This thesis is a critical assessment of the role of photography in representing suffering and death. Drawing on the images of torture from the Abu Ghraib prison, I argue that the ways in which things become visible structure our affective and ethical dispositions, with crucial implications for our ability to attend to the suffering of others. In the first chapter, I examine the political importance of photography in its capacity to differentially represent vulnerable lives. In the second chapter, I illustrate the ways in which the prison photographs made visible the violent exploitation of Iraqi civilians, contrary to the official narrative of liberation offered by the Bush Administration. Finally, in the third chapter, following Judith Butler, I implicate the viewers of images of suffering in order to illustrate their roles in perpetuating norms of visibility, as an opening to the consideration of lives which remain unseen. I conclude that photographs open an important reflective space for considering the differential distribution of vulnerability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/1696 |
| Date | 31 August 2009 |
| Creators | Taschereau Mamers, Danielle |
| Contributors | Kroker, Arthur |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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