Im/partial inflections of 9/11 in photo-reportage

Abstract

Photo-reportage of the 11 September 2001 attacks represented a formative moment in the emergent visual ecology of digital photojournalism. In addition to throwing into sharper relief incipient technical factors being inscribed in refashioned protocols of form and practice, it signalled a disruption of corresponding professional boundaries, inspiring a more egalitarian participatory ethos to surface and consolidate. The influx of raw, typically poignant ‘amateur’ or ‘personal’ digital images, captured and relayed by those who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time, proved to be a precipitous impetus recasting visual truth-telling. In briefly assessing this inchoate moment of convergence in and between professional and civic repertoires of photographic documentation, this article argues its journalistic appropriation and remediation legitimated in/visibilities of othering that continue to reverberate to this day. More than a transitional point in the evolving reportorial commitments of photojournalism, the onset of this digitalisation of vision signalled an epistemic shift with profound implications for public perceptions of the ‘new normal’ of the US-led war in Afghanistan, and with it the moralising valorisation of perpetual militarism and its lived contingencies.