The Forensic Turn: Bearing Witness and the Thingness of the Photograph.

Authored chapter : The Forensic Turn: Bearing Witness and the Thingness of the Photograph in Kennedy, L, ed (2014) The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, I.B. Tauris
The Forensic Turn and the thingness of the photograph.
Images of atrocity are deeply problematic, in that they potentially create a tension between form and content and are often accused of re-victimisation, aesthetisation of suffering, compassion fatigue and exploitation. As an alternative, therefore, there is considerable potential in examining images associated with atrocity that do not depict the actual act of violence or the victim itself, but rather depict the material presence of the spaces and objects involved in such acts. Images of the absence of visible violence can lead the viewer into an imaginative engagement with the nature of atrocity, and the nature of those who perpetrate it. In exploring this absence, Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ (1963), can be taken to mean that the spaces in which atrocities take place are often nondescript, everyday and banal, and that the items used in such violence too are often nondescript. Photography, with its optical -mechanical process, is adept at recording such banal facts of the scene, and by inviting the viewer to scan the image for minute details, often generates a tension between such mundanites and the audiences’ knowledge of the potential import of the situation garnered via a caption. This strategy of the aesthetics of the banal has become a common one in contemporary photographic practice, however, the idea that an image that appears on the surface to be of an ordinary situation, but which the viewer then discovers contains another, deeper and more imaginative reading, is one that has long been effective.
The media coverage of conflict, disasters and human suffering is full of ethical problems, and the risk of victimisation or exploitation of the subject’s distress is real and present. Whilst such claims are disputable, as an alternative to graphic images of violence an approach to documentary photography has emerged that focuses on the traces of war and conflict rather than its direct effects on the human body. Photographers such as turn their attention to the objects, detritus and spaces it produces. By photographing these ‘still lives’, and deploying an aesthetic drawn from human rights investigation and police forensic images, they deal with the complex issues of the ethics of representation whilst simultaneously opening up an imaginative space in which the viewer is invited to engage in a performative interaction with the situation. They also explore alternative vehicles for the dissemination of their work, including books, exhibitions and the web. By exploiting the presence of absence in objects, they offer an alternative and powerful route to the documentation of violence. This chapter explores the work of Gilles Peress, Gary Knight, Simon Norfolk, and Zijah Gafic, in this context.