Janus, the god of gates and doors, is a figure for contradiction, for that which opens as it shuts, arrives as it departs, welcomes as it turns away. He is the god who animates Wendy Kozol's Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing, a book that swings back and forth on the rusted hinge of representation and trauma. Photographs of military conflict, it may be said, do everything. They bear crucial witness to tragedy and inform the world about inhumanity and violence. They foment dissent, produce affect, and inspire ethical response. At the same time, it may also be said, pictures of war and its consequences do nothing. Commodities in the global trade in crisis imagery, they participate in neoliberal logics and the spectacle of Western empire. They are part of a superficial commerce in false empathy. For the victims of war, it might even be said that these images do less than nothing. Janus-faced, Western audiences look intently at such pictures even as we look away.

Kozol's approach to this squeaky debate is to position herself on the fulcrum around which such readings turn; it is to look for and carefully study that which is ambivalent in representation. Thoroughly researched, the book meticulously engages with relevant literatures in American studies, foreign policy, media studies, and theories of witness. Although photographs have ideological functions, she argues, their disciplinary power is not total. There is an “unpredictable excess” in representation that “destabilizes” and “bumps up against” our tendency to look away from the real causes of violence, from the role played by those who cast others as victims and themselves as heroes. “I argue,” she writes, “that an ethical gaze can occur only through, not despite, encounters with spectacles of violence” (16, original emphasis).

Kozol examines her topic through an array of examples that swing in a broad arc from photojournalists’ images of the distant wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan, to the notorious “selfies” taken by soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, to a film and websites advocating US missile defense, and across a range of artists’ projects that seek to intervene (often using invisibility as a tactic) in the visual culture and politics of witnessing. Despite the historical, geographic, cultural, and political specificity of each of these case studies, Kozol notes a familiar narrative pattern. Surrounding photographs that isolate their pitiful subjects in time and place, and that trade in the orientalist tropes and well-worn iconography of earlier art-historical eras, are narratives of trauma that discursively produce villains, victims, heroes, humanitarian logics, and the teleology of rescue.

To the protracted and often contentious debates around photographic documentation, Distant Wars Visible not only contributes ambivalence as both ethics and methodology, but also draws attention to the politics of gender and sexuality (so often neglected in the literature on this topic), which invariably undergirds these images and their accompanying narratives. Kozol directs her reader's gaze to instrumentalized images of universal motherhood, burka-clad women as cheap symbols of victimization, and a sea of headscarves made to stand for humanitarian crisis. She also addresses our attention to the heteronormative orientalist logics that cast male prisoners as queerly vulnerable and Islamic or Middle Eastern enemies as “penetrable” by the hard technological superiority of US missile defense.

But in her survey of media photographs depicting Kosovar Madonnas, Iraqi mourners identifying their dead, Afghani women begging for food or sitting on street corners, she lingers over provocative details (Barthes would call them “puncta”) – a hand clasping a wire fence, a head turned in conversation, a particular look that locks eyes with the camera – that create, as she says repeatedly, “friction” with hegemonic media habits. “Small elements in these pictures,” she writes, “remind us to attend to the relationships between visuality, affect, and political knowledge” (93).

The book offers careful readings of images and useful ideas about how those images can be most productively understood, but at the same time one wishes for a more systematic explanation of the precise source of the ambivalence to which the author attends. Are these images two-faced only to the degree that we take a deconstructionist approach to reading them, an approach wherein the philosophical binaries from which they inevitably emerge (here/there, hero/villain, ally/enemy, rescuer/victim) are exposed and revealed to be mutually constitutive? Are photography's “unruly affects,” in other words, inherent in representation itself? Or do these effects have something to do with artistic, journalistic, or political intention? Kozol might answer that photography's Janus faces are the result of a variety of factors, but it would be useful to know how and in what measure.

Such questions become most urgent where Kozol treats artworks very differently from the news and PR images she discusses. Although she is careful to describe the networks through which media images circulate (e.g. from the wire services to the pages of U.S. News and World Report), she tends not to discuss the artistic or political intentions of individual photojournalists. Conversely, she does consider the artistic agency involved in the art she examines, but does not sufficiently acknowledge the very similar networks of power through which the art world does business and the expedient neoliberal logics in which it participates.