拍摄暴行:危机中的摄影

IF 0.2 Q4 SOCIOLOGY
R. Watkins
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引用次数: 39

摘要

巴陈G.吉德利M.,米勒N.和普罗瑟J. 2011,拍摄暴行:危机中的摄影,反应图书。ISBN 9781861898722,作者:Ross Watkins。对他人痛苦的视觉展示和“观看”的伦理在历史上一直关注战争摄影的暴力和创伤。《描绘暴行:危机中的摄影》通过展示各种短文,通过(可以说)标志性的和鲜为人知的20世纪摄影图像来探索这些概念,从而为这一文学体系做出了贡献。27位作者讨论了一系列人类暴行——从1890年的《伤膝》(Wounded Knee)到2010年的《海地》(Haiti)——以及通俗易懂的语言,这本书的范围创造了广泛吸引力的潜力。在苏珊·桑塔格著名的《论摄影》(1989)中,她指出,“照片的伦理内容是脆弱的”,因为它们有可能被时间剥离,而且它们依赖于观众的政治意识来维持一种“情感控制”(1989:19-21)。这种脆弱性在《描绘暴行》中得到了检验,它展示了这样一种情况,即任何捕捉暴行发生的图像都会让观众考虑到自己的主观性,而不是被呈现的东西。通过这种方式,图像的“读者”可能会主动构建一种“熟悉感”来产生意义;“建立我们对现在和过去的感觉”的熟悉感(Sontag 2004: 76)。标志性的意象——公共尺度上的“熟悉感”——最有可能在意义的构建中引起读者的道德感。在日益增长的视觉媒体环境中,摄影构成了新闻“真相声明”的重要组成部分(Hanusch 2010: 56),并且这些描绘灾难性事件中创伤的图像在封装事件现实的“集体记忆”方面成为标志性的。然而,正如桑塔格指出的那样,在社会文化背景下,标志性图像的根本功能是虚构的,或者至少是基于叙事的:每个人都认识的照片现在是一个社会选择思考的组成部分,或者宣称它已经选择思考。它把这些想法称为“记忆”,也就是说,从长远来看,这是虚构的。严格地说,没有集体记忆这种东西…所有的记忆都是独立的,不可复制的——它随着每个人的消逝而消逝。所谓的集体记忆不是一种记忆,而是一种约定:这是很重要的,这是一个关于它是如何发生的故事,用图片把故事锁在我们的脑海里。(2004: 76-77)《描绘暴行》中出现的许多图像对读者来说并不熟悉,这似乎是一些书评家争论的焦点。…
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis
Batchen G. Gidley M., Miller N. and Prosser J. 2011, Picturing Atrocity: Photography in crisis, Reaktion Books. ISBN 9781861898722 by Ross Watkins.The visual display of the suffering of others and the ethics of 'looking' have historically focused on the violence and trauma of war photography. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis contributes to that body of literature by presenting diverse short essays which explore these concepts via (arguably) iconic and lesser known twentieth century photographic images. With 27 contributors discussing a range of instances of human atrocity-from Wounded Knee (1890) through to Haiti (2010)-and with generally accessible language, the scope of this book creates the potential for wide appeal.In Susan Sontag's well-known On Photography (1989) she states that the 'ethical content of photographs is fragile' due to their potential to be decontextualised by time and their dependency on a viewer's political consciousness to maintain an 'emotional charge' (1989: 19-21). This fragility is tested in Picturing Atrocity, which presents the case that any image capturing an occurrence of atrocity engages the viewer's consideration of their own subjectivity compared with that which has been represented. In this way, the 'reader' of an image may actively construct a sense of 'familiarity' to make meaning; familiarity which 'builds our sense of the present and immediate past' (Sontag 2004: 76). Iconic imagery-'familiarity' on a public scale-is most likely to engage a reader's sense of ethics in the construction of meaning. In the increasingly visual media climate, photography constitutes a significant component of journalism's 'truth claims' (Hanusch 2010: 56) and as such images depicting trauma during catastrophic events become iconic in encapsulating a 'collective memory' of the event's actuality. However, as Sontag points out, the root function of iconic imagery in a socio-cultural context is fictive, or at least narrative based:Photographs that everyone recognises are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas 'memories', and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory [...] All memory is individual, unreproducible-it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. (2004: 76-77)Many of the images featured in Picturing Atrocity will not be familiar to the reader and this appears to be a contention for some of the book's reviewers. …
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SOCIAL ALTERNATIVES
SOCIAL ALTERNATIVES SOCIOLOGY-
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