‘The image has become a powerful weapon’

‘Footage shows photographs of sexually abused women upon whom the military exercise a further act of domination with the camera. In one film taken on a smartphone soldiers are recorded throwing the bodies of dead females into a truck, rating their bodies as they fling them into a pile.

This objectification and absolute disrespect for the dead is emphasised once again by the presence of the lens, which is said to be recording the acts as ‘trophy footage’. The filming of brutal executions by the perpetrators is another decisively symbolic act of power.

However, like all weapons, these images can be used to exploit, but also have the potential to protect. The unstable nature of the photograph means it is unable to be monopolised, it can elude total partisan intervention. In the age of the network, the potential for the photograph to be re-written is intensified. The image can become the last civil refuge for those denied the privileges of sovereign citizenship. It can be employed as such regardless of whether this was the photographer’s original purpose, depending instead on the spectator and the discourse it is placed within.

Now these images have been leaked, picked up by Channel 4 and filtered onto the web where they remain, they have the potential to be removed them from their previous complicity in the act of war.

What was once a form of abuse for the people in the frame now has the opportunity to be a key part of a process for justice and retribution.’