Beyond the lens: The normalisation of horror in Sudanese war imagery

Daily Maverick

23-04-2025

In continuance of the reflection on my career in the media, which I referred to in my last column, I look here at the way that photography, especially 'war photography', brings the sheer horror, cruelty and savage killings to the screens of our computers and smartphones.
I look, in this column, at the way that images, or 'the visual', has become political as Rod Stoneman of the University of Galway suggested with his book, Seeing is Believing: The Politics of the Visual.
I have been going through pictures of the conflict that has ravaged communities and societies in Sudan since 2023. It brought home to me the way in which the Sudanese conflict has become normalised, how it has dissolved into the background of world affairs.
It also brought home how we have come to rely on photographs and photography to get a sense of the horrors of war, and what my old friend James Sey referred to (with reference to a picture I made 40 years ago) as ' forms of sudden death '.
To be clear, never mind the self-referencing, I have always been a middling reporter and a below-average photographer. Whatever I may or may not have achieved as a photojournalist was by accident. The slideshow on the website of the Nelson Mandela Foundation carries one or two pictures I made during the 1980s.
One aspect of photography (in our age) that cannot be ignored is the way that photography, like journalism — now more 'democratic' because anyone and everyone can do it — has become commodified, twisted and perverted.
'Instagrammable places'
And how photography, in particular, has become terribly middle-brow with ' Instagrammable places ', cringy pouting or duck-lip selfies, and much like the 19th century, photography 'made the visual world (and private lives) collectible… in the photographic album' then and through the smartphone, today.
One exemplar of this 19th century capture of private lives is the collection of Victor Hugo, the French Romantic author and poet, who, with the collaboration of his wife, Adele, assembled 41 photographs made between 1852 and 1854 and offered the collection as a gift to Mademoisele Euphémie Barbier of the family in whose house Hugo and his family had been hosted during their exile in Jersey between 1851 and 1857.
The point, here, is that the physical photo album has disappeared almost completely, and photographs are now 'stored' on smartphones, tablets and computers — a long way from the burgundy morocco-leather binding and gilt embellishments of the Hugo collection of 1854.
Journalism, the text and image, has been democratised, as it were. Both have been 'set free', and the thing about freedom is that you can't reel it back in — freedom will run away from what kept it shackled.
What has changed in terms of the practicality of photography (when comparing say news or social documentary photography with the Instagrammers) is that for the most part, making pictures starts with a story that is then followed by the image. It's not all happenstance, though it can be…
One of my favourite photographers, the late Ara Güler, aka 'Istanbul's Eye', who probably remains the greatest Turkish news and social documentary photographer, explained this in the following way with a reflection on being assigned a task: ' I look for the photograph that is in my mind's eye. The story comes before the photograph. As I know what the end product should be, I say, 'Bull's eye?' when I find it. Of course, I can't say, 'that's absolutely it', so I take several shots to be sure. The shot I'm looking for comes out in the processing.'
While I agree with him, in general — I always leave room for irrationalities, and sometimes your 'mind's eye' sees things that you never imagined as part of the assignment — seeing, knowing in your mind what you want, or how you want to capture what is before you, is a lot different from the incessant snapping of Instagrammable scenes or selfies that have no social or any other meaningful purpose.
While I may appear to be dismissive of the Instagrammers (I, too, am one of them) it should be clear that democratising everything with social media (journalism and photography), setting everything free, is just that, and it becomes difficult to reel freedom back in.
War in photography, images and paintings
It is war photography, and images of the conflict in Sudan, that is the main topic of discussion here. I have, admittedly, wasted much too much time on only somewhat related issues. That is the nature of the act of writing…
The conflict in Sudan has been raging since 2023. It has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced more than 11 million people from their homes.
The UN has described it as 'one of the worst humanitarian nightmares in recent history', the Guardian has reported. The closest we can get to the horror, those of us who are sat hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from the violence, is through photographs.
As Stoneman explained, 'we cannot avoid the image of cruelty. Pornography and atrocity both lead to degrees of disturbance on the part of the viewer, representations of violence which annul thinking. The focus is always on what can be done to the body of another: how it can be broken and destroyed…. All power inescapably contains violence.'
Researchers at Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab examined satellite images (and thermal sensing data) captured from the skies above Darfur in Sudan, and which illustrate the ways in which the conflict in that part of Africa caused mass death and destruction. War is, after all, about killing and breaking things. They wrote in the 28 February 2025 edition of the journal Science that: ' Where a hospital stood just a few weeks ago, there may only be scarred ruins today. A graveyard on the edge of a town has undergone a sudden expansion. Entire villages have been torched.'
We always come back, then, to the imagery of war, whether through photography or painting. As with most of the interpretations of war, our reflections depend on our class standing, national pride, or racial prejudices and biases.
We make of imagery what we want
The outstanding problem to those of us who look at the images of war in Sudan, is that it has become normalised. This normalisation has nothing to do with war in Africa 'because Africans cannot live together in peace'.
That glosses over, or conveniently ignores, the carnage of Europe's 100 years' war between 1337 and 1453, the estimated 40 million people killed during World War 1, and the 70-85 million people killed in Europe between 1939 and 1945 (about 3% of the world's population!).
We haven't yet factored in the wars that led to the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, or the war between Russia and Ukraine. So, before we conjure images or imaginaries about 'Africans who cannot live together in peace and harmony', we may want to go back to the image, and look at Paul Nash's The Ypres Salient at Night, or any of his other images of the death and destruction of war in Europe, for that matter.
Any one of those European wars, and any other war, is viewed through lenses of national identity, class analysis, discomfort, or it is relegated to the past.
As one commentator said about the likelihood that Albert Luthuli may have been killed by apartheid agents: 'The man died 58 years ago and if he was murdered the perpetrators are also long dead. We need to concentrate on the living!'
This wilful obfuscation reminds us of what Stoneman suggested: that the visuals of war are political. Our responses to the imagery (or who the killers are/were) becomes, then, political. Taking the commentator at his/her word… we are back to the line we draw under things that sit uncomfortably. Which wars or injustices should we remember? When or what is the starting point for 'moving on'? Whose death means more or less?
Photographs and images remind us of the cruelty, the savagery and violence and destruction of war. We choose to forget, or ignore wars, or are disinterested in wars (war remains interested in us!), and photographs and paintings, the image, bring wars to our desktops and into our lives. Faced, then, with images of 'war and of waste… (we) turn right over to the TV page' — as the words to the song go.
Sheer horror
We may not go through the pain and suffering that the people of Sudan experience every second of every day. We can only imagine, when we look at the photographs and imagery, the sheer horror. The images we see of Sudan should make us uncomfortable, but they clearly do not. A lesson about the US war in Vietnam remains with me.
The woman who (still) remains the finest thinker on photography and war, the late Susan Sontag, made us think whether anyone's life was worth preserving — as much as the life of a US soldier.
Mark Twain reminded us, long before that, that there was an extraordinary cultural chauvinism at work that was both existential and ideological, and in terms of which the lives of 'others' were really meaningless, and not worth saving, or even considering (probably because 'the perpetrators are also long dead. We need to concentrate on the living') if it means we have someone who has to take responsibility.
To the families and friends of people who continue to be killed in Sudan, the memories may fade, but the photographs will remain. DM