Impressions: Stretching the Limits of Representation
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Notes Impressions: Stretching the Limits of Representation 1 . John Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006). 2 . Ibid., p. 133. 3 . Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 199. 4 . This would not be unusual, as Janina Struk shows in Private Pictures: Soldiers’ Inside View of War (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011). 5 . Elderfield, Manet , p. 82. 6 . Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 33; Elderfield, Manet , pp. 17, 82. 7 . In addition to these paintings, Manet also produced a lithograph of the scene, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a small oil painting that can be seen at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark. Only parts of the London painting have survived. 8 . Elderfield, Manet , pp. 69, 44, respectively. 9 . See Frank Möller, ‘The Implicated Spectator: From Manet to Botero’, in M. Hyvärinen and L. Muszynski (eds), Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 25–9. 10 . Gregory, The Colonial Present . 11 . David Ebony, ‘Botero Abu Ghraib’, in Fernando Botero, Botero Abu Ghraib (Munich: Prestel, 2006), p. 10 (both quotations). 12 . Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), p. 28 (both quotations). 13 . See Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 208. 14 . David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 107. 15 . Elizabeth Dauphinée, ‘The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery’, Security Dialogue , Vol. 38, No. 2, June 2007, p. 148. 16 . Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story (London: Picador, 2008), p. 196. 17 . W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 109 (emphasis mine). 18 . Seymour Hersh, ‘Torture at Abu Ghraib’, The New Yorker , issue of 10 May 2004, posted 30 April 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040510fa_ fact (accessed 5 May 2004). 19 . I am not saying here that black-and-white photographs are by definition documentary or that the idea of documentary photography is unproblematic. Indeed, the category ‘documentary’ fails to grasp the ‘logical inconsistencies, 194 Notes 195 amorphousness of definition, and epistemological vagueness’ of this photo- graphic genre. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Foreword by Linda Nochlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 169. Despite this critique, the label ‘documentary’ is still used in numerous attempts to catego- rize photographic work. 20 . Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Body in Pain’, The Nation , issue of 27 November 2006, at http://www.thenation.com.doc/20061127/danto (accessed 13 November 2006). 21 . Mark Reinhardt, ‘Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique’, and Mieke Bal, ‘The Pain of Images’, both in M. Reinhardt, H. Edwards, and E. Duganne (eds), Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Williamsburg/Chicago: Williams College Museum of Art/The University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 16, 95, respectively. 22 . Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 44–5 (all quotations). 23 . Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 3–31. 24 . Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, ‘Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of “Accidental Napalm”’, Critical Studies in Media Communication , Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2003, p. 35. 25 . See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 3–4. 26 . Mirzoeff, The Right to Look , p. 6. 27 . As quoted in the liner notes of Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, Make Me Smile (New York: Sony Music, 1993). 28 . See The Library of Congress, American Memory , at http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/cwphtml/cwbrady.htlm (accessed 12 March 2010). 29 . Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, trans. T.Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry , Vol. 19, Spring 1993, p. 432 (all quotations). 30 . Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 161. 31 . Struk, Private Pictures , p. 32. 32 . Matthew S. Witkovsky, Foto Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945. Introduction by Peter Demetz (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), p. 143. 33 . See Robert Hariman and John Lewis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007); Linfield, The Cruel Radiance . 34 . Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), p. 126. Ritchin writes specifically about the ‘growing worldwide reach of the Web’. I have borrowed his terminology in ‘Celebration and Concern: Digitization, Camera Phones and the Citizen-Photographer’, in C. Martin and T. von Pape (eds), Images in Mobile Communication: New Content, New Uses, New Perspectives (Wiesbaden: VS Research, 2012), pp. 57–78. 35 . Reinhardt, ‘Picturing Violence’, p. 33. 36 . James Elkins, What Photography Is (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 193. 37 . Ibid., p. 173. 38 . Ibid., p. 149. 39 . Ibid., p. 190: ‘Nothing can give me that except photography’. 196 Notes 40 . Bal, ‘Pain of Images’, p. 103. 41 . Elkins, Photography , p. 190. 42 . Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others , p. 98. 43 . See Jacques Rancière’s interrogation of the claim that some things are unrep- resentable, in The Future of the Image , trans. G. Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009), pp. 109–38. For reflections on the paintable and the unpaint- able, see Alex Danchev, On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 8–32. 44 . Elkins, Photography , p. 189. 45 . Ibid. 46 . Ibid., p. 190. 47 . Simon Dell, ‘Mediation and Immediacy: The Press, the Popular Front in France, and the Spanish Civil War’, in C. Young (ed.), The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives of Capa, Chim, and Taro. Volume 1: The History (New York: International Center of Photography/Göttingen: Steidl, 2010), p. 46. 48 . Geoffrey Batchen et al. (eds), Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). 49 . Such photographs are discussed by Sontag but not by Elkins; see Regarding the Pain of Others , pp. 91–2. See also Dora Apel, ‘Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib’, Art Journal , Vol. 64, No. 2, 2005, pp. 89–100. 50 . Elkins, Photography , p. 116. 51 . Trevor Paglen, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes. With an Essay by Rebecca Solnit (New York: Aperture, 2010), p. 145. 52 . Sandra S. Phillips, ‘Surveillance’, in S.S. Phillips (ed.), Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), p. 143. 53 . Paglen, Invisible , p. 151. 54 . Elkins, Photography , p. 124. The surround is introduced on pp. 116–7. The surround is one of the things separating photography from painting. In painting, there can be no surround. For example, when Manet painted the execution of emperor Maximilian, he – for whatever reasons but intention- ally – decided to include in the painting representations of clusters of people in the background. Had he believed that what happens in front is defined by what happens in the back and vice versa, then his background would be ground (but, due to the intentionality underlying its representation, not surround). Had Maximilian’s court photographer, François Aubert, been allowed to take pictures of the execution, these clusters of people would also have appeared in the photographs (provided that Aubert had chosen a similar angle, and provided that these people did, in fact, watch the execu- tion scene). It is quite likely, however, that neither Aubert nor the people looking subsequently at his photographs would have noticed these people, simply because their attention would have been directed to Maximilian and to what happens in the foreground. 55 . Christine Ross, ‘Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture’, in O. Asselin, J. Lamoureux, and C. Ross (eds), Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), p. 7. Notes 197 56 . Jae Emerling, Photography: History and Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 9. 57 . Carlos Gamerro, The Islands. Introduction by Jimmy Burns, trans. I. Barnett in collaboration with the author (High Wycombe: And Other Stories, 2012), p. 3. 58 . Simon Norfolk, ‘Ascension Island: The Panopticum (ECHELON for begin- ners)’, at http:// www.simonnorfolk.com (accessed 16 January 2012). 59 . Trevor Paglen, ‘Images of the Everywhere War’, Aperture , No. 209 (Winter 2012), p. 78. 60 . Phillips, ‘Surveillance’, p. 143. 61 . See Rune S. Andersen and Frank Möller, ‘Engaging the Limits of Visibility: Photography, Security and Surveillance’, Security Dialogue , Vol. 44, No. 3 (June 2013), pp. 203–21. 62 . Norfolk, ‘Ascension Island’ and Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Don McCullin: “Photojournalism has had it. It’s all gone celebrity”’, The