 Okay. All right, we're going to begin. Thank you all for coming tonight. I'm the chair of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the moment and therefore I have the honor of hosting you all tonight and of welcoming our guests as well. What I, so tonight's event is, carries the title of of Vince Rothfell's paper called Humanizing the Inhuman, Photographing Death and Duterte's Drug War. What I will do is first introduce Vince Rothfell, our speaker, and then we will show a short film and then we will have a panel of respondents and I will introduce the respondents at that moment after after Vince's talk. So here here goes. So Vince Rothfell is the Giovanni and Anne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of several works. I will name a few of them here. Both very well known in Southeast Asian Studies I should say. Contracting Colonialism, White Love and other events in Filipino history and the promise of the foreign and motherless tongues, the insurgency of language amid wars of translation. Many other things bubbling around but I'll leave it at that so that we have enough time to listen to Vince's recent work. And let me tell you about this film. It's a very short eight minutes. It intersects shall we say with the photographic materials that Vince will be addressing in his talk so we thought it might be worthwhile to set the scene as we transition to the talk. So this is a film called Duterte's Hell by Aaron Goodman and Luis Luanag. It was the first prize winner of the World Press Photo Award for Digital Storytelling. So we'll move on to that then and then on to Vince. Thank you all. Thank you all for being here. Thank you Ashley for that warm introduction. Cristina, one for inviting me. You're the one I have to say. Thanks to you. Philippine studies seems to have had a renewed spark in so as and thanks to everyone for coming. The film is actually quite an interesting setup. I have more to say about the film towards if you want to I mean I actually have something to say about the film but towards the Q&A because the film came out after I'd written this paper so I'd like in the paper itself have a long footnote so if you want to sort of discuss this so that would be fine too. So let me start so that we could get the show on the road. This is the second half of a much longer paper the first half of which I gave yesterday and the second half the first half concentrates on the sort of the rhetoric and the politics of the drug war. This one concentrates more on the sort of representational sort of aspect of the drug war which I think as I said ties up nicely with the film. On May 22, 2015, while yet to declare his candidacy for the presidency, then Davao Mayor Rodrigo de Tertes spoke about his intention to kill as many drug addicts and pushers as possible. Often he was given to addressing them directly as a you the I addressing as you let me see if this works. If I became president you all should die and this idea of direct address itself very interesting it's almost as if he identifies with the addicts that he's addressing it's almost as if the I is substitutable with the you and I can come back to that later later on if you want. The 1000 killed in Davao city it will reach 50 000 I would kill all of you who make the lives of Filipinos miserable I will definitely kill you I will win because of the breakdown and law and order I do not want to commit this crime but if my chance God will place me there stay on guard because that 1000 will become 100 000 so he's also given to hyperinflation you can tell. You will see the fish and manila bay becoming fat this is where I will dump you all. Since becoming president a year later de Tertes has returned obsessively to this theme no matter what occasion or audience he cannot help but bring up the drug war and his eagerness for annihilating its alleged perpetrators for example when addressing the country's most prominent business leaders the Makati business club he offered the basic template for his drug policy it's going to be bloody I will use the military and the police to go out and arrest them hunt them and if they offer any resistance and thereby placing the lives of the law enforcers in the military whom I would task for the job to do I will simply say kill them all and end the problem now since taking his office president de Tertes has assiduously pursued his war on addicts the number of the dead keep rising whether one goes by the police estimate of nearly 4 000 or those of various human rights groups which range from a high of 20 000 most of them in the slums of the metro manila region. Sheila Coronel the journalist vividly describes this landscape of death quote the victims bodies are found on sidewalks or bridges their heads wrapped in packing tape their hands bound with rope some are left lying on the streets bathed in blood or splayed on the shaky wooden floors or shacks in shanty towns along the river and a shoreline of Manila Bay or further inland in the densely packed warrants inhabited by the cities poorest and neediest such scenes of nightly killings have been amply documented by various photographers and journalists both foreign and Filipino from July of 2016 until about the early 2018 which is about the time period I'm going to talk about because things have changed since January of 2018 and again I can talk about that later on a small but dedicated group of correspondents known as the night crawlers for the late hours they keep have been going from one crime scene to another to take photographs and write stories about the victims and their families serving on the front lines of the drug war they have witnessed the bloody toll of detergent necropolitics thanks to their work photographs and stories of the dead and their families have circulated wild widely around the world showing viewers the extent of the regime's brutality in what follows I want to ask about the complex nature and ambivalent effects of their photographic work I want to start by looking at the experience of the photojournalists themselves as they come into the crime scene in various interviews they often speak of being overwhelmed by what appears before them what they see often outstrips when they could possibly know much less talk about experience and expression are torn apart the latter exceeding the former. Carlo Gabucco for example says there's always a moment of disbelief whenever we go into a crime scene and I see the victim for the first time see how they suffered at the hands of their killers from Alex and Arun Pak recently I've been having many breakdowns and I'm wondering why I'm always crying but then I realize as well actually this is bigger than me this is not about me in Dondita Watau remarks you really think about what those images might do to you it was only later around November that I felt ill at one point all my dreams were about crime scenes I was about to check myself into hospital because I was having coughing fits we lost something here in the drug war I'm still grappling with what it is we lost faced with the scene of the crime photojournalists are struck with disbelief and confusion they apprehend more than they can comprehend and so don't exactly know what to think about but they are experiencing this radical gap between what one experiences and one's ability to narrate it is usually referred to as trauma a chasm opens up between what happened and one's ability to make sense of it as in for example accidents this failure to conceptualize what one sees and feels results in being struck numb or ill for days on end one replays the experience rather than finds a way to frame it and set it aside trauma by making speech difficult if not impossible compels instead the repetition of the event rather than its representation in a traumatized state one is unable to distance oneself from what one has gone through and so one one finds oneself divided against oneself unable to judge much less think rationally one is contaminated by what one sees and forced to relive its violence again and again an acting sense of loss persists made worse by the fact that one is uncertain as to what exactly was lost arising from a crisis of experience trauma disables photojournalists from doing what they are supposed to do cover the event by rendering them by rendering it into the true account of what actually happened this disability however is only temporary subsequent interviews with photojournalists show a pattern for dealing with trauma and recovering what was lost in a society where therapeutic practices for dealing with trauma are largely absent or inaccessible to all but the wealthiest dealing with trauma comes in different ways in the case of the nightcrawlers they speak about fostering a strong sense of camaraderie unlike other professional journalists who may compete to out scoop one another for a story those covering the drug war talk about the deep horizontal ties analogous to that of veteran soldiers who had fought through many battles feeling as if they were part of what they call a mutually supportive tribe but while important such friendships require something else a supplement as it were that might allow the traumatized self to recover this entails reconceiving oneself not simply as a passive observer but more important as an active witness to the events that it covers the acts of witnessing converts the photographer's work into testimonies of injustice but in the process of witnessing photographers invariably do something else they turn to the survivors of the victims and join them in the labor of mourning their loss witnessing is a cure for trauma is then retrospectively associated with friendship and grieving alongside the practice of truth telling in the face of extrajudicial killings witnessing mourning and truth telling are thus related moments in the emergence of the photographer from his or her initial state of confusion and paralysis in the context of deterters narco and necro obsessions such moments as I hope to show assume considerable significance it is to these processes that I now want to turn to when asked why they do what they do photojournalists invariably respond with some variation of their responsibility to report what they see on behalf of those who have no voice and for the benefit of those who otherwise remain blind to events they are in the sense witnesses using their photographs and stories as documents in pursuit of justice for the sake of those unable to do so for this reason photojournalists claim to be driven by a categorical imperative to do what is right for those who have been wronged as moral agents they act as witnesses for the victims of their families this process this process of witnessing entails seeing their photographs as more than what they are not simply as a collection of images but as artifacts saturated with meaning indeed the responsibility as they understand it begins by being able to look beyond appearances to see photographic images as necessary but ultimately dispensable means of getting at something like truth and justice how is this possible right so because for them their art is not art for it's never art for art's sake it's always for a purpose it's always for a reason how is this possible how does one move from taking photographic images to espousing moral ideals given that photography is precisely about the conversion of reality into appearances how does the photograph how does the photographer go from becoming a technician who captures images to an advocate for the subjects of his or her photographs and who are these subjects especially the dead victims captured on camera without their knowledge or their consent what is the relationship between the photographer the corpse and their survivors as they appear before the camera what role does the camera itself play as a technological and therefore non-human apparatus for documenting the dehumanizing effects of war what is the place of the camera in the formation of the photographer's sense of his or her own humanity predicated on his or her moral agency now as i mentioned earlier photographers think of themselves as witnesses becoming a witness however does not happen automatically it comes in the wake of their initial shock at the arriving at the scene of the crime to become witnesses they need to interview other witnesses to the crime this is because as jess asnar tells vice news journalists are forbidden from accompanying the police during operations quote we only get to cover the event after the fact when there's a dead body after the gunfights close quote to get the story they need to ask the people in the area whom they have uh who who may have witnessed the killing funeral parlors are particularly helpful since they are among the first to know uh if there is a body to be picked up and this is because cops and funeral parlors parlors have a an arrangement cops call in a dead body and then they get a commission in return and this is partly because there is no city more in manila and so all the bodies get to be delivered in private funeral parlors and and there's a whole monetary sort of aspect to this that again i can talk about at the end so they'll call us the funeral parlors or text us and say hey there's a dead body in this area we're going to be going there to pick up the body police are interviewed along with neighbors bystanders and family members when they are not too distraught to talk in short journalists and photographers can only become witnesses by talking with other witnesses their telling grows out of a series of other tellings as they become a link in a chain of witnessing as witnesses to other witnesses photographers are twice or thrice removed from their narrative however unlike their stories their their photographs are able to capture images of the first and the last witness to the death of the victim and this is the body of the victim itself some of the most arresting and off-reproduced images of the drug war are those of the corpses as you saw in the video as well based on the light of street lamps and police cars corpses appear as the most dramatic manifestations of the drug war they testify to the violence of the regime as they represent the fulfillment of the turtle's most cherished wish of annihilating addicts indeed this is the point of wrapping many of them in packing tape and leaving cardboard signs pusher I'm a pusher do not imitate me displayed in public they are meant by the police to be discovered by the people in the media the corpses become texts testifying to the power of the state not only to get rid of those it considers socially dead but also to extract their capacity to access a realm beyond the living this is the corpse indentured to serve as a sign for the state's ability to overcome and appropriate the power of criminality for itself bound packaged and labeled with signs the victims displayed remains the victims displayed remains are reduced into instruments with which to enact and transmit the will of the state it is a familiar tactic as old as public crucifixions hangings in the display of the capitated heads on spikes along the roadways from classical antiquity to the early modern period the body of the shabu addict is the figure which as Giorgio Agamben might say can be killed but whose death would not amount would amount neither to murder nor sacrifice the exposure of the corpse to public view is a way of including what has been excluded by the state it marks not just the boundary that separates the social from the anti-social the corpse from the perspective of the state is a concentrated point from which radiates sovereign power it is thus used as a stage to display the basis the very basis of state power itself which is the power to kill from which comes the sovereign's power to keep others alive but this is the only way the corpse can serve as a witness is it simply a prop for announcing the terrible power of the state or does it also function in ways that can undercut the state's claim to instill fear do the photo do the photographs of the corpse also bring out a different and more unsettling power the images and accounts of photojournalists indicate a different relationship to the dead the strange agency of the corpse its capacity to testify to its demise and act upon the world in the process of having escaped from it is evident in various interviews for example here are two remarkable stories of encountering corpses told by one of the most famous photojournalists in Manila Raffae Lerma so two stories let's show the first one this is the first one oh i'm sorry here's more grisly pictures more grisly pictures so here's the story of Raffae Lerma quote it was my second night on the night shift and i remember this is something that had a real impact on me there was another extra judicial killing a body wrapped in packing tape when the police were cutting the tape unfortunately i was using my zoom lens and was focusing on the face when the tape was removed i saw the expression on the face he was staring at me his mouth was open i was terrified really terrified because it was like i felt his last moments how he died like he was gasping for air the feeling you get when you're being buried alive that at first you lose all light then all air i felt that for it's so for a time i didn't take any more photos like that or if it's an extra judicial killing i don't focus my my camera on the faces the site of the corpse simultaneously invites and repels the gaze of the photographer and i'm assuming it looked something like this because this was a photograph he himself took at once living and dead it is as much a compelling object as an impossible subject of photographic interest it appears as something that is on its way to disappearing as the materialization of death's arrival the body of the victim is the something becoming nothing that nonetheless continues to be in the world it exercises an uncanny power as it occupies the radically undecidable border between the living and the dead as such it is the embodiment of the inhuman in two senses one as a recipient of a deadly force and secondly as an envoy of what remains outside of the social it is precisely the uncanny power that confronts larma seeing the face of the corpse emerging from the packing tape he is seized with terror he sees on its face quote its last moments its expression mouth open as if gasping for air testifies to its ongoing disappearance what is the source of the horror here perhaps it has something to do with seeing the corpse face and realizing how different it is from ours the living usually when we look at the face of an other we expect to see something similar to our own a sort of mirror that reflects our humanity as james seagull the anthropologist shows in his reflections on the german philosopher georg simmel the face is often regarded in westernized cultures as the lucrative expression concealing and revealing the soul the soul understood as the energy and rationality of the person hence is the face capable of conveying so much would so little showing anger for instance with the knitting of the brows or joy with a simple turn of the lips the most important parts of the face that enables it to convey a sense of intersubjective humanity are of course the eyes hence the cliche that the eyes are the windows of the soul just as they are organs for taking in appearances and indicating the workings of the mind right which is why when you see somebody who is blind or is cross-eyed the first thing you think of is you know maybe there's something wrong with this person right because you expect there to be a connection between the sharpness of the gaze and the active workings of the mind behind it simmel distinguishes between the eyes on the human face and those found on the painted portraits common in western art the latter function like mechanical eyes he says it sees only what simmel calls pure appearances making no distinction between for example the leg of a chair and that of a child he says the mechanical eye merely sees appearances it penetrates it withdraws it circles a room it wanders it reaches as low behind the wanted object and pulls it toward itself the power to take in appearances without regard to distinctions or interpretations is of course inherent in the eye of the camera it is a kind of technological eye that surpasses the human eye in its ability to zoom in and out focus and unfocus on details and panoramas captures subtle gradations of light and dark but despite the fact that it can do so much more than what the human eye can the camera's eye cannot synthesize or understand what it sees it cannot edit and delete parts to form holes and so cannot judge the images that it takes it registers images promiscuously but divorces these from interpretation and meaning the human eye however moves in the opposite direction to seize invariably to interpret and make sense hence the term I see right hence the human eye must censor and repress include and exclude framing images to highlight some while leaving others out we can only see selectively blocking out certain images in favor of others in order to comprehend what we apprehend doing so allows us to see distinctions and the limits of form that is to see the aesthetic qualities of images and by grasping the forms of what appears before us we are able to judge them it is this faculty of judgment that allows us to become moral agents telling apart what is beautiful and good from what is not blindness is this the price of insight our vision is humanized in so far as it is founded on the ability to take on and seize hold of the autonomous and inhuman power of the camera's mechanical eye rather than succumb to the amoral power of the mechanical eye however we find ways to tame it and put it under our control thereby aestheticizing what we see our capacity to see as humans is as predicated on our ability to contain in both senses of that word the power of the inhuman mechanical eye it is the rigorous domestication of the camera's powerful vision and the aestheticization of its resulting images that is precisely the work of the photographer but in lerma's story above we see how his encounter with the corpse places this aestheticizing ability in crises he sees the face of the corpse drawing close to it with the mechanical eye of his camera but what appears is not a mirror reflection of him the camera instead reveals a sight that overwhelms his own the face of the corpse turned towards him causes him to feel that he is dying the fate it is as if he becomes a corpse himself he experiences not a confirmation of his humanity as he might as he might by looking at the face of someone living but precisely its negation quote I felt his last moments how he died he finds himself in the place of the victim being strangled and buried alive quote losing all light and then all air the corpse is the best and last witness to its death but the sight of its face conveyed by the camera is such that it conjures in lerma a fantasy of his own death to see the agency of the corpse is thus to feel oneself on the verge of losing agency altogether the camera as an inhuman machine for registering pure appearances cannot not see the corpse it exposes the photographer to what he can no longer distinguish from himself not only does he become like the corpse he also becomes like his camera in both cases he begins to feel as if they were as if he were losing what made him human he is doubly captive to the inhuman power of the camera as it records the arrival of death in the body of the corpse and to the inhuman power of the corpse that shows him his own death the only way he can break out of this double bind is to turn away from both quote I didn't take any more photos like like that if it's an extra judicial killing I don't focus my camera on faces of the corpses one can take photos of the corpses body but not its face insofar as it threatens to expose one's own death doing so allows him to regain control of the mechanical eye and distance himself from the contaminating effects of the corpses look now lerma subsumes the eye of the camera into his own eye while distancing himself from the powerful because impossible agency of the corpse in this way he would seem to regain his humanity from these two inhuman forces but such a move is not sufficient to secure one's place as a witness something else is required which entails identifying with a sorrow of the victims families and this is a pattern that you see with all the photographers and this identification with the victims families of course is part parcel of the work of mourning the photographer in order to secure his humanity from the traumatic exposure to the dead turns to the living survivors and joins them in their grief such a turn is made possible by the photographers harnessing of the camera's mechanical power he converts the photographic image of the corpse from a horrific reminder of the individual's death to an icon of collective suffering and sacrifice the corpse is reframed not just as a victim of the state violence or as an envoy of one's own deadly fate rather it is reframed as a martyr destined for memorialization and devotion to see this let us turn to Rafi lerma's second story describing how he took what is probably his best known photograph and one of the most iconic photographs of the drug war i'm sure many of you have seen this which president Duterte himself during one of his state of the nation address took umbrage to referring to it as condescendingly as the pieta right the pieta a reference to the famous Michelangelo sculpture of Mary cradling the dead christ in her arms now i'm gonna come back to this picture in a while but first just a quick reminder of what the pieta for those of you forgot what it looks like the story of lerma about taking this photograph is three parts and and let me let me quote it at length because it's really quite remarkable here's the first part i keep going back to the day the day he took the photograph because even from afar i could see it already this was a picture this was a picture this is a very strong picture it was the way she was holding michael charon she was cradling him the first time i'd seen anything like it out in the open in other crime scenes there's always a crowd but they but they that is in this case they were secluded separated from the crowd because they were inside in the middle of the police cordon actually it looks staged uh because there were lots of television lights and they were in the center but what is imprinted in my mind is all yara's screaming for help i felt like we were vultures she was screaming help us we need to bring him to the hospital and we were there just clicking and clicking and in fact if you see some of the videos of the coverage uh one of the most amazing sounds is the sound of the cameras going right keeps going uh second part as photojournalists we're always looking for those strong pictures we know these photos and would really we know these photos would really make an impact and we have to take and it's sad to say it's really sad to say we have to take advantage of it and but but as we but but we just have to do our jobs and our job is to share these pictures and convey their messages all of us felt so heavy but still when we saw the photos we thought shit this is strong third part we went to the wake four days after right so there's the turn to mourn with the family we went to the wake four days later the first time they refused to let us in but i saw a newspaper with my photo on the front page like took it and i introduced myself to the father sir i was the one who took that photo so the photo becomes his entry card right i was the one who took the photo and the father michael sharon said oh we've been waiting for you to come for some time when i heard that i felt lighter he introduced me to jenlina oliras i told her i was sorry sorry that we behaved like that that night please understand what our work is she didn't say anything but she held my hand and i guess she nodded and she cried and i think she got it she saw the public reaction to the photo i felt my heart was lighter in the earlier story right lerma relates being traumatized right when he sees the face of the corpse he has a fourth taste of his own death when seeing the face of the corpse it is as if he looked at death in the face only to realize that his time had not yet arrived it's like that could have been me but thank goodness it wasn't me so he escapes to tell the story of his fear and subsequent recovery of himself after literally facing it's possible demise right so it's what some people would would call uh an experience of the sublime right because that's what the sublime experience is you come close to a deathlike experience and then you escape it and then you live to tell its story in this second story it is not a matter of facing the corpse unlike the first story the victim here is named michael sharon and in other accounts he is identified as a tricycle driver when lerma arrives at the scene it is already cordoned off and spectacularly lighted as if it were being staged so here it is again even more important the body of sharon was being cradled by his partner genelin oliras the crime scene had already been set up as it were it's a statusized appearance readily apparent to the photographer's eye that's what he kept saying it's a strong picture whatever menacing potential the corpse may have had was now safely contained both by the police cordon and the arms of genelin so there's multiple mediations of the corpse right as the scene it's a study qualities are already obvious and needed only to be recorded how so in other accounts of the story lerma in fact alludes to the scene as if it were a picture of the sculpture of the piata and this is how the picture has come to be known the famous picture of the piata what makes this photograph so compelling is that the corpse uh appears as if in the pose of a martyr this is suggested by allusions to the dead christ and of course saturated by a filipino historical consciousness shot through with christian narratives about martyred national heroes from ozerizal to ninoy in korea kino those of you familiar with filipino history will know this you cannot be a hero in the filipines unless you are a martyr you have to be shot you have to be killed uh heroes in the filipines are never conquering heroes heroes in the filipines have always been victimized and conquered right because then they can be turned into martyrs that you can then pity and then mourn shot from a particular angle it appears as if its abject body had been sacralized by death here's another angle of the same photograph other photographs of the victims similarly draw from this iconography of christian martyrdom showing them cradled by loved ones or mourned by family members here's one by noel salas there's one or is this interesting because it's almost as if the the light is coming from the face of the corpse this one is almost like caravaggio when i saw they said oh my god you know this is a renaissance and here's another one right two different photographers it looks like it's the same photography it's actually two different photographers others are shown laid out with their arms spread as if they were being crucified there's one another one uh another one another one in nearly all cases the photographs are lighted in ways that bring out their chiaroscuro quality the effect is to frame the victims and their survivors in a kind of sacred space surrounded by darkness while embraced by a halo of light reminiscent of renaissance paintings now in the abrahamic tradition martyrs are of course synonymous with witnesses the word martyr itself comes from the greek martyrs which quotes signifies a witness who testifies to a fact of which he has knowledge from personal observation martyrs are commemorated precisely as models of fidelity and courage and their fidelity and courage comes from precisely bearing witness right so having a message to which they they're willing to die for as it were uh the depictions of martyrs are integral to the designs of churches starting with the crucified christ in all his bloody glory he's a famous one of of i think it's matagna right and uh groenwald many many others you can go back to but these images of death meant to inspire the faithful are all artfully rendered uh and this is from a book about romania we were there last summer so i thought i'd throw that in whatever horrible death in particular martyr may have suffered is softened and shaped by colors and lines that lend them a specific identity distinguishing them from other angels and saints to be devoted to such martyrs is to emulate therefore the power of their witnessing beyond death right now by composing wittingly or unwittingly and i think for the most part it's unwitting right it's unconscious that they do this photographer the photographs of corpses uh by composing wittingly or unwittingly the photographs of corp corpses as if they were martyred surrounding or supplementing these with photos of their grieving survivors photo journalists set up a kind of sacred tableau that tames the trauma induced by the crime scene it turns the nightly occurrence of violence into a narrative of injustice directed at the poor by those who are powerful such photographs make legible death as sacrifice and the family suffering as mourning as as a mourning designed to commemorate the death so again it moves in the opposite direction as the police narratives right which doesn't see it as a sacrifice or murder uh but see it as a form of justice right but this moves in the opposite direction we get a sense of the of the conversion of the uncanny force of death into a narrative about martyrdom in the text that accompany the photographs either as captions or as more extended narratives such text focus on the singularity of the victim and i wish we had more time because we could go through the different write-ups of these photographs very elaborate very very moving such text focus on the singularity of the victim beginning with its name age occupation recounting its relationship to its family and community quote i try to rebuild the person i take the corpse and reimagine the man close quote says the journalist patricia evanglista laid out in a casket a smiling picture of the person is usually placed on top while the corpse itself is made up to look like an image of itself while still alive in this way funeral wakes seek to recuperate assemblance of the dead's dignity denied to it by its killers rather than trigger horror the corpse on display instead stirs memories among the living allowing them to tell stories apart from its murder in the sense are they remember in the sense are they redeemed the fact that their deaths could be converted into a narrative of who they were given a biography and so forth in the sense they are redeemed their humanity brought out by their victimization in what amounts to a kind of secular hagiography they are memorialized by journalists and by joining the family in mourning the dead photo journalists momentarily become related to the relations of the dead both are joined by a common witnessing that runs counter to deter this call for the victims the facemen now attempts at rehumanizing the dead and the living including the ranks of the photo journalists themselves after all this is not just about rehumanizing the survivors and the dead it's also about rehumanizing the photographers themselves who have become traumatized right that these attempts are not always definitive they are at best episodic and uneven we get a sense of this if we turn to lerma's story again that we looked at the second one midway in the story lerma admits somewhat ruefully quote as photo journalists we are always looking for those strong pictures we know what we know these photos that would really make an impact and we have to take and it's sad to say we have to take advantage of it but we just have to do our jobs and our job is to share these pictures and convey their messages the photographer's job of sharing his or her pictures means making them available to a global market for images this requires turning the photographs into images comparable to and substitutable for other images comparability and substitutability renders photographs into commodities exchangeable for money what does this mean for photographs to circulate globally and take on the commodity form a self-conscious witnesses to the crimes they cover photo journalists participate in at least two kinds of economies on the one hand the moral economy of mourning that seeks to rehumanize the victims and their families against the dehumanizing force of the state on the other hand they participate in the capitalist economy that produces images for global consumption of anonymous viewers photo journalists their images are primarily meant to serve as documents of the war and evidence of the murderous workings of the state but in these but in the aesthetic qualities of their photos lie a fundamental contradiction on the one hand the artistry of the images is meant to overcome the shock of encountering the dead and awaken the viewers to the truth of injustice on the other hand these aesthetic qualities are precisely what make them publishable to the extent that they attract the attention of a public who otherwise would remain oblivious to the grim realities of the war reaching such viewers requires that photos circulate globally the circulation of photographs however can take at least two directions one it could circulate as entries for international awards and prizes or two it could circulate as image commodities for consumption in mass circulation media what's the difference between these two one way of gauging a global impact of these photographs is to note the increasing amount of international recognition they have garnered since the start of the drug wars in july 2016 and the short film you saw was an example of that and it won several prizes and it gets distributed widely they have been exhibited in museums and art fairs discussed in university conferences such as this one while photojournalists themselves have been awarded prizes ranging from Pulitzer's magnums society of publishers of Asia the overseas press clubs so forth and so on international awards can have a number of effects they validate the photographer skills and ethical commitment to truth telling beyond the limited sites of their deployment awards serve to canonize their work singling them out as exemplary depictions of extraordinary times they are cited for their capacity to reframe what they reveal the universal human condition that resides within even the most local of events through the photographs the spatial and temporal particularity of the killings are thus acknowledged as ineluctable parts of larger ongoing crises of dehumanization across the world it is this ability to signal the universal in the particular to validate the ethical in the technical and to recognize the moral and the political that constitutes the cultural authority of awards for this reason the international award system if you can call it a system the international award system is strategically positioned to counter the coercive and localizing power of the state to contain and erase these murders aside from these awards however there's also another more common way because not everybody wins awards right only if you do what about those who don't win awards right so they have another way of circulating their images much more common which is by way of the global marketplace and I think yeah for the majority of photojournalists who are not fortunate enough to win awards staying employed is a precarious matter photographers have traditionally occupied the lowest rung in the hierarchy of professional journalism editors and writers usually enjoy a higher status and greater pay making things even more exploitive photographers at least in the Philippines often do not retain copyright to the photos published in newspapers only those who freelance can do this and they have more control over their work but they can barely make ends meet unless editors decide to use their photos hence like other craftsmen activists and artists the relationship of photojournalists at the market is as inescapable as it is highly contingent sitting uneasily beside the moral imperative of witnessing is the necessity of making a living by capturing and selling images of disasters and death indeed without the marketplace they would have no way to make public their images and thereby reveal the truth of what they see this ambivalent reliance on the market for circulating and publishing their images means that their attempts at re-humanization requires ironically a reliance on the non-human just as they depend on the mechanical eye of the camera so they come to rely on the inhuman and arguably dehumanizing workings of capitalism and the consumerism it breeds what are the effects of the mass circulation of these photos how does mass consumption mitigate and obscure the very truth that photographers wish to reveal photographers taking on the difficult assignments end up supplying what again James Segal to refer back to him again refers to as the ever-expanding taste for images of disaster it is a taste that is steadily cultivated and marketed in the vast media industries of Hollywood for example with endless films about extrajudicial killings apocalyptic wars and the slaughter of assorted aliens that's why I hate watching Hollywood in this sense the labor of photographers not only as the in this sense the labor of the photographers not only has an emotional aspect as seen in the trauma that many of them go through it also has an inescapably commercial one for this reason attempts at re-humanizing both the corpses and themselves remain at best fragile and incomplete by virtue of their conditions as workers and entrepreneurs they are compelled to convert their photography photographs into commodities the mass circulation of such photos has uneven and ambivalent effects on the one hand they expose different audiences both local and international to the horror that attends the site of corpses might be laid out on the streets such images may initially produce revulsion leaving viewers speechless in the face of what they see on the other hand anonymous viewers eventually come to think of these photos as photos not as traces of people who were once alive as photos representations of the dead become substitutable with other photos of other dead or injured bodies in many other places and many other times that is they are subsumed as commodities exchangeable with other commodities when we whoever we are consume photos in this fashion as photos that are similar to and interchangeable with other photos by virtue of their exchange value we as viewers begin to get over our initial shock though we may still feel disturbed every time we see them the aesthetic quality of the photograph and and the mediation of the marketplace tend to inoculate us from the trauma of witnessing the crime scenes likewise we are spared the obligation of having to attend to the suffering of the survivors at a distance from what we see we can set aside the photos in our screen or newspaper and get on with our day by for example scrolling down to look at other kinds of images or simply moving on we do not have to hear the piercing cries of the families or at least can mute the sound in the videos nor do we have to join in the extended work of mourning that at times escalate into larger calls for accountability rather than mourn we consume soon enough one corpse begins to look like any other especially once these are composed artfully in photographs similarly their families drenched in their grief now also begin to look like many other families in similar straits as we saw mourning entails the emergence of a collective sense of obligation to lay the dead to rest and shore up the line that divides the living from the dead the conventions of mourning entail the work of restoring the integrity of society and the dignity of the individual consumption by contrast that does away with this labor instead consumers regard images in of the dead in a state of distraction certain images may come across as arresting provocative even unbearable but they are soon replaced by other images substitution here is mechanical not the psychic process associated with mourning that entails considerable emotional investment the singularity of the corpse while alive and the particularity of the family's conditions melt into the air of the marketplace commodification thus places photojournalists in a double bind their moral claims come to depend on an amoral process their photographs reach a wider audience but at the cost of compromising their ethical and political commitments similarly this commodification affect our ability to respond to these photographs once commodified such images tend to habituate us to views of state violence just as they would seem to normalize the side of the corpses making them seem passe what is painful is converted into mere appearance one image mechanically registered and consumed soon to be replaced by another similar product the novelty in shock shock effect of photographed corpses soon wear off as such the potential of these photographs as critiques of official impunity are compromised by even as it is contingent upon their circulation as products for mass consumption for just as aestheticizing the dead can rehumanize the victims by making them to use Judith Butler's term grievable so too can it make for renewed indifference that forecloses the potential for political action the global circulation of such images can also result in their overexposure making what was once obscured into something obvious ironically even easier to bury and ironically even easier to bury like the corpses they depict so in this way the core of the photographs as we've seen and one of one of the underlying arguments here is the the photographs and the corpses resemble one another right they trigger shock and induce mourning but once they become representations right photos also ensure the forgetting of the dead now by way of conclusion i want to bring up one more thing which is the matter of haunting how does the return of the dead among the family of the victims differ from the return of the dead commemorated by the photographs right there's two kinds of returns i want to distinguish between the two with so much death happening on a nightly basis we might expect there to be a proliferation of ghosts as well as ghost stories this is the case with the families of the victims they often talk about expecting the spirit of the dead to return usually three days after their death they look toward the spirits coming back with great anticipation families want the spirit to reassure them that they are in a good state someplace else for example here's a story about ericardo who was killed in pasai in the early part of 2017 there's a picture of a wake during his wake joy his sister waited for the feeling that ericardo's ghosters with them she posted on facebook of course right asking if anyone had had contact with ericardo no one uh no one had i was annoyed with him she said it had been six days and he still hadn't made himself felt it wasn't until the day before his funeral that she felt him at a convenience store near the intersection where he worked the last place where he was seen alive climbing onto the back of someone's motorcycle that night ericardo visited joy in a dream he was smiling she said uh when he when she consulted the local spiritista an old woman who communes with the dead the woman told her that ericardo did not want the family to suffer he wanted them to feel that he was still alive it gave her comfort to know that ericardo was not an angry spirit lingering in this world unable to accept his own death and demanding vengeance it was just like him joy said he was always easygoing still one more dream joy craves i want to dream about the night he was killed she said i want to stab the person who stabbed him so i can finally defend him even if it's just in her dreams a dream of vengeance may be the nearest thing since joy and others the joy others can hope for few of the killers are ever caught and uh here is joy right there here the dead returns and it's kind of interesting because it's a story about a family who lives their family of squatters who live in the cemetery so it's ironic that you know they deal with the dead in this way here the dead returns not to ask for something but to fulfill the wishes of the living in other contexts uh many for example southeast asian context spirits usually return to possess the living causing them to fall ill curers are then asked to speak with these spirits and give them a voice hence do spirits often come across as co-desires without bodies they come in search of a body to allow them to speak and fulfill their wishes once heard through the medium the spirit leaves and the person possessed is cured of their illness but in this context the drug war spirits come by way of dreams to assure those they left behind the living this look upon the spirit returns as benevolent rather than malevolent spirits come back to grant a simple wish that of relieving the living of their worry as to the former's state in the afterlife spirit visitations are conventionalizing dreams and announced by local spiritistas in this way their arrivals are drained of anything uncanny rather than a symptom of trauma the visit of spirits like that of guests coming from abroad generate expectations of comfort such a return helps complete the work of mourning and give the living the sense that the dead are truly dead located in another and better place apart from the living but while a dream about the spirit of the dead may alleviate the grief of the living it does not result in a sense of justice as joy's account shows she wants to have another dream not about ericardo but about the but about his killer she wants to see what ericardo saw his own death at the hands of the murderer quote i want to dream about the night he was killed she says i want to stab the person who stabbed him so i can find me defend him here the living is left to the sense of lack she wants what the dead no longer cares for revenge her dream she hopes would let her become a witness to her brother's death in this way her dream acts as a kind of camera allowing her to see the corpse as it registers the image of its killer at the moment of its death like the photojournalists who see their task as one of witnessing joy sees her dreaming as a way of seeking the truth about her brother's demise for her seeking vengeance would be a way to defend him that is to respond to his killing in kind this is how she conceives of her obligation and her satisfaction justice by way of revenge in her world where the poor have neither the means nor the energy to go through the legal system much less file a case against those in power dreams afford some measure of assurance and fantasies of justice in the form of revenge unlike photographs however her dreams do not lend themselves to commodification they cannot be exchanged for money resistant to substitution her dreams remains hers alone similarly her brother's spirit escapes the pull of the capitalist marketplace and the violence of the state it is not absorbed into the global realm of technological ghosts made up of other photographs but returns only to his sister and perhaps to other members of the family coming from elsewhere the dream pictures afforded by the dead's return remain unseen and unseeable by us only joy sees them and holds them in reserve that may not amount to much but it is not nothing it amounts to something something perhaps impossible to calculate and command something that president deterred they cannot kill something that a camera cannot register and something new neither you nor I can consume much less appropriate thank you okay so um thank you thank you Vince thank you very much i'm blocking you um so we um we'll have responses from three people we haven't spoken about the order of response so um shall we just go one two three is that is that okay yeah so um let me let me introduce our speakers first we'll have Veronica Pedroza uh Veronica is an award-winning independent broadcast journalist based in London she began her career in 1995 as a news anchor with CNN international and then with BBC world are you stopping me I don't need to say any of this I'll keep going she's also been a journalist with ABS CBN news and current affairs and I will stop there but I'll introduce all three of you first and go from one to the next if that's okay all right uh so then we'll we'll have Dr. Finella Cannell who is a reader in social anthropology at LSE she lived four two years in the Bicol region of the Philippines and her book power and intimacy in the Christian Philippines won the binda prize for um a monograph on Southeast Asia in 2001 and our last respondent will be John Seidel who is professor of international and comparative politics also at LSE he's the author of capital coercion and crime bossism in the Philippines uh the co-author of Philippine Philippine politics and society in the 20th century colonial legacies post-colonial trajectories and perhaps I'll stop there with the Philippine specific books and um I'll turn the microphone over to Veronica Pedroza thank you thanks very much Ashley and thank you very much Vince for that amazing talk so yeah I the only reason I kind of interrupted was because I started my career actually in 1990 with ABSCBN oh okay thank you that's all right with ABSCBN and then I went on to CNN and then the BBC and back to CNN in Hong Kong and then uh I've been with Al Jazeera English for the last 10 years and and then I became freelance I kind of couldn't hack it anymore because of many of the things that um Vince talked about just then actually that um just really quite difficult to stay to keep one's humanity in the middle of covering a whole a very um tumultuous time in Southeast Asia and I moved back to London partly because I felt that I really wanted to live somewhere where I couldn't be put away or killed for something as um minor as posting if something on Facebook I don't know what's happened to Southeast Asia is you know what happened in Malaysia not withstanding um a couple of days ago um anyway yes um my response to Vince would be um to confirm question and um deep and further some of the ideas that he brought up um I was very um taken by this idea of um mediating uh viewing something as a human as a journalist for me also as somebody who was born in the Philippines but grew up in London and then went back to the Philippines as an international journalist because it's something that was quite that uh plays a very active part in the way that I tell stories I need this to be as um this story to be as compelling to somebody in the Philippines who knows this story back to front like La Rafi Lerma as it is to somebody in London who knows nothing about what's going on and what do you end up with when you've only got two minutes um it's so it's a it's a it's a something that is very difficult to do um and especially it depends on who you're working for for CNN ultimately it's the shareholders yeah in um for Jazeera it's something altogether different for the BBC it's another altogether different thing and as a freelancer I wanted to tell a story about an experience that I had quite recently which is that I wanted to get deeper into what had happened to the Rohingya who are on the border of Bangladesh now having fled from what some people are calling and I believe to be a genocide in Myanmar and I interviewed 15 people who had experienced a massacre in their village and and their um stories seem to build a picture that I thought corroborated each other and then they sent me pictures of corpses and I said and these are people who said they were his father that I mean they were the corpses father or the corpses brother or whatever and they were sent uh not just from people in the camp who had fled what had happened but also people who were still in the massacre site living in the massacre site or what remained of it and when I sent it to an editor to try and sell the story for a fraction of what I'd actually spent on the story um they said um no these pictures first appeared in September 2017 I went back to the people in the village and said are you sure that's your son and they said yeah absolutely and it clearly wasn't so I couldn't sell my story to that output they just said these pictures are false we don't know what else is false and we don't have the time or the money to spend anymore on this and that's kind of happened in the Philippines I think like Sila Rafi and Luis and all of those guys are saying that the editors are sick of seeing the same pictures over and over again and they're like as you say um they've become uh forgettable these images of these the people have become forgettable as a result of the commodification so I would like to say that you know my experience bears that out thank you because I've gotten a lot of grief from photojournalists for saying that that's something that I wanted to bring up as well from from photojournalists so I went one night with the night crawlers and there are some of them whose names I will not mention here because I know that they are um I don't you didn't really bring it out but they're under a lot of pressure politically um uh well they're under a threat of of their lives um as are many people who speak out against the extrajudicial killings can I take issue with your use of the term war there is no war there is no opposing side well that's that's the term that the state yeah it's a term that it's it is used but I dislike it personally because there's there's no other side it's the same with the Rohingya there's no other side there's no one fighting back um uh uh sorry so like it's bravura I there was a sense of bravura and of camaraderie under fire nowadays we used to be able to go to these um crime scenes what you you sit in um the western police district station where I don't know what they call it now manila something or other you know the one on Padre Fauré or something like that you sit there and someone says oh the soccer van's going the scene of the crime operation is going so you jump in the jeep that you've rented and you head off to Novartis or wherever it is Malabon and then you go and see the bodies and then you take the picture and then you go but recently the people who did the killings have been staying around and watching the police and watching the journalist when they first appear on the crime scene and they're very menacing they look back at the journalists and they are keeping an eye on who's taking the pictures so the night crawlers um have not then nowhere near as regular as they used to be now nowadays I hear no night it's yeah they they have dispersed yeah yeah um there's also an extent to which uh I might be busting a myth that the the journalists the night crawlers even just naming them as the night crawlers it's like here's our posse it's very barkada yeah yeah this is our posse and that was borne out by an experience that my ex-husband had my ex-husband was a cn is a cnn camera man so he wasn't a night crawler he was one of the parachuted in journalists like James nutway yeah yeah james nutway whose images he used um and he and they and he came almost to blows with them at a wake of one of these guys one of these victims because they were like wait a minute who are you right and he's like what you know and there was a little bit of friction there because there was this guy from cnn who had come in who hadn't paid his dues who wasn't part of the cartel and it's this this cartel on information that happens with journalists in the Philippines in particular that I think is quite an interesting phenomenon to look at if you're talking about journalism don't put that story out today the print guys are doing it tomorrow so let's sit on that one you know what I mean because they want to save it so that they can keep their jobs uh things like that um I wanted to also bring up just um how the pictures are viewed nowadays like we look here on this big screen and you're down there it's huge and look at the way looking at the way that the pictures are taken that they're very much at eye level at ground level at corpse level and and the technology I want I wanted to just add you know your chiaroscuro um observation cameras can do that nowadays in the way in a way that they couldn't do it so you just buy a camera for I know a few hundred quid and the blacks are intense and you've got this cinematic feel over with every image and anyone can do it it's amazing so and people are seeing them on smartphones they're not necessarily seeing them on a screen they're not opening a book there's no journey to see them that's another thing that makes it feel very disposable I think to me and makes my makes my witnessing of things feel a little contingent sometimes as well I actually spent a month living in Malabon because in sorry Novotas because I wanted to um counter what your observation was earlier Vince when you said that um they only arrive after the killing I wanted to be there when something happened yeah so that and live it and see it and what it's like and actually people there are very you know that thing that the cliche that people have about the Filipinos that they're so resilient they're so happy in spite of the poverty um uh and and they and they'd say what they said they said was we never had justice anyway you know what's and by the way we're on 12 000 dead now yeah it was not 7 000 anymore yeah yeah these figures are more like 20 000 um uh and uh I just tell a little anecdote to sort of supplement what you said which is that those I met a guy who was involved in a sort of mediation uh consultancy thing that it's a center for humanitarian diplomacy or dialogue yeah those guys uh one of those guys and he said that he he read a story that day about an actor who was he was being filmed doing a scene in one of those subdivisions in southern Manila like alabang or something like that and the security guard thought it was for real that a crime was being carried out so he shot the actor yeah and he was not and it was like I mean what do you do with that in court and there were so many things wrong with that story on so many levels and only in the Philippines type story um but he felt that he was totally you know doing the right thing that crime deserves to die yeah got on his little motorbike shot him dead thank you thank you so Vince thank you this has been amazing um thank you very much Vika and I'm I can't tell you anything about journalism in the Philippines so I I'm thinking about your extraordinary talk in relation to the whole range of your writings that I've known over now um quite a number of years and there are so many different things to say but I'm going to ask you I think a series of of stupid questions and and maybe you can give me um intelligent answers to them because I can't answer them for myself and one of the things I was thinking is how much you've written about the way that um the um the resilience of Philippine history and Philippine culture has often revolved around assimilating the unassimilable um and in making things that come uninvited from the outside into unlikely sources of value for the people who actually live in the Republic of the Philippines and I wondered whether you've reached a kind of limit case here with looking at Duterte's regime you know I wondered whether there is anything one can do with a leader who just shoots 20 000 of his own voters and citizens one after another or any way in which such a such a person could be converted into a source of value for others a source of of resistance or political mobilization by those whom he mistreats and um I well I wondered if your your focus on the stopping of language uh was part of a um a resonance there with your with your wide range of arguments in which the capacity to to use and um repurpose and recreate language has been one of the sources of people's ability to continue in in the accounts of work uh the accounts of the Philippines that you've given in your work so here are some of my my kind of silly questions I mean the stupidest question is what does this man think he's doing right I mean I I just wonder in what way he sees his own political project in your mind at the deepest level when as you rightly pointed out there is no way to really be a Philippine hero except by being short yourself you know but obviously he's he's operating in this alternate mode you know the mode not even of the strong man the man with many followers the man of power the man of of of um of admirable heroic might but simply the man who just kills person after person after person so maybe you can elucidate that for me um that was one question and another question was well what who who else is involved in the acts of mediation of these impossible assassinations I mean when I was living in Bickel which is now a long time ago I'm afraid I spent quite a lot of time thinking about um undertakers you know who came to um villages all the time and there are a lot of deaths rows living to um embalm and prepare the corpse and that that act of um spending money and also taking trouble is part of the way in which the living the family um begin to make the division between the dead person who might come back and take you with them and the dead person who will come back and be the gift that stays in your memory as you stay in theirs between a ghost and an ancestor so I was thinking about the undertakers in your story who are both mediating and also commercially benefiting from in a in a different register than the photographers and obviously less in an international arena um and then what was the final thing I wanted to say there was just uh just one more I think I think I've lost track of it with my own handwriting hang on um yeah so um that was um that was the second question and then the third question was about um who is being addressed in these acts and who the audiences are for uh for these different kinds of acts of communication or failed communication and you know in a sense the the um commoditization of photographs you could see it as um acts of communication that are that are looking for an audience they're looking for an address C but the address C appears to be entirely missing if we're looking for someone to to respond in the language of international justice uh at least um and then um you know I I wondered also about the um the the the the people who were killed because I was thinking about the famous case of those who were buried in the construction of emelda marcos's cultural center and how the the people who were wrongly buried were not buried by the families but were trapped in concrete became ghosts who wouldn't leave emelda alone um and yet these people are returned to their families and you thought of them as in a way ancestors people whose relationship with the living had been resolved I wondered why they weren't all haunting duterte uh and you know whether there's any you know in the past there's sometimes been um little political movements even tiny little provincial ones which has begun around a particular spiritista or medium uh part of whose um capacity to communicate is across the boundary between the dead and the living and I wondered whether you saw any of that kind of micro political um action and framing um in the encounters and locations where where you've been I haven't but that's a great idea and I think that's the future of organizing is to organize all these spiritists spiritists in the ulam duterte and haunt him I mean really because I think he would respond to that he might just respond to that no but just uh just we can just go around and then maybe have the audience also respond so john yeah as as usual there's an enormous amount in vinces talk to uh think about and comment on like I guess for me what what struck me uh as I was watching was this uh returning sense of discomfort um at the prospect of having to comment on especially as a foreigner who an american who travels frequently to the philippines in comfort and security um but but to comment on duterte and on this kind of politics in a way that doesn't you know uh fall into the trap of reinforcing and amplifying the kind of power that duterte uh exercises and as with say donald trump for example that this excessive attention to the individual um and a focus on the personality uh and the personal kinds of power that are are exerted by such individuals it's there's something uh that I find kind of uh sort of revoltsive and very unappealing and and you know sort of complicit in in talking about it and clearly to get to finella's question about duterte's motivation or intentionality here I think part of it must be that in this role as president and as master killer um in the philippines he's enjoying that there's a sense of of pleasure in enjoying that haunting that that we saw in the first film you know and that you uh revisited and therefore obviously when you think of the the role of journalists um and a photo journalists and of documentary films in revisiting and amplifying that there's the danger of amplifying the fear and amplifying the power um that comes with that and so what do you do against that and sort of analytically as an academic you can step back and say well you know I'm sorry but I've been in and out of the Philippines since the 1980s and as far as I can remember there have always been you know uh people killed like this um it's happened under both Aquino Presidencies it happened under Ramos it happened under uh Makapagal it happened under Estrada this is part of the repertoire of Philippine politics and you know it's a set of contingent circumstances that have elevated this to a a national kind of policy and and a sort of signature style and substance of of of this presidency um so that's one sort of historicization to sort of pull it away from Duterte and another way that journalists can engage in was that that piece you sent me months ago by Reuters where they systematically looked at one district uh within Quezon City and sort of mapped out you know what areas of Quezon City literally you know beautiful sort of 21st century you know multimedia presentation of mapping and gridding and also looking at the individual policemen whose whose presence on the scene was sort of you know correlates closely with these killings and so forth and you can sort of analyze it that way um but it seemed to me that early on in your presentation when you talked about the about the the disappearance of the social you know that that was really crucial because it seems to me you know if you go back to the the mid late 1980s which is when Duterte emerged in a city notable for the intensity of the revolutionary mobilization that unfolded in the period leading up to the overthrow of Marcos uh the well-gone bayon the the left wing broad popular forms of mobilization in the city and then after Marcos fell with strong American involvement the brutal anti-communist hysteria and vigilante mobilization and counter insurgency that unfolded that part of what was made to disappear was the social the notion of Philippine society all those people who were there in on edsa or who were in different ways mobilizing to represent Philippine society as social forces as workers as peasants as youth as men as women as the poor they disappeared in favor of newspapers and tv shows and representations in which society disappeared and individual politicians and personalities took their place and and i think what was actually quite moving in what you showed us was the return of the social in the funerals when you can and when you can see there are still vibrant as you discovered neighborhoods where people are there as members of society and families and communities and and and and in that we see you know as against you know what we see in terms of terrorism today not just the perpetrators and the pathologies of these these perpetrators but you know the victims the families um uh out there and that is i think perhaps along with the church after all these years the seeds of a basis of of some kind of renewal and some kind of effort to re-represent Philippine society in the face of what's become so hegemonic as an understanding of Philippine politics and a Philippine life in which you know representation is articulated in in this particularly narrow and deeply conservative way so i think that provided seeds of hope uh to my mind amidst all the horror did you want to jump in i just wanted to take out one of the points that you made John about um because my understanding is that the so-called war on drugs is being used as a political tool against local politicians by the central government duterte administration and that officials on every level of government are complicit in the growing so-called war on drugs for example kezon city declared itself to be a drug we want to be a drug-free zone in other words that was a declaration of fealty to the duterte administration and those that don't like in metromonella that's what i know best in makati um for example the mayor there will not declare makati a drug-free zone because it means they're not going to go along with it and that means that they may lose out on federal funds i mean not federal funds what are they called national funds central funds um which is a pretty interesting kind of side that isn't um brought out in the kurosukuro of the artistic photograph maybe we should see if the audience has any questions and yeah jenya and when you look at this collection of photographs i don't think anyone can can see in their right mind that this is the right thing to do for for for broad items and pushers i mean if you look at the photographs that were taken on the vietnam war i mean it's embedded in people's memories for for you know for perpetuity and it will never make that war right right so so i know that you know there's a lot of tension and discussion over these photographs they're very difficult to look at but one thing for sure is you look at this and you can never feel right about the way the philippines and do that in particular please drug addicts and i think this is a transferable lesson for other countries that are dealing with addiction in just just a very quick response to that in fact that's that's what people thought so they some of the people especially in baklaran church they started exhibiting these photographs putting them on tarps and so i when i heard about this i went over to baklaran and i was looking at people there and people just ignored it they walked right past it there were lovers who were sitting there making small talk beside a photograph of a dead corpse and so far and so i was wondering what's going on why aren't they like moved like we are then of course you realize that the we here is different right and then and then i also thought i was talking to oliver uh the guzman who's been covering a lot of this stuff london london because i was covering her life and so he's making a documentary right now so i asked him the same thing aren't people like weirded out walking by the alley where there's been a killing or in the site in the street the streets where there's been a kid he said you know what they don't really seem to mind it just goes out of their minds like the other day uh he was saying that he was somewhere in calaocca or someplace and they had had a killing the night before and and there were still traces of blood on the street and here come the kids and they're sitting there waiting for the school bus to come nobody says anything nobody says you know i mean in other words it seems like uh places which you think would be haunted places which you think would be permeated by fear are sort of like and i think part of it is the belief among most people not all but most people that well if they die they deserve to die i i'm i'm um this is a very naive question but perhaps following up on what some of you were saying as well it struck me in that uh in a number of ways the photojournalists could be saying i was surprised to hear you say that they are how much under threat they are the night crawlers right because it struck me that they could so easily be seen in many ways as playing the game as promoting as promoting i mean in some ways that you pointed out right that that they are there's circuit well they're circulating these these photographs for free right of of to scare that scares people right the faceless um they are also you know as we all do as you were pointing out we play up trump um through our obsession um and that that way in which they are a part of it seems to me to be well so the one thing that seemed to me to be really crucially distinguishing it is the photographs of the mourners so the body plus the mourners but the photographs of the bodies per se uh in absence of the the broader social context beyond the the asphalt um that seems to me to be really problematic and it could easily be folded into propaganda propaganda for the state this is what so which is i suppose coming back to what you were saying Gina as well that how how do we know right we're we're living in a very different moment from the vietnam war and from the aftermath of the vietnam war a very very different moment vis-a-vis media and how can we say that this photograph is not perpetuating uh more than it is contradicting and countering and with a future um vocation of that order with the exception perhaps of the inclusion of the social that seems to me to be an important distinction and i have something to say about that too but first maybe we can get some more get some more questions yeah jovie yeah i just um you you mentioned two ways yeah and uh you like to mention um based on the media is that we're no longer the the uh you know ml and vl or gatekeepers for anything you know it in a lot of ways so a lot of the gvc can you build outside of the outside of the system and that's both scary you know and that's both hopeful in some ways because um it also allows people to react and to popularize things and also but you know it's just it's a very complex and new kind of like media environment and i wonder if you can give that much thought yeah no it's a good point i i should i should think about because i'm not on instagram so i should i should probably join join instagram and think about but it gives rise to this idea of of of a third way which is curate curatorship individual photographers in fact do this they curate their work stuff that doesn't get used by their editors they put on their instagram and then you can look through them and of course they have their followers and so for it um but what happens to that is it's a little bit like like all curatorships you exhibit them right and then you ask well what's the exhibition exhibition value of these photographs well they're nicely done um maybe they trigger moral outrage or maybe they push an argument right but in and of themselves and this is the bottom line in and of themselves photographs cannot change policy photographs will not stop the killing everybody knows this every photographers themselves know this right so you can curate and you can have as many instagram things as you want and it might alleviate your conscience you might think well i'm putting this on as testimonies as documents for future but in and of themselves unless it's connected with something else for example actual legislation social movements the return of the social photographs i think are very very fragile that way yeah yes and then kenny yeah i mean yes uh edwin is it Eric Eric i'm sorry yeah yeah the new york times guy yeah yeah yeah who didn't like this paper by the way and uh one of these night morning yeah yeah yeah and they're laying down the sidewalks sometimes and they were going to sleep so he asked uh what the people there you know why are they doing this and uh and then the woman said that uh well the bill is now night right and they're clearing the privacy of our homes nobody would see what happens so what they do is for me to make this a concern so to be fair you know who's as a deterrence for you know they sleep now in the open right and so at least there will be a chance at the very top illers come somebody might be a witness and that could be a right so something and i i mean you know what this brings to mind is you know sometimes what's capturing the photographs right it's like uh you have a flowing river and then you only capture you know you know one smash at the bank of the river and i think maybe one of the times you know how do you bring up the story of the flow itself right then we would have found out by right you know just because of what prefer it was actually in there i think i can read for you know because there is very so much it's also possible that you know if you don't have the photograph uh you know uh if you see what's in there but you know it can also be an indication of what's not there finding out that all the photographs of course you know it is very clear that you know these are full people and so you can start to do the narrative as well of what's not being captured in the photographs so like like that story about people sleeping out in the open together as a way to defend themselves against the extradition killing i think these are the kinds of stories that needs to be looked out there yeah there's there's several of those patricio vanglista and carlo gobuco have been putting out the impunity chronicles uh they'll be coming out in rapler there's there's several of them they've won lots and lots of prizes that's exactly what they've been doing they spend a lot of time with the victims they interview the families as patricio says you know i try to build the man from the corpse right and sort of reverse the process of murder there are many of those but guess what they haven't made a difference the killing still continue the third it doesn't give a fuck it's as simple as that the police don't care and most tragically the people in the neighborhoods themselves don't seem to be perturbed at all they see it as tragic too bad but that's good you know today at least we feel safer you know those guys that used to like hassle us when we went to the sorry sorry store they're gone you know uh i would come home with my ccts and sometimes they would take my ccts with me and now they're all gone so it's okay i feel safe right and so you have this bizarre situation of what obviously looks like an incredibly sort of murderous regime is met by and large with approval i mean there are of course families who are hurting and so forth you know my favorite story is this mother and somebody you've heard of this she has two sons one son gets killed the other goes free and she's grieving and when they ask her what are you grieving about her will they kill the good son he was the one who's going to college who's going to work the other son was a drug addict they should have just gotten him so in her mind there's a particular kind of economy of substitution i don't mind the bad guy getting killed but i want my son the good son to stay alive right that for her is a sense of justice if she feels that there's been an injustice done that's the that's the level in which she feels the injustice has been done not this larger thing about how oh innocent people are being killed without getting due process because as we know due process is a very abstract and difficult concept for most people to get so for them killing is this is justice this is expeditious you get rid of the drugs right are they really drugs well we don't have to bother with that those are details so yes yeah yes oh okay are you a photographer yourself a filmmaker okay i'm sorry yeah yeah yes yeah what i admire most in most of our enemy is incredible college in the face of things yes and they haven't been sort of they're not threatened right you know sort of glass and hang around so at nothing. So we want to hear that a lot of the questions you made seems that your work seems to be about entry in the census and entry to the market place as sort of was a Benjamin in the motion of the, you know, the multiplicity of the image and the adjusted effectiveness of the image. And now, you talk about the ability of the photographers not to capture the image, whether the process of capturing the diversity. My question is, I guess, where is one of my lessons, but certainly the answer is not to talk about me, which is actually another point that was made. One of Carl's really good statements, which I really like, I don't know what you're talking about, he says, every waterfall does an answer to all of that. And, you know, in essence, it documents a tragedy for therapy. And so, you know, my response to the idea of how it is enshrined now whether it is amplifying, in fact, whether it's not amplifying, in fact, in essence, it's booking of something to happen. And that is incredible. Well, you talked about the camera a lot and the effectiveness of the camera. And as a mechanism, it would feel that this editor was an urgent force about the blink and how he's, in essence, punctured our thoughts by a blink and the attention to that is clearly accurate. And we punctuate kind of thoughts, you know, a new idea about how we blink. In essence, the process of taking a picture and the mechanism of the camera oftentimes induces the blink, the sort of a stinking thought. I guess I want to challenge the notion that, in some senses, the camera is sort of an unobstructed way in which back to ground, I might say, of using the primacy in that it is an mediator and, in some senses, in the physical forces of it oftentimes in the shopping of that system, which acts as a disconnect from how a woman might take in a primacy. And oftentimes, when I'm filming them, when I'm filming a primacy, it's actually easier for me to look through the camera than it actually is. And I've often found that it's much more interesting to look through the camera than it actually is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Gina. Yeah. We made some good points in response to actually a point. It's true. Photographs are captured at a precise moment, but over time it's the viewer that will change perspective. As whoever views this photograph will find a choice in that photograph. Yeah. I really think that this repository photograph will offer a choice in time. That's the hope. Yeah. That's the hope. Right? Yeah. So, we do live in very different times from the Vietnam War, but those people that saw those pictures at the time they were taking are different from the way people see it now. At the same time, we still don't agree that it was the right thing to do it. There were always a percent on whoever's viewing the image, but overall, who will surface from the precision of that image that was taken technically where I come from? Yeah. I think that's the hope. Kendi. When I was a junior photographer during the Marcos era, the old result guys used to say, if you see the photo, you didn't take it because of the shutter coming down. Saw the moment that we had to shoot. We didn't get the shot. So, it's the opposite of his point. Yeah. We saw it, but you didn't take it. I was going to just make a... I was really struck by the difference between that time and the long, long time of going to Galaxy far, far away. When I was a young journalist in the Marcos era, and the narration you just gave us, in the Marcos era in the 1980s when there was no social media, no antiquity of photography, and no easily manipulated photography, and there was a lot more trust because it took skill to produce a photograph, put it on a piece of paper, disseminate it. Sure. The impact of photography during the Marcos era was a part of what brought him down. There was also a very different attitude towards the photograph because I worked for a magazine which was this article, Mystery Days, which documented the rep, the idea of the Marcos. And these photographers, Lucas Luana was one of them, the guy who made the film, would walk into the room, my job was to take the photographs, and we just have spreads and spreads and spreads of rallies, terrible photos, good photos, protests, against Marcos. And that sold hundreds and thousands of copies of our magazine every week. The reason my editor said the reason is probably because people like seeing themselves in newspapers, like seeing the photos, the more they saw of themselves and they identified with the crowds of people protesting, the more they saw of themselves, the more they participated in the protests against Marcos. And the opposite is happening today because people are, what was the word there, oversaturated with information from Facebook and Instagram and all those photos. They've seen too many photographs. It wasn't like in the old days where you had to buy it to see it and you looked in the crowd, the crowd photos we published, the crowd photos in full spreads because we knew that the people buying the newspapers would search for themselves through those tiny heads. But now people have this sense of, first of all they're happening in these communities which have always, always been ignored, which have always suffered that kind of justice. There's nothing new to them being shot in their beds. It's just that it's the government that's doing it. And then there's this other thing that's also happening where I'd rather that wasn't me. So they are not participating. They don't have that kind of revolution and anger. Perhaps they do, but they're not showing it. But they're not, it's not like the way it swept people through the markets, the photographs swept people into the streets. This is driving them in because they're saying, no, that's not me. I'm not a problem. That's a really, really interesting way of historicizing the reception of the photographs that in another context the sort of identification of the photograph in this context there's a dis-identification of the photograph. In one context, it stimulates the emergence of a new social. In this case, it it deracinates it. It continues that sense of deracin. And I suspect, because I have a much longer version of this paper the first half, where I talk about how the drug war is connected to contractualization, to OFWs, to call centers. In other words, there's an entire neoliberal economy that in some ways informs the way these killings are killed out and the way they're received. It's very important to remember that the killings are financialized quite handsomely. So cops are rewarded for every kill they make. Funeral parts benefit and profit from the debt that's delivered. And the drug money, the drug trade in fact continues to prosper rather than to fall apart because the targets have been these poor people rather than the drug lords themselves. So there's a way in which the killings are actually part of a much larger economy. Very, very profitable for some people that produce all of these things. So that may be too why the photographs tend to perhaps this is what's going on. The photographers bring with them a kind of hope and a kind of ideology that's from an earlier era. That somehow hasn't come to terms with the different conditions, radically different conditions of the way in which people view and receive and circulate these photographs. Alongside living entirely different ways of life. So that may be what's coming up. There's also the nature of the photos in the magazine. We also had some really horrendous photos of military abuses in the countryside. Pictures of children with their bodies ripped up and chumped up by it. By military people just trying to stop them from collaborating with communist insurgency. And when we publish really, really sensitive photos like that there isn't the kind of reaction that we get that you get. Your people are upset. Sorry for them maybe but they don't have a strong reaction in the way that you might find in the west piece as well. Interesting. Yes, yes, and then yes. Yeah, I just wanted to comment on the social impact of the reception of the photographs because you have to note that people are not experiencing them in a vacuum. There are other narratives being put forward by let's say state-compagandist or just amateur supporters who actually have counter-meritings to what the photographs are saying. So even before the photographs come out you already have sometimes purely worded Facebook was saying that that person was a criminal and this person was a criminal and it's often obscured by these narratives and the other comment I had in regards to that is that the contrast between the professionals and the beauty of these photos they're often brushed aside from very amateurish memes and iconography that support the state and it's almost as if professionals are not being rewarded. You're actually being penalized for being slightly professional because there's a narrative that says the people who are good at their jobs, the journalists and the rights activists and the academics are actually spreading lies and it's us for amateurs who do these very rough statements who are telling the truth. So I just wanted to raise that as a point for discussion in regards to how change can happen with these two narratives or these two points of view in the clash. Somebody else, yes the person in the back, yes. Hi, in 2004 I was assisted in the Thai military in Thailand a week throughout the back of the glory and we were fine with the roadblock and as we went through the blackboard and as we went through the roadblock I noticed there was three dead bodies on the side of the road and made to my arms and I was told that this was the taxi that was wore on drugs in 2000 around 2004 and I missed something it doesn't seem to be as much exposure with taxing than the thousands that he saw exhumed as there seems to be here on the Philippines and that was my first point, I don't know why that wasn't and I wonder whether that was because of the reason I was there was humanitarian retreat courses because of Lee Sinan at the same time so I ended up randomly not from choice as head of security in a moor and that was to stop cultural journalists from taking pictures of the courses that would get into the newspapers because it was early days and it was a long job because the concern was there was Europeans and it seemed to be more value based on Europeans so now that's my love long before they were my vision so it was a fabulous task in Scotland but the photojournalists just didn't give up they did not give up the other hand which had been able to get by so the point was because of the lenses there were too many getting pictures of the courses that were stored behind so yeah I just wonder really why there wasn't as much exposure of war and drugs in Thailand as there has been on the Philippines unless I've missed it yeah that's interesting I've got a comment when the next question related to what you just talked about I would really love to read the rest of the paper and what I'd like to say is somebody else who has much more than written a book about it and showed you the writer of the books I've always had problems with particularly with the participation of the people who have been killed I know a lot of the photographers let me just read this and then I'll let me ask the question that we are not totally transformed that we can turn away turn the page switch the channels there's not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images there's not the defect that we are not seeing that we do not suffer enough when we see these images neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering to fix out in France such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention to reflect to those who examine the rationalization for mass suffering offered by this published power all this would be understanding that moral indignation like in fashion cannot dictate the rules of action we mentioned earlier about the... was that Susan Sontag? yeah and you can question the panel let's say 10-20 years from now you know you said photographs are fragile and you know there's not very much it can do it cannot change it cannot change how and all but you know let's say 10-20 years from now you think that then there is value to these photographs that they have to as we mentioned earlier there isn't as much exposure to high problems by instance my quick answer to that is to say that the photographs are most powerful when they're connected to as Eric was saying to larger narratives for example these photographs have been used by Human Rights Report by Amnesty International I'm sure they're being looked at by the ICC as they are beginning to investigate the TIRTA so that's one aspect of it and I think that's part of what I've been calling the International Awards system where you have the outside world that sees these photographs and uses them to build a case against the regime and to come to terms with to construct this narrative I think historians will find these photographs extremely valuable as they have with every sort of depictions of atrocities in various places as a way of supplementing and amplifying certain kinds of arguments they want to make in a particular event so in that sense they're valuable as repositories of a particular event or a particular moment each photograph is an archive of some sort and like all archives they have to be unearthed they have to be sort of excavated but they also have to sort of quote-unquote come alive and their way of coming alive is precisely by being attached to a narrative even if it's just a caption or a skill that sucks and such by so and so once you begin to caption it you begin to frame it and you can see this Judith Butler has this interesting argument with Susan Sontag this is how she argues against Susan Sontag because Sontag forgets that photographs are already framed and they in turn allow you to frame events so there's a whole series of frames that allow you to enter into a kind of intimate relationship with the subjects of those photographs so yeah, that would be my quick answer to that we should probably take one more question or so Raphael and then somebody in the back Thanks everyone for creating this and that is the issue that we're encountering here is that these are important documents that are unenviable that become such which are just about manifesting the context which is the two colors that they would like to see last question they were saying how perhaps the fact that there's more knowledge now it's actually not really pushing people to be more open minded and academic or neutral and it's not a true finding thing because there's so much knowledge people are more pushed towards the bias already or making some form of opinion and the more knowledge that they get it's really just more to have particular bias that they already have so for some of us who do see these photographs and we say why are people not angry why are the people in our country still okay with this I'm now wondering about the personality of the photographs when people see these photographs perhaps when I see it I have so much sympathy with those who are affected by the war but there are also some people who perhaps are seeing these photographs and they're saying good for them this is the justice that I want and so it actually perhaps even supports the very narrative that they already have because it's just that photographs are further causing the violence no I agree I think we're done right we're running out of time we're not done we're watching the time we will interrupt until next time so thank you thank you to our panel members and all of you as well