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Between Affect and Authenticity: Disobedient Photographs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
Extract
I would like to begin this essay by thanking Peter Pastor for his careful reading of my article “Heroes, Victims, Role Models: Representing the Child Soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising” which looked at the cultural portrayals of the anti-Nazi revolt and focused, particularly, on contemporary narratives surrounding the underage soldier. By spotting my misreading of the Budapest images, he opened up an important discussion on the afterlife of archival photographs, their (mis)uses, re- and misinterpretations, and crucially, their longevity and continued relevance. I believe it is a timely debate and, as the other essays in this forum show, a debate that is relevant to artists, writers, historians and cultural studies scholars, among others.
- Type
- Critical Forum: The Afterlife of Photographs
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2017
References
1. I wrote this essay during my time as the Leibniz Summer Fellow at the Center for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF). I would like to thank the ZZF for hosting me between May and June 2016, and providing me with an ideal working environment during that period. I owe my special gratitude to Annette Vowinckel who commented on an early draft of this paper and to John Paul Newman for talking through key ideas with me.
2. Interestingly, the cropped out picture of the boy has often been digitally manipulated to include the yellow star on his coat, as visible in Figure 2 from the poster advertising the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Ireland.
3. The protests took place in Jerusalem where Haredi Jews claimed they were being persecuted by the Israeli state for demanding gender separation in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods and other public spaces.
4. Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York, 2012), 133 Google Scholar.
5. A striking example of recreating the original image is a 2016 picture by the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, who photographed himself lying face down on a pebbled beach on the Greek island of Lesbos, assuming the same pose in which Aylan Kurdi’s body was found. The image was part of a series of projects in which the artist participated on Lesbos, aiming to highlight the plight of refugees.
6. Brendan O’Neill, “Sharing a Photo of a Dead Syrian Child Isn’t Compassionate, It’s Narcissistic,” The Spectator (September 3, 2015).
7. Despite this widespread criticism of war photography, there is an emerging trend in photography studies which emphasizes the moral obligation of contemporary viewers to continue to look at such images and to see people in them, irrespective of the emotions the act of looking inspires. See, for example, Linfield, Susie, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8. Stańczyk, Ewa, “Heroes, Victims, Role Models: Representing the Child Soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising,” Slavic Review 74, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 738–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9. Sontag, Susan, On Photography (London, 1979), 71 Google Scholar.
10. Linfield, The Cruel Radiance, 22.
11. Sontag, On Photography, 19.
12. Taylor, John, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (New York, 1998), 18 Google Scholar.
13. Good, Jennifer, Photography and September 11th: Spectacle, Memory, Trauma (London, 2015), 65.Google Scholar