War Photography, the Face, and Small Acts of Senseless Kindness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18952626 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alex Danchev (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 113-129 |
| Publication date | 2011-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for Cultural Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1479-7585 • E-ISSN: 1740-1666 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14797585.2011.574051 |
| OpenAlex | W2151476392 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 4 |
This article examines the moral work of war photography — the classic portraits of Don McCullin and also the latter‐day landscapes of Simon Norfolk — probing their moral depths. It focuses on "the face" as Emmanuel Levinas understood it, and argues that the photographers do the same; following Levinas, it makes use of Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate (1980) to adumbrate an ethics of small acts of senseless kindness, in Grossman's phrase. It proposes that such an ethics offers a compelling description of our response (and our responsibility) to others, and a crystalline encapsulation of the war photographer's practice
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Grossman · Kindness · Photography · Portrait · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Schopenhauer and Stefan Zweig
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.22 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2021 (5) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |