguity in the situation, the exclusive focus in the accompanying article on the relative merits of different military strategies foregrounds policy to the exclusion of any consideration of the social or political com-plexities of intervention. Calling up this mythic origin story, masculinity, heroism, and rescue instead align the viewer with a narrative about U.S. military power as the benevolent force extending humanitarian assistance to a global community.

Even prior to the NATO bombings, critics like Vida Penezic (1995) re-


buked Western news depictions of nationalist conflict in postcommunist states for reproducing a Cold War paradigm that blamed ethnic violence and economic crises on the former communist regimes and on nationalist overreach. She writes:

Whether or not this was true for the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia’s situa-tion was not quite that simple. The country has been decentered and federal, with multilingual education, publishing, press, television, and so forth. While this regulated and strictly controlled ethnic tol-erance might not have been enough to assuage nationalist hungers, reducing the causes of war to nationalism only is, in my opinion, overly simplistic. (63)

News coverage of the NATO bombings did not discuss these historical factors or the economic conditions, power struggles between different po-litical groups, and other elements destabilizing the region. Instead, all three magazines displayed a U.S.- centric narrative of the West coming to the rescue of victims in a dangerous and backward locale. As with American media more generally, a persistent orientation toward the U.S. nation- state failed to provide a sufficiently transnational perspective to contextualize this conflict (Koshy 1999). Media witnessing instead promoted an authori-tative gaze with little attention to the significant impact of globalization on the political economy of the Balkans.

Having said that, ambivalences in the news coverage reveal instabili-ties within media witnessing. In the second week, for instance, all three magazines published the same photograph of a long train filled to over-flowing with refugees, many of whom are hanging out of the windows (Figure 4). The train extends across the entire frame of the composition from the left foreground into the right background, effectively blocking any broader view of the city behind. This compositional device keeps the gaze in the foreground where a very large crowd stands on the train platform. Intimate visual contact with this crisis, in which the terrors of displacement are palpable, can push beyond the narrative constraints of mainstream news reportage. Photographs like this one importantly create opportunities for political recognition of refugees facing threats of physi-cal violence and other human security risks.

At the same time, visual and textual rhetorics articulate this desper-ate situation within a Western framework that unquestioningly champions

Figure 4. u.S. news & World report, April 12, 1999, page 15, with a photograph of a train station filled with fleeing Albanian Kosovar refugees.


U.S. and NATO intervention. Much of the affective power of the train photograph derives from the visual allusion to the trains used by the Nazis to transports Jews and other prisoners to the death camps. Such refer-ences (and there are many in these reports) render the scene familiar to Americans who have at least a popular understanding of the Holocaust.13 These historical associations locate the refugees in a space distinct from the viewer, accentuating the temporal, cultural, and geographic distance from the United States to Kosovo/a (Fabian 1983). In accompanying ar-ticles, reporters quote political leaders who explicitly associate ethnic cleansing with a historical narrative of fascism through references to Neville Chamberlain and Czechoslovakia to raise the possibility of vio-lence spreading to the rest of Europe. Western commentators supportive of the NATO air strikes likewise warn of the dangers of appeasement as part of a larger appeal on behalf of human rights. Exclusive attention to human rights crises in this coverage legitimized a humanitarian discourse, which importantly called attention to intense human suffering yet also depoliticized both the conflict and NATO’s military intervention (Žižek 2000, 57).14

Throughout the 1990s, American news media extensively reported on genocidal acts of ethnic cleansing and other forms of oppression by Ser-bian nationalists against ethnic populations in Bosnia, Kosovo/a, and else-where in the former Yugoslavia. Beginning in 1998, Serbian military and paramilitary forces began an escalated campaign against Albanians in Kosovo/a. According to some critics, however, mass expulsions and killings associated with ethnic cleansing did not occur until after the bombings started on March 24, 1999. In the words of NATO commanding general Wesley Clark, it was “entirely predictable” that Serbian violence would es-calate once the bombings started (Chomsky 1999, 37; see also Hehir 2010b, 188). Critics at the time charged that NATO and the United States did not wait to exhaust diplomatic and economic options, but instead retrospec-tively used evidence of ethnic cleansing to justify the bombings (Chomsky 1999; Haynes 1999). While humanitarian issues were of grave concern to many, NATO prestige was also on the line (Hehir 2010b, 187). Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has had to reconfigure its legitimacy as an interna-tional institution. Interventions in the Balkans were part of a larger effort by NATO to extend its reach to a wider geopolitical arena than the original purpose of the European Alliance. As Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain


explained, “To walk away now would destroy NATO’s credibility” (quoted in Chomsky 1999, 40).

Defense of humanitarian intervention also ignored the substantial ma-terial interests at stake for NATO and the United States. These interests included investments by arms manufacturers and Western businesses, oil companies’ efforts to secure pipelines across the Balkans, and the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the region. In the late 1980s and 1990s, for instance, IMF austerity programs to secure debt repayment increased the region’s economic instabilities. Moreover, as the former Yugoslavia broke up, recognition or nonrecognition of states by Western countries had significant and unequal impact on their political economies. Pressure on the Clinton administration also came from expatriate groups in the United States as well as businesses advocating international policies that would increase access to global markets (Haynes 1999; Kaldor 2007, 125– 26).

An authoritative form of witnessing emerges in the newsmagazines’ coverage of the Kosovo/a campaign through rescue narratives focused on the vulnerability of the Kosovars. Crucially, the newsmagazines character-ized the Balkans as a primitive region violently shaped by historic ethnic rivalries. Pictures show people walking in single file on railroad tracks to avoid land mines or fleeing amid desolate landscapes. In Newsweek, for instance, an April 12 photograph depicts a man in the foreground pushing a wheelbarrow in which sits an elderly woman wrapped in a headscarf, winter coat, and blanket. Behind them another man also pushes an elderly person in a wheelbarrow and two others walk along the road. This primi-tive mode of transportation underscores the refugees’ vulnerable status, while the desolate landscape offers no clues to specific geographic, tem-poral, or cultural locations. Images of seemingly helpless, elderly women cared for by men with limited resources create sympathetic portraits of those in need. Moreover, these pictures render Kosovar men solely with-in a subordinate masculinity that depends on the protection of outside forces, and represent women as vulnerable and needy because of their age and gender. Sympathy, of course, is an ambivalent emotion often tied, as here, to paternalistic narratives that reinforce a humanitarian worldview in which poverty, lack of resources, and vulnerability to social violence are material occurrences that happen outside the West.

Looking elsewhere at peasants in a premodern setting erases the range of material resources and cultural experiences of the Albanian Kosovars.15


Moreover, this narrative of humanitarian intervention depoliticizes the racialization underpinning this military action. Progressive commenta-tors at the time criticized NATO’s racial selectivity that contrasts inter-vention in the former Yugoslavia with the lack of international actions to stop the genocide in Rwanda or other sites of ethnic- political conflict such as Sierra Leone and Palestine (Chomsky 1999; Haynes 1999). The photo-graphs reinforce this racial privilege when they feature Albanian Muslims who look white, like the intended reader, if less modern.

Physically locating the conflict in a nightmarish space, pictures like the one of the elderly woman in the wheelbarrow and the photograph of the train station create what Slavoj Žižek (2000, 4– 5) refers to as the “imagi-nary cartography” of the Balkans, a “terrain of ethnic horrors and intol-erance” still fighting centuries- old battles presumably in contrast to the advanced democratic status of the West. Rather than question categories like East and West, which could have happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, photographs of refugees resecure an imagined cartography that defines Europe as the countries of Western Europe while the Balkans remain somewhere on the fringes of civilization.16 These images also play into enduring Cold War– style narratives that continue to depict socialism as a failure of modernity. This humanitarian gaze, furthermore, ignores the local and transnational forces shaping the region’s economy. After the collapse of communist regimes, hyperinflation, austerity measures, and other economic constraints intensified social and political unrest in the region. Escalating debt increasingly weakened the region’s economies, re-sulting in high unemployment that “led to a sense of ontological insecu-rity, which was assuaged by the simplicities of the nationalist rhetoric” of Milošević and his supporters (Kaldor 2007, 126). News media ignored or minimized local, regional, and transnational factors shaping this conflict, while the “visual highlights” featured in the three newsmagazines worked to secure an authoritative form of witnessing through reductive spectacles of demonized leaders and innocent refugees.

The lack of references to Albanian politics similarly ignores the diversi-ty of Albanian identities and political activism. None of the magazines, for instance, discussed the nonviolent agenda of the Albanian intellectual and political leader Ibrahim Rugova (Chomsky 1999; Mertus 1999, 6). Instead, the only coverage of Albanian responses to Serbian violence focused on the small militant Kosovo/a Liberation Army (KLA). Photographs featured male KLA soldiers in combat uniforms but without any signs of actual


combat.17 Compared with detailed discussions of American military equip-ment, strategy, and personnel, reports on the KLA emphasized the lack of equipment, training, and the general incompetence of these fighters. This contrast further eliminates political alternatives to the spectacle of victim-ization. Žižek (2000, 59) argues that NATO intervened to protect Kosovar victims while making sure they would remain victims; that is, there was no international support for Albanians to become full political agents or to sustain an armed resistance. He describes this as the “paradox of vic-timization: the Other to be protected is good in so far as it remains a victim” (60).

While Žižek offers an incisive critique of the humanitarian discourse mobilized to justify military intervention, his exclusive focus on repre-sentations of Kosovars as victims fails to acknowledge the ambivalences that structure media witnessing despite the powerful disciplining logics of rescue that pervade this coverage. In a half- page picture in U.S. News on April 12, for instance, the photographer’s high- angle shot of refugees makes the crowd appear very large as people extend out to the edges of the frame (Figure 5). In the center foreground, a woman holds out her hands in a supplicant pose with the caption, “Pleading. A woman from Kosovo asks Macedonian police officers to let her cross the border. Thousands waited without food or water.” As the focal point of the composition, the female supplicant stands as the representative of the waiting group. According to Žižek (2000, 58), representations like this one create the “ideal subject- victim in aid,” a phrase that refers to humanitarian representations of Albanians not as political subjects who struggle for their own survival or fight back but only as feminized objects of the Western gaze. Žižek’s cri-tique of the idealized victim, however, underestimates the affective and ideological complexities of photographic representation. This woman’s sym-bolic status as victim is complicated by her presence as a spokesperson for the group. Standing at the front of a crowd demanding aid, she as-serts her political subjectivity as she spreads her arms wide to claim space in the public sphere of the refugee camp. As Azoulay (2008, 18) suggests, subjects in crisis who consent to being photographed “participate actively in the photographic act and view both this act and the photographer fac-ing them as a framework that offers an alternative— weak though it may be— to the institutional structures that have abandoned and injured them.” Captioning this woman’s actions as “pleading” certainly produces a moral imperative to witness within the frame of humanitarianism. At the same

Figure 5. u.S. news & World report, April 12, 1999, page 23, with a photograph of a group of Albanian Kosovar refugees led by a woman trying to cross the border into Macedonia.


time, affective excesses associated with her visible assertion of political subjectivity within the public space of the refugee camp can subjunctively destabilize that moral gaze.

As other critics have rightly cautioned, images of suffering do not nec-essarily result in specific or effective acts of intervention (see, e.g., Sontag 2003; Sliwinski 2004; Dauphinée 2007). Yet the veritable explosion of vi-sual cultures now depicting conditions of suffering around the world can-not be easily dismissed either, for they provide, at the very least, a visual perspective on the problematic of social responsibility (Sliwinski 2004, 159). Because authoritative witnessing is always a struggle to secure one narrative over others, ambivalence also enables an analytic perspective on how visual news reportage is complicit with corporate structures sustain-ing Western geopolitical imperatives even as visual texts create spaces for affective investments that push against this normative gaze, including pos-sibilities for recognizing the subjectivities of those depicted. In this regard, images like the pleading woman reveal both the capacity to witness and its limits.

transnational motherhood

Media witnessing of Kosovar refugees prominently feature attractive, white- looking mothers on two newsmagazines’ covers and as the opening two- page spread in all three magazines in the second week of coverage. In important ways, these pictures provide the visual alibi for a national nar-rative about U.S. military power as a humanitarian force for global politi-cal good. As Blocker (2009, xvii) writes, “Witnessing is an act of represen-tation, of picturing, an act that is staged in the aesthetic domain of the visible and the invisible.” In/visibility crucially informs the racial logic of whiteness, for there are few signs legible to Western viewers that would identify the Albanian refugees as nonwhite or, for that matter, as Muslim (such as the veil, which many non- Muslims associate with religious af-filiation). Functioning as a metonym for the innocence of the refugees, the visual embodiment of white motherhood does not so much produce knowledge about the conflict as turn subjects into spectacles of trans-national motherhood.

I use the term transnational motherhood to reference how pictures of mothers and children presumably traverse, if not transcend, cultural dif-ferences. Spectacles of transnational motherhood depend on supposedly


universal ideals about gender, maternal care, vulnerability, and innocence. From its earliest history, photographic efforts to depict political conflicts and violence have turned to this iconic sign of innocent suffering (Kozol 1994; Brothers 1997; Wexler 2000). In coverage of the NATO bombings, isolating the figure group of the mother and child makes the conflict not only visible but also legible to the Western viewer.

Humanitarian discourse typically configures suffering as a universal condition that articulates supposedly shared values between viewers and subjects of the gaze. Within this visual economy of victimization, photo-graphs of women with their young children articulate an ideal of universal maternal care. For instance, a tightly framed photograph in U.S. News from April 12 shows a group of refugees enclosed in a space that appears to be surrounded by a wooden fence (the caption explains that the wood frame is part of the back of a truck). In the center of the composition, a woman cries in anguish while holding a child in her arms. Sandwiched between her and another woman who holds a hand to her face is a young boy who stares soberly at the camera. The crying woman’s intense expression of vulnerability associates her suffering with maternal responsibilities, while the boy’s stare seems to beckon the viewer to care. The prominence of images of mothers and children in this two- week period indicates that both photographers and editors understood the value of sentimentality in human rights discourse. The moralizing function of images like these ac-tivates universal ideals that invite the spectator to recognize the humanity, not the ethnic differences, of these women and children (Chouliaraki 2006, 165). Whiteness, moreover, contains the otherness of Albanian Kosovars who, like this anguished mother, lack racial, ethnic, or, frequently, religious markers of difference. Despite social developments in the second half of the twentieth century that include the rise of feminist movements in vari-ous parts of the world, idealized domesticity in the form of the racialized mother– child dyad continues to have valuable ideological and affective resonances within the U.S. cognitive grid.

The deployment of maternal imagery in service of the nation- state is, of course, not limited to U.S. or even Western rhetorical strategies. In the 1980s and 1990s both Serbian and Albanian governments and political leaders mobilized maternal tropes to support national ideals and to justify state militarism. Serbian policies instituted during the 1980s included the outlawing of abortion, demands that women sacrifice their sons and hus-bands, the symbolic use of women as sexual objects to signify the nation at


risk, and state- sanctioned rape justified as a form of revenge against men of enemy states (Milic 1993; Allen 1996; Boose 2002). Motherhood was a key rhetorical logic in Serbian efforts to increase its own population as well as attempts to limit the Albanian population (among the highest in Europe). For instance, laws provided incentives to Serbian families to have more children while cutting benefits to Albanians (Drakulic 1993). Popular culture likewise contrasted Serbian mothers with Albanian women who were described “as baby makers, calling their offspring ‘biological bombs’” (Mertus 1998, 178). Nationalist rhetorics also invoked dangers to the family as justification for violence against ethnic groups. Andjelka Milic (1993), for instance, describes a photograph that was popular in Serbia in the early 1990s. The picture shows a woman holding a child in one arm and a gun in the other as she patrols an empty village road. This popular image both visualizes the nation in jeopardy and displays the willingness of citizens to defend the nation. A woman toting both a child and a gun can also be read as a shaming demand for masculine protection by displacing this woman from the normative sphere of mothering into the sphere of national secu-rity.18 Women’s bodies have long been deployed to sustain symbolic claims of nation- states. Despite their symbolic importance, however, women, es-pecially women from minoritarian communities, continue in many places to have a tenuous hold on citizenship (Yuval- Davis 1997; Cubilié 2005). Feminists throughout the former Yugoslavia, including Serbian Women in Black who protested against the Milošević regime, were all too aware of this tenuous citizenship built on selective ideals of the gendered body (Enloe 2000, 142– 51).

Reliance on representations of gendered citizenship, not surprisingly, also occurred in Albanian Kosovars’ nationalist rhetorics. As Ellen Berry (1995, 2) states, “Representations of the body— especially the female body— and the larger cultural meanings it assumes, are particularly striking sites for witnessing the performance of complex national dramas of crisis and change.” Albanian narratives that emphasized victimization within a hos-tile Yugoslav state drew on the image of female vulnerability to reinforce “the larger Kosovar Albanian identity, that of the suffering people. . . . All problems lead in one direction, to the oppressive Serbian state” (Mertus 1998, 173). Similar to American news coverage, Albanian nationalist rheto-ric elided women’s political agency and experiences as it employed the symbolic ideal of heteronormative domesticity.

Transnational motherhood in American news coverage contrasts with


Serbian and Albanian legal and cultural discourses that tethered gender to nationalism. Instead, the three newsmagazines downplay Albanian Kosovars’ “otherness” by privileging a universal ideal of maternity that at-tempts to transcend political, cultural, and racial differences. The cover photograph in U.S. News for April 12 exemplifies the process of “domesti-cating alterity” (Morley 2000, 223) (Figure 6). Above the headline “Balkan Hell,” three figures in the center of the composition look out at the cam-era. With a somber but calm gaze, a woman holds a small child while an older boy leans against her. Even more explicitly than other mother and child images in this news coverage, this photograph evokes the Christian art tradition of the Madonna and Child flanked by one or more saints. In the extreme foreground a person whose head is covered in a white cloth moves toward the picture plane. This forward- bent posture implies movement beyond the camera’s frame and into the viewer’s space. The tri-angular position of the main figure group creates a stability that counter-balances the dynamic movement of this foreground figure. Compositional and iconographic stability signified by this Madonna and children fore-grounds heteronormativity, albeit normativity at risk. During the Balkan wars, reporters often told of Serbian detention and killings of fathers and husbands. Depicting the family without the male figure underscores the social crisis and reinforces the call to rescue mothers and children.

Images of suffering, in other words, that hail the witness to gaze at iconic motherhood make suffering legible within a humanitarian visual logic. Yet this picture does more than simply produce a spectacle that elides local contexts and political struggles. Media witnessing here domesticates alterity as part of justifications for military intervention, but her subjectiv-ity is not so easily contained. Aesthetic strategies in this witnessing text position the Albanian mother’s political subjectivity as distinct from that of the viewer through the compositional stability, the direct stare that could be read as suspicious of the photographer/viewer, and the main fig-ure group’s visual distance from the viewer, blocked partly by the fore-ground figure. In explaining the political significance of the civic contract of photography, Azoulay (2008, 14) argues that viewers rely on “a civic skill, not an exercise in aesthetic appreciation,” in recognition of the politi-cal subjectivity of those at risk. As visual analyses in this chapter demon-strate, however, aesthetic factors are not easily disentangled from content and thus are inseparable from recognition of both human suffering and political subjectivity (Reinhardt 2007).

Figure 6. “Balkan Hell,” u.S. news & World report cover, April 12, 1999, with a photograph of an Albanian Kosovar refugee mother and her children.


Even as this depiction of transnational motherhood incorporates the Albanian mother and her children within an American ideal of domes-ticity, she remains other in her (unlabeled) ethnicity and in her state of crisis. Victimization thus can also activate affective investments that may exceed liberal humanitarian constraints. In writing about a different mo-ment in American news coverage of social violence, Jennifer Peterson (2011, 129) comments that “the logic of public mourning is also a logic of who matters in the polity or who is recognizable as part of the politi-cal body.” Although the caption does not identify her religious affiliation, the accompanying article discusses the violence in Kosovo/a as an ethnic conflict between Serbian Christians and Albanian Muslims. Within the framework of transnational motherhood, this woman’s religious otherness provokes a tension between sameness and difference. Both like and un-like the viewer, she exists within a political space of violence similar to the woman demanding aid. Recognition here oscillates between identifying similarities (recognizing the other as human) while remaining distant and distinct (the other who is not like the self).

Photographs that turn to motherhood as a symbol that presumes to transcend differences nevertheless rely on aesthetic strategies that bring viewers into an intimate space with subjects of political violence. Excesses within pictures of transnational motherhood that can destabilize disci-plining logics reveal the potentials for ethical spectatorship within main-stream visual news practices as well as the limiting strictures of media wit-nessing. A question that arises, then, and one hard to answer, is whether such excesses are in fact enough to foster the recognition of the other’s political subjectivity? Do such excesses encourage, even perhaps provoke, an interrogation of what constitutes the responsibilities of the viewer across social, economic, and political differences? While it is impossible to answer such questions without empirical study, well beyond the meth-odological confines of this project, it is worth noting that many photog-raphers working in conflict zones both within and outside media institu-tions grapple with these challenging questions. Not all images succeed, of course, nor indeed are all intended to be provocative. But the presence of images within mainstream news media that contain ambivalent, contin-gent, and excessive meanings suggestively indicates photographers’ efforts to work both within and beyond hegemonic constraints. For other visual producers, though, the constraints of media institutions provoke them


to seek alternative optics to represent conflict zones. Looking elsewhere, they face the challenge of visualizing trauma while attempting to avoid the spectacle of embodied suffering. What happens, though, if there is no embodied victim with whom to engage affectively in the violent impacts of war?

Homes and Gardens: trauma, Domesticity, and (In)Visible Bodies

Shadows dancing on a walkway lined with purple, pink, and orange flow-ers lead the eye to a well- maintained house (Figure 7). The calm orderli-ness of this domestic scene recurs throughout the photographs in Melanie Friend’s 1996 photo- testimonial project, Homes and Gardens, about Alba-nian Kosovars persecuted by the Serbian government in the 1990s.19 Friend worked during the 1980s as a photojournalist and published in major news magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the Guardian. She traveled to the Balkans from 1989 to 1995, interviewing and photographing Albanian Kosovars, and then returned in 1999– 2000 to re-interview displaced Kosovars now living in refugee camps (Friend 2001). Homes and Gardens was Friend’s first major work to appear outside main-stream media institutions.

In this installation project designed for exhibition in galleries, Friend critically engages with the generic conventions of photojournalism, in-cluding the problematic focus on representations of embodied suffering standard in visual reportage of conflict zones. Like the title, nothing in this photograph of a house exterior speaks of invasive attacks on homes, arrests, torture, and other human rights violations. Other pictures in this installation show tranquil scenes of house interiors and fenced- in yards. In one backyard, neatly stacked white plastic garden chairs look like ones that can be purchased at the discount stores that populate subur-ban American landscapes. Reminders of the quotidian nature of domestic life include a living room with houseplants and family photographs on the walls. Saturated colors, so different from the century- long tradition of black- and- white conflict photography, highlight the ordinariness of these scenes. The brightness of a blue sky contrasts with the richness of the green paint on a fence and the red brick tiles on a rooftop, while pink flowers on a coffee table stand out against a dark interior. Rather than cre-ate a distance from the Albanian victims of ethnic cleansing, Homes and Gardens reparatively lessens the divide. Pictures that feature plastic garden


chairs, blue sofa covers, and other recognizable consumer goods situate this presumably local conflict within a global political economy. Houses that appear comfortable if not prosperous by Western economic standards further distance this witnessing project from exoticized media depictions of a primitive and violent Kosovo/a. Familiarity here refuses the ideologi-cal distance promoted in many news reports about Third World conflicts to bring the viewer culturally, if not geographically, within proximity of these homes and gardens.

In Homes and Gardens, Friend refuses the photojournalistic convention

Figure 7. Melanie Friend, “No foreign journalists come here so the police feel free to do what they want. In the small towns in Kosova they do what they want.” Homes and gardens: Documenting the Invisible, 1994– 1995, 1996. Melanie Friend, no Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (San Francisco: Midnight Editions, 2001). Copyright Melanie Friend, 2001. Reprinted with publisher’s permission.


that visualizes conflict through embodied victimization. Notably, she re-sists the temptation to use the camera as a recording device, to witness in the juridical sense. Because witness testimonies can be discredited, visual documentation has historically retained credibility as legal evidence.20 Yet torturers easily learn techniques of abuse that do not leave marks, and, as in other cases of state- sponsored violence, without visual evidence Serbian officials readily denied their involvement in human rights abuses. One challenge, then, for photographers like Friend is to represent traumas hidden from the camera without returning to the spectacle of embodied suffering. In addressing that challenge, this reparative project troubles the voyeurism endemic to gazing at the distant other. Instead, these photo-graphs provide an alternative optics by registering their temporality as “after the fact” depictions absent any visible signs of violence. At the same time, the bright colors and the calm order of domestic scenes affectively problematize the temporality of viewing the aftermath of militarized vio-lence. Are we gazing at what precedes the trauma but doing so after the violation? In a fascinating representational impossibility, do these images then represent a space prior to violation as well as contain the trauma of violation within their ordinariness? Rather than pictures of an innocent past, the absence of the traumatized body in Homes and Gardens func-tions metonymically to configure trauma’s belatedness. Not yet present, the trauma that has not yet returned haunts the photographs like a phantom.21

The absence of the body in almost all the photographs as well as the subtitle of Friend’s exhibition, “Documenting the Invisible,” reference a dilemma for both visual artists and scholars about the representability of trauma.22 Drawing on the work of Holocaust studies, especially that of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, scholars like Cathy Caruth (1996) have argued that trauma is a violent rupture, or shattering break, that de-fies conventional narration and emerges only through belated repetitions of deflected memories. As Carrie Rentschler (2011, 120) explains, in this theoretical model, “sufferers cannot narrate [the trauma] to others but in-stead involuntarily and compulsively display its symptoms over and over again.” Other scholars like Ana Douglass and Thomas Volger (2003) and Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (2004) explore how those attempting to narrate trauma through expressive cultures operate within historical con-ditions that both enable and constrain speech acts. Literary and cultural studies scholars, moreover, caution against Eurocentric assumptions about supposedly universal responses to trauma.23 Friend’s installation project


speaks reparatively to both the need for documentation of human rights abuses and the problematics of representation. The interactive exchange between the oral testimonies and the pictures transforms these ordinary domestic scenes into haunting spaces of unarticulated pain, even though the specific details of the trauma remain unvisualized.

In the only picture that features a person, a woman sits on the side of a bed looking directly at the camera (Figure 8). Elsewhere in the project, the absence of people resists the spectacle, and even the claim of authenticity, that accompanies representations focused on bodies as metonymic figures

Figure 8. Melanie Friend, “I hardly sleep at night as I know that they may come at any moment . . . Even that bit of sleep I get is a complete nightmare full of frightening scenes with the police.” Homes and gardens: Documenting the Invisible, 1994– 1995, 1996. Melanie Friend, no Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (San Francisco: Midnight Editions, 2001). Copyright Melanie Friend, 2001. Reprinted with publisher’s permission.


of political violence. This photograph, thus, remains provocative as the sole image with a person. The sunlight shines on her face, casting a shadow on the wardrobe. Half in shadow, half in light, the woman sits off center in the composition, competing for attention with a painted portrait of a man on the wall behind her. Other contemporary and ancestral portraits on the wall connect her to an unidentified family history that suggests a social order and communal identification in contrast to the traumatic events de-scribed in the oral testimonies. The lack of visible suffering positions this woman in a world surrounded by her family lineage, a framing that locates her in a world distinct from that of the Western viewer. The clarity of de-tails in the room paradoxically does not (cannot) speak of the traumas that haunt this image. As Friend (1996, n.p.) writes, “Without bandages, clearly defined wounds, traumatized faces or crying women, the pictures could not be instantly ‘read’ or interpreted. The people couldn’t be neatly categorised as victims.” If media witnessing typically deploys racial and gender codes of domesticity to make pictures legible to Western audiences, this woman’s story remains unspoken and unavailable.

Juxtaposed to compositions of tranquil sunlit interiors and garden set-tings, oral testimonies describe Albanians’ experiences of terror and vio-lence in their homes at the hands of Serbian police forces.24 Using the ver-bal register to narrate unvisualized violence certainly risks privileging the voice as the authentic embodied expression of trauma. But the ordinari-ness of the pictures pulls the viewer back toward questions about tempo-rality. Not knowing if we are looking before or after the trauma unsettles the relationship between the verbal and visual registers that, in turn, ref-erences the belatedness and persistence of trauma in the spaces of daily life (Hesford 2011, 116). Furthermore, the verbal narrative may convey the memory of trauma, but individuals remain unidentified on the audiotape. Scholars of testimonio distinguish this genre from autobiography because speakers typically articulate collective experiences of trauma (Hanlon and Shaker 2000; Sánchez- Casal 2001). Similarly, testimonials in Homes and Gardens reference both the speakers’ experiences of violence and those of others, whether or not they witnessed these events. The oral register of anonymous men and women speaking together narrates collective memo-ries about violence and trauma.

Homes and Gardens features apparently peaceful domestic spaces with full awareness of the transgressions and violations of such spaces. Rape and other acts of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans were deliberate attempts


by Serbian forces to destabilize communities by violating both men’s and women’s bodies and the domestic spaces that contain them. Torture that included beating men’s genitals and raping women in front of their fami-lies, as well as destroying property and removing family members from their homes and communities, intimately connected violence to the sexual and gender politics of the domestic sphere (Mertus 1998; Boose 2002). Homes and Gardens describes beatings and killings that took place in homes and schools, often early in the morning or late at night. If domes-ticity conventionally signifies a private space of safety, these acts of torture violently destroy that illusion. The testimonial linked to the photograph of the woman states: “I hardly sleep at night as I know that they may come at any moment. . . . Even that bit of sleep I get is a complete nightmare full of frightening scenes with the police” (Friend 1996, n.p.). In connecting nightmares and the unconscious with the gendered body, Friend calls at-tention to the belatedness of trauma while also naming the political and material elements of “the seemingly private space of the unconscious” (Hesford 2011, 116). As Friend (1996, n.p.) notes, “Domesticity could offer neither security nor privacy against a state intent on undermining it.”

The pictures and testimonials of Homes and Gardens reparatively cre-ate an act of witnessing the vulnerability of domesticity and, conversely, the ordinariness of torture and violence. Friend’s photographs resist a he-roic narrative of suffering in favor of scenes that emphasize the persistence of everyday life such as pictures of backyards with laundry ready to be put on the line and carefully tended garden plots.25 Domesticity in Homes and Gardens forces the viewer to rethink the nature of injury and violation when those injuries do not mark particular bodies. Without individual faces and with only unidentified testimonials, scenes of domesticity show what is at risk, rather than show the violations themselves. Instead of gaz-ing at victims, Homes and Gardens renders absence as a sign of what is, or can be, lost. Representations of the domestic that refuse to “see” traumatic suffering disrupt nationalist discourses in which the family stands met-onymically for the state.

Witnessing always runs the danger of erasing aspects of violence and trauma when representational strategies privilege some visual and textual narratives over others. Friend recognizes the risks of such erasures in rep-resenting social violence, finding an alternative optics for exploring the visibilities of absence and loss. This complex understanding of witnessing unsettles any move toward empathy as a form of appropriation (LaCapra


2001). By troubling viewers’ desire to “know” the other, to be intimate with suffering, this work produces a radical ambivalence about the visual en-counter with trauma. In this way, Homes and Gardens promotes an ethical spectatorship by confronting both the urgent imperative to publicize so-cial violence and the challenges of witnessing trauma.

Homes and Gardens refuses to visualize the spectacle of violence, but does that make it easier to turn away? One could argue that nowhere do the photographs or testimonials in Homes and Gardens imagine any ac-tions toward retributive justice or redress of human rights violations. This concern, though, relies on the assumption that speaking the truth and showing the pictures will elicit outrage and demands for justice, a funda-mental assumption in human rights discourse. Testimonials have been a crucial recourse for survivors, especially for women who often have little or no access to juridical processes or hegemonic cultural discourses. Truth- speaking discourses, especially in the 1990s and after, have become an im-portant mechanism of resistance for marginalized women and subjugated populations, who have used these genres to articulate their experiences of sexual violence and other bodily tortures (Hanlon and Shankar 2000; Agosín 2001). Feminists challenging military violence and other forms of state power often turn to women’s voices and testimonials as key sites for counternarratives. Marjorie Agosín (2001, 11), for instance, urges feminist scholars and activists to recognize the “integrity of the voice” in listening to women’s stories of human rights abuses, stories that avoid “succumb-ing to silence— using one’s voice to resist oppression, to reconcile history’s wrongs. . . . Having witnessed that which is beyond language’s power to represent, women continue to search for the meaning of hope. Their re-sistance to silence bespeaks the desire to remain whole and human.” Such testimonials have had notable political and social efficacy, but as feminist scholars of human rights discourse argue, they too are cultural narratives reliant on broader discursive frames.26 Significantly, Homes and Gardens uses testimonials while resisting the conventional authority of the body as the site of identity. Friend’s one image of a woman may appear to contra-dict that claim, as the viewer gazes at a presumed victim. Yet, even here, she is surrounded by and competes for visual attention with the family photo-graphs on the wall. Scripting her gendered associations with domesticity insistently locates her within a broader familial and generational identity, so that the trauma remains even here a collective experience. Likewise, in the installation, unidentified voices speak separately but are never isolated,


since each voice invokes memories that combine to form a collective his-torical memory.

Homes and Gardens provides a model of ethical spectatorship in its confrontation with the limits of photojournalistic vision and the complic-ity of the witness’s desire to see spectacles of suffering. In turning away from a visual embodiment of suffering, trauma in Homes and Gardens re-mains present even if invisible. The invisibility of the body in this project does not forget the trauma but rather reminds the viewer of the limits of representation. In losing the spectacle, viewers lose the voyeuristic privi-lege of the gaze, but does that also result in a loss of knowledge of the trauma itself? Importantly, without visuality, and without spectacle, how can representations acknowledge the ways in which trauma is not a uni-versal experience but rather occurs in historically specific contexts that mobilize gender, race, sexual, religious, and other factors to produce differ-ences foundational to such violence? For American viewers familiar with news stories like those that appeared in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, the invisible body of trauma in Homes and Gardens may be imagined to be female and white. Because Friend relies on a narrative frame of domesticity that mobilizes gender- and race- based concepts of home and prosperity, this reparative project reiterates dominant visual rhetorics even as it resists “showing” the trauma. As Homi Bhabha (1994) has argued, reliance on mimicry, or the use of recognizable frameworks to contest or transform them, can nevertheless trap those strategies within the basic premises one is attempting to unpack. Challenging the spectacle of photojournalism, Homes and Gardens itself struggles with the dilemma in which the imperative to publicize violence remains too frequently de-pendent on visual conventions of race, gender, and domesticity. Ethical spectatorship in Homes and Gardens thus itself ambivalently grapples with the ethical and voyeuristic politics embedded in visual acts of witnessing.

Ambivalent gazes

Photographs of victims, especially of mothers and children, have been successful in bringing world attention to human rights abuses and the sufferings of victimized populations. The political effectiveness of depict-ing victims of state violence and brutality cannot be underestimated. Yet, when suffering and violence are the only visual depictions of social con-flict, the news media too easily move on to the next crisis or war, never


envisioning the struggles to reconstruct social worlds in the aftermath of social violence. Susan Koshy (1999, 21) has labeled this type of reportage a “minimalist humanitarian perspective” whereby human rights issues are only ever represented through the spectacle of suffering victims “incapable of self- representation.”

Rather than dismiss photographs of refugees or civilians caught in vio-lent conflict as “human- interest elements,” this analysis of American news magazines’ coverage of the NATO humanitarian intervention in Kosovo/a demonstrates how gender, sexuality, and race normatively structure nar-ratives of enemies, allies, and victims. As I have explored in this chapter, photojournalists operating within dominant paradigms for witnessing humanitarian crisis problematically rely on a visual economy of victimiza-tion in which transnational mothers with their children appear as specta-cles of innocent suffering. Yet even here affective and ideological elements within these images produce contingencies and excesses that contest the narrative contours of those spectacles. Analyzing ambivalent encounters reveals rhetorical efforts to produce an authoritative witnessing by posi-tioning images of suffering within a Western logic of imperial benevo-lence. At the same time, this humanitarian discourse, itself problematically tied to ideals of liberal humanism, makes visible the vulnerabilities faced by minoritarian populations in ways that provocatively stretch these con-fining narratives.

Homes and Gardens offers an affectively unsettling critique of the spec-tacle of conflict zones often produced in mainstream photojournalistic practices. In some ways, however, Friend’s work is tautologically depen-dent on the genre to make itself comprehensible. This tautology, in turn, raises questions: Is a challenge to the conventions of news reportage pos-sible only outside photojournalism? Does such a critique hold up non- mass- mediated, or “artistic,” vision as a superior approach to photograph-ing war? While both of these are legitimate concerns, I would suggest instead that Friend’s project reparatively challenges the viewer- witness to engage with the disciplining frames of mainstream news media.

And, indeed, alternative optics sometimes do have an impact on news reportage. While it may be unreasonable to expect that mainstream news institutions like Time, Newsweek, or U.S. News would publish Homes and Gardens, other institutional spaces that reach broad audiences have been able to expand the possibilities for publication and circulation of repara-tive witnessing strategies. Mother Jones, for instance, published a photo-


essay by Paula Allen (2001) of a Kosovar woman who saved other women in her village from Serbian attackers by driving the women in a tractor across a river. The photo- essay depicts the women’s return to the village and their efforts to reclaim their land and livelihood after all the men had been massacred. The main photograph features one of the women from the village who lost her father and two brothers. She stands in the fore-ground with her back to the camera looking over cultivated agricultural fields. Allen pushes against the mainstream visual economy of victimiza-tion by representing these women within specific geographic and tempo-ral locations. Looking past the woman, whose back is to the camera, the photographer denies the viewer the ability to gaze at a victim. Moreover, the woman’s stance, so close to the picture plane, visually underscores her agency; this further challenges conventional narratives of gendered victimization, such as the image of transnational motherhood. A smaller picture in the photo- essay shows women driving tractors in a field. This photograph, along with the others in this series, presents a more nuanced representation of Kosovar women’s subjectivity by locating violence within a framework that also depicts them rebuilding the village. The absence of men further destabilizes heteronormative assumptions about gender and sexual agency. Finally, the photo- essay historicizes the visual narrative of war beyond the spectacle of suffering through this photo- essay about women who responded to military violence in local and collective ways.

Whether in Kosovo/a, or more recently Iraq, Afghanistan, and other conflict zones, visual documentation has become a vital resource for jour-nalists as well as human rights advocates attempting to alert international communities to conditions of violence and oppression. Ambivalences within visual texts shape witnessing encounters such that looking risks turning people into spectacles of suffering yet also creates the potential for forms of recognition beyond the humanitarian frame. Even more to the point, of course, not looking is too risky, for that ignores the violences enacted daily against vulnerable and marginalized peoples.

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1-domesticating war in kosovo

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