(Re)thinking Suffering and Mourning Through Covid-19 Photographs in India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12919637 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Purbita Das (0000-0002-4993-1602, Schlumberger (Ireland), corresponding author), Antara Chatterjee (0000-0002-7384-9414) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 133-149 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Photographies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-0763 • E-ISSN: 1754-0771 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17540763.2022.2158490 |
| OpenAlex | W4323288296 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
This article offers a close textual and visual analysis of some of the most iconic photographs of the COVID pandemic’s second wave in India, to examine how they evoke violence both within and outside the photographic frame, and become sites of critical reflection. The pandemic’s second wave witnessed a proliferation of images in social media and online news portals representing mass deaths, corpses floating in rivers, and mass funerals executed in makeshift crematoria. Pointing out how the widely circulated photographs deployed an excess of violence to represent death as a dreaded event external to life, this article contends that the violence in these images not only evoked shock and horror but also interrupted mourning both in the private and the collective realm, furthered through violence in the images and the interruption of familiar mourning rituals for those dead. Deriving from Ariella Azoulay’s idea of the ‘civil gaze’ to ‘watch’ photographs, the article explores how these photographs configure a space of critical reflection and responsibility towards those photographed, which uncovers the crucial biopolitical interfaces between disease, death, the state, and the precarity of citizens. It simultaneously deliberates on the role of the visual and the photographic gaze in foregrounding these intersections
Aesthetics · Art · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Event (particle physics · Foregrounding · Gaze · Literature · Media studies · Pandemic · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Realm · Social media · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology
Spectacle of Grief
The Spectatorship of Suffering
The Burden of Representation
Modernity and Postmodernity
Vulnerability in Resistance
Symbolic Exchange and Death
The Eye of History
On Photographic Violence
Between remembrance and knowledge
Death and the Spectacle in Television and Social Media
The Uneven Citizenry of Photography
Regarding the pain of others
Intolerable Gaze
The Civil Contract of Photography
The dead and their public. Memory campaigns, issue networks and the role of the archaeologist in the excavation of mass graves
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |