Framing Violence

Images, especially graphic ones, carry immense power. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 2004 essay Regarding the Torture of Others: “photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.” Recall the hooded man standing on a box, the nameless bodies stacked, the burnt child running, and charred hanging bodies that still evoke a century of mass violence. 

This issue of Caterwaul Quarterly includes four articles which explore visual representations of violence around the world: their production, dissemination, and stubborn persistence. With Obama now recycling the Bush Administration’s state secrecy arguments in his refusal to release new torture photos, our authors explore the transformative potential of images which force us  to bear witness to the horrors of human suffering, but also remind us of the photographer and viewers’ own potential complicity in the unsettling events depicted.

Framing Violence articles:

• Bolivia 9/11: Bodies and Power on a Feudal Frontier by Bret Gustafson
  
• Their Violence is Ours by Nate Lavey
• Reflections on Susan Meiselas's In History by Miriam Grotte
• Images of War and Justice: The Painter of Battles by Kasia Kunicka