Outside the Frame: Re-examining Photographic Representations of Mourning,’ Photography & Culture

Marta Zarzycka

MADONNAS OF WARFARE, ANGELS

OF POVERTY

Cutting through press photographs

Press photography often reduces geopolitical conflicts from local or regional politicaldisasters into isolated, simplified and safely communicable spectacles of atrocity. Images ofnon-Western women in particular regularly function as symbols of the degeneracy and hope-lessness of the oppressed, obscuring social and political subjectivities. This article follows twocase studies of press photographs portraying women, analysing gender as their key component.The main road of scholarship on photography capturing war and conflict has focused on theempathic responses of the Western audiences to the general category of “trauma photography”,rather than on institutionally-distributed image-making that produces contemporary notionsof identity, (non)citizenship and sovereignty. The goal of the article, however, is to pointout how these representations, generating ethical and aesthetical responses, simultaneouslyfunction as normative devices producing the imagery of certain communities and mediatingtheir distance from the audiences.

Introduction

Susan Sontag wrote about how profoundly she was shaped by a chance encounter withthe photographs from the Nazi camps, found in a Santa Monica bookstore:

Nothing I have ever seen — in photographs or in real life — ever cut me as sharply,deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into twoparts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was severalyears before I understood fully what they were about. (On Photography 20)

Into how many parts are lives divided today, considering one perpetually encountersimages of death, violence and poverty in the media? Do those images create ruptures inour being/knowledge or rather reassert certain continuations within ourselves? Do livesget divided at all?

The perpetual shifting between division and continuation is at the heart of the pho-tographs one comes across in the daily press, raising questions about the vitality ofimages and their functioning. On the one hand, press photography is often thoughtto transform geopolitical conflicts from local or regional political disasters into safelycommunicable spectacles of atrocity, like an eternal image of an African child. Takenup into the global circuit (Boltanski; Moeller) it reaffirms the distance between Western

Photographies Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2012, pp. 71–85ISSN 1754-0763 print/ISSN 1754-0771 online © 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2012.655945

72 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

audience and non-Western suffering subject. While Sontag herself was of Jewish descentand the victims in the Nazi camps were not an absolute Other to her, the rupturebetween spectators and the objects of their looking already takes place on the level oflocation, history and language. On the other hand, photographs came to be seen as ablueprint for the processes of subject formation, contesting the fixed, universalized sub-ject and bringing together all the participants involved in the creation and distribution ofa photograph (photographer, photographed subject(s) and spectators) (Rosler 304–41;Sekula). Those different approaches form the contemporary debate on the consistencyand reliability of visual representation, and on whether images support and extend one’sknowledge of the world, or act as a simulacrum (Baudrillard): not as copies of the real,but as truths in their own right.

Those debates come forward in my analysis of two images of non-Western women.At issue here is an effort to disclose the tensions between photography understood bothin terms of performing civic skill (Azoulay) and as inducing aesthetic/moral appreci-ation, often grounded in the knowledge we already possess. This article builds upontwo strands of scholarly research: current debates on the role of documentary photog-raphy in contemporary society and theories of representation and gender. My goal is topoint out how these representations make claims about contemporary notions of gender,identity, (non)citizenship and sovereignty, and how they function as normative devicesproducing the imagery of communities distant from their audiences.

Sontag did not pay particular attention to the gender of the Holocaust victims(and perpetrators) in the photographs she saw in the bookstore, but the questions con-cerning gendered representations are fundamental to the critical reading of those andother photographs.1 The photographic stills of women, documenting the action anddestruction of war and conflict, have always been one of the central visual techniquesof humanitarianism, spanning geographical distances and cultural divides. Awarded inphotographic contests, circulated by aid NGOs, images of women play a significant rolein winning public opinion and influencing political actions (Campbell 55–74; Sontag,Regarding). Scholarly and public debates concerning iconic photographs such as MigrantMother (Hariman and Lucaites), Napalm Girl (Burman 238–53) and Afghan Girl (Lutz andCollins) have mostly focused on the audience’s reaction to the disempowered subjectsand on “regarding the pain of others” (Sontag, Regarding). I, however, will argue thatthe photographs of women in media coverage, although perpetually oscillating betweenuniversalism and their geopolitical “Otherness”, in addition to compelling their audi-ences to be touched by their broad scope of referentiality also make statements regardingtheir very specific civil identities. I do not aim at exposing these two images as “false” or“untrue”, nor make the general claim that every representation of a non-Western womanin press coverage is caught in spectacle and the capitalist desire to consume, but ratherdemonstrate that gender is a key component in both opening up and narrowing downa concept space for the practical engagement with the represented subjects (Boltanski).Focusing on gender as a vehicle of rhetoric that mediates the circulation and recogni-tion of press images, this project enhances the understanding of both their structure andtransmission, simultaneously recognizing or restoring the accountability of the peoplerepresented.

I follow here two of the common tropes (rhetorical devices used in a figurativeor non-literal sense; Bal, Travelling) which flourish in printed press and stock image

M A D O N N AS O F WA R F A R E 73

banks — a mourning woman and a young girl. Two chosen images were awarded a prizelast year in the annual press photography contest of World Press Photo (embedded inthe Netherlands yet international in its scope and appeal), but might easily be found inany other contest. My choice was based on the fact that they both are portraits (awardedin Portrait category): capturing female faces, they simultaneously efface/give face to thequestions of political identities of women represented. The relationships a human facecan establish with its viewers operate along different spectacles, summon up distinctcommunities and oscillate between identification and distancing. The basis of those rela-tionships, as Martha Rosler has pointed out, is a “physiognomic fallacy”, in which the faceis seen as expression of identity (221).2 However, much can go astray here. Because itproffers the face of an Other, the photographic portrait encourages one to attach to it themeaning within one’s own worldview, silencing other voices and disregarding other cul-tures (Jones 947–78), engaging in a distancing work through quasi-ethnographic meansof looking at the photographs.

In the following analyses, I seek to account for how the meaning is constructed inconnection to (gendered) identities. To this end, I will first analyse the formal side andthe content of both images. As a next step, I will look at the context I encounteredthem in, focusing on the way they have been framed and semanticized and how staging,editing, selectivity or mislabelling undercut/enhance their indexical powers.3 I thenconnect them to the number of broader concepts taken up by cultural theory, suchas mourning or childhood which, I argue, facilitate their travels outside the genre ofpress imagery and grant them recognition among global audiences. Finally, I point toalternative readings that could be performed, which might establish new ruptures inour viewing of other people’s lives, fundamental to the production and discussion ofthese photographs.

The rupture that I have in mind here would therefore move away from the Barthesianidea of punctum (seen by him as an emotive, affect-inducing, often incommunicable“piercing” or “bruising” of the viewing subject) and shift towards Butler’s notion of thebreaking of the frame (the context those images are viewed in, but also their internalorganizations). When a frame breaks with itself, “a taken-for-granted reality is calledinto question exposing the orchestrating designs of the authority who sought to con-trol the frame” (Butler, Frames 12), exposing the mechanisms of power that enabled theexistence of this very photograph, and the cultural mediations surrounding it.

Photograph 1: Disturbing mourning

On the photograph by Yuri Kozyrev, Agency Noor (First Prize in the Portrait categoryin 2009) Rajiha Jihad Jassim (37) stands with her son Sarhan, in Baghdad, Iraq. Her husband,Gazie Swadi Tofan, was kidnapped in November 2006 and is still missing. For months she vis-ited the city morgue, in case she could recognize her husband among the dead. With five childrenand no family income, she can no longer pay the bus fare so does not go to the morgue any more,but still hopes for Tofan’s return.4 The light picks up only on both faces and Rajiha’s handsholding her son. The woman on this photograph, veiled in a black chador, exists throughher hands (which could belong to a much older person) and through her face, avertedfrom the viewer, staring into the void. The rest of her body is washed out in darkness,


FIGURE 1 Copyright Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR.


indiscernible from that of her son. The boy, however, is confronting the viewer with hissolemn expression and his eyes fixed on a point unknown to us. Facing different direc-tions, they nevertheless seem united in their suspension. The dramatic play of light anddarkness, sculpting the faces of mother and son, intertwined in a complex relationshipof those who survive, makes one enter this image through the aesthetic of a spectacleof “beautiful suffering” (Reinhardt et al.), regardless of how one might be aware of thedangers of such approach in both journalism and humanitarian interventions (Shaw).The static yet theatrical composition of the scene invites timelessness. The medium ofphotography, initially designed to commemorate and chronicle the moment, lends itselfmore to the idea that all that pertained to the existence of this very image had alreadyhappened (Barthes).

The context this photograph has been placed in makes the figure of a mourningwoman into both agent and referent in the construction of her story, creating circuitsfor emotional exchange and moral address (Hariman and Lucaites). In Oude Kerk, thechurch in Amsterdam where the WPP exhibition opened last year, the image, althoughno bigger than other photographs, drew the visitors towards it. The black backgroundseemed to absorb all the light around it (which happens also when the image is repro-duced in print), rather than reflect it, like an oil painting would. The church settingseemed to cast the quasi-sacral character upon this image nonetheless, along with itsconnections to sacral iconography both on the formal level (the ray of light was a com-mon practice in Renaissance and Baroque painting, symbolizing God picking the ChosenOne; see Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew) and the content level (the figure of amother holding her soon-to-become-fatherless son is reminiscent of Pieta). Unframed,unadorned (the simplicity with which WPP exhibitions are executed seems to aim tocontest the painterly value of many photographs and refuse them art-like status), withminimal caption beneath, it stood alone, forming a momentary pause from colour andmovement in other photographs.

Following the image on various websites, I encountered slight shifts in the caption.On the website of Agency Noor, the text is very similar, with an added sentence: “Shelives with five children, supported by community hand-outs.”5 The image is presented hereas a part of the series Victims of the Iraq war: men, women (mostly) and a child, allagainst a deep black background with a single ray of light upon their faces, testify to theacts of violence committed against them and their families. Another lost part-sentence,found on the blog of an Israeli photographer: “For months she visited the city morgueto join the crowd that daily watches the images of unidentified corpses screened on five videomonitors, in case she could recognize her husband among the dead” (emphasis added).6

Those retrieved sentences seem significant or significantly omitted: support by thecommunity and the fact of endless watching, together with others, the videos of faces,have been cut out in the editing process. But those cuts perform a greater role: the waythe photograph is presented within the WPP exhibition and contest mirrors its internalorganization: the loneliness is overwhelming, the silence piercing, the connections tothe community broken.

Although the death of Rajiha’s husband is not (yet) a fact, this picture enters along tradition of the iconographical motive of mourning in the visual sphere, where theimages of mourning women stand for the nation and its lost lives (Ahmed). Normally,grief attends the life that has already ended. But, “grievability is a condition of a life’s


emergence and sustenance . . . ‘a life has been lived’ is presupposed at the beginningof a life that has only begun to be lived” (Butler, Frames of War 15). The timelessnessof the image contains the whole duration of that life and its completion. Our concep-tualizing of the mourning process happening here is influenced by abstracting figuresfrom the background, de-contextualizing bodies, editing out sentences and, above all,removing this image from the rest of the series. Although the loss and grief are mostprobably brought upon Rajiha’s family by military operations, no perpetrators are sig-nalled in the image or the caption. In fact, the existence of a community that offerssupport and the community of survivors that gathers to watch videos of the corpses,(un)hoping to see their loved ones among them, have been erased altogether. This pic-ture and the way it is framed in fact shield us from the narrative rendition and thepictorial representation of death (even mediated by other visual technology, video), butalso un-designs systems of power involved, enabling the elision of questions of politicaleconomy and multicultural affiliations. The ray of light picks up on the image of dignifieddistress rather than on issues of the structural disadvantage of the Iraqi civilian popula-tion, opening this photograph to emotional reactions: pity, empathy and compassion,or, on the other hand, compassion fatigue, suffering at a distance and the voyeuristicpleasure of looking (Sturken and Cartwright). Caught in the intimacy of the light andshadow rather than during a public act such as a wake or funeral, the woman in Kozyrev’sphotograph remains in a transient zone between the family and the state. Her mourningremains a mono-cultural individual and psychological condition (Caruth), rather thanbeing a social act of reaffirmation of mediated civil identity, a structured ritual, andperformed collectively in a public municipal space. Like many women before her, shemight be seen as engaging in a gendered labour of mourning, love and affectivity (Freud81–83; Klein), commemorating the (presumed) dead, and producing closure, ratherthan providing testimony of structural violence.7

As a result, Rajiha Jihad Jassim becomes an uneasy equilibrium between the con-tinuity of victimhood and the recognition of difference. The sacredness of the scenebecomes the condition of the woman’s simultaneous de-sacralization: while her imageis both elevated and sanctified, her body remains excluded from the public discourse.With subtle but clear accents signalling her difference from the Western audience, shemight turn into a marker of “authenticity” and “essence” of certain cultural and ethnicidentities, relying on sexual difference that, especially in times of war, “has returnedto the world stage in a fundamentalist and reactionary version, re-instating a world-view based on colonial lines of demarcation” (Braidotti 6). Consequently, grievingfor the life that has not been recognized within Western political, social and institu-tional relations as precarious or “livable” (Butler, Frames of War), her mourning mighteasily become an act of the ultimate principle dividing her from the historical andgeopolitical location where her grief would be legitimate and recognized, rather thancontemplated and admired.

What could be the disruptive moment in or around Kozyrev’s photograph that wouldchallenge the vision of a mourning woman eternally relegated to the outskirts of dis-course? How not to let a mourning woman (especially a woman who is culturally,racially and spatially foreign to her audiences), become simultaneously universal andmarginal? For that, the ideological space of the mourning process needs to be disturbed


and reconceptualized. At the heart of this alternative reading lies the concept of mourn-ing as an active, embodied activism, as a viscerally experienced act of witnessing andresistance, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of the “intimate public sphere” (4).That reading may create new spaces for female identity and agency by paying particu-lar attention to the ways in which this woman’s response to death might be significantto the development of autonomous, speaking subject. While Freud’s view of mourningpromises the eventual return to a state of well-being (which some communities werenever granted in the first place), we might derive a sense of empowerment through thephotograph of women’s deeply personal practices of grieving that do not attain closureand are not susceptible to the idea of progress and healing, therefore contesting patri-archal structures of war and conflict. To rearticulate mourning as historically situatedaction of dissent, undermining the normative role stereotypically assigned to womenby nationalism, would then be to make mourning not the process of never-ending(Derrida 171–92), melancholic (Freud 81–83) or self-indulgent (Bauman) letting goof a subject lost, but rather acknowledging and memorizing the void caused by polit-ical loss. By re-embodying mourning outside quasi-religious context and detaching itfrom “nationalistic and heterosexist fantasy of the ‘mother of the nation’, the weep-ing mother who has honourably sacrificed her sons to the nation’s military pursuits”(Athanasiou 41)8 we as Western audiences might give priority to the embodied expe-riences of women across public and private settings and challenge and discontinue theworkings of cultural mediations surrounding images of women as emblematic figures ofgenocide and dispossession.

Photograph 2: Girl, interrupted

A photograph of Sung Nam-Hun, Photonet, shows a novice nun of an esoteric sect of TibetanBuddhism, in an isolated monastery high in the Himalayas. One sees a young girl, staringstraight into the camera. Her face, weathered by the harsh climate, seems impenetrable,but her eyes are focused and determined. Due to a close-up, the play of textures ofskin, fur and fabric gives this photograph an almost tangible character. Although thephotograph itself does not provide any clue as to gender, age or social position of thegirl — only the caption tells us it really is the girl we are looking at — I will argue herethat the image is gendered by default and that it plays with and re-affirms the conventionsof the standard aid appeal image, without intentionally being one.

The girl portrayed here appeared on posters announcing the WPP exhibitions inseveral cities in the Netherlands, the contrast between the vividly pink cheeks and thealmost monochrome rest of the picture catching the eye of many. Before it enteredthe contest, the photograph was a part of the exhibition Lotus Well in the Museum ofPhotography in Seoul, where fourteen portraits of the Tibetan nuns were presented. It isa part of a larger series of other young bhikkhuni (nuns) and bhikkhu (monks); in searchof authentic Buddhism and its practitioners, Korea-based photographer Sung Nam-hunwent to a Buddhist sanctuary in Kham, Eastern Tibet, where more than 10,000 monksand nuns have gathered looking for spiritual teachers. In his other pictures, the photog-rapher captured them practising their customs and praying daily in holy places covered


FIGURE 2 Copyright Nam-Hun Sung.


with flags of five colours, symbolizing five universal elements (water, sky, fire, windand land) and five spatial directions (east, west, south, north and centre). He also pho-tographed the arduous physical training they undergo, i.e. lifting heavy planks of wood.

In both the WPP and museum exhibition, the accompanying text was employedto produce shifting degrees of identification and empathy. The text on the WPP web-site focuses on distance and isolation, the almost mysterious quality of life “high in theHimalayas”. The text on the museum website and catalogue, together with a rather sim-plified description of the practice of Buddhism, draws a clear line between the Westernworld and the Kham sanctuary:

It is far from the modern life in other parts of the world, which involves the pursuitof comfort and ease. . . . In these modern times when cities are expanding rapidly,and in this material world into which other people are plunging in order to sat-isfy their desires, what makes these monks and nuns choose such a life? . . . Thephotographs of Nam-Hun Sung offer us a chance to think about our busy lives andcontemplate our souls’ existence, which we’ve neglected.9

Although the vision of Western society here is decadent and seems doomed, the cor-responding image is similar to the smiling and pensive faces of children in Western aidcampaigns, characterized by over-familiarity and taken-for-granted platitudes. Its seren-ity taps into a long tradition of reportage photography where childhood has come tocarry significations of truth, nature, spontaneity and innocence. Either in the contextof artistic practice or global broadcasting, the photograph signals the presence of the“child within”, the “true self” one cherishes against the cruelties of the harsh, alienat-ing world outside, which functions as the index of integrity, authenticity and freedom.Those features are reinforced here through relation to Buddhism, esoterism and spir-ituality, positioned on a level unreachable by the Western standards, and supposedlycommunicated by this image.

The travels this photograph undergoes across a variety of genres might perhapschange what we seek and what we appreciate in it (a refined aesthetics, a legitimacyof witnessing, a potential aid appeal). Like many photographs of children (think of AnneFrank, whose photographs stood alone for the atrocities of the Holocaust), the Tibetangirl is portrayed alone, without markers of culture, history or community. While thecaption vaguely addresses the geopolitical context, the image transgresses it — thegirl could be anywhere, which makes it possible for this image to live longer than thestory and the credit, reproduced across a range of media, genres or topics. Similar toKozyrev’s photograph, the temporality of the image, its connections to here and now,are denied. Barthes in Camera Lucida argued that the photographic image has a particularcapacity to cast a subject’s face in the tense of the future anterior, being both a chronicleof what “has been” and a “portentive certainty about what will have been” (qtd. in Butler97). This seems to be particularly true when the face is that of a child, both indulgingviewers in the nostalgia of the past and signifying futures and potentialities, denying thelinearity of time and space.10

Both serenity and timelessness of childhood bring the photograph of a name-less girl close to “positive imagery” of children used in humanitarian communication,


glossing over the misery, poverty or destitution and concealing systemic power rela-tions (Chouliaraki, “Post-humanitarianism” 107–26).11 Just like UNICEF photographsof disarmingly pretty children — “photogenic poverty” (Hutnyk 81) — this photographand the way it is framed might easily open commodity fetishism and touristic leisurein another person’s everyday life, transmuting any kind of conditions different from aWestern, middle-class, urban environment into naïve aesthetics.

What is the alternative reading of this image? Again, our revision of the conceptof childhood, abstracted from its historical, cultural and political location, might be ofhelp here. While frames, such as the idea of childhood, often function as an editorialembellishment of the picture (Butler, Frames of War), they could also be seen as a self-commentary on a process of framing itself (our cultural notion of childhood determiningour viewing) and consequently transgressed:

to call the frame into question is to show that the frame never quite contained thescene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside, which made thevery sense of the inside possible, recognizable. The frame never quite determinedprecisely what it is we see, think, recognize, and apprehend. Something exceeds theframe that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that doesnot conform to our established understanding of things. (9)

One should un-frame this image, transforming it from a timeless symbol into a politicalinstrument, where the image of a child can function to break up rather than maintainprevailing colonial and paternalistic relations. We should address this image in a limited,partial attempt to reconstruct the part it played in those relations, rather than re-affirmthe binaries by which a space of political relations between the West and the rest aregoverned in the representations of children. Just as images full of drama and theatre-likedynamics evoke fascination and compassion (as Kozyrev’s images does), positive imageappeals are instrumental in summoning up empathy and gratitude: the moralizing func-tion of this regime relies on the “sympathetic equilibrium” (Chouliaraki, Spectatorship;“Post-humanitarianism”): the logic of representation that orients the appeal towards aresponsive balance of emotions between the sufferer and the spectator as potential bene-factor or co-feeling subject, constructing viewers as the nurturing mother provider,set firmly within paternal and colonially defined standards. Consequently, problems ofinequality, HIV, famine or war are primarily linked to the Western model of childhoodto generate money and support (Burman 238–53; Szörényi 24–42).12 Childhood asa period of dependency and need of (institutional) nurturance and protection coin-cides with colonial paternalism and the corresponding infantilization of the countriesin receipt of aid, in order to secure the viewer’s own sense of adulthood.13 Additionally,within aid imagery, little girls are the quintessential child victims; the vulnerable, depen-dent aspects of childhood are displaced onto the already feminized space of the “Other”.In the other words, the depoliticization of this image of a Tibetan girl, probably healthyand content, and in no need of a benefactor, gives it a quality of pleasurable, self-indulgent fascination with the exotic (Shohat and Stam), warding off anxieties aboutthe accountability of the mediating process.


Conclusion

Although, based on the example of two tropes frequent in press photography, I haveproposed that visual “trafficking in pain” (Bal, “The Pain”) runs into the danger ofbecoming trafficking in women, flattening out and eventually silencing civic andsovereign subjects, my intention was to present them not as manipulative devices,but rather as continuously mediated arrangements of gender whose production andreception are culturally determined.14 Not only the photographs of women aresusceptible to canonization; media reports also capitalize on a set of visual strategiesto represent men in order to orient viewers towards particular imaginations. Butler(Precarious Life; Frames of War) observes that in the US media the response to certainforms of violence is to consider it inassimilable through the assertion of masculineimpermeability (as opposed to feminine victimization), both evoking multiple emotionsand providing the viewing of systemic power. A good example of such practices is theafterlife of another portrait, a photograph taken by Los Angeles Times staff photographerLuis Sinco, showing a blank-faced young soldier, James Blake Miller, with a scrape onhis nose and a cigarette hanging from his mouth, during the assault in Fallouja, Iraq.Immediately named the Marlboro Marine, the image appeared on the front page of morethan a hundred newspapers and all of the major television networks. It evoked strongemotions around the world: mothers wondered whether the soldier was their ownson; women wanted to marry him. Even the Marine Corps command took notice ofthe image’s enormous popularity, offering Miller the chance to leave the combat zone.Despite photographer’s concern about the afterlife of this image,15 the photograph hasbeen widely interpreted as a swaggering pro-war emblem, a symbol of “Kicking Buttin Fallouja” (New York Post, 10 November 2004). Many recognized the “thousand-yardstare”, linking it to Hollywood’s representations of the American West, even thoughMiller — a 20-year-old from rural Kentucky who joined the army because there wereno job opportunities, presently diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder anddivorced — hardly fits the image of lonesome cowboy or hero GI. This example servesto demonstrate that cultural constructions of gender are both the component of pressphotographs and the lens through which we look at them, making one inscribe on thesingle image stories/tropes that have been eternally present in societal discourse, andoften dismissing the ruptures that might occur in those readings.

Images taken by Kozyrev, Nam-Hun and Sinco testify to the need for new relationalapproaches to press photographs, based on relations of race, gender and citizenshipwhich are never fixed, but multidirectional, prone to interventions and subject to regu-lar redefinition. Gender-sensitive analysis enables us to look at them not as visual formsmore or less able to engage audiences dulled by spectacle and repetition, but as socialpractices prompting an ethical turn in visual criticism, creating interactive, communica-tive experiences. Images of women and men should be regarded as seeking to establishcontinually reassessed encounters in which meaning is elaborated collectively and intime and resistant to any form of foreclosure or hegemonic powers of interpretation.

A better understanding of the rhetorical effects of such images is needed to enforcea break in the surrounding accumulation and continuation of bias that a worldwideaudience is facing and their repercussions. To perform alternative readings of those


images, readings that would not reinforce the notion of suffering at a distance or visualtourism involved in the process of looking, one should undo received renditions of gen-der and show how they can break with themselves in the production and circulationof and response tosuch images. In this article, I have considered ruptures and recon-firmations of the knowledge we bring into the process of viewing globally broadcastphotographs and consequently of our ways of being in the world. The first step in cut-ting through the proliferating representations of mourning women or wide-eyed girls isto realize that the homogeneity of representations of women within the general categoryof “trauma photography” (Baer) frequently makes us relapse into a form of essentialism.The second would be to move from emotion-oriented universalism towards reflex-ive particularism (Chouliaraki 107–26): the contextualization of the female subjectand revision of the relations and dependencies it creates geopolitically and sociolog-ically (Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes” 333–58; “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited”17–53). The final step might be to open up a concept space needed to articulate themeaning of such imagery not only as an eternal, easily consumable image of distantsuffering/enduring, but also the production of slippery and momentary notions of usand others that we perform daily.

Notes

1 Marianne Hirsch, in her essay Nazi Photographs in Post-Holocaust Art: Gender as an Idiomof Memorialization, is one of the few to pay attention to the constructions of gender(19–41).

2 While the photographic portrait in general has been mobilized as a way of celebratingthe centred, Cartesian, Western individual (as in portraits of politicians, artists andcelebrities) it has also precluded the normative, coherent subject of viewing (oftenwhite and masculine) in relation to a passive feminine object (Jones 947–78). On theother hand, the recent enormous success of deadpan portrait photography (practisedfor example by Rineke Dijkstra, Celine van Balen and Gillian Wearing, representingmostly children, adolescents and women) is a reflection of the growing interest inthe decreasing political agency of an individual in the neoliberal society (Stallabrass71–90).

3 It is worth mentioning here that, although those images were meant to accompanya story in a newspaper, I encountered them as a part of photography exhibition,therefore after they had been moved from their original context, and followed theirmoves.

4 Caption as given on WPP website <http://www.worldpressphoto.org>.5 <http://www.noorimages.com>.6 <http://niralon.wordpress.com/>.7 Das (184–205) pays attention to how cultural rituals (like throwing earth over flesh

at funerals or lamentation) rely upon the medium of the female body to enact anemotional response to death, contesting death’s invisibility. The mourner is theembodiment of the feeling that had been evoked by the act of death-making.

8 Similarly, the AIDS Memorial Quilt conjured by AIDS activism in 1980s and theWomen in Black movement have addressed grieving in all its affective, social and


political implications, opening spaces for challenging divisions between public andprivate as well as between affective and political (Athanasiou 40–57; Crimp 3–18).

9 <http://www.photomuseum.or.kr/>.10 The most famous example here could be Afghan Girl, one of the most iconic child

images of all times, relying on the same formal organization as Buddhist nun (sharp-ness of facial detail, engaging eye contact). It has attained its anterior future whenthe girl in question was photographed seventeen years later, the two images oftenpresented together.

11 Chouliaraki also gives examples of discursive activism where NGOs reject essential-ist representations of non-Western subjects and attempt to educate photographersby mediating reflexive cultural specificity.

12 Similarly, Sontag (Regarding) pays attention to how the same photographs of childrenhave been employed for political propaganda by both sides in the Serbo-Croatianconflict.

13 Hutnyk (77–94) argues that in photographs of children we can witness the doubleplay of aid/war: while looking at the photographs of children’s amputated legs orburns, we are assured that the rationale for the military intervention is to ensure thefreedom of the women and children.

14 It must be mentioned that there exist alternatives to unproblematic connecting ofnon-Western women to universal victimhood and oppression — i.e. emergent tropeof a woman soldier.

15 Conversation with Luis Sinco at Humanizing Photography conference, Durham,22 Sept. 2009. Extensive documentary on Miller is available on http://www.mediastorm.com.

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Marta Zarzycka is an Assistant Professor at the Gender Studies Department, UtrechtUniversity. She teaches and publishes in the field of visual studies, feminist art history andmemory studies. In her current research she focuses on the role of digital photography inshaping collective Western consciousness through its representation of trauma happeningglobally. Her publications include “‘Now I Live on a Painful Planet’: Frida Kahlo Revisited”in Third Text and “The Force of Recalling: Pain in Visual Arts” in Technologies of Memoryin the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan). She is currently editing a volume Carnal Aesthetics:Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (forthcoming 2012 from I.B. Tauris).

Documents

Outside the Frame: Re-examining Photographic Representations of Mourning,’ Photography & Culture