Picturing Absence: Photography in the Aftermath

Abstract

How to make the unknown victim the protagonist of the story? One of the challenges in current research about the relation between war and culture is how to incorporate in the repertoire of models those strategies devised to account for the experience of the anonymous and forgotten victims of war. One particular instance of this issue is how to represent the absence of the victim, the one no longer there. Photography is not so much the central topic as the vehicle or testing ground for these strategies of representation. The theoretical discussion is illustrated with examples from the work of photographers and artists who explore the limits of the representation of absence in different ways: Alfredo Jaar, Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk, James Bridle, Gervasio Sánchez, and Gustavo Germano. These visual works cover a wide range of conflicts that stress conventional definitions of war, while providing challenging test cases for any examination of the imprint of war in culture.