Today in our weekly circle-jerk session, our director asked us to talk about voyeurism in a post-conflict arena. Some people are feeling awkward about getting excited to take pictures of bullet holes and bombed out buildings and basically proof of mass destruction and death. And yeah...that kind of sucks. My friend Kim said that she was taking a picture of a house that was covered in bullet holes, when the woman who lived in the house suddenly appeared in a window. Kim felt super uncomfortable and awkward, which is entirely understandable. The way she put it is that if she had been in that woman's position, and someone was taking a picture of her house purely because it was proof of war, a war that very well may have been responsible for the deaths of multiple family members, she would be horribly upset.
But...is it better to not take these pictures? Our director kept calling it voyeurism, and I kind of have a problem with that. To me, voyeurism implies malicious intent. When I take a picture of a building that was destroyed, or the side of a church riddled with bullet holes, I'm doing it because I want to document for myself the pain and trauma that crimes against humanity cause, so that when I'm back in my comfy house in Denver, CO, trying to write papers about international law, I can look back to these pictures and remember the intense sadness that I felt and impart that in my paper. To my mind, it honors the victims of the war and the country itself. I'm pretty sure it would be worse if we just covered up all traces and forgot that it happened. We need to take pictures and remember so that we can try to avoid it in the future.
My director also mentioned that she had talked to Bosnian friends about it, and they said that basically they wanted the world to remember and acknowledged what happened here, to their friends and family. And yes, it is clearly very important to Bosnia. But, for me, genocide and crimes against humanity and mass rape are a blight on humanity as a whole -- the war in Bosnia is part of a global history that impacts every person on the planet, not just Bosnia. That's why they call them crimes against humanity...clearly. So I don't feel that I'm being a voyeur into something that is specifically Bosnian. Unfortunately, what happened here is innately human. And as a human studying human rights, I feel that it is almost my responsibility to document what I see and to capture the emotions that I feel here so that I can bring it with me into the future and into the work that I'm going to do in the future.
Thoughts?
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