Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis

Batchen G. Gidley M., Miller N. and Prosser J. 2011, Picturing Atrocity: Photography in crisis, Reaktion Books. ISBN 9781861898722 by Ross Watkins.The visual display of the suffering of others and the ethics of 'looking' have historically focused on the violence and trauma of war photography. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis contributes to that body of literature by presenting diverse short essays which explore these concepts via (arguably) iconic and lesser known twentieth century photographic images. With 27 contributors discussing a range of instances of human atrocity-from Wounded Knee (1890) through to Haiti (2010)-and with generally accessible language, the scope of this book creates the potential for wide appeal.In Susan Sontag's well-known On Photography (1989) she states that the 'ethical content of photographs is fragile' due to their potential to be decontextualised by time and their dependency on a viewer's political consciousness to maintain an 'emotional charge' (1989: 19-21). This fragility is tested in Picturing Atrocity, which presents the case that any image capturing an occurrence of atrocity engages the viewer's consideration of their own subjectivity compared with that which has been represented. In this way, the 'reader' of an image may actively construct a sense of 'familiarity' to make meaning; familiarity which 'builds our sense of the present and immediate past' (Sontag 2004: 76). Iconic imagery-'familiarity' on a public scale-is most likely to engage a reader's sense of ethics in the construction of meaning. In the increasingly visual media climate, photography constitutes a significant component of journalism's 'truth claims' (Hanusch 2010: 56) and as such images depicting trauma during catastrophic events become iconic in encapsulating a 'collective memory' of the event's actuality. However, as Sontag points out, the root function of iconic imagery in a socio-cultural context is fictive, or at least narrative based:Photographs that everyone recognises are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas 'memories', and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory [...] All memory is individual, unreproducible-it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. (2004: 76-77)Many of the images featured in Picturing Atrocity will not be familiar to the reader and this appears to be a contention for some of the book's reviewers. …