Picturing atrocity: Photography in crisis A symposium report

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Photographs of atrocities have troubled the American consciousness since 1862, when Matthew Brady displayed pictures of the Civil War in his New York gallery. The public circulation of images documenting human brutality—wars, massacres, genocide—as well as so-called ‘natural’ disasters, such as famines and hurricanes, provokes practical and ethical questions about what such images mean and accomplish, how they are chosen, which are suppressed, how they become iconic, and their short- and long-term ramifications. The symposium ‘Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis’, held at The Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY) on 9 December 2005, raised and addressed these questions in a day-long programme that ended with the opening of an exhibition organized by a graduate student seminar, meant to counteract some of the assumptions that atrocity images perpetuate. Organized by Geoffrey Batchen, Nancy K. Miller and Aoibheann Sweeney of CUNY Graduate Center and by Jay Prosser, University of Leeds, the event was co-sponsored by the Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds, The Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center and The British Academy, and was held in support of Amnesty International.