Arresting an image

This post was originally written in Feb. 2017. I'm reposting it because I think it holds up as a worthwhile discussion about photography in the context of a political tragedy. 

We sometimes speak of images as being arresting, an oddly suggestive term which means remarkable in some way – an image that stops us dead in our tracks. But for how long? Not very, typically – a glance, maybe a second glance, and we're on to something else. We are constantly deluged with images and so become inured to them, no matter how shocking or eye-popping they are. The more images come at us, the less attention we pay them. “The world is too much with us” - and for that reason we understand and feel it too little.

What I want to do here is 'arrest' an arresting image, by which I mean retrieve it from the collective amnesia of disposable images and see what else can be gleaned from it.

The photograph I've chosen was seen by millions. On Dec. 19 the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated while speaking at the opening of a photo exhibition at an art gallery in Ankara. The photograph shows the assassin, a young Turkish police officer, standing over the dying body of the ambassador. In one hand he holds a gun while with the other he is stabbing the air with a finger. He shouts: “Don't forget Aleppo! Don't forget Syria!” The shout, if not the words, are evident in the photograph.

Obviously this isn't a posed photograph. The photographer (who works for AP), like the other guests at the opening, had no inkling of what was about to happen; indeed, he wasn't even planning to attend since the event didn't seem newsworthy, and only dropped by because the gallery happened to be on his way home. After the assassin shot the ambassador five or six times, the photographer recovered from his initial shock and went back to doing his job, showing a lot of courage. Under such circumstances there's no time to think about formal matters like composition or angles. You do what you can to get the events 'on record'. And so this picture is like many other eyewitness images of terrible events taken on cell phone cameras – reality, so to speak, in the raw.

But in one important respect this picture is posed – not by the photographer but by the assassin. And this complication makes the photograph more interesting, because the assassin not only planned a killing but also must have had some intention as to how he wanted his act to be seen. A further complication: the 'stage' for this photograph is itself an exhibition of photographs.

So far I haven't used the names of either person in the photograph because an assassination isn't personal. The ambassador was shot because he was an ambassador, the assassin's motives were political and religious. Of course in one respect the experience is decidedly personal – the dying. Both men would soon be dead – the ambassador, Andrey Karlov, would die of his wounds after being rushed to hospital; the assassin, Mevlut Mert Altintas, would be killed after a 15-minute shoot-out with Turkish security forces. In the moment captured by the photograph the assassin knew his death was imminent. “Only death will take me from this place” is another thing he shouted. 

The violence of the act makes for a terrible clarity in the photograph. We know who the assassin is, gun in hand, and we know who his victim is, lying on the floor. There is no mystery and also no depth – everything seems to be exactly as it appears. Until, that is, we look more closely at seemingly incidental details.

It starts with the clothes. The ambassador is a faceless heap on the floor but one thing we can see are the soles of his shoes, which are worn out. Also the shirt he was wearing seems a size too short and has been pulled out from his belt by the suddenness of his falling backwards. Karlov was a veteran diplomat and one assumes well-paid by Russian standards. One also assumes that dressing the part is part of an ambassador's job. Maybe he was 'slumming' because this was a low-key event. Or maybe money really was a problem. Those worn-out soles bespeak a life of work and worries.

By contrast his assassin is well dressed: black suit and tie, crisp white shirt, shiny black shoes. Altintas was from a working class family. He graduated from police training a couple of years back, and worked for the Ankara riot squad. The suit looks like something out of a Secret Service manual, and it turns out that Altintas had done some security details for dignitaries, including once guarding the Turkish president. My guess would be that it's the one suit he had. After the assassination, people who work at the gallery remember that he had stopped by a few days before, either to reconnoitre or because he got the date wrong. He was wearing the same suit.

Then there is the physical contrast, not just their obvious differences (the overweight older man, the younger one trim and fit) but their positioning in the picture. The ambassador is splayed out on the ground, arms wide open in what is an eerily welcoming gesture, whereas the assassin is a column of angry intensity. His hand is raised and he is stabbing the air with his finger which, it turns out, is a jihadist gesture, signifying 'takbir' – the greatness and oneness of Allah.

It has been pointed out that the assassin used the wrong hand for this gesture: it should have been the right, not the left. He was 22, recently radicalized, clearly a novice when it came to jihad or assassination or indeed posing for a photograph. It's a detail that undermines the image he wanted to convey, of himself as a righteous avenger. And for that reason it adds, like the ambassador's shoes, an element of poignancy.

Also in contrast to the clarity of the image is the murkiness of the politics behind it. The assassin was probably a follower of the Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's branch in Syria. Since that would be an embarrassment for the Turkish regime, which has been supporting Al Nusra in the Syrian civil war, the government would rather portray him as a Gulenist, follower of an Islamic cleric whom the regime blames for a coup attempt last July. There isn't any evidence for this but it makes for a serviceable lie.

There is a lot of anger on the streets in Turkey over the slaughter and destruction in Aleppo, much of it directed at Russia. All week prior to the assassination big demonstrations had been going on outside the Russian embassy in Ankara. Until recently the government encouraged this anger, but then it opted for a rapprochement with Russia to end the Syrian war, without bothering much to convince its political base that the hated enemy was now a friend.

It's hard even for well-informed people to make sense of this welter of conflicting interests, all but impossible if you are inexperienced and young. You probably come out of police training with a rigid sense of right and wrong, only to confront a political morass that leaves you bewildered. I can imagine the powerful pull of religious fundamentalism in such circumstances, especially since the government itself has blurred the line between jihadism and Turkish nationalism. I can also imagine the appeal of a spectacular act of defiance, a blow against a hated enemy, a blow also against all the murkiness and confusion. 

But that isn't how it turns out. The blow only creates more carnage and more mess. This is a bad time to be young and angry: so much anger is misdirected, so many lives are squandered. Including the two in this photograph.

There is one more detail worth mentioning: the photographs on the wall. These were pictures taken by tourists of favorite tourist spots across Russia. It's no surprise the Russian embassy was sponsoring the show since it was just a tourist promotion posing as an art exhibition. Again the contrast is striking – between the kitsch on the wall and the murderous violence being played out in front of it. Stranger still, the picture right behind the assassin is of an old cannon and three cannonballs. It's as if the kitsch was shooting back.