Grievous Images: Working with Photographs of Pain and Defeat – History of Photography, Volume 47, Issue 4 (2023), Guest Editors: Daniel Foliard and Sean Willcock

The way we look or decline to look at photographs of violence matters. In her influential 1977 essays on photography, Susan Sontag discerned a process of desensitisation operating within modern cultures of consuming violent images due to their proliferation in the media.Footnote¹ Ethical and affective sensitivities were thus tied to the rate and quantity of the images perceived. This past decade has seen an unprecedented surge of extremely graphic photographs and videos circulating on social media. The pace of our collective looking at images of pain has perhaps never been faster. The existence of a special issue such as this makes an implicit argument for the value of a different kind of cognitive and temporal space for encountering violent imagery: the long-form academic article, wherein a careful selection of images is seen in relation to the delineation of context and elaboration of an argument.

Scholarship can provide an opportunity for a pace of gazing and rhythm of thought that deviates from, and perhaps even counters, the effects of the cascade of violent images found in the press and social media. Against the pull of a modern visuality defined by hyper-proliferation and its sense of immediacy, urgency, discontinuity and displacement, we pit the Sisyphean task of insisting upon thick contexts for interpreting the origins and flows of violent historical photographs. This is nowhere more imperative than with images of violence, which often seem to ‘fix’ and concentrate moments of pain and defeat in striking and sometimes unbearable ways. As Ulrich Baer writes, there is a ‘traumatic’ quality to the ‘shrapnel’ of photography, which can capture intense, aberrant moments that even the photographic operators and subjects failed to fully process at the time, creating raw images ‘radically exposed to a future unknown’ to those involved.Footnote² Photographs ineluctably abstract events from their original contexts and open up new horizons of meaning which untether traces of violence from the psychic conditions, power relations and techno-material substrates that produced them. Spending time with these images is essential, then, not only for recuperating their historical origins, meanings, afterlives and effects, but also in creating a space for different kinds of (not) looking to be enacted, along with their corollary forms of historical understanding and political and ethical engagement.