Synopses & Reviews
In 2005, photographer Chris Hondros captured a striking image of a young Iraqi girl in the aftermath of the killing of her parents by American soldiers. The shot stunned the world and has since become iconicandmdash;comparable to the infamous photo by Nick Ut of a Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack. Both images serve as microcosms for their respective conflicts.
Afterimages looks at the work of war photographers like Hondros and Ut to understand how photojournalism interacts with the American worldview.
Liam Kennedy here maps the evolving relations between the American way of war and photographic coverage of it. Organized in its first section around key US military actions over the last fifty years, the book then moves on to examine how photographers engaged with these conflicts on wider ethical and political grounds, and finally on to the genre of photojournalism itself. Illustrated throughout with examples of the photographs being considered, Afterimages argues that photographs are important means for critical reflection on war, violence, and human rights. It goes on to analyze the high ethical, sociopolitical, and legalistic value we place on the still imageandrsquo;s ability to bear witness and stimulate action.
Review
“
The Cruel Radiance is a brilliant, lucid, and incisive exploration of photography and political violence. It looks deeply and unsparingly at how photographers have pictured war, genocide, and atrocities, and in so doing illuminates photographys democratic promise. By making the world present to us even when we want to look away, photographs have the potential to make us think and question together, to draw us into a community of witnesses.”
Review
“This is a magnificent book. Susie Linfield has a good eye for the photographs and a good head for the politics. And she has the moral strength to look at these images of mutilation, death, and destruction, explain their value, and demand that we look at them, too.”
Review
“Its not enough to say that Susie Linfield looks at photography with fresh eyes. Throughout this book—for me, most powerfully when she takes on Nazi extermination camp photographs—she sees with a mind unintimidated by fashion, shibboleths, attitude, cliche. She sees behind the pictures she looks at, to their motives, fears, ambitions, and lies. She writes through them.”
Review
“A profoundly thoughtful account of the role of photojournalism in an irremediably violent world, Linfields book is as much about conscience and empathy as it is about photography. Examining images from the Spanish Civil War to Rwanda, she accepts no easy, sweeping answers. Rather, with vivid common sense and with painstaking, often abashed humanity, she guides us through the moral minefield where horror meets art, and helps us to see.”—Claudia Roth Pierpont
Review
"A somber, heartfelt plea for readers to see the truth and acknowledge and understand the consequences of humans' potential for inhumanity. This should be required reading for students of journalism and political science and general readers with an interest in human-rights activism."
Review
“Linfields great achievement is more than to shake up the orthodoxy that says, ‘Look away! Its a call to arms, an incitement to look closely at the world via the medium of photography, and, implicitly, to do something about it.”
Review
"A smart, very readable dismantling of postmodern criticism's confusion over the power of photojournalism."
Review
"At its best, the passionate intensity and intellectual rigour of Linfields writing may convince you that looking away, or not looking at all, is not an option. To make sense of a violent world we must, she contends, look at, and look into, what James Agee called "the cruel radiance of what is." Whatever the cost."—Guardian (UK) Guardian
Review
“Beautifully crafted, exquisitely written, and exceptionally powerful in its arguments.”--
Design ObserverReview
"Susie Linfield has written a brave and unsettling book . . . and she creates a calculus for a new kind of photography criticism--one that respects photography rather than distrusts it, derives its power from intellect and feeling."
Review
"To look at a photograph entails a peculiar kind of participation: distanced in time and space, and severely limited in regard to the context leading to and consequences stemming from the moment fixed on film, yet often viscerally affecting. . . . Susie Linfield writes forcefully about this predicament. In The Cruel Radiance her eye for the unplanned, wounding photographic detail that Roland Barthes called the punctum is acute, and her empathic intelligence shines."
Review
"The Cruel Radiance is a beautifully considered and unabashedly impassioned plea for the continuing moral relevance of photojournalism. . . . Linfield offers a defense of photojournalism that honors the photographers without turning them into saints or their work into sacred icons."
Review
"Extraordinary."–Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times
Review
"While images of violence and human degradation should never be easy to consume, this book contends that their wordless stories demand the kind of imagination, interpretation and thought that brings the wider world closer to our doors. As such it offers a timely analysis that is itself challenging, unflinching and, for the most part, generous in its aims."
Review
"The Cruel Radiance is a treatise on moral witness and empathic leaps: a book of brief lives--grief lives--on both sides of the camera. . . . For Linfield, criticism is a high calling. There is a scrupulous attentiveness to her looking-in and arguing-out.. . . As criticism, The Cruel Radiance is a work of deep distinction. It will surely become part of the history of its field."
Review
"After years of intellectual stagnation in the field of photography criticism, The Cruel Radiance offers a stimulating, lively discussion and successfully repositions documentary photography in its rightful place, highlighting its decisive impact on how we come to understand the world. For restoring documentary photography's lost dignity, Susie Linfield deserves the thanks of photographers who still believe in the power of their craft."
Review
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Synopsis
In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look.
Synopsis
Liam Kennedy here takes as his focus the ways in which selected photographers have sought to frame the activities and effects of American foreign policy, often with a critical perspective, and how their work engages the dynamics of power and knowledge that attend the American worldview.and#160; What is at issue in this book is understanding relations between the geopolitical conditions of visuality and the particulars of the image.and#160; andldquo;Conditions of visuality,andrdquo; for Kennedy, are the ideologies that determine certain ways of seeing, that support actions and representations which establish (in)visibilities and which police the relationship between seeing and believing the American worldview.and#160; The individual photographers whose work Kennedy so insightfully dissects are those who have pushed the boundaries of photographic practice and who reflect critically on the contexts and scenery of war:and#160; Larry Burrows and Philip Jones Griffiths in Vietnam, Gilles Peress covering the Iranian Revolution, Susan Meiselas in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Ron Haviv and Gary Knight in the Balkans, Ashley Gilbertson and Chris Hondros in Iraq, and Tim Hetherington and Lynsey Addario in Afghanistan.and#160; These individuals expanded the conception and technical repertoire of photojournalism, receiving critical acclaim, provoking public and professional controversy, and often incurring great personal cost to themselves.and#160; Afterimages presents us with a revisionary understanding of the art of conflict photography.and#160; The images are often searingandmdash;they sometimes demonize and dehumanize the enemy, but also humanize friend or victim:and#160; a focus on the human roots the range of feeling in such imagery, from horror to pity.
Synopsis
Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that defined historical moments and generations. Today such a history feels insubstantial and imprecise, even unscientific. And yet photographic technology was not always a necessary precondition for the accurate documentation of history. The documentary impulse that emerged in the late nineteenth century combined the power of science and industry with a particularly utopian (and often imperialistic) belief in the capacity of photography and film to capture the world visually, order it, and render it useful for future generations. This book is about the material and social life of photographs and films made in the scientific quest to document the world. It explores their creation and production as well as the collecting practices of librarians, archivists, and corporations. Together, the chapters of Documenting the World call into question the canonical qualities of the authored, the singular, and the valuable image, and transgress the divides separating the still photograph and the moving image, as well as the analogue and the digital. They also definitively overturn the traditional role of photographs and films in historical studies as passive illustrations.
About the Author
Susie Linfield has been an editor for American Film, the Village Voice, and the WashingtonPost and has written for a wide range of publications including the Los AngelesTimes Book Review,the New York Times, Bookforum, the Village Voice, Aperture, Dissent, and the Nation. She is associate professor of journalism at New York University, where she directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface: The Black Book
PART ONE: POLEMICS
1 A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?
2 Photojournalism and Human Rights: The Calamity of the Kodak
PART TWO: PLACES
3 Warsaw, Lodz, Auschwitz: In the Waiting Room of Death
4 China: From Malrauxs Dignity to the Red Guards Shame
5 Sierra Leone: Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity
6 Abu Ghraib and the Jihad: The Dance of Civilizations
PART THREE: PEOPLE
7 Robert Capa: The Optimist
8 James Nachtwey: The Catastrophist
9 Gilles Peress: The Skeptic
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index