On the way back from our mini-break to Montreal, we listened to a bunch of podcasts that Cait found on iTunes. The most intensely academic one was from a lecture Judith Butler gave on “Torture, Sexual Politics and the Ethics of Photography” at Stanford last October. She concentrated mostly on the photos from Abu Ghraib and how they act as proof of torture that has occurred, does occur and will continue to occur after the moment the photo is taken.
Her argument was incredibly complicated and nuanced, with lots of binaries that were set up only to be reversed one moment later, but one of the most interesting aspects of her talk was her examination of the other images that were taken in the sequence of photos found on the digital camera. Apparently, a whole different set of images, including snapshots of local bazaars, documentation of a couple having sex and a photo of a camel being shot were all included in this quasi-narrative of images, which makes the images of torture seem like another banal moment in everyday life in the war rather than an exception to the rule. A lot of it reminded me of film director Errol Morris’ excellent and ridiculously thorough examination of the Abu Ghraib photos on his New York Times blog which also discusses the way the photos are framed and composed, in many ways, like snapshots.
I don’t really know where I was going with this, aside from saying that Butler’s lecture was thought-provoking and definitely worth the $0.99 on iTunes and the hurt in the brain that comes from trying to keep up with her cognitive leaps.
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