Panel Two - Friday, April 9th

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  • Friday, April 9h
  • 1:10 – 3pm EST
  • Jennifer Raab
  • History of Art, Yale University
  • Photography and the Crimes of War
  • Bio: Jennifer Raab is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University and a faculty affiliate of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine. Her first book, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (Yale University Press, 2015), examined the aesthetics of detail that fundamentally shaped nineteenth-century American landscape painting and that was inseparable from scientific discourses of the time. More broadly, it asked: What is a detail? What does it mean to see a work of art “in detail”? Her next book, Relics of War, under contract with Princeton University Press, examines the many lives of a single photograph taken just after the American Civil War. Recently, she co-authored a book and exhibition, Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance (Yale University Press, 2018) and contributed the lead essay to East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2017). She has written on topics from history painting and the aesthetics of mapping, to the gendering of ornament in portraits of and by indigenous men, to alchemy in contemporary sculpture. Her work has appeared in Art Bulletin, Art History, American Art, and Journal of American Studies and has been supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among others. At Yale, she is one of the founding members of the Environmental Humanities Program.
  • Paper: Photography and the Crimes of War
  • Whittled wooden spoons, crude baking dishes, artillery shells, and soup bones form a strange, altar-like arrangement. Taken right after the American Civil War, this photograph—known as Relics of Andersonville Prison—was produced by Mathew Brady’s studio in 1866 and pictures objects collected by Clara Barton (later the founder of the American Red Cross) from the notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp. Through the trope of the relic, the image engages with the most pressing issues of the time: finding, naming, and burying the unprecedented number of dead, as well as indicting those responsible. The photograph becomes a political tool to argue for legislative change on behalf of the women and children left behind; a sacred site for mourning and remembrance made portable, reproducible, and collectively available by photographic technology; a means to visualize and racialize pain and sacrifice; and an act of witnessing indelibly shaped by the first use of photographs as legal evidence in a war crimes trial. Widely circulated in its time but little known today, Relics of Andersonville tells a story about violence, grief, advocacy, accusation, memory, and martyrdom. This talk will focus on the photograph’s particular relationship to a newly emerging, but still profoundly unstable, discourse of the evidentiary and of visual testimony.
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  • Friday, April 9h
  • 1:10 – 3pm EST
  • Karen Strassler
  • Anthropology, The Graduate Center, CUNY
  • Beyond Atrocity: Reparation and the Mournful Image
  • Bio: Karen Strassler is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY’s Queens College and the Graduate Center. Her research interests include photography, visual and media culture, violence and historical memory. She is the author of Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Duke UP, 2010), a study of the role of everyday photography in the making of Indonesian national identity. Her recent book, Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia (Duke UP, 2020), explores the political work of images in post-authoritarian Indonesia. She is currently working on a project on visuality, violence, and the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.
  • Paper: Beyond Atrocity: Reparation and the Mournful Image
  • In this paper, I look at a set of photographs that document violence against the ethnic Chinese minority during the Indonesian Revolution—and a set of artworks made in response to and with these images. Contrasting these photographs with the kinds of atrocity images by which human rights claims have typically been made (Sliwinski 2011; Batchen et al 2012; Hesford 2012), I argue that while the images of the revolution-era massacre perform evidentiary work, their evidentiary function is subsumed within a disclosure of care and mourning. I am interested in the different modes of attention and affective responses that are called forth by atrocity versus such mourning images. The former readily congeals into outrage and pity that reinforces a separation between viewer and viewed and between past and present and in so doing can perpetrate violence anew by spectacularizing death or rendering victims abject (Raiford 2020).  The mournful image, I argue, instead issues a “summons to relationality” (Silverman 2015: 85), inviting the viewer into an ongoing, present-day and future-oriented work of care and repair. Rather than a liberal-humanist, generic empathy towards “human suffering,” moreover, these mourning images invite a familial form of affiliation that entails obligation as well as recognition. More broadly, this paper is part of an attempt to move beyond the questions of exposure and indexical evidence that have dominated our framings of the relationship between photography and violence. It is an effort to think about how images, in disclosing and sustaining forms of relation, might foster more reparative ways of seeing violence.​
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  • Friday, April 9h
  • 1:10 – 3pm EST
  • Erina Duganne
  • Art History, Texas State University
  • There was no record of her smile: Muriel Hasbun’s X post facto
  • Bio: Erina Duganne is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas State University. Her research and teaching focus on intersections between aesthetic experiences and activist practices as well as race and representation. Recent publications include Global Photography: A Critical History and Cold War Camera (forthcoming). Her co-curated exhibition, Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, opens at the Tufts University Art Galleries in January 2022.
  • Paper: Beyond Atrocity: Reparation and the Mournful Image
  • In this paper, I look at a set of photographs that document violence against the ethnic Chinese minority during the Indonesian Revolution—and a set of artworks made in response to and with these images. Contrasting these photographs with the kinds of atrocity images by which human rights claims have typically been made (Sliwinski 2011; Batchen et al 2012; Hesford 2012), I argue that while the images of the revolution-era massacre perform evidentiary work, their evidentiary function is subsumed within a disclosure of care and mourning. I am interested in the different modes of attention and affective responses that are called forth by atrocity versus such mourning images. The former readily congeals into outrage and pity that reinforces a separation between viewer and viewed and between past and present and in so doing can perpetrate violence anew by spectacularizing death or rendering victims abject (Raiford 2020).  The mournful image, I argue, instead issues a “summons to relationality” (Silverman 2015: 85), inviting the viewer into an ongoing, present-day and future-oriented work of care and repair. Rather than a liberal-humanist, generic empathy towards “human suffering,” moreover, these mourning images invite a familial form of affiliation that entails obligation as well as recognition. More broadly, this paper is part of an attempt to move beyond the questions of exposure and indexical evidence that have dominated our framings of the relationship between photography and violence. It is an effort to think about how images, in disclosing and sustaining forms of relation, might foster more reparative ways of seeing violence.​

CCA 2021 Conference

Photography Between Evidence and Disclosure

12.3

Muriel Hasbun, X post facto (12.3), archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Photo Rag Satin, 2009.