Philosophy of Photography - Violence, Part 1, Oct 2022

This editorial articulates key questions and striking phenomena of violence that confront the theory and practice of photography today. It introduces contributions to this Special Issue of Philosophy of Photography (POP), which is Part 1 of a two-issue exploration of questions of violence.

This interview with the art historian and curator Julian Stallabrass was conducted by Alex Fletcher and Andrew Fisher over the winter of 2022–23. It takes as its point of departure Stallabrass’s recent and large-scale study Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (2020), in order to consider the changing ways in which images have been used to both document and to wage war. The interview explores Stallabrass’s central historical contrast between photography in the Iraq and Vietnam Wars. It considers the relative critical values of photojournalism and art in their engagements with violence and what the problems and possibilities of photojournalism tell us about the wider fate of liberal notions of the public sphere. The interview ends by linking these themes in Killing for Show to the photographic mediation of current conflicts and the visual cultures of contemporary capitalism.

This article explores the role of photography in the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey in 2016. The photography exhibition titled Russia through Turkish Eyes was the background for the assassination. The author argues that photography occupies a paradoxical position of a metalanguage of an event that it simultaneously announces, records, destroys and celebrates while assuming the role of an impartial observer. Photography operates as a counter-factual, exceeding the documentary, and assuming the function not of a witness but of an active participant. The author suggests that in a primitive culture like ours, some objects acquire the status of a portal that facilitates the transformation between symbolic, imaginary and real forms of existence. A camera is one such object. The article concludes that the assassination of the Russian Ambassador cannot be easily separated from the photographic event that preceded it, accompanied it and immortalized it.

This publication presents a selection from ‘Negative’: a landscape project on the aftermath of the recent political unrest in Hong Kong.

The essay is concentrated on emotional affects caused by representation of violence in the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine and beyond. Instant accessibility to first-hand visual information created fertile soil for planting and then multiplying manipulative strategies of one or another political interest. Meanwhile, the demand for shocking content continues to steadily rise because it guarantees popularity, spectacle and even a form of pleasure. This, in turn, supports a very propagandistic version of reality where violence plays a central role in the overall design and transmission of contents, which is driven by shock as an affective medium. Blind Spot, Gradual Loss of Vision and Speck in the Eye represent a body of works by Mykola Ridnyi, address the question of what potential response(s) could be given by artistic interventions understood as a dialectical and critical framework able to face and make visible the problem of dehumanization through violence?

Review of: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, Walter Benjamin, Peter Fenves (ed.) and Julia Ng (ed.) (2021)

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 368 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-80474-952-7, h/bk, $25.00