Picturing Absence: Photography in the Aftermath

Press photography often reduces geopolitical conflicts from local or regional political disasters into isolated, simplified and safely communicable spectacles of atrocity. Images of non-Western women in particular regularly function as symbols of the degeneracy and hopelessness of the oppressed, obscuring social and political subjectivities. This article follows two case studies of press photographs portraying women, analysing gender as their key component. The main road of scholarship on photography capturing war and conflict has focused on the empathic responses of the Western audiences to the general category of "trauma photography", rather than on institutionally-distributed image-making that produces contemporary notions of identity, (non)citizenship and sovereignty. The goal of the article, however, is to point out how these representations, generating ethical and aesthetical responses, simultaneously function as normative devices producing the imagery of certain communities and mediating their distance from the audiences.

RSF - Rivista di Studi di Fotografia, 2016

Extending the concept of device (dispositif) - defined by Michel Foucault and developed by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben to photography as a whole, this essay discusses the various functions performed by images of war, especially during the WWI. A set of portraits of drafted soldiers taken by Saverio Marra - a small town photographer from Calabria - further exemplifies the theoretical assumptions of the article, including the role of "consenting subjectivity" in the celebration of war and military life.

Criminology & Criminal Justice

This article explores the relationships between war and representation through the use of visual images, and takes a cue from the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, who has written extensively on the militarization of vision in ways that have yet to be fully recognized in criminology. It then outlines some of the disputes surrounding documentary photography, not least since one of the main factors driving the development of the medium was the desire to record warfare, before turning to recent efforts to reconfigure the violence of representation by focusing on what has been termed ‘aftermath photography’, where practitioners deliberately adopt an anti-reportage position, slowing down the image-making process and arriving well after the decisive moment. This more contemplative strategy challenges the oversimplification of much photojournalism and the article concludes by reflecting on how military-turned-consumer technologies are structuring our everyday lives in more and more pe...

In her 2003 book-length essay titled Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes, "ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death." 2 Indeed, the image and death are inextricable on various levels. The camera's ability to capture a fleeting moment, to preserve a lived reality long after its subjects have perished, defies (at least in a visual sense) the mortal human experience. The lens, as time machine, creates a permanent stamp out of histories from which we are far removed, turning pasts into objects of our visual pleasure and analysis. On the other hand, it is exactly the transcendent power of the image that modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard equates with death. Because the image can never comprehend holistic experiences and the frame is inherently exclusionary, Baudrillard argues that photographs do not duplicate reality, but rather, murder it. 3 Through these theoretical frameworks, the following pages will explore several layers of relationality between the image and death, paying special attention to the ways in which the visualization of war and atrocity establish immense power in shaping collective memory and national narratives of violence.

Visual Studies, 2015

transformationsjournal.org

The common understanding of war is strongly influenced by cogent but codified visual narratives. “Images of war” is a complex photographic genre impregnated with emotion, which unsurprisingly carries enormous power in determining reality. Departing from the emotion-focused debates on the representation of war/wartime, photo-journalism and questions of photos’ authenticity, the present chapter looks at how images shape both what we know and how we learn about contemporary war, its landscapes, actors, actions, and causes. It aims to contribute to the debate on the fragility of war representation in a time when we are saturated with images of violence.

The war in Iraq has brought to the fore some very old questions about the visual representation of conflict, war and pain. I shall be examining the particular twist given to those issues by the developments in Iraq and in particular the so-called Abu Ghraib photographs, now world (in)famous. The issues of Third World people represented by the denizens of Western power, the USA and UK, and especially of Muslim males being subjected to the force and rule of non-Muslims in what was understood as a neo-Christian moral and globalising crusade, are some of the more complex issues of our time. The article will examine images of unidentified Iraqis taken by their jailers and torturers. How do such images compare with ones taken during the war in Vietnam when the US liberal media arguably played a significant role in bringing the war to an end? The question of the role of the media in this latest conflict, and especially of the visual imagery of pain, will be assessed through the Abu Ghraib visual record of scandalous and inhuman treatment of the detainees by US forces and the effect this had on the American public. Some deep sociocultural fault lines, historically linked to the representation of war and conflict, will be also examined, such as the question of veracity instanced by the off-staging of scenes and the re-creation of emotions by visual direction of the documentary image. Such issues are the staple of postmodern textual analysis but occupy a position of special importance here.

E flux Notes, 2024

Images produce bodily eQects and wield the power of persuasion. They reveal invisible and hidden violence; they show the suQering associated with loss and… trauma as something very physical. While photography can convey such feelings, it can also build distance between those suQering and those viewing images of suQering, who may not want that closeness. After all, being close hurts. But all of these bodies, suQering or not, are a part of one collective body at war, with all its legs, breasts, and broken hands wearing a yellow and blue bracelet.