“Image-Sick”: Gretchen Bender, Susan Meiselas, and a Picture from the Salvadoran Civil War

In January 1984, two versions of the same photograph were exhibited at different venues in lower Manhattan as part of the international solidarity campaign Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. The picture was taken in El Salvador by the American photojournalist John Hoagland in August 1980, and it depicts the bodies of two girls, murdered on the side of a road during the Salvadoran Civil War. Susan Meiselas included it as a work of photojournalism in her exhibition El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers at Central Hall Artists. Meanwhile, multimedia artist Gretchen Bender appropriated Hoagland’s image, combining it with a stuttering digital abstraction in a wall piece titled Drone, which she contributed to an Artists Call group exhibition at Metro Pictures Gallery. In this paper, I expand upon these simultaneous public presentations of the same image as a heuristic for the critical paradigm of simulation as theorized by Jean Baudrillard and taken up by others in the 1980s. Where Meiselas advocates for an idea of the photograph as historical testimony, Bender positions the image as an element within a much larger, deeply compromised media spectacle. In their respective treatment of Hoagland’s photograph, Meiselas and Bender trouble a clear distinction between a modern or postmodern attitude. In this paper, I argue that Bender and Meiselas choose distinct but equally critical methods for grounding a photographic image as an unstable discursive site that participates in both representing a specific time and place and constituting a broader mass culture environment.