The Wikileaks video ruined my otherwise perfect Easter holiday. Even in the midst of the spectacle surrounding the UK hung parliament, I’m still thinking about the damn thing.

By now, you would have watched the video, which depicts the murder of two Reuters journalists and several Iraqi civilians by the US airforce. It led to a worldwide condemnation over the incident, led by the media.

A still from the Wikileaks video. See the video below - if you have the stomach for it.

AJ Somerset, former soldier and now a Canada-based freelance photographer, provided an alternative view in contrast to what the majority of the media practitioners feel about the incident. He said the Wikileaks video is “deliberately manipulative”, “framed with an introduction that encourages us to see it in a certain way”. The style of narratives “lead us to see what they want us to see, and we see it”, he says. “And then we loudly complain about what we see, and puff ourselves up in self-righteous indignation”.

The Pentagon has admitted that the video is genuine, but what Somerset is objecting here is to the dramatisation of a piece of visual evidence.

Ok, let’s treat it as cinema

If we were to look at the video though the lenses of the two prominent film theories, Formalism and Realism, we would have arrived to different conclusions on the validity of the video.

The Realist school of Andre Bazin would have us believe that film is “an imprint of reality”, that the processes involved in the making of an image – minus manual intervention (or manipulation) would lend “indexicality to the (moving) photograph”. Through this lens, that video can be taken as reality, or evidence.

However, if we were to examine it via Rudolph Durkheim’s Formalist lens, we would accept that the narratives of the mediation – the hypermediacy and the transparency – are just ‘styles’ employed to reinforce the ‘unrealism’ of the photographic piece. The editor’s or photographer’s depiction has got nothing to do with reality. It’s art. If it’s art, it’s abstract, and is therefore open to various interpretations. Through this point of view, the Wikileaks video can be viewed as ‘fiction’.

AJ Somerset has got a point.

Now look at it as ‘art’

But let’s apply John Berger’s ways of seeing here and examine the video from the point of view of the soldier who murdered those people. We see an event unfolding in the first person’s point of view, depicted in present time (this, however, is determined by the format of photography. Can’t be helped), and the murderer soldier nattering like he’s some Yankee teenage gamer wanting to eliminate his opponent on the World of Warcraft.

Lane DeNicola, my anthropology tutor, pointed out a piece by Alexander Cockburn on truthout which carries this quote by a retired US army person:

“How much is simulator training responsible for the disconnection from reality demonstrated in this incident? The crew was detached from reality … How (is) the Army … producing crews that, having the potential for such incompetence, cannot detect it among themselves. If anyone in that crew had paused and asked if the action being taken was correct, surely it would have been aborted … The Army has to find out why.”

So AJ Somerset has got a point about the Wikileaks edit being dramatised, but look and listen to that video and you will see that this is no more than a video game to the murderer. The gendered gaze that epitomises the ‘divine’ way of seeing – or looking down at – its subjects is again at work here, in war.

The Fallujah chemical plant, so we're told. This satellite image forms the evidence for the existence of the weapon of mass destruction in Iraq

Seeing is ‘believing’. Really

On this vein, what then does this make of, say, satellite images, or ‘live’ televisual images transmitted via satellite? If we apply the Formalist view on satellite images, would that also make them ‘art’ – or fictional? In other words, not ‘evidence’? After all, satellite takes photos where the human eye can’t reach, so how do we know how accurate the depiction is? I posed this question to David Heinemann, who is teaching Art of the Image course for Spring at the Department of Anthropology, University College London.

Seeing via the satellite could be an act of faith, he answered. Not in the religious sense, but we don’t see the evidence with our eyes and we only have what is taken by the satellite to believe in. Think of the ‘divine’ point of view of heaven that Michelangelo painted for the Sistine Chapel. Is that true? Who knows, but it takes faith to take Michelangelo’s words, or images, for it.

Heaven, according to Michelangelo. To see this, and take it as evidence, is an act of faith.

So, yes, Mr Somerset, the Wikileaks video could be fictional, but so are NATO satellite images. Seeing is subjective, not objective, and seeing depends on the social construct. The social construct says those who own the technology own the way of seeing. Because technology, in this case (moving) photography, comes with a certain way of looking and understanding. Are you surprised that this, as a result, is the model followed by Wikileaks, and also by journalists like you and me?

If you’re interested to learn more about the Art of Images, email David Heinemann or email inSight, or go to www.insighteducation.org.uk.

Visit duckrabbit for more commentaries on the ethics of photojournalism.