The literature on the problem of photography’s relation to violence and its aestheticization is vast. See, e.g., Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, eds. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Williams College Museum of Art/University of Chicago Press, 2007); David Levi Strauss, “Nikons and Icons. Is the Aesthetizication-of-Suffering Critique Still Valid?,” Bookforum, Summer 2007: 16–17; Dominique Baqué, L’effroi du présent: Figurer la violence (Flammarion, 2009).
Hannah Harris Green, “Photographer Ismail Ferdous On Documenting the Rana Plaza Factory Collapse,” The Aerogram, May 15, 2014 →.
The term has been introduced by Ariella Azoulay. See her “Getting Rid of the Distinction between the Aesthetic and the Political,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 7–8 (2010): 239–62; and “Regime-Made Disaster: On the Possibility of Nongovernmental Viewing,” in Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Politics, eds. Yates McKee and Meg McLagan (Zone, 2012), 29–41.
Time Photo Department, “A Final Embrace: The Most Haunting Photograph from Bangladesh,” Time, May 08, 2013 →.
See Shahnawaz Khan Chandan, “All Talk and No Action?,” The Daily Star, April 20, 2018 →.
Taslima Akhter, interview by Karen Knorr, Global Archive Photography, May–June 2012 →.
Taslima Akhter, interview by Karen Knorr.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (University of Illinois Press, 1988), 295. I will not engage deeper here with the strong, and arguably controversial, claims which Spivak made about the “subaltern woman,” something that has been done by many feminists and postcolonial studies scholars since. See, e.g., Sara de Jong and Jamila M. H. Masca, “Relocating Subalternity: Scattered Speculations on the Conundrum of a Concept,” in Cultural Studies 30, no. 5 (2016): 717–29.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (Pantheon, 1980), 82.
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 281.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Richard Philcox, with commentary by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha (Grove, 2004), 9. I must emphasize and account for my own position from which I pose the question of decolonization. Given that I am a consumer-citizen in the affluent North who, if not knowingly, then certainly unknowingly benefits from the obscenely underpaid, exploitative, gendered, and racialized labor that went into his garments, one may argue that my attention to the Savar situation (like any Western commentator’s) may inherently contradict or even harm any decolonial agenda.
John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations (Columbia University Press, 2014), 150.
Roberts, Photography and Its Violations, 160. Italics in original.
Roberts, Photography and Its Violations, 161.
See her The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone, 2008).
Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, trans. Louise Bethlehem (Verso, 2012), 24.
Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 25.
Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 25.
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” (1921), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings: Volume 1 (1913–1926), eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Harvard University Press, 1999), 236–52.
Ariella Azoulay, “Potential History: Thinking Through Violence,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 548–74, 574.
Sarah Jane Cervenak, “The Problem of After,” ASAP/Journal 3, no. 2 (May 2018). The quotation above is from 308–9.
Dan Friedman, Rocco Parascandola, and Bill Hutchinson, “Eric Garner’s daughter holds ‘die-in’ at Staten Island location where her father was put in fatal police chokehold,” New York Daily News, December 11, 2014 →.
Cervenak, “The Problem of After,” 306.
Cervenak, “The Problem of After,” 307.
Cervenak, “The Problem of After,” 307. Italics in original.
Cervenak, “The Problem of After,” 309.
Cervenak, “The Problem of After,” 309.
A first draft of this article, since largely revised, was presented at Camera Austria’s “Symposion on Photography XXI: The Violence of Images” (Graz, October 5–6, 2018); see →. Many thanks to Reinhard Braun, everyone at Camera Austria, the other speakers, and the audience. Thanks also to Elvia Wilk, who helped tremendously to lend shape and consistency to the argument in the revised version.