Roundtable 'Double Exposures, Double Takes'

Abstract

This roundtable discusses ‘perpetrator photography’, or rather the relation between the two terms, in a range of contexts. As a springboard for discussion, the participants (Rabiaâ Benlahbib, Wulandani Dirgantoro, Kobi Kabalek, Zuzanna Dziuban, Lovro Kralj and Tjebbe van Tijen), were sent a picture of one of the promotional posters for Swiss artists Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger’s recent exhibition Double Take at C/O Amerika Haus in Berlin (16 March–1 June 2019).2 Cortis and Sonderegger worked for several years on the project Icons, a series of faithfully reconstructed world-famous images of dramatic historical events (such as the 1937 Hindenburg disaster and the 9/11 terror attack on the Twin Towers), through detailed three-dimensional dioramas. The dioramas are photographed together with the artists’ tools and materials such as cardboard, plaster casts, glue, cotton wool and sand. Last spring, I passed C/O Amerika Haus daily on my way to work, and every time I was struck by this poster that showed a restaging or reframing of the ‘Hooded Man’, a photo taken by Military Police Sergeant Ivan Frederick at Abu Ghraib. There is a vast body of images documenting the Iraq War, many of which come from ‘embedded journalism’ (as we now call the longtime interaction of army and media). Yet, for cultural theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘what [is] remarkable about this mass in retrospect [is] the lack of any truly remarkable images’.3 In this line of reasoning, not even the videos of the staged toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square (2003) and the fallen dictator’s execution (2006) stand out, since they are just ‘war