Maus: "Having a writer in the family is to have a traitor in it"

Continuing on the cartoon and animation theme are these images from the manga, Doubt. It is wonderful the way that visual tropes get poached and translated from one place to another. In yesterday's post, I looked at the use of still photographs in Black Lagoon ( an anime which was heavily influenced by the films of Quention Tarantino, a film maker who was heavily influenced by anime - as well as everything else )  and here you can see a little bit of Guantanamo creeping into the manga action.

The central symbol of Doubt is hanging rabbits. And as soon as you see hanging rabbits, you are absolutely into Art Spiegelman and Maus; the link is inescapable It's how you get from Japanese teen fiction to the Holocaust in one easy step. Such is the magic of the visual world.

Maus is the phenomenal story of Art Spiegelmann's father and the holocaust. But it's also a story about family, relationships and the destruction the Holocaust wrought after the fact. It's a story in which Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs and French as frogs. That notwithstanding, it's a story that Spiegelmann insisted should be filed in the non-fiction section of bookshops. And quite right he was too.

But in Maus, amidst the mice, and the cats and pigs, there are photographs. There are cartoons of photographs and then there are 'real' photographs; three of them. One of Spiegelmann's brother Richelieu (who died before he was born), one of his father, and one of Spiegelmann with his mother.

In Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch writes about how these images ask how 'different media - comics, photographs, narrative, testimony' create multiple voices that may 'definitively eradicate any clear-cut distinction between documentary and aesthetic.'

Maybe, and maybe for Spiegelmann including these images reconstitutes a nuclear family that once was and now is reimagined in a haze of Spiegelmann's  'postmemory' ( that's a memory where the personal and historical overlap).

The top image is of Richeu, the brother Spiegelmann never met. He was poisoned before deportation so 'he wouldn't suffer in the death camps.' The picture is a longing, a memory that isn't, of a being together that never happened. The picture introduces a chapter, it's outside the narrative. It's a stamp of personal sorrow and regret.

The picture of his mother is one of a meeting of histories; Spiegelmann's personal history, that of his family and that of the Holocaust, with the history of his mother smothered; she killed herself in 1968 when Spiegelmann was just out of 3 months in a mental hospital. In the chapter that follows, the mice and cats and pigs of the rest of Maus are replaced by human figures and it's Spiegelmann who is now wearing the camp uniform. He's been transported into the hell that his parents lived through but now it's one of family anguish and guilt with an overlay of the Holocaust to make things even worse.

The picture of his father is a 'souvenir photo'. It shows him after liberation in a borrowed camp uniform provided by the studio where the picture was taken. It's the picture he sent his wife, Anja, to show he survived. He didn't send a picture of himself in civilian clothes, but in camp stripes. But they're souvenir stripes, ironed and clean, and Vladek is full-cheeked and bright eyed. He's showing 'their common past, their survival, perhaps their hope for a future,' says Hirsch. Spiegelman didn't sentimentalise his father in Maus, he portrayed him with all his flaws and in the book stated that he could barely stand to be in the same room as him, so there might be a bit of that coming up in the photograph as well.

"Having a writer in the family is to have a traitor in it," says Spiegelman and the treachery here is the refusal to conform to the idealised view of what a father, a family, a survivor should look like. And it might be that Spiegelman's brutal familial view is slipping into how his father portrait is used in the book. It's another kind of alchemy at play here, one that works at a subconscious level.

The photographs then are fragments, part of the 'testimonial chain' that make us identify with the survivor. And the whole of Maus is made up of framed fragments in 'an aesthetic that is indistinguishable from the documentary.'

But at the same time the photographs jump out of this past/present chain as something that is instantly recognisable as a photograph but at the same time an unfamiliar part of a history 'we cannot assimilate', 'a past that will neither fade away nor be integrated into the present.'


The picture of Spiegelmann's father is also a kind of trophy picture. Vladek is reclaiming himself and is wearing the clean, lice-free skin of the thing that tried to kill him. He's making himself a human again and he's giving the finger to the dehumanisation of those millions that were killed in Auschwitz and in the other campls.

Songs for Nelson Mandela

In tribute to Nelson Mandela, here's a question for you. Who are today's Nelson Mandelas, in the sense that they are people rotting in prison, imprisoned by an unjust system, berated for fighting against brutality, corruption and injustice?


Who won't end up loved by (nearly) all the world, or have people backtracking wildly when their opinion turns out to be so obviously the wrong one, people rotting away in places like Guantanamo, people like Shaker Aamer, people in every country in the world.

Here's some music, via AfricasaCountry. If the tv coverage gets too much, listen to some of these songs..


Songs for Nelson Mandela, South African edition.

Songs for Nelson Mandela, International edition. 

Two books with the same theme: Guantanamo and Infidel

It's good to see two great books by British photographers about Afghanistan. The first is Tim Hetherington's Infidel, which is photographs from Hetherington's time embedded with the US army. It's a fantastic book which looks at the limitations that confinement within a small group of men can bring, not to mention the futility of fighting a war that will never be won.

With its theme of a small group of men living in a confined space in a hostile environment, Infidel has a lot in common with Edmund Clark's Guantanamo: If the Lights Go Out. This is a fantastic book that looks at how imprisonment affects people in the penal, domestic and family environments. Like Infidel, it is about the limitations of confinement (and this might mean many kinds of confinement), but while Infidel visits  ground that has already been very well trodden, Guantanamo shows me someting new and has an intelligence and dry elegance that is exceptional.

Both these books cast a tiny beam of light on Afghanistan but it is always good to remember that it is only a tiny beam. When people talk about photography and how it has all been done, I think of Afghanistan and the vast range of communities and viewpoints that have not been touched upon and will probably never been touched upon. Photography is not complete and has not even started to be complete.

Edmund Clark

all pictures copyright Edmund Clark

These pictures are from Edmund Clark's Guantanamo project, If the Light Goes Out:Home from Guantanamo (you can see more of his work on Lens Culture).

The work mixes pictures from the homes of wrongfully imprisoned Guantanamo detainees with the Guantanamo prison and accompanying naval base - showing how confinement informs the domestic spaces of the ex-prisoners. Clark's work is a kind of antidote to the visual/lexical string of terror suspect mugshot you see on TV and in newspapers here in the UK. Deadpan pictures of Asians tagged with terror, dirty bomb, Old Trafford bomb, carnage all wheeled out with what effect, only those who do research into these things know. But you can imagine the effect and you can witness it in Britain today both by talking to people, any people, or by looking at recent news stories here in the UK. You can see more of Clark's work here and read more about him at Prison Photography here.

I interviewed Ed during the summer for the BJP and this is what he said:

My last book was called Still Life/Killing Time and was about a prison in Britain. I'm interested in the themes of confinement and entrapment. Guantanamo Bay stands out as a symbol of confinement and my imagery is about the symbolism of that confinement. The starting point was going out with detainees who had been released and seeing how they were surviving. These people had been in prison for years, had never been charged but still had this massive label of being the worst of the worst stuck on them. I was interested in what their personal spaces said about them and if they were any traces of what they had experienced in Guantanamo.

Access was very difficult but started with their lawyers and slowly progressed to the point where I could photograph their homes. Once this was done, the second part was getting into Guantanamo itself. I applied to the Pentagon and made it clear I wanted to photograph both the American Naval Base side and the prison side. It took me 6 months to get clearance and then it was another 2 months before I went. Once I was there I Iwas fortunate enough to get paired up with Carol Rosenberg, a journalist from the Miami Herald who had been reporting on Guantanamo since it opened as a prison. She knew how to deal with the Guantanamo media team (who were new in their jobs) and how to get past their obstruction.

I spent 8 days there in total, including 4 days on the naval base. It was like so many expatriate places, more American than America itself. It was interesting to look at the schools, the shops, the restaurants. It was like a little bit of America in Cuba, with reflections both of America and of entrapment; models of old refugee camps, a shrine to the Virgin Mary where she almost seems to be imprisoned, A Ronald MacDonald statue surrounded by fencing and wire. It looks like he's banged up.

I don't have any images of the detainees except for one - which shows a guard reflected in the cell window. But that's not what my work is about. There is a lot of long lens imagery of Guantanamo showing the prisoners in their orange boiler suits, but I don't know what that's telling me. My work is about the spaces and what they evoke and how they relate to the spaces people live in once they have been released.

The work is about memory and control and dragging the work out of Guantanamo into where people are living now. I'm doing that through the edit of the 3 different spaces I photographed: the homes, the American Naval Base and the prison. When I got back, I started to edit the pictures in sequence as a narrative, but then I began to mix them up so you're never quite sure where you are. I juxtaposed images, put one things together so one image sets off ideas that enriches the idea of what it is both to have been in Guantanamo, but also to have that experience inside you.

There are also strange details that I'm not sure off, such as the picture of the Duress button. We were told this was in an exercise room but we think it was one of the interrogation rooms and this was a panic button for the guards. Another picture shows a row of Ensure jars with a plastic tube next to it. Ensure is an energy drink they used to force feed hunger striking prisoners and the Americans had it on display to show their 'duty of care'.

The detainees brought home and kept the strangest of things, a red cross calendar with the days ticked off. Only the best behaved prisoners would get this because there was a strategy of total disorientation. When prisoners first arrived they had no idea of where they were, what day it was or what time it was.

Then I looked at other bits of people's homes, especially windows because in Guantanamo they have no windows with a view. There are no views. Being released and being able to choose what to look at, to have a view, is quite a thing. Sometimes people chose not to have a view.

I'm working with Omar Deghayes on an edit of all the letters he received at Guantanamo. When people received letters, they didn't get the original, they got photocopies or scans of every page, even blank pages, including the front and back of the envelope, each page bearing a document number and a Guantanamo stamp.