Abstract
This introduction takes as its central armature Karen Barad’s agential realism to provide a framework for understanding the essays brought together in this Special Issue under the rubric of pictures of conflict. The intention is to move the discussion with regard to picture making forward to more fully embrace the pictorial and the physical, the historical and institutional processes within apparatuses of picture-making. The attempt in ‘Ghost stories’ through the concept of a visual apparatus, is to shed new light and thinking on pictures as material objects; how they act and feed into our subjectivities, experiences and realities and to account for their currency, duration, affectivity and authority beyond transparent representation or symbolic meaning. In order to achieve this, Barad’s agential realism is inflected by insights from Malafouris’s (2013) material engagement theory; W.J.T. Mitchell’s (2005) image theory; Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk’s (2017) image operations; Mondzian’s (2005) understanding of the economy of the image, as well as the ontological concerns of new German art history and image science exemplified in the work of Hans Belting (1996, 2011) and Horst Bredekamp (2017), for example. In this framework, the worlds pictures create, and the subjectivities they produce, are not understood to precede the phenomena they depict. The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it, makes an ‘observational cut’ that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. As such, it has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political. A fact which is particularly important during times of conflict and war.
Highlights
This introduction takes as its central armature Karen Barad’s agential realism to provide a framework for understanding the essays brought together in this Special Issue under the rubric of pictures of conflict
The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it makes an ‘observational cut’ that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. It has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political (Barad 2007), a fact which is important during times of conflict and war
If the number of academic volumes on the subject of pictures in conflict in the last twenty years is anything to go by, there is a sense of urgency to understand how pictures contribute to the realities we inhabit, especially at times of crisis, which any Marxist would claim as a permanent state of affairs
Summary
If the number of academic volumes on the subject of pictures in conflict in the last twenty years is anything to go by, there is a sense of urgency to understand how pictures contribute to the realities we inhabit, especially at times of crisis, which any Marxist would claim as a permanent state of affairs. Focusing on ‘non-moving’ pictures uncircumscribed by—yet including—the categories of reportage and photojournalism, the essays employ a multitude of methodological and epistemological approaches to the analysis of case studies across six continents. Focusing on ‘non-moving’ pictures uncircumscribed by—yet including—the categories of reportage and photojournalism, the essays employ a multitude of methodological and epistemological approaches to the analysis of case studies across six continents They demonstrate how pictures and the imaginaries they represent have been increasingly weaponised in war and conflict since 1945. Their inclusion does not concern a local or a thematic approach on the subject but offers a comparative plane from which to further understand a period that, in the West, marked the transition to a new world order—a world in which the accelerated rate of change of technological scale and character has transformed the ways we conduct, participate, depict and consume conflict on a global scale. The transnational and interdisciplinary approaches presented here examine the ways pictures function alongside, or in concert with verbal or written texts; or have deep relationships with, and are produced within, traditional, political, institutional, social, theological, aesthetic and other discourses
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