It is a piece of news from 1997 that a rape victim committed suicide.
The last sentence of the reporter on this news:
"Yang(victim's name)'s choice to die instead of living a shameful life has great implications in today's world in which the concept of chastity has become sparse."
"수치스러운 삶 대신 죽음을 택한 이양의 선택은 정조 관념이 희박해진 요즘 세태에 시사하는 바가 큽니다."
Link: https://imnews.imbc.com/replay/1997/nwdesk/article/1768738_30717.html
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictible thoughts, feelings. Poster-ready photographs - the mushroom cloud of an A-bomb test, Martin Luther King, Jr, speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, the astronaut walking on the moon - are the visual equivalent of sound bites. They commemorate, in no less blunt fashion than postage stamps, Important Historical Moments; indeed, the triumphalist ones (the picture of the A-bomb excepted) become postage stamps. (다행히 나치 캠프의 사진은 없다) p. 77
모든 기억은 개인적이며 재현될 수도 없다. 기억이랑 것은 그 기억을 갖고 있는 개개의 사람이 죽으면 함께 죽는다. 우리가 집단적 기억이라고 부르는 것은 상기하기가 아니라 일종의 약정이다. 즉, 우리는 사진을 통해서 이것은 중요한 일이며 이것이야말로 어떤 일이 어떻게 일어났는지를 알려주는 이야기이다, 라고 우리의 정신 속에 꼭꼭 챙겨두는 것이다. 이데올로기는 뭔가를 구체화 할 수 있는 이미지, 즉 중요하기 그지없는 공통 관념을 담고 있으며 사람들의 생각과 감정을 예측 가능하도록 움직이게 하는 재현적 이미지의 저장소를 만들어 둔다. 곧장 포스터로 만들 수 있는 사진들, (… 등의) 사진들은 중요한 사건들의 핵심을 전달해 주는 시각적 등가물이다. p131
In contrast to a written account - which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a large or smaller readership - a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all. P. 17
사진은 단 하나의 언어만을 가지고 있을 뿐이며 잠재적으로 모든 이들을 위한 것일 수밖에 없다. P41.
Nonstop imagery (television, streaming videos, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a quotatopn, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall. P. 19
…
프레임에 고정된 기억, 그것의 기본적인 단위는 단 하나의 이미지이다. …사진은 인용문, 그도 아니면 격언이나 속담 같은 것이다. 우리는 모두 순식간에 떠올릴 수 있는 수백 장의 사진들을 마음 속에 담고 있다. p44.
Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin Group.
수잔손택, 타인의 고통
Thoughts on the video materials.
About the narrator:
testifying about this case and the very image.
No choice but to follow this voice.
how convincing the speaker is?
with inaccurate memories,
still engulfed in infantile fear,
in the partial and fragmentary structure.
And the right to tell this story.
Gladbecker Geiseldrama
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiselnahme_von_Gladbeck#Kritik_an_Presse_und_Polizei
Durch ihre Liveberichte und -interviews boten die Medienvertreter den Tätern während der Begehung der Tat ein öffentliches Podium in bis dahin nicht gekannter Form. Dieses Verhalten der Presse rief in der Öffentlichkeit Empörung hervor.
Das Verhalten der Journalisten in Bremen wurde zum damaligen Zeitpunkt unterschiedlich bewertet. Aufgrund der chaotischen Situation gelang es Journalisten, die Freilassung von fünf Geiseln zu erreichen. Auch die Freilassung der beiden Bankangestellten auf der Raststätte Grundbergsee erreichten die Journalisten durch ein Gespräch mit Rösner. Zwei Reporter übernahmen auch den blutenden Emanuele an der Tür des Busses und zogen den schwerverletzten Jungen in den Gang der Raststätte. Vorher hielt einer der beiden Reporter den herabhängenden Kopf noch einmal „fotogerecht“ vor die Kameras.
Wegen des Fehlverhaltens der Journalisten während des Geiseldramas teilte der Deutsche Presserat am 7. September 1988 mit, dass Geiselnehmer während einer Geiselnahme nicht interviewt werden sollten und eigenmächtige Vermittlungsversuche nicht zu den Aufgaben von Journalisten gehörten. Der Pressekodex wurde entsprechend erweitert. In einem Bericht der Süddeutschen Zeitung 20 Jahre nach dem Gladbecker Geiseldrama erklärten einige der damals beteiligten Journalisten, sie bereuten ihr Verhalten, das zur Unterstützung der Verbrecher beigetragen habe.[51] Frank Plasberg erklärte im Rückblick, aus damaliger Sicht nichts falsch gemacht zu haben, heutzutage würde er aber anders handeln. Auch der Berliner Tagesspiegel analysierte in einem längeren Artikel am 16. August 2018 das Verhalten der Medien.[52]
„Das bizarre Fiasko, in dem die Einsatzkräfte während des unverschämten Katz-und-Maus-Spiels der Täter untergingen, wurde nur noch von der Sensationsgier der Reporter übertroffen. Während die Polizei im Blindflug agierte, waren die Medien umso näher dran. Direkt am Fluchtauto. Sie hatten ihre Bilder von blutüberströmten und mit der Pistole bedrohten Geiseln.“
– Paul Jandl[53]
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| from the film "Elle", 2016 |
The ash girl :
"Her father apparently killed 27 people indiscriminately almost four decades ago and a dubious photo of the then 10-year-old girl Michèle taken in this context suggested to the public that she could be complicit Being involved in the mass murder, she and her mother are repeatedly exposed to hostilities."
(Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elle_(film))
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Selected and translated from the French by ANNETTE LAVERS
THE NOONDAY PRESS - NEW YORK FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, 1972
"It seems that this is a difficulty pertaining to our times: there is as yet only one possible choice, and this choice can bear only on two equally extreme methods: either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poetize. In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (by poetry I understand, in a very general way, the search for the inalienable meaning of things).
The fact that we cannot manage to achieve more than an unstable grasp of reality doubtless gives the measure of our present alienation: we constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but we restore it to a state which is still mystified. It would seem that we are condemned for some time yet always to speak excessively about reality. This is probably because ideologism and its opposite are types of behaviour which are still magical, terrorized, blinded and fascinated by the split in the social world. And yet, this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge."
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
두 가지 똑같이 극단적인 방법이 있다. 역사에 전적으로 투과되는 현실을 상정하고 이데올로기화하는 것이 있다. 또는 반대로 궁극적으로 투과될 수 없고, 환원될 수 없는 현실이 있으며, 이 경우에는 결국 시화하는 것이다. … 우리는 물체와 그것의 탈신비화 사이에서 끊임없이 표류하며, 그 전체를 제대로 표현할 힘이 없다. 우리가 그 물체를 관통하게 되면 우리는 그것을 해방시킬 수 있지만 결국 그것을 파괴한다. 그리고 우리가 그것의 전체 무게를 제대로 인정하려 하면, 우리는 그것을 존중할 수 있긴 하지만 여전히 그것을 신비로운 상태로 복원할 뿐이다.
It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. …(p. 36)
… There was also the repertoire of hard-to-look-at cruelties from classical antiquity …(p. 37)
But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering, Torment, a canonical subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something being watched (or ignored) by other people. The implication is: no, it cannot be stopped - and mingling of inattentive with onlookers underscores this. (p. 37.38)
Sontag, Susan. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin Group.
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| Andy Warhol used Wiles' photo in one of his prints entitled Suicide (Fallen Body) |
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| Her picture was also used on the cover of Saccharine Trust's album Surviving You, Always, released in 1984 by SST Records |
A sexual layer overlaid on a woman's death
e.g: Death of Cleopatra.
The unconfirmed stories about her suicide from viper bites (even her breast) reinforce the sexual image of her death.
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| Reginald Arthur, 1971-1934, The Death of Cleopatra. 1892, Oil on canvas, Roy Miles Gallery, London. |
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| Guido Reni, The Death of Cleopatra, 1639, Neues Palais |
Georges Bataille, Die Träne des Eros (Org. Les Larmes d‘Eros. 1961)
Matthes & Seitz Verlag Gmbh., München, 1993
Die in Verbindung mit sexueller Aktivität auftretende Scheu erinnert (in einer Hinsicht zumindest) an die Scheu, die Menschen angesichts des Todes und der Toten empfinden. In beiden Fällen sehen wir uns von einer fremden Gewalt übermannt: in beiden Fälle sprengt ein fremdes Geschehen die etablierte Ordnung der Dinge. Der Tod haftet etwas Anstößiges an, das freilich von anderer Beschaffenheit ist als das Unanständige des Liebesaktes. Der Tod ruft Tränen hervor, das sexuelle Verlangen zuweilen Lachkrämpfe. Doch ist das Lachen dem Weinen nicht so entgegengesetzt, wie es den Anschein hat : der Gegenstand des Lachens und der Gegestand des Weinens ist immer an eine Art Gewalt gebunden, die den regelmäßige, den gewohnten Lauf der Dinge plötzlich unterbricht. (p. 35-36)
바타유, 에로스의 눈물
우리가 성 활동에 대해 느끼는 거북함은 최소한 어떤 의미에서는 죽음에 대한, 죽은 자들에 대한 거북함을 상기시킨다. 두 경우 모두에서 ‘폭력’이 낯설게 범람한다. 성과 죽음 모두에서 일어나는 것은 우리가 받아들인 사물의 질서에 비추어 낯선 사건이며, 폭력은 바로 그 사물의 질서에 맞선다. 성의 경우처럼 노골적이지는 않지만, 죽음 속에 는 우리를 거북하게 하는 모종의 무례함이 담겨 있다. 죽음은 눈물과 연결되고, 때때로 성적 욕망은 웃음과 연결된다. (p.23-24)
Die Erotik hat einen lächerlichen Aspekt.
Die Erotische Anspielung hat jederzeit die Macht, die Ironie zu provozieren.
[…] Eros ist nicht weniger tragisch. (p. 114)
에로티즘은, 어떤 의미에서, 우습다…….
에로틱한 암시는 언제나 야유를 촉발하는 힘을 지닌다.
(…) 그렇더라도 에로스는 비극적이다.
This scene has a peculiarly strong imprint on people and is most recounted despite the other offensive and uncensored images that illustrated the same incident. The naked, exposed woman‘s body above all else, sparked a taboo.
AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION REPORT, by Civil Aviation Bureau Ministry of Construction & Transportation Republic of Korea, 1993
AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION REPORT, by Civil Aviation Bureau Ministry of Construction & Transportation Republic of Korea, 1993
On September 5, I was sitting on a plane trying to land through Typhoon Hinnamno.
I thought that if I died in an airplane accident while investigating an airplane accident, there would be no such obvious cliché.
So please, I beg to die not now.
the human body swept away by disaster.
The naked, exposed woman‘s body in the media.
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| Pisanello_010 Delinquenten um 1438. Sie tragen „Beinlinge“ |
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| Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phryne before the Areopagus, 1861, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg |
