Traumatic Images

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12919459
AutoresJessica Catherine Lieberman (Rochester Institute of Technology, autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen1
Número1
Páginas87-102
Fecha de publicación2008-02-12
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPhotographies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1754-0763 • E-ISSN: 1754-0771
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17540760701788283
OpenAlexW4251793452
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas23

This paper explores an analogy between the meaning structure of psychic trauma and the meaning structure of photographic images. It argues that like traumatic experience, photographs are displaced from the “reality” they reference. The photograph is not, ultimately, the record of an event. In a significant and intelligible way, the event never happened or was never experienced. With the advent of digital imaging, viewers increasingly do not expect photography to represent a real objectivity. This paper questions the notion of a redeemable reality in an image. In photographic criticism, some scholars argue for a depicted reality that is irredeemable; others think that the reality of photographs can be redeemed in the future. This paper claims that photographs simply do not depict reality. Rather than looking at a photograph as the depiction of an irredeemable past or the promise of a redeemable future, we can look at it as analogous to a trauma, where what matters is not the inaccessible original event but the history of interpretations. Notes 1. For examples, see CitationBrown, Sheflin, and Hammond, Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law; CitationCaruth, Trauma; CitationHerman, Trauma and Recovery; CitationLeys, Trauma; CitationMcNally, Remembering Trauma; CitationShowalter, Hystories; CitationVan der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisæth, Traumatic Stress; CitationYoung, The Harmony of Illusions. 2. See especially CitationBreuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria; CitationFerenczi and Dupont, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi; CitationFreud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria”; CitationPrince, The Dissociation of a Personality. 3. The notion of the “event” has its roots in ontologically oriented phenomenology, especially CitationHeidegger, Being and Time. I am straddling an irresolvable line between phenomenological realism (when it comes to traumatic experience) and empirical realism (when it comes to the nature of the image) and psychiatric realism (when it comes to the experience of trauma). Poststructuralist, pragmatist and postmodernist theory are required to call all such claims of realism into question. 4. Owing to a belief in the quasi‐sciences of physiognomy and phrenology, Duchenne saw the human face as a chartable map, with a grammar of expressions that “could be codified into universal taxonomies of inner states” (CitationSobieszek 109). 5. For discussions of Freud's use of metaphors of the camera and of photography, see especially CitationBaer, Spectral Evidence; CitationBatchen, Burning with Desire; CitationDerrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”; CitationKofman, Camera Obscura. 6. The argument for an absence of relation between a pre‐representation event and its representation can be made following CitationVictor Burgin and CitationAllan Sekula, challenging the very notion of a simple, pre‐photographic real. It can also be made following CitationRoland Barthes and CitationEduardo Cadava, focusing on the temporal peculiarity that distances the representation from its production. CitationBurgin, Thinking Photography; CitationSekula, “The Body and the Archive”; CitationCadava, Words of Light; CitationBarthes, Camera Lucida. 7. CitationMorris, “Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up”. 8. See especially the debate over the image of a man jumping from the World Trade Center on 11 September entitled “The Falling Man” – the running and then censorship of the photo by the press, its iterations in film and fiction, and the various claims to the photographed subject's identity. CitationJunod, “The Falling Man”. CitationMarianne Hirsch tackled the issue of photographing at Ground Zero: CitationHirsch, “The Day Time Stopped”. For more theoretical discussion, see CitationMiller, “‘Portraits of Grief’”; CitationBal, “Light Writing”. Also see CitationGillian Rose's essay on images in the newspaper following the July 2005 bombings of London's public transportation system: CitationRose, “Spectacle and Spectres”. 9. Texts that focus on the subject of historical trauma in the Holocaust include CitationApel, Memory Effects; CitationRothberg, Traumatic Realism. Another focus is on “survivor art” of victims of rape and incest. See, for example, CitationKilby, “A Withdrawn Vision”. 10. See especially, CitationFlusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography. 11. When CitationCaruth argues that to be “traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4–5), trauma becomes (if conceived within the models of print and visual communication) a failure to properly edit and then contextualize input for appropriate interpretation and is like a photographic negative that does not reveal its image until transferred into a different format. 12. CitationFreud, Moses and Monotheism. 13. CitationRuth Leys takes issue with CitationCaruth's development of traumatic latency. See CitationLeys, Trauma 270–71. 14. In addition to CitationBaer, see also CitationGreenberg, “The Echo of Trauma and the Trauma of Echo”; CitationHartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”; CitationJacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading. 15. Part of CitationBaer's contestation of the linear model of historical understanding is an artificial construction of two opposing notions of time, taken from ancient Greece. He attributes one to the “ancient Heraclitean notion of time‐as‐river” (3) and the other to Democritus and a “conception of the world as occurring in bursts and explosions, as the rainfall of reality” (5). 16. See CitationCrary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter‐memory”; CitationDebord, The Society of the Spectacle. 17. The material/digital divide has been effectively deconstructed by Hayles. See especially CitationHayles, How We Became Posthuman. For the concept of intermediation in CitationHayles: My Mother Was a Computer. 18. With respect to both CitationLev Manovich and CitationWilliam J. Mitchell, as they argue over digital and analog technologies, photography's long‐standing debate over the role of reproduction may no longer be relevant. See CitationManovich, The Language of New Media; idem, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”; CitationMitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Between mechanical reproduction and mathematical reproduction lies an embodied agency – a code scripter who programs algorithmic choices. Where can we find the individual who is connected to the production of the image from artistic authorship, through encoding software, to computing hardware? This image maker is certainly as much of a fiction as the subject she images. Furthermore, even if freed from the expectation of authentic representation, can the maker and the subject ever be free of the grand narrative of the photographic image: that it represents? 19. See CitationBolter and Grusin, Remediation. 20. Professional photojournalistic associations such as the US National Press Association have developed codes of ethics to define appropriate and inappropriate alteration. While some of the famously fired photographers are apologetic (such as Brian Walski, fired from the Los Angeles Times in 2003), others are defiant. Patrick Schneider, who was fired from the Charlotte Observer in 2006, argued that his changes restored the actual experience of the event. CitationLang, “Charlotte Observer Photographer Fired for Altering Colors”. 21. For one of many articles on the subject, see Citation“Scientists at Work on a Pill to Fade Traumatic Memories”. 22. CitationShema, Sacktor, and Dudai, “Rapid Erasure of Long‐term Memory Associations in the Cortex by an Inhibitor of Pkm‐Zeta”. 23. See note 7 for discussions of Freud's many uses of optical and ocular metaphors. 24. Dissociation was the concept that CitationJanet used to describe the mental processes by which traumatic experiences were turned into pathology. CitationJanet, L'Automatisme psychologique. 25. CitationSontag herself contests the critique of “events known through images” that she put forth in On Photography. In Citation Regarding the Pain of Others she asks: “Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I'm not so sure now. What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?” (105). 26. The logic of trauma argues that the crisis event happened in the distant past or, in fact, not at all – a slippery ambiguity that is useful in the world of art (CitationFoster 123) but disastrous in the world of science‐based politics and criminal justice. See also CitationElaine Showalter on recovered memories and CitationLeys' critique of CitationShowalter (304–06). 27. For the differentiation between “interactive” and “natural” mental disorders see CitationHacking, The Social Construction of What? 100–24. 28. See CitationFarrell, Post‐traumatic Culture; CitationJarzombek, “The Post‐traumatic Turn and the Art of Walid Ra'ad and Krzysztof Wokiczko”; CitationLeys, Trauma. 29. CitationUlrich Baer posits CitationSiegfried Kracauer's idea of a future “unredeemed” reality (56) as an antidote to the views of CitationWalter Benjamin, CitationRoland Barthes, André Bazin and “their eagerly melancholic followers” (181) who see the future death of the subject in the photograph. See both CitationBaer, Spectral Evidence, and CitationKracauer and Levin, The Mass Ornament

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