The Ambassador and the Assassin

Photo by Catherine Jagoe

The Ambassador and the Assassin

Catherine Jagoe

It made the front-page news around the world two Christmases ago. The Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei G. Karlov, was assassinated at an art exhibit in Ankara on December 19, 2016, by a lone gunman. Coming just three months after my father’s death, while I was still raw and permeable from grief, a photograph of the assassination lodged in my mind. Something about my response to it eluded me. In the months after I saw it on the front page of the New York Times, I kept returning to the image. I found myself unable to toss the newspaper into the recycling bin. After it had sat around for a week, I cut out the picture and stored it between the pages of my journal, unable to parse my strong reaction to it. I found it arresting: it stopped me in my tracks, compelling attention. I was not alone. Although three photographers recorded the assassination, at great personal risk, this particular image—by Burhan Ozbilici of the Associated Press—went viral almost instantly and was later named World Press Photo of the Year.

 

In the photograph, the assassin—a young white man with thick black hair, neatly combed, and black eyebrows, in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, black belt, and shiny black dress shoes—stands facing the camera. His right hand points down at the floor, holding a black pistol. The forefinger, bloody at the tip, is stretched down the gunstock. It is the only trace of blood visible anywhere.

 

The picture is so beautifully composed it looks like a tableau, a still life.

 

The assassin’s left hand is raised in a fist, with one long forefinger pointing heavenwards, in a gesture vaguely reminiscent of God imparting life to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It also reminded me of the ancient Qigong move “Touching Heaven, Touching Earth.” But no healing will come of this death, even though the killer might describe it as a form of surgery.

 

He is thin and angular, in a world of right angles. The various triangles all around him draw the eye into the scene. They provide a pleasing symmetry, one that implies order, certitude.

 

He’s dressed himself in absolutes, as if for his own funeral. But his family will refuse to accept his body out of shame at the murder. He will be buried in a place for unclaimed corpses.

 

Although I’m not typically a visual person, even I can see the cameraman’s compositional skill with lines and geometric shapes. It must be either instinctual or deeply ingrained, because this is an act in progress, a whirlwind happening. The assassin’s legs are planted far apart, with the right heel fractionally raised, as if trying to keep his balance on deck in a storm. The floor is glossy grey; the gallery walls behind him are an immaculate matte white. Flanked by color landscape photographs in rectangular black frames, he is perfectly positioned at the midpoint between two of them. The “v” of his long, straight legs in their wide stance is echoed by the angles of the bumped-out wall behind him and by the open legs of the body lying prone to his left, as if poleaxed. There is intense tension between the manic aliveness of the assassin and the stillness of the fatally wounded man on the floor.

 

The assassin is clearly the photographer’s subject, but I want to look instead at the ambassador’s body. Its positioning makes it seem almost incidental. It is not altogether in the frame. The bottom half of one leg is outside the picture. The ambassador lies belly up, spread-eagled on the floor, arms out-flung. Like his murderer, he is wearing a black suit and a white shirt, but, in addition, a black button-down waistcoat. His belly is portly—that of a man in middle age. We can’t see his face, or his wounds, beyond the mound of it. Judging by his torso, he liked to eat and led a rather sedentary life. When I first saw it, that felled paunch made me think of the middle-aged courtier killed by a young man in my favorite play: Polonius, whose body Hamlet contemptuously describes as “the guts.” Hamlet runs him through with a rapier, mistaking him for someone else. But this murder was no mistake. It was meticulously planned.

 

A poignant detail that is easily overlooked: in the far corner of the room there is a pair of eye-glasses on the floor. Perhaps they bounced and skittered after contact. Presumably they belong to the ambassador and flew off his face as he fell, jolted off by the impact of the bullets, or the back of his head hitting the floor. There is something personal and vulnerable about them, sundered from the wearer who needed them to see.

 

The assassin looks tense. His bullets have felled a man; he has wheeled to the right to face the world, to deliver his message in his last moments. The left side of his jacket and his tie are still airborne, flying back to lie on his body. The ambassador’s tie is also frozen in mid-air, as gravity pulls it back to the chest it belongs on. It is not ramrod-straight like the young man’s, but soft, fat, crumpled, collapsing. The shock of the photograph is that it preserves the moment: it is all still happening.

 

Any minute now, the assassin will be gunned down himself in a shootout. His mouth is stretched wide in a perfect oval, like a trained singer, his remarkably even teeth bared top and bottom. He doesn’t look as if he grew up poor, although he must have: his parents worked in a textile factory. The center of his tongue is depressed, like an opera star hitting a climactic high note. He must be shouting at the top of his lungs. According to the news reports, after shouting Allahu akbar (“Allah is greater”) in Arabic, what he was yelling—in Turkish—was “Remember Aleppo! Remember Syria!”

 

This tall, thin, angular gunman was someone’s son, as loved as any of our children. The ambassador was a young man’s father. Yet the bombing of Aleppo struck home for the assassin somehow, so deeply that he committed a murder that would destroy his own family and that of his victim. What kind of hell did he find himself in, to opt to give up life, at twenty-two? What happened to make him—a Turkish policeman, trained to enforce the law and protect people from danger—so anguished about the war in Syria that he resolved to shoot a man simply to force millions of people to think about it, if only for an instant? How could we not be anguished about Syria? How can we let that hideous, pointless suffering drag on and on? He wanted to be a meteor, blazing up for a moment in a dark sky; that spectacular and lethal. But we’ve seen such images before—of men, young and old, hectoring crowds, men with guns. We know what they wreak; we know the spiral of violence they’re caught in. Like doomed moths, they only feed it.

 

 

So why is he the center of the photo? Why do we look at him first? In Ozbilici’s case, the answer is clear: because he poses an imminent threat to the photographer’s own life. Yet for the spectator, the implications are more disturbing. Looking at the gunman first—drawn by his intensity and manic energy—makes us, in a way, guilty of complicity with his goals, even though we are powerless to intervene.

 

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The one detail that pierced me with its unbearable intimacy when I first saw it, making me look away, the detail I can’t forget , the detail that keeps drawing me back to the photo, is this: the worn soles of the ambassador’s shoes, one of which is unexpectedly revealed, facing the camera. Its color is a mixture of black and tan, where the black has worn off. It has two nail-dimples in the heel, as if the shoe had been recently re-heeled. In Ankara there are probably plenty of shoe-menders.

 

Those soles could tell us a lot, if only we knew how to read them. How weary the ambassador was, perhaps; how wearying a life is. How many miles of sidewalks and floors he traveled in them.

 

It was a Monday night. For the ambassador, this was just another reception, part of his job. Was it pleasant? Routine? Boring? I imagine him strolling the gallery, being offered canapés, chatting to dignitaries, being introduced to the Turkish photographers featured in the exhibit. Resigned to yet another evening function, a short speech about Russo-Turkish cultural relations. It was the end of the day: he was probably tired. He couldn’t change out of his suit and tie yet, but perhaps he’d put on comfortable shoes because he was going to be on his feet for a while yet. Who shined those shoes for him? And where are they now? In a landfill? Or were they donated to charity? Is some poorer man wearing them now?

 

Our private shabbiness emerges in emergencies—in sudden death, accidents or illness. Our intimate garments, the things we choose to wear because our bodies are more comfortable in them, or because we have nothing better, may be laid bare, shaming us. Putin himself attended the ambassador’s funeral. He must have seen this photo. I bet he wasn’t happy that those soles, and their hidden vulnerability, were beamed all over the world. Russia, they might suggest, is not as powerful as it might seem. The emperor is naked.

 

The shape of the ambassador’s shoe is, uncannily, the exact shape of my father’s dress shoes. My father’s soles would have looked like that. My father, dead so recently too, wore those shoes almost to the end, even though he couldn’t walk, even though his feet and legs swelled until the shoes couldn’t be laced. In his younger days, he polished them lovingly. After his death, I stared at them, orphaned in his closet, noticing the cracks where his feet had flexed at the ball joint, fingering the accumulation of years of pungent, waxy shoe-polish, the thin, round laces.

 

Something in me catches at the sight of that worn sole in the photo, proof, as if we needed it, that under all the trappings of office, an ambassador is just a man. Something sad and mundane and mortal. Of course he’s not entirely blameless: an envoy for a government that helps bomb Syrian civilians. But neither is he to blame. He’s both complicit and a victim. A man simply doing his job.

 

By showing us a detail that Ozbilici may not have even registered in the chaos and extreme danger of the moment, the image brings the diplomat’s death home to viewers all over the world, causing a shock of recognition and tenderness. It’s like seeing the ambassador in his pajamas. It makes me associate him with my own family and home, and with the family who mourns him. Like him, the father I mourn wore glasses, had well-worn shoes. The photo disturbs because it makes us unwilling voyeurs, avidly peeking into the private life and death of a man who did not give his permission to be portrayed in this way. It taps into our innate familial piety, arousing deep pity for him and terror both of and for his assailant—the ingredients, Aristotle said, of tragedy. But there is no catharsis, and no hero.

 

****

 

Still, I return to the photo, trying to tease out the conflicting strands of feeling it evokes. There’s something troublingly seductive about the image, but what? Its focus on the killer undoubtedly contributes to glamorizing evil—in the way that Satan, the protagonist of Paradise Lost, is so much more compelling than the other characters. The photograph’s very beauty of composition detracts from the moral issue at hand. When I watch live footage of the event, there is nothing beautiful about it: instead, there is chaos, confusion, terror, and ugliness. In Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole writes that a photograph of violence or conflict, if done well, “can move us to think of art and pop culture … instead of the suffering it depicts.” I can’t help noticing that the assassin, in his moment in the spotlight, seems to be aping the virile and suggestive stance adopted by numerous rock stars. His splayed legs and raised arm with its upward-pointing finger resonate with televised performances of masculinity, a dance move used by numerous sex-symbols in the music industry—Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend and Michael Jackson, to name but a few.

 

Another danger inherent to an artful photograph of a shocking event, as Cole and Susan Sontag point out, is that the shock itself renders spectators more liable to ignore its local context. After multiple attempts to decipher the photo, I stumbled on a piece of information that jolted me: I had been missing something important. There is a political message behind the assassin’s raised forefinger that was entirely lost on me. Nathaniel Zelinsky writes that a raised index finger, “so seemingly inconsequential at first blush,” is in fact “the ISIS salute,” “the jihadi equivalent of a gang sign.” Since it is universally understood as representing the number one, ISIS militants use the raised forefinger to signal that there is only one god, one right world order, and one way of seeing things. They use it in killings as a marketing brand, a recruitment tool. In a sense, the photograph is a Trojan horse, with a smuggled visual message.

 

In my UK childhood, an upraised arm with a pointing index finger meant signaling for a teacher’s attention in class because you knew the answer. In America, the upraised arm can also connote power, victory, defiance, or resistance, from the black power salute to the statue of liberty. Thus the set of associations I had for interpreting the image—all coming from Anglo American culture—were quaintly naïve and wrong-headed: God creating Adam, Christ at the Last Judgment, a macho figure from an action movie, a tortured Hamlet.

 

Islamic art tends to discourage portraiture as potentially idolatrous and has been historically rich in geometric patterns instead. So it is ironic on a number of levels that this photo is both a portrait and replete with geometric shapes, a photograph that contains other photographs, and that it was shot in a Turkish art gallery. The image is so artful it is at home there; it could be hung in an exhibit itself. The assassin, as befitting an iconoclastic ISIS militant, went around smashing photographs in the gallery before he was killed. But he needed photography to spread his message and recruit other jihadis. Perhaps this is why he didn’t shoot the photographers in the room, including Ozbilici, standing right in front of him.

 

I have no way of knowing whether Ozbilici knew what the assassin’s gesture signified, what he assumed his photograph communicated. What I saw, looking at that image, depended on who I am, what I brought to the seeing. In that sense, we’re all a part of this photograph’s effect. It takes us beyond the two men depicted to our own culpable, helpless, sensation-hungry selves. Spectator, beware.