With President Sadat's initiative in 1977, and then his negotiations with the Israelis, a minority in Egyptian and Arab cultural life, with the great Fuad Zakariya perhaps its most prominent symbol, emerged. Those who belonged to this minority did not necessarily agree with everything Sadat had been doing, but they believed that he had replaced the irrational approach to resolving the conflict with a rational one.
In fact, after the initiative and the negotiations, it seemed for a moment that the conflict and its resolution had become a question of land, borders, resources, and interests - not a question of greetings, handshakes, sharing a meal, or appearing in a joint photograph.
Before it, a joint photograph had essentially been a criminal indictment- irrefutable evidence of sin, betrayal, and infamy.
As is so often the case in Arab experience, however, the expectations of the rationalist few were not validated by reality.
More recently, the Iranians and Americans were negotiating an end to the war. They negotiated through an intermediary in Oman, but according to Western sources, they met face to face in Islamabad and Geneva, without being photographed. Iranian officials reportedly refused to be photographed with the killers of their leader, Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile, in Washington, Lebanese and Israeli military delegations met, and the Lebanese refused to be photographed alongside those who had killed Lebanese soldiers.
If the real reason, in the Lebanese case, is a powerlessness that makes keeping the camera away the only thing that can be achieved, the real reason in the case of Iran is officials' failure to speak candidly with the Iranian public about their delegation's engaging in something that official Tehran deems scandalous.
However, the voice of raw common sense asks: if a formality like taking a photograph with the killers is not permissible, how can negotiating with them be permissible, when negotiation goes beyond "form" to "substance"?
The photograph, however, is far too complicated to be a mere form. We know, for instance, of a phenomenon called "camera anxiety," which could stem from a person’s insecurity about what he sees as a flaw in his appearance or body, or thinks he is not at his best, or because the picture, at the moment it is taken, falls short of the one he has of himself. This is why old studio photographers would ask their clients to smile: to present a face that overcame the obstacles to being photographed.
The photograph, then, is entrapment. Roland Barthes saw anxiety as what overtakes a person when he is photographed, as he suddenly realizes he is "merely an object in someone else's eyes." Susan Sontag, for her part, saw the photograph as freezing the fluid, changing human condition in one particular moment and "shot." For her, photography involves "appropriation" that confiscates the freedom of the person being photographed, whereby a single moment becomes a stand-in for his complex and ever-shifting self and life. Because it can be viewed again and again, it freezes this fleeting impression of those captured in it.
Before Barthes and Sontag, Walter Benjamin taught us that the advent of photography undermined the "aura" and prestige of uniqueness. In recent decades, the growing importance of photography has heightened fears of its capacity for "distortion" or "diminishment.” A picture or photograph can, for instance, turn into an image - a visual could be more imagined than real and can convey characteristics or reflect on one’s reputation, not merely outward appearance.
For this reason, when diplomacy is not secret - and its negotiations therefore not secret - it seeks to tame imagery and master its challenges, exactly like the photographer asks his customer to smile.
That was precisely the aim behind the profusion of photographs taken at the close of the American-Vietnamese peace talks in Paris in 1973: the vast photo album became proof that the conclusion of the war had become a fait accompli. We saw the delegates seated around the negotiating table, and we saw them in conversation, altogether or in smaller groups. It was as though both sides were affirming the seriousness of the negotiations they were conducting.
Another school of thought around how to deal with the difficulties of the image emerged - one that teaches submission to a rigid image that lays hold of everyone and binds them, whereby something resembling worship grows up around it.
In 1966, Abdel Halim Hafez sang a song written by Salah Jahin, "A Picture," in which the word "picture" recurred as a tireless refrain:
"A picture, a picture, a picture — that's how we all want a picture.
A picture, a picture, a picture — beneath the victorious banner.
A picture of the joyful people beneath the victorious banner.
O time, take our picture, take our picture, O time.
We'll draw even closer together, and whoever drifts away in the square will never appear in the picture."
The song was part of the commemoration of July 23, 1952, and so it came associated with historical optimism and the achievements reflected in a collective picture that everyone was meant to join, and whoever did not "will never appear in the picture."
Here, then, the photograph was meant to be the end of a history in which human beings had no part. But the defeat of June 1967 came less than a year later.
