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Articles 1 - 23 of 23
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Sexual Violence In The Field Of Vision, Sharon Sliwinski
Sexual Violence In The Field Of Vision, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
Meditating on a single photograph from a recent Human Rights Watch report concerning police violence in Northern British Columbia, Canada, this paper pursues two lines of questions about the visual politics of human rights. One concerns how our ways of seeing—our modes of attending to the vulnerability and integrity of particular persons—can itself be understood as a form of human rights practice. The other aims to widen space in contemporary political theory for thinking about how sexual violence functions as a central technology of sovereignty and how we might make this phenomenon more perceptible. The paper explores the ways photographs …
The Woman Who Walks Through Photographs, Sharon Sliwinski
The Woman Who Walks Through Photographs, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This paper explores Michal Heiman's creative strategy to imaginatively enter the space of asylum. Her recent project, RETURN: ASYLUM (THE DRESS, 1855-2018), offers a new way to extend solidarity to people who have been subjugated by the institution. She actively enlists the public's help in developing further strategies for connecting with those individuals who have been bereft of legal rights to property, family, or public hearing. This article explores Heiman's crucial political intervention, which blends creative visual practice with object relations theory.
Sexuality In The Time Of War, Or, How Rape Became A Crime Against Humanity, Sharon Sliwinski
Sexuality In The Time Of War, Or, How Rape Became A Crime Against Humanity, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
Working closely with women's testimonies from the genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, this chapter aims to widen space in contemporary human rights discourse for discussion about sexuality--and in particular about the ways sexual violence functions as one of the forces of sovereign power. There is an intimate and largely non-visible strategy that sovereign power has at its disposal to cleave a subject from their capacity to live a human life, namely, by attacking the individual’s sense of sovereignty over her own body.
Before The Law, Sharon Sliwinski
Before The Law, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
In 2005, a group of photographers stood alongside the people of the small town of Bil’in, in the West Bank, and documented their fight to prevent the Israeli government from building the West Bank Barrier. Inspired by what they had seen in Bil’in, the photographers decided to form Activestills, a collective whose work has become vital in documenting the struggle against Israeli occupation and the attempt to continue with everyday life in extraordinary circumstances.
Evocative Objects: A Sexual Violence Primer, Sharon Sliwinski
Evocative Objects: A Sexual Violence Primer, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This commentary on Nina Berman’s series, “Object Lessons,” examines the photographer’s strategy of photographing trial evidence from cases of sexual slavery and human trafficking as a study in object relations.
That Incorrigible Disturber Of The Peace, Sharon Sliwinski
That Incorrigible Disturber Of The Peace, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This chapter makes a case for the way James Baldwin’s essay, "The Creative Process" offers a fresh set of entry points into the intersection of art and social justice.
The Face Of Our Wartime, Sharon Sliwinski
The Face Of Our Wartime, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This paper considers a turn toward portraiture amongst contemporary photojournalists who have covered the War on Terror. A series of wartime faces is examined in order to consider the way prolonged conflict flattens our visual landscape.
Inventing Human Dignity, Sharon Sliwinski
Inventing Human Dignity, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
Are human beings endowed with an inviolable dignity? Or is dignity something that is lost and won? One of the most significant assertions made in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the statement that every individual possesses an inalienable dignity simply by virtue of belonging to the “human family.” This chapter aims to make a modest contribution to the emerging scholarship on the history and meaning of dignity as it pertains to universal human rights. My goal is to trace how this particular quality came to be affixed to the human …
The Freedom Of Thought, In Dream-Life If Nowhere Else: Freud, Foucault, And Euripides, Sharon Sliwinski
The Freedom Of Thought, In Dream-Life If Nowhere Else: Freud, Foucault, And Euripides, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This essay examines the “dead daughter in a box" dream, initially reported in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in order to explore two, related ideas: First, the dream is considered an exemplar of the work of symbolization, and in particular, a means for the dreamer to work through the fantasy of infanticide. Second, the dreamer’s disclosure of her dream is treated as an example of parrhesia – a particular speech act that Michel Foucault regarded as central to democracy. The overarching aim is to view dream-life as a quotidian and crucial site for the freedom of thought and speech.
The Storyteller: Observations On Murtada Bulbul’S ‘Swineherders’, Sharon Sliwinski
The Storyteller: Observations On Murtada Bulbul’S ‘Swineherders’, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This review engages Murtada Bulbul's series of photographs of Bangladeshi swineherders (published in this issue), casting the photographer's treatment as that of a storyteller. On one hand, this treatment suggests the importance of visual-cultural forms for the very legibility of human rights. On the other hand, Bulbul's pictures can teach us something about what it means to live a "bare life," that is, to live at the edges of the human community.
New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski
New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
What does fear look like? What can photography reveal of the unconscious dimensions of terror? Working with the largest photographic archive devoted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City, this chapter studies the visual inscription of terror in the bodily gestures of eyewitness, gestures that were captured by citizen photographers.
A Painful Labor: Photography And Responsibility, Sharon Sliwinski
A Painful Labor: Photography And Responsibility, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This paper considers the tension between photography and responsibility despite the avalanche of objections regarding documentary’s false promise to awaken social conscience. By examining the encounter with images of suffering through a psychoanalytic register, the paper tries to articulate what Barthes describes as the ‘painful labour’ of responding to the photographic other – an encounter that illuminates the limit of the spectator’s ability to respond. Photographs provide an occasion to register this limit, which, I argue, opens up the spectator’s traditional notions of responsibility from a set of moral duties towards a questioning of the ethical relation.
Air War And Dream: Photographing The London Blitz, Sharon Sliwinski
Air War And Dream: Photographing The London Blitz, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This paper treats Lee Miller's photographs of the London Blitz as a species of dream, which is to say, the Surrealist's images are regarded as a special form of thinking in which the conflicts and horrors of the times are represented in an effort to discharge their destructive force. This treatment calls upon Freud's discussion of dream-work, but also upon Didier Anzieu and Wilfred Bion's later writings, which consider the defensive and protective qualities of oneiric life. Miller's photography, like dream, provides a glimpse into the interior dimension of human existence. The essay argues that this interior dimension provides protection …
Icarus Returned: The Falling Man And The Survival Of Antiquity, Sharon Sliwinski
Icarus Returned: The Falling Man And The Survival Of Antiquity, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This chapter examines the so-called "Falling Man" photograph: Richard Drew's infamous image of an anonymous man in free fall, following his jump from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Using Aby Warburg's iconographical method, I read this figure as a latter-day Icarus, putting Drew's photograph in dialogue with other representations of Icarus as a way to explore the image's unconscious force.
The Gaze Called Animal: Notes For A Study On Thinking, Sharon Sliwinski
The Gaze Called Animal: Notes For A Study On Thinking, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
Over the course of several days in 1997, Jacques Derrida delivered a long lecture to attendees of a conference in Cerisy called “The Autobiographical Animal.” As part of his opening remarks, the philosopher recounted a curious little scene that served to introduce the central theme of the larger address that followed. The scene begins when Derrida reports that each morning, with an almost ritualistic regularity, he is followed from his bedroom into the bathroom by his cat, an unnamed feline, he insists, that is a real little cat, not the mere figure of a cat: “It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an …
Visual Testimony: Lee Miller’S Dachau, Sharon Sliwinski
Visual Testimony: Lee Miller’S Dachau, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This essay examines images of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp taken by American war correspondent and photographer Lee Miller. Miller’s work is mobilized as an optic through which to grasp the shock of confronting the Nazi camps. Her images are read as a form of visual testimony. That is, although they fail to provide a transparent view of what occurred in the Nazi lagers, they are nevertheless inscribed with all that the photographer did not know of the events to which she bore witness. The nature of this strange unintelligibility is what the author pursues: the visual inscription of …
The Childhood Of Human Rights: The Kodak On The Congo, Sharon Sliwinski
The Childhood Of Human Rights: The Kodak On The Congo, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This article examines the Congo reform movement’s use of atrocity photographs in their human rights campaign (c. 1904–13) against Belgian King Leopold, colonial ruler of the Congo Free State. This material analysis shows that human rights are conceived by spectators who, with the aid of the photographic apparatus, are compelled to judge that crimes against humanity are occurring to others. The article also tracks how this judgement has been haunted by the potent wish to undo the suffering witnessed.
The Aesthetics Of Human Rights, Sharon Sliwinski
The Aesthetics Of Human Rights, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This essay situates the 1755 Lisbon earthquake as an alternate origin point for human rights discourse. As one of the most destructive earthquakes in recorded history, the event had a broad effect on both scientific and philosophical thought. The quake also represents one of the first modern mass media events in which subjects throughout Europe became spectators to a distant catastrophe. Both visual and verbal representations of the event circulated throughout Europe with incredible efficiency and helped inaugurate a secular notion of human suffering as well as thoughts about its prevention. The story of the quake shows that the notion …
On Photographic Violence, Sharon Sliwinski
On Photographic Violence, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This paper explores the significance of photographic violence in relation to a single defaced image found during the Bosnian War. The single example of pictorial violence opens a set of questions interrogating the nature of human aggression: What is the status of violence carried out in effigy? Can this particular example of defacement open understanding into the other forms of violence that took place during the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia? How does the image come to be marked by affect but also serve as the medium of its transmission? And finally, why does photography lend itself so easily to …
New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski
New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
What does fear look like? What can photography reveal of the unconscious dimensions of terror? Working with the largest photographic archive devoted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City, this article studies the visual inscription of terror in the bodily gestures of eyewitness, gestures that were captured by citizen photographers.
Camera War, Again, Sharon Sliwinski
Camera War, Again, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
The war in Iraq has undoubtedly produced some of the most dreadful entries in the history of camera war.
The Childhood Of Human Rights: The Kodak On The Congo, Sharon Sliwinski
The Childhood Of Human Rights: The Kodak On The Congo, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This article examines the Congo reform movement's use of atrocity photographs in their human rights campaign (c. 1904–13) against Belgian King Leopold, colonial ruler of the Congo Free State. This material analysis shows that human rights are conceived by spectators who, with the aid of the photographic apparatus, are compelled to judge that crimes against humanity are occurring to others. The article also tracks how this judgement has been haunted by the potent wish to undo the suffering witnessed.
A Painful Labor: Photography And Responsibility
A Painful Labor: Photography And Responsibility
Sharon Sliwinski
Despite the avalanche of objections regarding documentary's false promise to awaken social conscience, this paper considers the tension between photography and responsibility. By examining the encounter with images of suffering through a psychoanalytic register, the paper tries to articulate what Barthes describes as the ‘painful labour’ of responding to the photographic other – an encounter that illuminates the limit of the spectator's ability to respond. Photographs provide an occasion to register this limit, which, I argue, opens up the spectator's traditional notions of responsibility from a set of moral duties towards a questioning of the ethical relation.