Having little to say about the image as such, however, discourse analysis cannot show what an image shows. For example, Philip Jones Griffith’s Vietnam at Peace is said to have communicated primarily that Vietnam “is not yet ‘at peace’ with itself.”178. For what purpose? Raymond Rosenthal from the Italian (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 24. African art and Europe. (82) Writing in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer speculated that there is something wrong with the assumption that the more we see, the more we know. What is required is a certain type of visibility linked to and derived from the invisibility of the represented. World Press Photo Award 2015; see http://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2015/contemporary-issues/tomas-van-houtryve (accessed May 7, 2015). Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller (Leverkusen, Germany: Barbara Budrich Publishers, forthcoming). Rather than being only an expression of nostalgia (which probably is part of the viewing experience), showing that (some form of) peace had been possible before violence gained the upper hand may also indicate that peace might be possible again should violence stop. Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle, “Introduction: Art, Politics, Purpose,” Review of International Studies 35, no. Art can be understood as a form of, or contribution to, political discourse; as a descriptive, interpretive, or explicitly critical approximation; or as a vehicle with which to transcend the political. Both the social world and its photographic representation involve acts of subjugation. Patterns of exclusion and inclusion can be observed with regard to both people participating (in different subject positions) in digital media and areas covered by digital media. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16. Photographs of acts of violence are different from—and represent a different degree of violence than—photographs of acts of violence that have specifically been committed for the purpose of the production of images.119 It is thus problematic to use the term violence indiscriminately when discussing photographic representation (and, indeed, in its stead such terms as exploitation, subjugation, or violation appear in the photographic discourse). But even if we agree that the photographic act necessarily includes (an element of) violence, how could this be otherwise in a world characterized by physical and structural violence in abundance? (7) The cautious use of the verb “threaten” implies that beauty does not necessarily neutralize acts of violence, and Bal acknowledges that representation “does not … necessarily stylize violence away.”134 It “can also place [horror] in the foreground in novel ways that do justice to the political content.”135 If beauty is capable of either neutralizing violence or doing “justice to the political content,” then the aestheticization critique loses much of its power and has to be transformed into analysis of the conditions in which beauty neutralizes violence as opposed to those in which it does not. Christine Ross, “Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture,” in Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Roberts, Photography and Its Violations 111. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (London and New York: I. Recent books include Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave 2009/2012) and, as editor, Visual Global Politics … (31) (8) (100) B. Tauris, 2014), 87. Designations of meaning, rather than “encouraging the free play of the spectator’s faculties,”87 ultimately patronize viewers, denying them the right to independently assign meaning to what they believe they see. (49) While images should be analyzed on their own terms, such analysis is impossible due to the inevitable involvement of language in any act of analysis translating what can be seen into what can be said; hence approaches to the study of images derived from discourse analysis. Expanding the conception of the aftermath seemingly endlessly and thus establishing temporal distance between a photograph and the violence it references184 is not a convincing approach to peace photography either, because its reference point remains violence, and temporal distance may result in images’ irrelevance. 15 Influential Political Art Pieces The Realm of Political Art. The visual arts, the Church argued, played a key role in guiding the faithful. Emerling, Photography: History and Theory, 165. Without ignoring history, such an approach would have to go beyond constantly referring back to what was and instead point forward to what will be or to what might be, to peace or to peace as a potentiality. (140) A good starting point for reflections on peace photography—or peace photographies—is aftermath photography (see above). Edelman believes art provides us with models, scenarios, narratives, and images we draw upon in order to make sense of political events, and he explores the different ways art can shape political perceptions and actions to both promote and inhibit diversity and democracy. Of course it is a provocation: after hundreds of years of fighting for the autonomy of art, after decades of learning that the essential quality of art is ambiguity, after years of repeating that art poses rather than answers questions, there is suddenly this persistent call for an art that is useful, for direct commitment, for artistic activism, for intervention in the political … Few images, it seems, do not pose a problem; many do. In addition, some prominent performing artists, such as U2 vocalist Bono, have successfully used their celebrity to call world leaders’ attention to such issues as global poverty and AIDS in Africa. Achebe, in the same interview, explains that visitors “must visit with respect and not be concerned with the color of skin, or the shape of nose, or the condition of the technology in the house.” Molly Rogers’s analysis of the practice of US American race theorists, who in the mid-nineteenth century had photographs (daguerreotypes) taken of selected slaves shows that the photographic act can indeed be an act of violation: [T]he experience of being daguerreotyped was unlike any other they [the subjects depicted] had known. Ritchin, In Our Own Image (New York: Aperture, 1999), 41. Cristina Demaria and Colin Wright (London: Zoilus Press, 2006), 9. Artivism is not limited to artists. PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). And it may appear that how we understand anything is not unrelated to how photography works.”8, Art is political if it complicates, not simplifies, and if it “extends the thread of recognition and understanding beyond what previously was seen and known.”9 Art is political also if it reinterprets “what previously was seen and known” so that alternative understandings may emerge. However, since Leonardo da Vinci, authors have also emphasized the merits of the invisible. It may visualize the replacement of experiences of violent change with expectations of peaceful change while simultaneously acknowledging that this is not a linear process, but rather one characterized by ups and downs, progression and regression. 191 (Summer 2008): 38. Without visualizing paths to peace, then, aftermath photography does not qualify as peace photography. (London and New York: Verso, 2010); W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Ben O’Loughlin, “Images as Weapons of War: Representation, Mediation and Interpretation,” Review of International Studies 37, no. (84) 2 (2015): 263–288. (188) Political analysis of the visual arts includes critical investigation of the connection between what is seen and what is known. Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, 117–171; Hanna Rose Shell, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2012); David Campany, “What on Earth? Mitchell, for example, notes that the invisible affects the imagination more strongly than the visible.145 Artist João Louro, in his work shown at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015, focuses on the invisible—on “what’s behind, what’s hidden, covered, veiled from the mirror”146 —with the aim of countering manipulation by the image. Sylvain Roumette, video, ARTE Développement (2008), 3:21–3:23. Thus, both the photographic act and the act of witnessing through photographs may be violent, but both acts of violence are necessary in the interest of truth. In addition to the work referenced by Lisle, see, for example, Joel Meyerowitz, Aftermath (London: Phaidon, 2006); Guy Tillim, Avenue Patrice Lumumba (Munich: Prestel/Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, 2008); or Pieter Hugo and Linda Melvern, Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide (London: Oodee, 2013). Jenny Edkins, “Exposed Singularity,” Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices, foreword by Linda Nochlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 176. A photograph of one person taken by another person morphs into a person’s self-portrait by means of another person’s photograph of him or her; the photographer is a vehicle through which a person represents himself or herself. Looking beyond fine art also seems to be mandatory with regard to photography and the visual arts. Conflict ▪ Time ▪ Photography (London: Tate Publishing, 2014). 29 (2011):, p. 874. What it reveals exactly to individual viewers has to be analyzed. It alludes to violence by its (seeming) absence, thus reversing the photojournalistic practice of referencing peace by its absence, but its main reference point remains violence: war is the condition of possibility for both war photography and aftermath photography, narrated and visualized in multiple forms of representation, including “black humor, poignant reflection, or simply iconic mythologizing.”182 Competing with “the visual domestication of conflict that occurs in more official pictorial regimes,” such representation may be “subversive,” but its reference point is nevertheless the preceding violence.183 There is thus a categorical difference between aftermath photography and peace photography, the one referencing violence, the other nonviolent ways of dealing with conflict. A possible response, for example, is acknowledgment of “the relationship between oneself and the depicted other including, arguably, acknowledg[ing] the other’s not-so-otherness without, however, conflating one’s own perception of the depiction of an other’s pain with the other’s physical and mental experience of pain.”109. The production and distribution of images may be more democratic than before, but it does not follow that each and every person worldwide would equally participate in image making and dissemination. Rather, as Debbie Lisle has suggested with regard to what she calls the “Late Photography of War,” it is politically important due to its “capacity to interrupt familiar ways of looking.”161 This photography challenges routinized patterns of interpretation and undermines privileged viewing positions, because viewers cannot immediately know what they are looking at and how what they are looking at relates to the war it is alleged to reference. (59) (92) Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 218. Aesthetic approaches, affirming that analysis is necessarily interpretive, not only insist that solving current problems requires “employ[ing] the full register of human intelligence”36; they also acknowledge that representation, due to the inevitable act of interpretation, is necessarily nonidentical with that which it represents. Rather, in order for them to be visualized, sophisticated visual approaches are required, political analysis of which helps us understand the artistic projects and their underlying politics but also the politics these projects reference and critically engage with. Grégoire Chamayou writes that according to Walter Benjamin, “technology, today used for death-dealing purposes, may eventually recover its emancipating potential and readopt the playful and aesthetic aspirations that secretly inspire it,”155 and that is one way of addressing van Houtryve’s art politically. Lisle, “Surprising Detritus of Leisure,” 876. Art photography’s interpretive openness and its insistence on various connotations that images carry with them appear inappropriate when it comes to representations of people in pain (and a substantial portion of the recent work on politics and art focuses on such representations). Although the focus in this contribution is on visual images, I suggest that questions such as the ones asked by Mitchell can also be asked with regard to other artistic genres. Politics is everywhere and it is not just limited to the government. Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); David D. Perlmutter, Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyber Age (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999); Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror,” in Violence and Subjectivity, ed. When you think of art and politics, the most memorable images that pop up will probably be the anti-war messages and propaganda from the 1960s. As time passed, the visual and performing arts became more politically provocative, with artists using their work to make statements or highlight certain issues. Möller, “Looking/Not Looking Dilemma,” Review of International Studies 35, no. Photographic image production cannot be limited to quantitative considerations, but has to include qualitative assessments as well.95, It is also argued that (seemingly identical) images of victims “can produce a generalized and standardized visual account that anonymizes victims and depoliticizes conflict.”96 Images of victims, rather than increasing critical awareness, which can then be transformed into politics—the hope underlying concerned and social documentary work in the visual arts—are said to paralyze viewers and make them politically inactive. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. See also Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian, eds. Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. Individuals contextualize images also by means of “pre-existing representational resources,”81 including images they already carry with them as visual memories derived from their own experience, the culture industry, or, increasingly, photo-sharing forums on the Internet. Next lesson. and with introduction by Lucien Taylor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). It is more common to suggest that it is the photographer who operates in a safe zone offered by the camera which protects him or her from the surrounding environment. (154) Reinhardt, “Picturing Violence,” 21. Danchev, On Art and War and Terror, 4. The intersection of arts and political activism are two fields defined by a shared focus of creating engagement that shifts boundaries, changes relationships and creates new paradigms. Campany, “What on Earth?,” 51. Not only did i… Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 9. (64) (200) She is an Irish painter and performance artist who graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 1983 and went on to complete a Masters degree in Equality Studies from University College Dublin. Still, many critics focusing on exploitation and subjugation seem to underestimate the importance of such projects to local people, and this importance stems from two factors: visibility (connected with hope; hope, however, can be frustrated) and participation. It is also important to note that these artists, by employing all sorts of digital technologies and combining them skillfully, successfully challenge widely held assumptions of African backwardness, technological and otherwise. This means that aftermath photography can become “a space for the discursive reconstruction and extension of the event” and this “reconstruction can … be, in principle, infinite.”163 Such discursive reconstruction has been defined above as an ingredient of critical art. If an individual’s response to conditions of human suffering depicted in images is adequate only on condition that it alleviates the suffering depicted, then there is in most cases no such thing as an adequate response. Or, elsewhere: “[A]t some point in the interest of truth the preservation of the integrity of the ‘victim’ has itself to be violated” (p. 149). 3 (2011): 622–643. (94) The violations inherent in the photographic act seem acceptable on condition that the photographer, first, adheres to the notion of nonfigural, documentary photography in search of a conflict’s “truth,” “(some truth, that is)” (p. 153), and second, generates “a respect for the moment of the inhuman in the representation of truth, that is, an identification of truth with the making visible of the truth of the ‘victim’” (p. 150). 006 (Spring 2014): 27. During the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church, a political power in its own right, commissioned religious-themed paintings and sculptures. In the course of the project, the subject moves from being a subject to being a co-artist, exerting much more influence on the way he or she gets represented than can normally be observed in photojournalism. Grégoire Chamayou, Drone Theory (London: Penguin, 2015), 78. The first section is divided into three parts: on method, words and images, and quantity and quality. David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics. Religion and the Spiritual Realm. Axel Heck and Gabi Schlag, “Securitizing Images: The Female Body and the War in Afghanistan,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 103. (81) 4 (1996): 393–418; Bernadette Buckley, “The Workshop of Filthy Creation: Or Do Not Be Alarmed, This Is Only a Test,” Review of International Studies 35, no. B. Tauris, 2013). 91 (May 2015): 38. (52) It bothers me when these projects use a pseudo-democratic rhetoric to describe the act of handing out cameras, as though distributing cameras alone is “empowerment” or “giving voice to the voiceless.” When I see this kind of stuff, I become listless; the process is so much more complicated than that.192. One path toward a narrow concept of peace photography is a wider understanding of peace; the more ambitious the understanding of peace is, the fewer pictures qualify as peace photographs. Furthermore, it reflects that even seemingly purely visual narratives require language to assign meaning to them. (20) (50) For example, Fred Ritchin refers to an aerial view of the World Trade Center taken months before the attacks on September 11, 2001, “showing the Towers as if in heavenly repose—peaceful reflection on what was no more.”179 His interpretation, however, is unlikely to be shared by those people for whom the Twin Towers symbolized structural violence: economic inequality, the North-South divide, arrogance of power, and forms of institutionalized exploitation inherent in global politico-economic structures. MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema, 257. Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, where he directs an interdisciplinary research program on Visual Politics.His work has explored the political role of aesthetics, visuality and emotions. Pearl Cleage Polk’s assessment reflects, I think, what David MacDougall had in mind when he wrote that photographs cannot but show the commonalities of being human, regardless of the photographer’s intention. (191) They were simply called from the field, the house, the workshop, or the slave quarters, taken into town, and led up the stairs of an unfamiliar building and into rooms with a powerful, dense odor that no perfume could hide…. Ideally, the artist takes exactly the pictures that the subjects depicted would have taken had they themselves taken the pictures. Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, 117–171. Ritchin, After Photography, 126. Caitlin Patrick, “Ruins and Traces: Exhibiting Conflict in Guy Tillim’s Leopold and Mobuto,” in The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, ed. (41) . (23) (134) Sticking to some degree of obscurity and invisibility while representing the obscure and invisible is hoped to result in viewers’ engagement—engagement with that which even after it has been rendered visible still retains some degree of obscurity and incomprehensibility, requiring further investigation on the part of viewers; in other words, engagement with the artists’ politics and not only with their aesthetics.150. (206) Art may include a utopian element. "Elegantly written. Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: W.W. Norton 2009), 139. Such research is interdisciplinary and open to methodological pluralism and innovation. While it's sometimes popular to mock art by saying "my kid could paint that!," the visual arts have a strong influence on the development of society. Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, 44. (107) Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 89 (emphasis added). (72) Jorge Amado, The War of the Saints, trans. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 3rd ed. What ties bind art, power, and patronage? (212) Veena Das, Artur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000), 46–78; Michael C. Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 47, no. (102) James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., Caitlin Patrick, “Ruins and Traces: Exhibiting Conflict in Guy Tillim’s, James Johnson, “‘The Arithmetic of Compassion’: Rethinking the Politics of Photography,”, Mark Reinhardt, “Painful Photographs: From the Ethics of Spectatorship to Visual Politics,” in, Christine Sylvester, “Picturing the Cold War: An Art Graft/Eye Graft,”, Bernadette Buckley, “The Workshop of Filthy Creation: Or Do Not Be Alarmed, This Is Only a Test,”, Gerald Holden, “Cinematic IR, the Sublime, and the Indistinctness of Art,”, Cerwyn Moore and Laura J. Shepherd, “Aesthetics and International Relations: Towards a Global Politics,”, Thomas Keenan, “Disappearances: The Photographs of Trevor Paglen,”, Steve Smith, “Singing Our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11,”, Christine Sylvester, “Postmodern Feminist Methodology and International Relations: Learning from the Arts,” in, Axel Heck and Gabi Schlag, “Securitizing Images: The Female Body and the War in Afghanistan,”, Rune S. Andersen and Frank Möller, “Engaging the Limits of Visibility: Photography, Security and Surveillance,”, Lene Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis,”, Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle, “Introduction: Art, Politics, Purpose,”, Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror,” in, Michael C. Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,”, David Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War,”. David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, introduction by John Berger (New York: Aperture, 2003), 9. Elkins, What Photography Is, 50. Since one of the criticisms of documentary representations of violence is that they “repeat[] that which the [artist] wishes to critique and dismiss,”159 aftermath photographers concentrate on postconflict situations, often equating conflict with the use of physical force and misunderstanding the end of the use of physical force as an indicator of the end of the conflict. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977); Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. (177) Since friendship is an important feature of the good life and virtuous habits can be acquired through moral education and legislation, Aristotle regarded life within a moral community as a vital component of human morality. And if it is a common language, are we facing a non-hierarchical kind of communication among equals? Bal, “The Pain of Images,” 104. (111) Images are unpredictable and uncontrollable, no matter how hard authorities try to control them.213 Every image is thus potentially political, because every image may find itself “caught up in a process of domination and resistance.”214 And nowadays there are more images than ever before. Michel Foucault, for example, argues that “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.”76 Jae Emerling states that “one never sees what one says, and vice versa.”77 Writing or talking about images, then, can never adequately represent what one sees; like every translation, it is the invention of something new. After all, as Chinua Achebe notes, “a visitor can sometimes see what the owner of the house has ignored.”116 Thus, differentiation is required. While some artists “deliberately ‘turn up late’ after the victims, bystanders, witnesses, photojournalists, editors, cameramen, soldiers, bereaved families, distraught friends, security officers, and aid workers have all disappeared from the scene,”173 other artists acknowledge that for victims and bereaved families, the option of “disappear[ing] from the scene” does not exist, because even if they manage physically to move to another place, they carry “the scene” with them as traumatic memories. (217) (152) Historically, political authorities have been a source of patronage for artists. MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema, 68. Roberts explains the “process of secondary ostension” as follows: “by pointing at one thing, we may in fact be making clear that we are pointing at something else, relating one thing metonymically, synecdochically, to another thing” (154–155). This element of photographic representation is often overlooked in critical assessments focusing on the violence of the photographic act, just as is the fact that nowadays many subjects ask photographers to take their pictures so as not to become invisible in a world where what cannot be seen does not exist.
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