A painful labour: responsibility and photography

Sliwinski, Sharon

doi:10.1080/1472586042000301656

Cited by 17 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(2 reference statements)

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“…After all, photography, like film and television and in contrast to such older modes of visual representation as painting, exposes violence to millions of people, thus helping to naturalize violence in viewers' perception. Visual representation has been criticized for its alleged failure to change the conditions depicted (Sliwinski 2004;Edkins 2005) and to raise sufficient awareness among audiences to demand political change. The existing literature is both substantial and necessary to illuminate merits and liabilities of visual representations of human suffering and people in pain (Sontag 2003).…”

Section: Visual Studies Violence and International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visions of Peace in International Relations

Möller

Shim

2019

International Studies Perspectives

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In this article, we engage with IR's recently rediscovered interest in peace and connect it with the visual turn in international relations. We move the field's focus on representations of war to representations of peace and develop the concept of peace photography. We suggest both understanding photography as a social agent promoting visions of peace and incorporating analysis of peace photography into IR's emerging agenda on peace. Our illustrative examples show that it is insufficient to think about and analyze visual images only in connection with representations of large scale violence and interstate war. In contrast, we provide an alternative approach which aims to broaden our understanding of (the study of) peace in IR. First, we explore a positive conception of peace at the individual and everyday level of analysis. Second, we advocate methodological pluralism by examining different analytical sites of peace photography. Third, we concentrate on the potentialities of peace photography in Colombia and Brazil—notorious spaces of everyday violence. We argue that the analytical perspectives developed in this paper have also relevance beyond our examples: If peace photography can be found here, than it can also be found elsewhere. Put differently, everyday visions of peace constitute particular instances of the international.

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Section: Visual Studies Violence and International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visions of Peace in International Relations

Möller

Shim

2019

International Studies Perspectives

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“…This oppositional and interventionist role would be achieved through its function of documentary and evidentiary imaging, which in times of war has often been bolstered with an ethical imperative to capture the precarity and suffering of victims. Subsequently, such images might facilitate compassion and even initiate anti-war actions, suggesting a connection between photography and responsibility (Sliwinski, 2004).…”

Section: Faces Of Enemies: An Ethical Visual Intervention?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Portraits of the enemy: Visualizing the Taliban in a photography studio

Chao

2017

Media, War & Conflict

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This article examines studio photographs of Taliban fighters that deviate from popular media images which often confine them within the visual coordinates of terrorism, insurgency and violence. Gathered in a photographic book known simply as Taliban, these 49 photographs represent the militants in Afghanistan through a studio photography aesthetic, transplanting them from the battlefields of the global war on terror to intimate scenes of pretence and posing. Besides troubling the Taliban’s expected militant identity, these images invite an opaque and oppositional form of viewing and initiate enigmatic visual and imaginative encounters. This article argues that these alternative visualizations consist of a compassionate way of seeing informed by Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and grievability, as well as a viewing inspired by Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic dissensus that obfuscates legibility and disrupts meaning. Consequently, these photographs counter a delimited post-9/11 process of enemy identification and introduce forms of seeing that reflect terrorism’s complexity.

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“…63 Sharon Sliwinski perhaps puts this line of thinking most succinctly when she observes that "encountering images of suffering illuminates the limit of the ability to respond." 64 But while difficult to comprehend, Ishikawa's photographs at the very least bear witness to this suffering. Perhaps the most salient feature of his images is that they point to, often in upsetting detail, the ultimate victims of the decision to target Japan's cities for destruction.…”

Section: Ishikawa Koyo -: Calamity's Witnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Optics of Urban Ruination

Fedman

Karacas

2014

Journal of Urban History

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World War II yielded many photographs of bombed-out cities. In this paper we telescope between two sets and scales of images that represent the principal frames through which the American and Japanese publics have memorialized the incendiary bombings that laid waste to urban Japan: aerial photographs taken by the US Army Air Forces during its wartime planning, prosecution, and assessment of the raids; and the ground-level images captured by Ishikawa Ko–yo–, a photographer working on behalf of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. By means of a detailed examination of the production, circulation, and consumption of these photographs—what some scholars have called an “archaeological approach” to images of ruination—we explore not only the visual rhetoric and reality of the destruction of Japan’s cities, but also how that destruction is situated in history, memory, and visual culture.

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A painful labour: responsibility and photography

Cited by 17 publications

References 7 publications

Visions of Peace in International Relations

Visions of Peace in International Relations

Portraits of the enemy: Visualizing the Taliban in a photography studio

The Optics of Urban Ruination

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