Picturing Atrocity

Picturing Atrocity
Author: Geoffrey Batchen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN:

This title taps into the widespread interest in, and concern about, photographs of atrocity. The book contains a broad range of atrocity photographs from throughout history and around the world, as well as essays by well-known artists and photographers.

The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938

The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938
Author: Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2017-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785335979

First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China during the winter of 1937-38. Through a series of deeply considered and empirically rigorous essays, it provides a far more complex and nuanced perspective than that found in works like Iris Chang’s bestselling The Rape of Nanking. It systematically reveals the flaws and exaggerations in Chang’s book while deflating the self-exculpatory narratives that persist in Japan even today. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction by the editor reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the massacre.

The Cruel Radiance

The Cruel Radiance
Author: Susie Linfield
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2012-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0226482510

Susie Linfield addresses the issue of whether photographs depicting past scenes of violence & cruelty are voyeuristic, arguing that if we do not look & understand that we are seeing at people, rather than depersonalised acts of inhumanity, our hopes of curbing political violence today are probably limited.

The Violence of the Image

The Violence of the Image
Author: Liam Kennedy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-09-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000211746

Photography has visualized international relations and conflicts from the midnineteenth century onwards and continues to be an important medium in framing the worlds of distant, suffering others. Although photojournalism has been challenged in recent decades, claims that it is dead are premature. The Violence of the Image examines the roles of image producers and the functions of photographic imagery in the documentation of wars, violent conflicts and human rights issues; tackling controversial ideas such as 'witnessing', the making of appeals based on displays of human suffering and the much-cited concept of 'compassion fatigue'. In the twenty-first century, the advent of digital photography, camera phones and socialmedia platforms has altered the relationship between photographers, the medium and the audience- as well as contributing to an ongoing blurring of the boundaries between news and entertainment and professional and amateur journalism. The Violence of the Image explores how new vernacular and artistic modes of photographic production articulate international friction.This innovative, timely book makes a major contribution to discussions about the power of the image in conflict.

Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia

Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia
Author: Jovan Byford
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020-06-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350015970

Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia examines the role which atrocity photographs played, and continue to play, in shaping the public memory of the Second World War in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Focusing on visual representations of one of the most controversial and politically divisive episodes of the war -- genocidal violence perpetrated against Serbs, Jews, and Roma by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) -- the book examines the origins, history and legacy of violent images. Notably, this book pays special attention to the politics of the atrocity photograph. It explores how images were strategically and selectively mobilized at different times, and by different memory communities and stakeholders, to do different things: justify retribution against political opponents in the immediate aftermath of the war, sustain the discourses of national unity on which socialist Yugoslavia was founded, or, in the post-communist era, prop-up different nationalist agendas, and 'frame' the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In exploring this hitherto neglected aspect of Yugoslav history and visual culture, Jovan Byford sheds important light on the intricate nexus of political, cultural and psychological factors which account for the enduring power of atrocity images to shape the collective memory of mass violence.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others
Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1466853573

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Representing the Experience of War and Atrocity

Representing the Experience of War and Atrocity
Author: Ronnie Lippens
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-04-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030139255

This book explores how the experience of war and related atrocities tend to be visually expressed and how such articulations and representations are circulated and consumed. Each chapter of this volume examines how an image can contribute to a richer understanding of the experience of war and atrocity and thus they contribute to the burgeoning field of the "criminology of war". Topics include the destruction of war in oppositional cultural forms - comparing the Nazi period with the ISIS destruction of Palmyra - and the visual aesthetics of violence deployed by Jihadi terrorism. The contributors are a multi-disciplinary team drawn mainly from criminology but also sociology, international relations, gender studies, English and the visual arts. This book will advance this field in new directions with refreshing, original work.

Photographing the Holocaust

Photographing the Holocaust
Author: Janina Struk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000323773

Atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust were photographed more intensely that any before. In the time since the images were taken they have been subjected to a perplexing variety of treatments: variously ignored, suppressed, distorted and above all exploited for propaganda purposes. With the use of many photographs, including some never before seen, this book traces the history of this process and asks whether the images can be true representations of the events they were depicting. Yet their provenance, Janina Struk argues, has been less important that the uses to which a wide range of political interests has put them, from the desperate attempts of the war-time underground to provide hard evidence of the death camps to the memorial museums of Europe, the US and Israel today.

Picturing Toronto

Picturing Toronto
Author: Sarah Bassnett
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2022-03-30
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 0228013801

In 1911, when Arthur Goss was hired as Toronto’s first official photographer, the city was at a critical juncture. Industry expansion and population growth produced pressing concerns about housing shortages, sanitation, and the health and welfare of citizens. Dispelling popular misconceptions, Picturing Toronto demonstrates that Goss and other photographers did not simply document the changing conditions of urban life – their photography contributed to the development of modern Toronto and shaped its inhabitants. Drawing on archival sources from the early twentieth century, Sarah Bassnett investigates how a range of groups, including the municipal government, social reformers, and the press, used photography to reconfigure the urban environment and constitute liberal subjects. Through a series of case studies, including the construction of the Bloor Viaduct, civic beautification plans, urban reform in “the Ward,” immigration and citizenship, and Goss’s portrait photography, Bassnett exposes how photographs were at the heart of debates over what the city should look like, how it should operate, and under what conditions it was appropriate for people to live. This lavishly illustrated book is the first study to treat images as vital elements that shaped Toronto’s social and political history. Interdisciplinary in its approach, Picturing Toronto displays the complex entanglements between photography and urban modernity.

The Ravine

The Ravine
Author: Wendy Lower
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 0544828690

A single photograph--an exceptionally rare "action shot" documenting the horrific murder of a Jewish family--drives a riveting forensic investigation by a gifted Holocaust scholar.