Perpetrator images

Perpetrator images, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, are photographic, film or other kinds of images taken by people who commit crimes. In this sense, it is possible to apprehend them as one element of the destruction apparatus since they embody the perpetrator or their accomplices’ vision before, during or after the crime is carried out. Putting these images in circulation, even if only within a limited framework, confirms the pride of the authors (author of the photos, of the crimes or of both) in the face of their infamy. However, once these documents become public, they are exposed to the eyes of historians and to the possibility of a memorial recovery. A rigorous analysis ought to above all separate the shots from the exercise of violence, even if in reality both these actions are very closely linked. Thus, the topology of these troubling images is extremely varied depending on how they were produced, the spheres within which they circulate and the strategies to instrumentalize them for other purposes.

The stakes and risks related to the use of these images is derived from the fact that one can identify with the perpetrator and the accomplices’ points of view. Let us clearly state that sharing someone’s physical position does not imply that one adheres to their emotional or ideological position. Yet, it is necessary to rigorously provide the context of these images, to define who realized them: the perpetrators, their accomplices or propaganda services. For example, it is significant to determine whether they result from an explicit order or from the author’s own will. Such distinctions are decisive for the diverse uses that these images have (museological, theoretical, artistic). Each new use may provoke multiple reactions: perverse, empathic, critical. Four examples may help to  illustrate the changes which, since the Second World War, have taken place within the production, circulation, reception and the way in which perpetrator images are recovered. First of all, we note the filming of a documentary by the Goebbels services in the ghetto in Warsaw during the spring of 1942, one month before the great deportation toward Treblinka. A second example can be seen in the mug shots of the detainees as they arrived at the torture centre S-21 at Phnom Penh with the Khmer Rouge. The photos of the Abu Ghraib prison broadcast in the media in 2004 provides another example. Lastly, we have the recent videos of beheadings transmitted by the leader of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Despite this development and through all these images, the arrogance of perpetrators photographing themselves at the moment of the crime transpires.

Baer, Ulrich, Spectral Evidence. The Photography of Trauma, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

Brink, Joram ten & Joshua Oppenheimer (eds.), Killer Images. Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence, New York: Wallflower, 2012.

Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Sontag, Susan, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, NYT Magazine, 23 May 2004.