Reviving trace: photographic image within the treatment of pain experiences

Abstract

Recognition the importance of other people’s experiences is one of the urgent philosophical problems. If by the middle of the 19th century people encountered painful experiences of others directly or through witnesses, since then after the advent of media technologies, the role of the witness was replaced by the anonymous visual. Visual images are formations whose structure avoids ambiguity and creates a field for multiple interpretations. This duality is well reflected by the nature of the photographic image. It is characterized by a dialectical tension: on the one hand, capturing someone’s painful experience the photograph represents the mental state of a person, but on the other hand, it raises the question of an unambiguous attitude towards it. The ambiguity of the photographic image yields a dilemma: either to accept what we see on faith and base our moral discussion of events on it alone, or to analyze the action of the forces hidden in the work of the photographic image. To talk about photographing suffering means to declare a certain ethical and political position. The case of the photograph problematizes the requirement of ethical involvement, because the photograph can simply be ignored. The article shows how the photographic image communicates the criteria, using which a perceiver is able to fit what he sees into the context of his own political and social world. Having performed the act of recognition, a perceiver is able to politicize human life as an irreplaceable value. In such acts, he actualizes his own subjectivity through the recognition of the photographic image as a part of common shared reality. He perceives the signs of someone else’s pain in the photo as a reason to reflect on human vulnerability. For this, the perceiver must carry out a complex procedure of image interpretation, stripping it off anonymous universal features.