Nothing To Say: The War On Teror And The Mad Photography Of Roland Barthes

摘要

The current "war on terror" highlights, yet again, the stakes of the debate surrounding photography's role in shaping history, our memories of events, and our responses to events and images of events.1 The widely circulated photographs of the World Trade Center's fall and of the people who died in it; the easily transmitted and more easily suppressed digital photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. and British soldiers; the forbidden photographs of caskets returning home, and of Iraqi and American dead: these images and the controversies associated with them call upon us to revisit the question of photography's relation to war, history, politics, and death. But after more than one hundred and fifty years of contemplating photographs of war, what is left to say? What have we learned and what must be unlearned about the relationship among photography, language, and violence, of how words and photographs (or the lack of them) could have functioned, did function, and continue to function in times of war? How does the newspaper photograph differ from online versions of the same image and its surrounding articles, and how do these differences impact our reception of news photographs?