Once an image is firmly embedded in the mind’s eye, it is difficult, if not impossible, to shake the belief that it is “true.” All too often we mistake sight for fact, believing that what we are being shown is what actually occurred. Yet so much of what we see is presented to use secondhand, filtered from sources we have not vetted to the fullest extent. We easily mistake fiction for fact when we are told that what we see is evidence of criminal activity.
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How many times has misinformation been presented as fact? It is impossible to know, for rare are the cases when sources admit to their error without a powerful public outcry demanding it be so. We are conditioned to believe these things do not actually occur, that neither the government nor the media would betray its citizenry for ulterior motives. And yet, with the Freedom of Information Act, we begin to learn just how frequent deceptions and counter operations regularly occur.
Thus we are left to detect such things on our own, to train ourselves to think critically, to vet sources, and constantly watch for biases underlying another agenda at work. Argentine-Israeli photojournalist Miki Kratsman understands this better than most, having worked in the Palestinian Occupied Territories for over three decades creating photographs for the daily news.
Over the years, his tends of thousands of photographs have established meaning of their own. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details become the central narrative. To say Kratsman’s photographs have been appropriated would be a gross understatement; they have become tools of propaganda for the worst possible use.
Kratsman looks at both men wanted by the Israeli state as well as everyday people who can be labeled a “suspect” by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place. As Azoulay writes, “Singled out, taken out of context, he or she no longer appears as an individual but rather as an outsider, a threat, presented as encapsulated information that can be acquitted—if at all—only through systems of detection programmed by specific military logic.”
Sound familiar?
Azoulay continues, “This book of photographs unfolds the drama of the portrait making in circumstances wherein certain people—an entire population of individuals—are doomed to appear under the resolution of the suspect.”
This is where it begins, the deadly art of portraiture and all it conveys: the simplicity of manipulating the populace with false evidence designed to inflame fear-based biases. It’s a deeply disturbing proposition, one made all the more so by the blind faith so many have in sources not their own. That said, The Resolution of the Suspect is not without hope for it suggests that if we learn to question what we are told, we may just discover the truth.
All photos: From The Resolution of the Suspect. © 2016 Miki Kratsman. Courtesy of Radius Books.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
