When Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 2018 for their New York Times serial, ‘Welcome to the New World’ (Halpern and Sloan 2017), it was the first time a longform graphic narrative was recognized by the committee under the category of journalism. Their win is part of a growing trend toward the recognition of the value of using graphic narratives for humanitarian purposes, one which includes a broad variety of texts: memoirs which mix personal narrative, social context, and testimony like Marjane Satrapi’s two-part series Persepolis (2000; 2004) and Guy Delisle’s conflict zone travelogues (2007, 2008, 2012); works of graphic journalism, including Joe Sacco’s longform work on Bosnia and Palestine (2000, 2001) and Molly Crabapple’s Guantanamo reporting (2013); books and pamphlets with pedagogic and activist mandates produced by non-profit organizations like Positive Negatives, whose mandate is human rights advocacy through graphic narrative by turning personal testimony about social and humanitarian issues into pamphlets, posters, and educational comics; and finally, works produced alongside humanitarian missions like Dr. Pascal Grellety Bosviel’s mixed-media record of half a century of aid work, Toute une vie d’humanitaire: 50 ans de terrain d’un médecin-carnettiste (2013). While these works differ considerably in style, structure, and audience, the claims around the value of the medium of graphic narrative for the purpose of humanitarian testimony overlap: comics and graphic narratives mobilize the affective punch and concision of visual demonstration while adding narrative context and the voice of the depicted subject, and thereby generate empathy and identification in the reader.

Empathy is the keyword here. If graphic narratives have specific affordances to increase immersion and identification, then they are powerful instruments for empathy, a term which blurs aesthetic and ethical categories and has become increasingly central in human rights narratives, discourse, and even policy. As Susan Lanzoni tracks, the last century has seen an empathy explosion, as what was once a concept relegated to aesthetics and philosophy moved quickly through ‘a stunning number of fields, from aesthetic psychology to social work and psychotherapy, to politics, advertising, and the media’ (2018, 2). But while the term ‘empathy’ is everywhere, its meaning is nonetheless various and contested. Object of study or subject of critique, aspirational goal or neurological mirror, catchword or therapy, the many uses of empathy testify to its increasing prominence in contemporary technologies of the self in relation to the other. As comics become part of the empathy industry, the work of graphic artists increasingly rely on the assumption that the goal of their art is the production of empathy—feeling for and with the other—as both a political and an aesthetic aim.

Humanitarianism and Graphic Narrative

Advocates of humanitarian graphic narratives have often claimed comics have the ability to flatten the difference between reader and writer, and observer and participant, in order to increase engagement and magnify identification through the iconic simplicity and accessibility of the drawn image. In the frequently quoted words of Scott McCloud, ‘the cartoon is a vacuum into which identity and awareness are pulled, an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it’ (1993, 36). ‘When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face,’ McCloud writes, ‘you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon you see yourself’ (8).Footnote 1 The claim that graphic narrative acts as means of focalizing empathy, creating immediacy, and engaging the reader in a mode of recognizing the other through the projection of the self is often foregrounded in critical claims for the aesthetic and political potentials of the medium in relation to humanitarian narrative. Charlotte Salmi’s article, for example, ‘Visualizing the World: Graphic Novels, Comics, and Human Rights,’ makes sweeping claims for the value of graphic narrative in humanitarian discourse. Salmi argues that the intermedial mode of graphic narrative facilitates visibility, recognition, and the assertion of a rights-bearing subject through attention to both speech and image, the voice of the individual, the context-bearing narration of the situation, and the visual representation of trauma, which she claims thereby demands response. Salmi’s article, expansive in its survey of comics advocacy, graphic narrative, biography, and graphic journalism, concludes with the intermedial potential of the comics form to ‘trouble the spectacle of violence in visual culture’ (2019, 187), present ‘ways of viewing that enable the viewer to recognize their complicity in structural inequalities’ (187), and finally, ‘testify to the dehumanizing violence between people and states, and to their own obligation to make rights-bearing humans visible in the accounts of oppression and violence that we see and read’ (188).

By contrast, Sidonie Smith is much less broadly celebratory of the role of graphic narrative in human rights discourse and, indeed, of the claims and techniques of rights advocacy itself. Instead of beginning, as Salmi does, with the history of comics as a medium preoccupied with justice, Smith centers ‘the ways in which comics reproduce colonialist, racist, and anti-Semitic tropes of difference through crude visual stereotypes’ (2011, 61), arguing that while rights advocates critique the frequent use of comics as propaganda and an apparatus of stereotype and oppression, they nonetheless ‘exploit the capacities of the genre’ (62). In the graphic pamphlets and comic books that Smith calls ‘crisis comics,’ the ‘genre can be thought of as social action, contributing to the “social work” of publicizing rights discourse, distributing rights identities, and interpellating the reader as a subject of rights activism’ (64). But as the scare quotes on ‘social work’ indicate, Smith sees the production of comic books by human rights organizations and advocates as ‘constrained’ (64) through the ‘management of such scenes of witness [which] involves a series of remediations that frame the story, the subject of rights, and the scenario of rescue’ (64). Smith points to the largely invisible team behind the testimony, soliciting and framing what is misleadingly presented as unmediated first-person witness: ‘an NGO that is functioning as a coaxer’ and facilitates access to the humanitarian setting, ‘an interviewer, a compiler, an editor, perhaps a translator,’ ‘a drawer who visualizes the story, distributing it in frames and gutters, figuring the avatar, attaching affect to the width of a line or the design of the page’ (64). Smith clearly sees these occluded actors as manipulative stagers, who rather than providing voice to the voiceless, choreograph and exploit the subject, ‘coproduce the personal story, reframing it as boxes of victimization,’ and collude both in a savior narrative and in ‘the commodification of contemporary life writing’ (64). Here, Smith targets those who contend that the value of graphic narrative is the way it facilitates empathy in rights activism, writing that, ‘In reaching for the identification of the reader with an avatar within the comic, the form reinforces the argument that rights activism is a matter of managing empathetic identification rather than targeting structural inequalities and formations of exploitation within and across nation’ (65). In Smith’s argument, empathy is not enough: graphic narratives should not provide the false equivalency of identification or the voyeurism of trauma tourism, but should advocate for structural change.

What about humanitarian graphic narratives which problematize empathic identification? If the aesthetics of empathy, as Sianne Ngai argues, can risk being both politically impotent and socially narcissistic—an ‘imaginary symmetry’ (2005, 82) and ‘a mirror reflection of the subject’s affective response, each confirming the other in an imaginary loop’ (82)—we might then be well served to consider alternative forms of affective engagement with humanitarian subjects and spaces, embedded not in the projection-dynamics of empathy but in what Ngai calls ‘ugly feelings’ which block empathy: those affective encounters which resist, bristle, and irritate, rather than immerse and soothe. The Photographer [Le Photographe] (2003–2006), a hybrid non-fiction work which merges the conflict zone photography of Didier Lefèvre with the drawings of Emmanuel Guibert and design of Frédéric Lemercier, challenges the empathic stance of much graphic humanitarian discourse. The ‘ugly feelings’ produced in The Photographer provoke not immersion and identification but meta-reflection and distance in the humanitarian encounter. In Ngai’s account, ‘ugly feelings can be described as conducive to producing ironic distance’ (2005, 10). If Lefèvre’s ironic distance as a photographer avoids the traps of empathic projection, however, he also troubles the claim that the graphic witness facilitates political change, emphasizing instead a considerable gulf between documentarian and subject and between the work of the graphic narrative and processes of humanitarian intervention.

Slow Time: Drawing and Photographing the Conflict Zone

The photographer Didier Lefèvre joined an Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) mission to Afghanistan in 1986, during the Soviet War. Lefèvre took 4000 photographs on this mission. Upon his return, only six were published in La Liberation on December 27, 1986, in a two-page spread; the rest stayed in storage for over a decade until his friend, Emmanuel Guibert, proposed remediating them into a graphic narrative. The process of turning the photographs into a graphic memoir was collaborative. Lefèvre told Guibert stories, handed over the contact sheets, and left much of the work of curation, interpretation, and design up to Guibert, a cartoonist, and Lemercier, a colorist and graphic designer. Serialized between 2003 and 2006, The Photographer was a surprise hit. It sold 250,000 copies in France, was translated into 11 languages, and was featured, among other venues, on Rachel Maddow’s talk show in 2009, who called it ‘one of the most amazing publications I’ve ever read’ (2009)—the word publications hedging her inability to designate the genre. The success of The Photographer had much to do with the timing of its publication. When Lefèvre first published photographs from the mission in 1986, Afghanistan seemed a distant crisis zone; after 9/11, it was the center of a global conflict. While on the one hand, The Photographer stages its justification and premise as bearing witness to the plight of the Afghans, the publication of the book long after the time in which the photographs were taken complicates the usual immediacy of war photography—printed in the heat of the moment—with the testimonial and reminiscent mode of the memoir, and the retroactive history of a conflict and country which became magnified long after the events the book documents. As Orbán writes, the temporality of graphic journalism necessitates slower time, which explains ‘why graphic reportage is drawn to wars and conflict particularly in the form of aftermath reportage: the long view of the consequences of complex and often lasting situations, geopolitical quagmires, long-term ecological processes’ (2015, 124). But slow time complicates the claim to journalistic witness; by the time The Photographer was published, the conflict it charted had changed nearly beyond recognition, and some of the characters in his book were long gone.

The most original element of The Photographer is the amalgam of photographs, captions, and drawings. In his text and drawings, Guibert responds to Susan Sontag’s critique of the floating and contextless quality of war photography with dialogue and captions that tether the images to meaning through emphasis and remediation in drawing and narrative. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag criticizes Virginia Woolf’s premise that ‘when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things,’ writing, ‘No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain’ (2003, 7). Here, as the title of The Photographer indicates, the ‘we’ is not taken for granted—it is the photographer who looks, whose feelings are positioned so as to solicit those Chaney calls ‘the reader-viewer’ (2016, 23). Throughout the graphic narrative, Guibert stays wedded to Lefèvre’s point of view, what Sontag calls the war photographer as star witness (2003, 33). Lefèvre begins as a naïve idealist—’every now and again, I think about Tintin,’ he writes (Guibert et al. 2009, 72)—and the style of drawing in Guibert’s BD emphasizes this comparison, picking up on Hergé’s simplified ligne claire and delineating detailed and sublime backgrounds and relatively cartoonish characters, in a style Bart Beaty humorously calls ‘ragged Tintin’ (2006). That resemblance is more than aesthetic. It suggests a deliberate trajectory from the age of French imperialism and the conquistadorial adventurousness of Tintin to organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières, the inheritors of the aftermath of the age of exploration, and to documentarians like Lefèvre himself.

As the book opens, we begin with a mix of photographs and drawn captions, anchoring the intermedial technique of the graphic narrative. Hillary Chute contrasts comics with other documentary images such as the photograph, writing that, because of its framing and placement in a network of images rather than a single picture or series of photographs, ‘a comics text has a different relationship to indexicality than, for instance, a photograph does’ (2016, 20). But in The Photographer, the frequent use of strips of photographs from contact sheets rather than curated singular images emphasizes instead the resemblance of the photo strip to the comic strip: tiers of panels, in which repetition and difference spatially chart the passage of time. Guibert also cannily exploits the transition between the two mediums, moving deftly from photographs to comics panels. On the bottom of the first page, as Lefèvre boards a plane to Afghanistan, the long single panel of a plane taking off into a clear blue sky is drawn rather than photographed, cartoonish contrails leading the eye toward the unknown, signaling the shift of modality as the journey begins.

Despite initial similarities, the differences between the use of comics in the images and the use of photographs are substantial. The photographs in the text are in black and white. While captions are sometimes used above the photographs as a form of diegetic commentary, the photos are often left as silent. By contrast, the drawings are executed in color, though the clear blue sky of the first page is an anomaly: in general, Lemercier prefers sepia tones which evoke both the past and the desert landscape. Though representational, the drawings are flat and caricatural, with figures which stand out against simple, realistic backgrounds. Narration is integrated into the comics panels rather than floating above or beside them, and words enter into the images in the form of speech bubbles. Lefèvre, Guibert, and Lemercier are careful to continue to balance between photographs and comics drawings so that the reader does not settle into either modality, but keeps adjusting between them and the different forms of reality they represent and ways of reading that they require. Chute writes that ‘Comics is about contingent display, materially and philosophically. It weaves what I think of as interstice and interval into its constitutive grammar, and it provokes the participation of readers in those interpretive spaces that are paradoxically full and empty’ (2016, 17). The intervals, not only between comics panels but also between drawings and photographs, contribute to what Chute calls ‘an ethics of looking and reading intent on defamiliarizing standard or received images of history while yet aiming to communicate and circulate’ (31).

From Empathy to Irony

The tension between words and image, and between photographs and drawings, creates multiple levels of duality that suspend the reader and the observer between different kinds of aesthetic encounter and experience. Rather than leaning into empathy—the immersive projection into the experience of the other—the text employs a form of distancing which might be called ironic. In her appendix to the essay collection Double-Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Canadian Contemporary Art and Literature, Linda Hutcheon emphasizes duality—double talking, double meaning, and double voicing—as the central formal device of irony, distinguishing between deconstructive critical irony, which subverts, distances, and undermines, and what she calls ‘constructive’ irony, a liminal form ‘always concerned with internally oppositional positions. Here marginality becomes the model for internal subversion of that which presumes to be central’ (1992, 30). Through what Hutcheon calls ‘the forked tongue’ (29) of irony, the reader encounters ‘those familiar rhetorical devices of understatement, hyperbole, anticlimax, and repetition; those modes of strategic positioning that provoke counter-expectation (incongruity, re-contextualization, defamiliarized or literalized cliché, parody)’ (31). Liminal irony characterizes the stance of the observer and the outsider; in Hutcheon’s terms, it ‘opens up new spaces, literally between opposing meanings, where new things can happen’ (31).

In her PMLA editor’s column ‘Collateral Damage,’ Marianne Hirsch argues the affordances of comics facilitate the creation of these liminal spaces. As ‘biocular texts par excellence,’ Hirsch contends, asking ‘us to read back and forth between images and words, comics reveal the visuality and thus the materiality of words and the discursivity and narrativity of images’ (2004, 1213), comics become the liminal form par excellence. The effect of this double vision is political as well as aesthetic as comics ‘highlight both the individual frames and the space between them, calling attention to the compulsion to transcend the frame in the act of seeing. They thus startlingly reveal the limited, obstructed vision that characterizes a historical moment ruled by trauma and censorship’ (1213). In The Photographer, Lefèvre is the consummate outsider, a stranger to Afghanistan and attached to but not entirely part of the MSF mission. The biocular strategy of his text is twofold, the use of photographs and drawings adding an additional layer of distance to the mix of word and image. In Orbán’s words, the ‘ontological and functional split between the graphic and photographic explodes the narrative time and time again. As the narrative is followed, one keeps plunging into the silence of the photograph, then pulled back into narrative proper, slipping between modes of reading and viewing’ (2015, 133). Both form and narrator are never entirely inside and never entirely outside the conflict here depicted. In the in-between space of constructive irony, incongruity, and understatement, we see the distance between his experience and the trauma he charts, rather than experience empathic immersion. Through this distance, we chart the lucidity of his outsider’s vision as well as the limits of his understanding and his inability to intervene in the conflict he records.

Some of this limitation is inherent in his very positioning as ‘the photographer.’ As Lefèvre arrives in Karachi en route to Peshawar, the drawings shift back to photographs again, identified as ‘my first shots from the trip’ (Guibert et al. 2009, 4). Lefèvre photographs himself in the mirror of the hotel room, his face obscured by the camera, his body fragmented by the frame. The use of the mirror evokes the projective assumptions of empathy, making visible what Ngai calls the ‘affective reflexivity embodied in the dynamics of sympathy and empathy’ (2005, 82). If empathy is, as Ngai claims, a mirror stage of intensification, then the depiction of the mirror itself makes the dynamic of empathy reflexive. Mirrors are liminal spaces, as Michael Chaney points out, ‘the site of a threshold’ (2016, 45) which ‘forces reader-viewers to confront assumptions about the text’s capacity to convey reality’ (23). The mirror here reflects fragmentation and alienation, as Lefèvre’s image is both cut off by the frame and obscured by the camera, which covers most of his face. As the photographer, he is the camera, his eye the lens. When Lefèvre introduces himself to the MSF team, he identifies them by their function in the mission: surgeon, anesthesiologist, mission chief. When it comes time for him to be introduced, the Afghan translator calls him ‘the photographer.’ The metonym of the role, which also serves as the title and is highlighted through the choice of image on the cover of the first French volume and in the English translation, implies not only a function but a stance. The ostensive objectivity of the photographer’s position is challenged by his role as central character and narrator, which anchors the story, not in detached observation but in embodied, situated encounter. The photographer is centered in the frame, from which he is traditionally excluded. Rather than a detached record of what he has seen, the pictures become part of his sentimental journey.

The contrast between the first self-portrait in the book, the photographer in the mirror, and the drawing of the photographer on the cover is also worth noting. In the photograph, Lefèvre is still dressed from his flight, in a white button-down shirt and black pants. The camera obscures nearly all of his face, and the picture includes the lamp and curtain in the foreground, making the generic setting of the hotel room evident and emphasizing the strong verticals in the room: curtain, frame, standing figure. Two versions of the same image are included, the nuances so small they require close attention to realize the viewer is not looking at the same picture twice. There are small variations, the camera tilted just a little more in the first picture, the bottom of the lamp cut off in one frame, hidden in the next. In the drawing on the cover, however, the photographer crouches on the ground. There is no pictured background, though the tan color which serves as backdrop evokes the desert. He is now covered in an Afghan patu and turban, but his camouflage is incomplete; trousers peek out from under the robe, and his circular glasses, his sneakers, and the camera itself identify him (Fig. 6.1). His sartorial metamorphosis is only ever provisional. Even inside the busy market, the photographer remains outside those he documents, a liminal figure and stranger in the middle of the crowd.

Fig. 6.1
A painting of a man clicking pictures with an camera.

Guibert Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. 2009. The Photographer. Trans. Alexis Siegel. New York: First Second, title page

Full size image

In the drawings in The Photographer, the juxtaposition of narrative and action creates ironic distance and layer speculation and evidence. When we shift from the comics to the double-page spreads of photographs, they are, by contrast, both more immersive and less informative. The photographs are silent, even silencing, compared to the drawings, which incorporate dialogue as speech bubbles, narration in boxes. The effect is, oddly, to make the photos seem more estranged than the drawings and to make the photos more prone to the voyeuristic traps of the romanticization and silencing of the subject, while the drawings are demystifying, humorous, and chatty. The photographs are occasionally interspersed with narration, but the narration is never part of their fabric, as in the case of the comic boxes. The photos create atmosphere and provide much of the aesthetic pleasure of the book—Lefèvre is a talented photographer, with an eye for haunted interiors, sublime landscapes, striking faces. It is in the drawings, however, that the characters and context come alive.

On Voyeurism and the Obscene Image

The use of drawing also calls into question the objectivity of photography. As Nancy Pedri writes,

In The Photographer, the coupling of cartoon drawings with photographs repeatedly exposes photographic reference as faulty and points to the photographic image as falling short in its role as a sound verifier of reality—as an immediate, incontrovertible, complete record of experience. The drawings trouble the security of the photographic image, producing a differentiated space of representation that opens up a more complex articulation of the way in which photography cannot fulfill its promise to make the “real” or the “true” visible. (2011)

Guibert also uses drawing to navigate the potential obscenity of the voyeuristic photograph and video. Didier meets a war photographer whom he calls the Alsatian. The Alsatian, a man in his sixties, whom Lefèvre describes as ‘a fascinating guy’ (Guibert et al. 2009, 26), collects Leica cameras. He is also a connoisseur of violent images. ‘I’m going to show you something,’ he says (26), standing over Lefèvre with his arms crossed. ‘You’ve never seen anything like it, right?’ (27). The narration relays that these are ‘films of executions of Russian prisoners. Badly filmed, but uncensored’ (27). The repetition of scopic verbs—show, look, see—emphasizes the spectacle of violence, as well as the Alsatian’s odd voyeuristic investment in their display. The photographer claims to have distributed cameras to Mujahideen commanders in order for them to record scenes of torture and to have returned six months later for the cassettes. It is unclear why he engaged in this project, what purpose the images are supposed to serve, or why he is so eager to share them. ‘The images leave me speechless’ (27), Lefèvre records, refusing to describe them (Fig. 6.2). As importantly, Guibert does not draw them, so they are imageless for us, the readers. Lefèvre, Guibert, and Lemercier have decided to keep these executions off-camera. They are neither shown nor described but become part of an occluded archive of spectacular violence. We see Lefèvre sitting in front of the television, but our view is blocked by the screen and censored through the discretion of the text.

Fig. 6.2
A painting depicts the conversation between a young and an old man. The conversation is in a foreign language.

Guibert Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. 2009. The Photographer. Trans. Alexis Siegel. New York: First Second, 27

Full size image

At other points, however, Guibert and Lemercier are more explicit in the depiction of the impact of violence. As the MSF team come closer to the conflict zone, they pass refugees heading in the opposite direction and start to encounter the war-wounded. Didier learns not just to look but to read the situation. It is typical to see a grandfather looking after a child, he is told, because the men of fighting age are all missing. He learns about the diplomacy of the mission, not just its efficacy—the very limited powers of intervention of the medical team, illustrated when they operate on a cancerous toe though the sufferer will surely die, or when they spend extra time examining the chief of a tribe because they need his sponsorship, or when they repair a boy’s foot only to show him limping into a landscape which the narration warns us is full of landmines. The humanitarian possibility of the mission—the hope it offers—is tempered by pragmatism and dwarfed by the scale of the conflict. When the team is shown in miniature marching into the endless desert, the futility of their intervention is emphasized.

The most graphic images in the book are in the photographs, not the drawings—16-year-old Amrullah, whose jaw has been torn off by shrapnel (119), and 2- or 3-year-old Ahmadjan, who dies soon afterward of internal bleeding (136). Sontag claims that humanitarian photography can exploit the suffering of the subject in a voyeuristic fashion, extracting trauma in what she calls a ‘tropism towards the gruesome’ (2003, 97). But Lefèvre resists decontextualization through balancing the blow-up with the contact sheet—that is, the isolated, monadic image with the network of photographs that provide context and call attention to the curation and isolation of the single shot. When the book moves from close-ups of images of wounds to the contact sheets which chart the operations (Guibert et al. 2009, 120), we zoom out of an immediate and shocking encounter to a mobile, dynamic representation of the field hospital as well as the work of the photographer in choosing the best frame, marked with a red X. In other words, we move from a representation of the traumatized individual to the network of care and representation which surrounds them. When Lefèvre photographs a man getting a bullet extracted, he once again includes a whole contact sheet of images, drawing out the excruciating experience of the treatment of even what is called in the text a ‘minor wound’ in the play-by-play of the photographs, so much more expressive of durational pain than the single frame.

The sight which Lefèvre finds most distressing, a girl who has been paralyzed by stray shrapnel during a bombing, is not photographed at all, but only drawn. When the MSF team surgeon, John, tells Lefèvre to come and see the girl, we ourselves are shown almost nothing, only the headlamp on John’s forehead in the darkness, a white circle against his black silhouette, in an image more abstract than representational (135). As Guibert writes of his choice to draw the scene with reticence, ‘No speeches, no violins, no spilt blood. Drama is often something which hasn’t the appearance of a drama: just a child lying on a bed, silent and still, but who won’t get up anymore’ (Lorah 2009). When there is nothing to see, there is nothing to photograph; when there is nothing to do, there is nothing to treat; Lefèvre collapses in futility, cries silently in despair, and when he rouses himself to photograph again, on Juliette’s prompt, his perspective is birds-eye and transcendent outside and above the action. The pathos of the scene lies in the distance of what we are told and what cannot be shown, in an anti-dramatic, anti-cathartic record of loss.

Ugly Feelings

The Afghan subjects in Lefèvre’s photographs mostly occupy a fairly limited emotional range: suffering, stoic, ridiculous, frozen in speechless frames, what Orbán calls ‘a reserve of the unvoiced’ and a ‘hinterland of the unseen’ (2015, 134). By contrast, the doctors are fully developed and distinguishable—they are funny, skeptical, hopeful, tenacious, strategic, ambivalent. The Afghans appear in limited and mostly transactional dialogue, perhaps inevitable for a photographer who does not speak Pashtun, but the medical team has long conversations. If there is an emotional relationship celebrated here, it is not the vertical one between sufferer and savior, but the horizontal one between these teammates turned friends. As Guibert wrote in an interview with Michael Lorah, ‘[T]he work of organizations like MSF is something irreplaceable. What we precisely wanted was to give back a face, a voice, a first name and a behavior to doctors who are generally faceless, nameless and voiceless for the public. The work Juliette, Robert, Régis, Sylvie, John, Évelyne, Ronald, Odile, Michel have done deserves respect and gratitude. This book is for them’ (Lorah 2009). Though Lefèvre at times loses faith in the local people, in the prospects of an end to conflict, and in the possibilities of intervention, his admiration for the MSF team never falters.

As he approaches the end of his mission, Lefèvre becomes jaded, angry, sometimes cynical, afraid. Lefèvre decides to head back to Pakistan without his team and is escorted by four men who abandon him on the trail. He tries to cross the mountains on his own in the snow. This section, entirely in silhouette, shows a man reduced in the blurry snowlit twilight. He wraps himself in his survival blanket and is no longer recognizable as a human form. He takes a final photograph of the gorgeous, pitiless, indifferent landscape, printed as the only double-page single image of the book, as a record: ‘To let people know where I died’ (Guibert et al. 2009, 219). Lefèvre does not die but is picked up by a band of rescuers who then blackmail him, is later held hostage by a rogue policeman, and barely survives a harrowing journey before eventually making it home. During his treacherous journey, he is less interested in taking photographs and takes only one—of an old man he calls ‘a crippled baba,’ which he deems ‘a kind of self-portrait’ (229). At this point in his travels, even when he encounters the other, he only sees himself, in his increasing precarity and withdrawal. He is no longer part of the mission, but on his own, and dangerously so. The loss of his teammates, the loss of protection, and his lack of access to translators mean almost all his interactions with the local population are embattled and hostile. He has almost run out of film, and he is increasingly haggard. This final volume is mostly drawn, not only because Lefèvre is running out of film, but also because he no longer feels like taking pictures. Having left the MSF mission, he finds himself lost, apathetic, sick, frightened, and resentful. ‘They make me sick,’ he writes of his blackmailers. ‘I make myself sick’ (232). The afterword in the English edition reports on the physical toll of his voyage: chronic furunculosis and 14 lost teeth, which the editors write was caused by ‘his dreadful return, with its attendant exhaustion, lack of hygiene, malnutrition, and stress’ (262).

‘Those who stress the evidentiary punch of image-making by cameras have to finesse the question of the subjectivity of the image-maker’ (2003, 26), Sontag writes, and The Photographer foregrounds that subjectivity by making the photographer himself the primary subject and his spectatorial, detached perspective our vantage point on the journey. This reflexive primacy of the storyteller is frequent in many works of longform graphic witness, from Joe Sacco to Guy Deslisle, Kate Evans, and Sara Glidden, where the narrator is both primary character and the filter through which we experience the story. This might overcorrect for the problem of the invisible subjective photographer or storyteller at the expense of the subject at hand, but it introduces a different problem. By the end of the story, our sympathies primarily attach to Lefèvre, and we identify with his despair and exhaustion. In the third volume, the Afghans are depicted as less sympathetic and more oppositional—they are dishonest, dangerous, an obstacle to his journey home. At the end of the story, the graphic narrative doubles down on what becomes an empathetic gap, and what Ngai calls ugly feelings come to the fore. We look at Afghanistan through Didier’s eyes, we hear his voice. The reader-viewer is invited to feel for him and with him—the fatigue, ambivalence, and complicated distance of the implicated and powerless voyeur. Guibert writes, ‘At the time (1986), Didier certainly believed in the role and the efficiency of photographs as a testimony against war. As he grew older, the quick evolution of his job, of the medias, and of his own psychology made him more doubtful about that’ (Lorah 2009). The book, as retrospective document, foreshadows that doubt and ambivalence.

Conclusion

Ngai argues that negative affect is frequently encountered in ‘a general state of obstructed agency’ and ‘situations of passivity’ (2005, 3). They can serve as ‘allegories for an autonomous or bourgeois art’s increasingly resigned and pessimistic understanding of its own relationship to political action’ (3). In her article, ‘Post-Humanitarianism,’ Lilie Chouliaraki calls attention to the shift away from empathic identification in the messaging of humanitarian organizations, writing of campaigns which employ ‘ironic double-voicedness’ (2010, 12) and instead:

refract grand emotions into, what we may call, low intensity affective regimes—regimes that insinuate the classic constellations of emotion towards suffering but do not quite inspire or enact them. Guilt, heroism and compassion re-appear not as elements of a politics of pity, partaking a grand narrative of affective attachment and collective commitment, but as de-contextualized fragments of such narrative that render the psychological world of the spectator a potential terrain of self-inspection. (16-17)

Chouliaraki writes that the shift from empathy to irony, and from savior politics to introspection and futility, is a mixed bag: while it ‘manages to reflexively address the limitations of a politics of pity, detaching the communication of suffering from grand emotion, it has, in one and the same move, also suppressed the articulation of ethical discourse on public action’ (20). As an affective regime of intimacy and identification, empathy can smother, blur difference, and overclaim, but the distance of irony risks the surrender of action and of agency. Lefèvre returns home to his mother, his dog, and his native France, depicted on a contact sheet on the final page, and the prospects for intervention in Afghanistan remain unclear. The narrative ends with the familiar comfort of home and his temporary retreat from the humanitarian project. But these familiar images do not fill the page; the second half of the contact sheet is black, a record of photographs not taken, and an imprint of the problem of both representation and intervention raised by the text as a whole. If the photographer leaves us in darkness, it is also our darkness: the space between the impossibility of looking and the impossibility of looking away, which neither empathy nor irony seem sufficient to illuminate.