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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Theory and Criticism
The Face Of Our Wartime, Sharon Sliwinski
The Face Of Our Wartime, Sharon Sliwinski
Data and Test Instruments
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.
New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski
New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski
Data and Test Instruments
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
Data and Test Instruments
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.
The Gaze Called Animal: Notes For A Study On Thinking, Sharon Sliwinski
The Gaze Called Animal: Notes For A Study On Thinking, Sharon Sliwinski
Data and Test Instruments
Over the course of several days in1997, JacquesDerrida delivereda 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 …
Icarus Returned: The Falling Man And The Survival Of Antiquity, Sharon Sliwinski
Icarus Returned: The Falling Man And The Survival Of Antiquity, Sharon Sliwinski
Data and Test Instruments
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.
On Photographic Violence, Sharon Sliwinski
On Photographic Violence, Sharon Sliwinski
Data and Test Instruments
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 …
The Aesthetics Of Human Rights, Sharon Sliwinski
The Aesthetics Of Human Rights, Sharon Sliwinski
Data and Test Instruments
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 …