This is and is not a picture of an injured soldier. Like the high-technologization of both military tactics and aesthetics, the absence of images of injured soldiers is often said to lubricate the production of war violence by removing American flesh and blood or displaying it sparingly and only when it is clean, contained, and dry.
Schuff N, Zhang Y, Zhan W, et al. Patterns of altered cortical perfusion and diminished subcortical integrity in posttraumatic stress disorder: an MRI study. Neuroimage. 2011;54 Suppl 1:S62-S68, with permission from Elsevier. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811910007561.)
This is a picture of a soldier's brain, but mediated by a whole team of researchers with a suite of technology and ideologies about evidence and about the body and the mind and the mechanisms that connect them. Here, I take it starkly out of its context in a neuroscientific research article. There, it is not a picture of an injured soldier but a representative map showing a pattern of blood flow that, researchers suggest, may be a marker of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or, perhaps, mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI).
PTSD and mTBI are known as “signature injuries” among US soldiers in the US-led military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan (the signatures etched in other kinds of bodies are less well known to us). PTSD and mTBI are also usually called “invisible injuries.” Yet they are increasingly made knowable through the production of images like this one. And so this picture of an invisible injury does not show us what we expect to see of an injured soldier. It does not strike us with the force that images of injured soldiers are supposed to.
What ethics of attention—beyond bare life and morally weighted icons of soldier bodies—might be possible if we learned to read expertly mediated images as traces of the management of war violence? Might this introduce a productive friction into the many clean scenes that we do not see as showing war at all, while still remaining sensitive to the ethical precarity of rendering suffering spectacular?
This is an image of an injured soldier and in that sense it is a grave exposure.
Footnotes
Wool ZH. This is a Picture of an Injured Soldier. Public Books. http://www.publicbooks.org. Reprinted with permission.
- © 2013 American Physical Therapy Association
