Year: 2013
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This paper considers the tension between photography and responsibility despite the avalanche of objections regarding documentary's false promise to awaken social conscience.By examining the encounter with images of suffering through a psychoanalytic register, the paper tries to articulate what Barthes describes as the 'painful labour' of responding to the photographic other -an encounter that illuminates the limit of the spectator's ability to respond.Photographs provide an occasion to register this limit, which, I argue, opens up the spectator's traditional notions of responsibility from a set of moral duties towards a questioning of the ethical relation.
Source: Routledge eBooks
Author: Timothy Brook
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1585350442