(119) The following page references in the text are to this book. “Habits of seeing are estranged strategically in the hope of opening up a space to think differently (about warfare, about landscape, about photography, about vision).”165 David Campany continues by warning that this is “a risky strategy, always provisional and contingent upon the cultural norms that are being challenged.”166 However, the traditional photojournalistic approach resulting in “generally interchangeable images of violence’s apex”167 is equally risky in that it may produce and reproduce predictable—and deeply problematic—patterns of viewing. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 3rd ed. Thus, what are the conditions for a specific body of photographic work meaningfully to be referred to as peace photography? Peter Gilgen, “History after Film,” in Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age, ed. Awam Ampka, “Africa: Colonial Photography and Outlaws of History,” in Africa: See You, See Me, ed. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), 14. Viewers’ independence, however, is precisely what some critical voices fear, suspecting that the visual is either “too open to misinterpretation” or “too engaging, for it draws the viewer into an interpretive relationship that bypasses professional mediation.”88 Especially in the context of visual representations of human suffering, however, precise contextualization is often required so as not to misrepresent and violate the people depicted. There is a critical ingredient, and there is a moral ingredient, in much artistic work and also in many studies on politics and art. The women represented by JR, or better, the women who represent themselves with the help of JR, do not seem to feel exploited, exposed as they are to the gaze of others. (215) (110) 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. Lisle, “Surprising Detritus of Leisure,” 879. 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. Congress created the NEA in 1965 as an independent agency to support and promote artistic endeavors. The editor in chief of the British Journal of Photography recently wrote: “Now we live in the digital present, connecting online as global communities; communicating via vast, interlinked networks that bypass geographical, economic, and sociopolitical boundaries; using photographs where common languages don’t exist.”215 Who is this “we?” Is photography a “common language?” How can it be a common language when its interpretation is context and culture dependent? 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. JR, Women Are Heroes: A Global Project by JR, text by Marco Berrebi (New York: Abrams, 2012). (165) Research on politics and art reveals the politically progressive potentialities of art and the progressive politics of artists without ignoring the fact that artistic manifestations may also (appear to) support repressive and violent politics.19 This work analyzes works of art that are critical of the existing social order but also artworks that affirm this very order. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Otherwise, we would not need art. Ritchin, In Our Own Image, 27. (85) How can they respond to conditions depicted in images when the mere number of images overwhelms them? Don McCullin, for example, self-critically acknowledges this when saying that his work on wars and violent conflicts is “in many respects … almost a crime.”120 (The focus, I think, should be on “almost,” not on “crime.”) It is violence exerted on the subjects depicted (see below); it is violence exerted on viewers who are exposed to scenes they would rather not see and to which they have to respond, but whatever they do, they cannot directly influence the conditions depicted (see above); and it is violence exerted on the photographer himself or herself.121 McCullin, in the video referenced above, is not the only photographer who suspects he has been damaged by the conditions in which he worked all his life. Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson, eds. (2) Charles Weber and Johan Galtung (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 188. Jenny Edkins, “Exposed Singularity,” Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. To be sure, photographs that abstract from the conditions they reference without specifying these conditions with nonphotographic means are problematic. The “excess meaning”89 images carry with them can always be translated into a multitude of interpretations and designations of meaning for each and every single image. Aftermath photography is a form of war photography; war is the condition of possibility for both war photography and aftermath photography. (168) Sharon Sliwinski, “A Painful Labour: Responsibility and Photography,” Visual Studies 19, no. Reinhardt, “Picturing Violence,” 21. 191 (Summer 2008): 38. How does this increase in the number of images affect knowledge production? It is for this reason that no attempt is made here to identify a given image as a universal peace photograph. All art is political. (49) Focusing on peace as a potentiality makes peace photography possible even in the absence of peace (and this would be the answer to the question of how that which does not exist could possibly be visualized). Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Danchev, On Art and War and Terror; Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Book, 2007); Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics; Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 2. By defining “war, conflict, or atrocity”—the traditional subjects of photojournalism—as “the main event,”175 which aftermath photography references by implication or discursively reconstructs, epistemic priority is assigned to war, rather than peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction. (11) Such analysis has to apply and develop methodological approaches suitable for the political analysis of art. 4 (2005): 372. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1991), 134. I think that this project will help the women of Kibera.”190 Of course one should not jump to conclusions here; the inclusion in the book of voices critical of JR’s project would not seem to be very likely. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 123. [1] In his short but powerful rendering of postulates of present-day arts in relation to … 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. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 176. João Louro, as quoted in Maria João Guardão, “Tratado da invisibilidade,” Up Magazine, no. (75) But what prevents us from defining peace as the main event? Love and Mattern, “Introduction: Art, Culture, Democracy,” 6–8. 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…. Beyond the Aestheticization of the Politics. What is required is a certain type of visibility linked to and derived from the invisibility of the represented. Sometimes they can be political questions, sometimes they can be questions about the … 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. More than twenty years ago, W. J. T. Mitchell wrote: Certainly I would not be the first to suggest that we live in a culture dominated by pictures, visual simulations, stereotypes, illusions, copies, reproductions, imitations, and fantasies…. James Johnson, “‘The Arithmetic of Compassion’: Rethinking the Politics of Photography,” British Journal of Political Science 41, no. 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. Images’ operations on observers always employ contextual clues; no image is seen in total isolation. 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