Perverse Witness: The Role of Photography and Shock Compulsion in Contemporary Trauma Discourse

Abstract

In this work, I interrogate society’s overwhelming entrenchment in what Hal Foster terms ‘trauma discourse’, in which he claims that trauma becomes the arbiter of the real. In this dynamic, the camera arts (i.e. documentary photography and video) occupy an elevated status in their abilities to ‘capture’ the real. Drawing on Judith Butler’s text Frames of War and Susan Sontag’s On Photography, I outline two central planks of my argument. First, I address how photography visually augments shared notions of reality and meaning through photography’s indexical relationship to the real. Second, I address the temporal registers of photography as ‘punctum’ and an ongoing past. Photography, in its temporal and contextual properties, palpably molds dominant discursive mentalities. A noted concern of photographic theory is the effect of images of atrocities becoming banal. If the real is what is traumatic, and the veracity of the real is found in photographic representation, then there is a ratcheting up of the demand for shock, for trauma, as confirmation of the real. This creates a perverse desire to witness the world’s atrocities in order to fetishize the proliferation of ever more horrific images, which it justifies through a disavowal of censorship. The central claim of this article is that society’s current relationship to the explosive production and dissemination of shocking photographic images is indicative of the dialectical movement of trauma-discourse.

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

—Walter Benjamin