Abstract
This chapter opens with a reflection on the ability to produce a representation of “life” that is as direct as possible—an ability that runs through Caravaggio’s works—particularly focusing on the surfaces of bodies, on the skin. This question is then used as a key to understand some longstanding rhetorical devices underlying humanitarian photography. An analysis of a few famous shots and of some lesser-known and less widely circulated images offers the opportunity to draw a comparison with postcolonial studies and, in this way, to reflect on the relationship between systems of representation of the colonial past and those of the humanitarian present.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Bernard Berenson, Caravaggio: His Incongruity and His Fame (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 4–5.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1994), 118: starting from the “works of Delacroix and literally dozens of other French and British painters, the Oriental genre tableau carried representation into visual expression and a life of its own.” As a point of reference for transformations in the idea of “race” starting from the Middle Ages, see Francisco Bethencourt, Racism. From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013). For a classic study of European images of black people, see David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010–2017).
- 4.
For a long-term reflection on the relationship between art history and the theory of race, see Eric Michaud, Les invasions barbares. Une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 2015).
- 5.
See Maurizio Calvesi, La realtà del Caravaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 1990), 3–81. This hypothesis is also discussed in Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 117–130. On the relationship with Loyola, see Pierre Francastel, “Le réalisme de Caravage,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 80, (1938): 45–62. This question is re-examined from a theoretical perspective in Pierre-Antoine Fabre, “Le(s) rendez-vous manqué(s) du Caravage et de la compagnie de Jésus,” Ricerche sulla storia sociale e religiosa 43 (2014): 49–71.
- 6.
This is the theory supported mainly by Ferdinando Bologna, L’incredulità del Caravaggio e l’esperienza delle cose naturali (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006), 154–190. For a discussion about this position, see Lorenzo Pericolo, “Interpreting Caravaggio in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: Between Galileo and Heidegger, Bruno and Laplanche,” in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, eds. Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 301–309.
- 7.
Daniel Arasse, Le détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 78.
- 8.
“ritratta dal naturale con due pellegrini, uno co’ piedi fangosi, e l’altra con una cuffia sdrucita, e sudicia; e per queste leggeriezze in riguardo delle parti, che una gran pittura haver dee, da popolani ne fu fatto estremo schiamazzo.” Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti dal pontificato di Gregorio XIII fino a tutto quello d’Urbano VIII (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni Editore, 2008), 137.
- 9.
Pamela M. Jones, Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 101. On Caravaggio’s relations with his clients, see also Alessandro Zuccari, “Caravaggio, sus comitentes y el culto lauretano,” in Caravaggio, eds. Claudio Strinati and Rossella Vodret (Madrid: Electa, 1999), 63–72.
- 10.
Berenson, Caravaggio: His Incongruity and His Fame, 17.
- 11.
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1998), 29. On the relationship between the representation of death, resurrection, and conversion, see also Argan, Immagine e persuasione, 157.
- 12.
Genesis 1, 27.
- 13.
For the theoretical development of an “anthropology of likeness,” starting from the Letters of Paul, see Giovanni Careri, La torpeur des Ancêtres. Juifs et chrétiens dans la chapelle Sixtine (Paris: Editions de l’Ehess, 2013), 21–29.
- 14.
Letter to the Romans 8, 29. On the reconstruction of the glorious body through scholastic theology and the history of western art, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), especially 117–199.
- 15.
Longhi, Caravaggio, English edition, 41.
- 16.
Bologna, L’incredulità del Caravaggio e l’esperienza delle cose naturali, 199.
- 17.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 138.
- 18.
Ibid. 215.
- 19.
For a theoretical exploration of the logic of sensation and “becoming-animal” starting from the paintings of Francis Bacon, see Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
- 20.
“qui fait du touchant soudain touché l’expression radicale de l’appartenance du corps du garçon au rang de ‘chose’.” Careri, Caravage. La peinture en ses miroirs, 89.
- 21.
Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 95.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting & Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
- 24.
Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, 81.
- 25.
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. and with an introduction by Laurent Dubois (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 49.
- 26.
Ibid. On the image of Africa as a “sick continent” in colonial and missionary discourse of the early twentieth century, see also Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 55–58.
- 27.
Regarding the scientific and cultural expression of the racist discourse, see Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 2004), especially 29–44.
- 28.
In addition to Said , for more on the photographic construction of Orientalism, see Ali Behdad and Luke Gartland, eds., Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013).
- 29.
For an overview of the phenomenon, and for a exhaustive reference bibliography, see Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, “Exhibition. L’invention du sauvage,” in Exhibitions. L’invention du sauvage, eds. Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep (Paris: Actes Sud, 2012), 20–53. For a study that rethinks this question in relation to the construction of the colonizing countries’ identities, see Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography & Exhibition: Representation of the “Native” and the Making of European Identities (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999).
- 30.
Burton Benedict, “World’s Fairs and Anthropology,” Council for Museum Anthropology Newsletter 5, no. 2 (1981), 2–7. On the relationship between representation, public exhibition of bodies and the construction of the idea of race, see Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David, and Dominic Thomas, eds., The Invention of Race: Scientific and Popular Representations (London: Routledge, 2014). On the use of cinema in the context of colonial expositions, see Carmelo Marabello, Sulle tracce del vero. Cinema, antropologia, storie di foto (Milan: Bompiani, 2011), 65–95.
- 31.
On the relationship between colonialism, famines, and geological upheavals, with particular reference to the Indian context, see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2000).
- 32.
Christina Twomey, “Framing Atrocity. Photography and Humanitarianism,” in Humanitarian Photography, 52. Outside the humanitarian sector, with regard to the use of photographic reproductions as part of the public exhibition of “exotic” bodies for commercial purposes, see Melissa Banta, From Site to Sight. Anthropology, Photography and the Power of Imagery (Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, 1986).
- 33.
For more on the different purposes that these images served as well as a bibliographic overview on the colonial period in the Congo, see Sharon Sliwinksi, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2011), 57–81.
- 34.
Ariella Azoulay, The Civic Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 183.
- 35.
Ibid., 184. On the muscular tension and reserved expression of the colonized subjects as a possible form of resistence, see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 291.
- 36.
On the figure of the wound, with particular reference to slavery in North America, see Cassandra Jackson, Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (London: Routledge, 2013), especially 12–29. On the wound, from a perspective that combines aesthetics and political theory, see Felix Ensslin and Charlotte Klink, eds., Aesthetics of the Flesh, trans. Karl Hoffmann (Berlin: Sterneberg Press, 2014). For an investigation into the image of the wound, considered along with its political-theological implications, see Angela Mengoni, Ferite. Il corpo e la carne nell’arte della tarda modernità (Siena: S&B, 2012), especially 52–64 and 95–103.
- 37.
Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: The British Library, 2008), 99.
- 38.
See Marco Bischof, Tania Samara Kuhn, Werner Bischof, Kirsten Lubben, and Fred Ritchin, Werner Bischof: Backstory (New York, Aperture Foundation, 2016).
- 39.
Sebastião Salgado, Sahel: The End of the Road (Berkeley; Los Angeles; and London: University of California Press, 2004). For a look at how Salgado’s photography has influenced the development of the rhetorics of humanitarian communication, see Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 171–177.
- 40.
Anthony Suau, “Region in Rebellion Eritrea,” National Geographic (September 1985): 384–404. Anthony Suau and Florence Aubenas, On a deux yeux de trop. Avec les réfugiés rwandais, Goma, Zaïrei (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995).
- 41.
For the War of Biafra as a time when the humanitarian sector underwent a shock and, in particular, for the foundation of Doctors Without Borders as an emblematic event of this historic transition, see Eleanor Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism (1954–1988) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 19–49. For a discussion on the iconography of famine that goes beyond the examples cited here, see David Campbell, “The Iconography of Famine,” in Picturing Atrocity. Photography in Crisis, eds. Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 79–91.
- 42.
On the transformations of a communicative nature that took place in this phase, see Lasse Heerten, “‘A’ as in Auschwitz, ‘B’ as in Biafra: The Nigerian Civil War, Visual Narratives of Genocide, and the Fragmented Universalization of the Holocaust,” in Humanitarian Photography, 249–274.
- 43.
See, for example, John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man (New York: Verso, 2010) and Edward W. Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). On the relationship of image and text in John Mohr and Edward Said’s “photographic essay,” as well as for a theoretical and critical conceptualization of this form of “composite art,” see William J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 312–322. See also Kelly Klingesmith, In Appropriate Distance: The Ethic of the Photographic Essay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016).
- 44.
David Hevey, The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 29.
- 45.
Leora Kahn, ed., Darfur: Twenty Years of War and Genocide in Sudan (New York: Power House Books, 2007), 16.
- 46.
For a look at photographic experiments on human body, including reportage and artistic photography, see Elio Grazioli, Corpo e figura umana nella fotografia (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2000).
- 47.
For a critical discussion on how the politics of Surrealism intersect with the politics of disability art, see Amanda Cachia, “Disabiling Surrealism. Reconstituting Surrealist Tropes in Contemporary Art,” in Disability and Art History, eds. Ann Millett-Gallant and Elizabeth Howie (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 132–154.
- 48.
For a historical reconstruction of how the political culture of international healthcare developed post World War II, and, specifically, on the establishment of the World Health Organization, see Sunil S. Amrith, Decolonizing International Health. India and Southeast Asia, 1930–1965 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 72–98.
- 49.
Hugo Slim, “Relief Agencies and Moral Standing in War: Principles of Humanity, Neutrality, Impartiality and Solidarity,” Development in Practice 7 (November 1997): 342–352. The question of the specific moral feelings related to childhood had already been explored in 1795 by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 225–226. On the moral implications of the figure of the child, starting from nineteenth-century criminal photography, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 13–14. For a reflection on the rhetorics and politics related to the condition of childhood on the contemporary global scene, see Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent, eds., Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (Berkeley: California University Press, 1999).
- 50.
The term “aspectualization” is used in semiotics to analyze the modalities that allow for the representation of temporalization as processes. See Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist, Daniel Patte, James Lee, Aedward McMahon II, Gary Phillips, and Michael Rengstorf (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 18–19. On the use of “aspectualization” as a concept for analyzing images, see Omar Calabrese, La macchina della pittura. Pratiche teoriche della rappresentazione figurativa fra Rinascimento e Barocco (Florence: La Casa Usher, 2012), 52–59. On the forms of visual aspectualization as they pertain to humanitarian aid actions, see Daniele Salerno, “La foto della sofferenza: istanza estetica, mediatica e umanitaria,” E/C, no. 7–8 (2011): 166–170.
- 51.
Davide Rodogno and Thomas David, “All the World Loves a Picture. The World Health Organization’s Visual Politics, 1948–1973,” in Humanitarian Photography, 231.
- 52.
On the origins of the visual rhetoric of “before and after the treatment,” starting from the nineteenth-century experiments by the philanthropist Thomas John Barnardo, see John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 83–87.
- 53.
Although mainly referring to aid initiatives in Asia, for a look at international campaigns in the 1950s “founded on the assumption that poverty was amongst the ‘natural’ conditions that the new technologies of the age could circumvent,” see once again Amrit, Decolonizing International Health, 127.
- 54.
Kate Manzo, “Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO, Identity and the Iconography of Childhood,” in Antipode 40, no. 4 (2008): 650.
- 55.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 109.
- 56.
On the idea of the “anatomical theater” as well as on the production of “certain theatrical effects to create the illusion of life,” in Dutch painting between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Julie V. Hansen, “Resurrecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch,” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 4 (December 1996): 663.
- 57.
For an examination of the idea of aestheticization, see Mark Reinhardt, “Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, eds. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 20–25.
- 58.
Sebastião Salgado and Isabelle Francq, De ma terre à la terre (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 2015), 41–42.
- 59.
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 78. For an examination of this passage from Sontag’s text, see also Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 227–228.
- 60.
On the iconography of medical intervention, see Carol Squiers, The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness, and Healing (Berkeley; Los Angeles; and London: University of California Press, 2005), and Alessandro Beretta Anguissola and Diego Mormorio, Il medico e il reportage: nelle fotografie della Magnum (Roma: Peliti Associati, 1992).
- 61.
For a reflection on the relationship between medical ethics and visual ethics in humanitarian context, see Philippe Calain, “Ethics and Images of Suffering Teddies in Humanitarian Medicine,” Social Science & Medicine 98 (2013): 278–285.
- 62.
Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 37.
- 63.
Jacques Derrida, On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 236.
- 64.
- 65.
Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 164. For an examination of Caravaggio’s work that centers around transformations in the “painting of history,” see Lorenzo Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2011).
- 66.
Marin, To Destroy Painting, 166. As a classic reference on the theory of photography, see Philippe Dubois, L’acte photographique at autres essais (Paris and Bruxelles: Nathan, 1983).
- 67.
Sebastião Salgado, The End of Polio: A Global Effort to End a Disease (New York: Bulfinch, 2003).
- 68.
John Berger, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 43.
- 69.
Ibid.
- 70.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 250. The relationship between the construction of the “negro” and the idea of wild nature and animality is central to Frantz Fanon’s earlier work, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986).
- 71.
On the semantics of “immunization,” see Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), especially 153–159. On the relationship between the device of the immunitas and the idea of communitas, see also Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
- 72.
See the campaign web page at http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news-stories/slideshow/faces-yida-msf-vaccination-campaign-south-sudan.
- 73.
See the campaign site “La próxima vacuna ponla tú” (The next vaccine you can give yourself) https://ponunavacuna.msf.es.
- 74.
In this regard, see the analysis of injection images published in the WHO Newsletter in 1955, provided in Rodogno and David, “All the World Loves a Picture,” 240–243.
- 75.
For a large repertoire of images of this type, please see the site of the UNICEF and World Health Organization Joint Monitoring Program, which monitors accessibility to water and its uses: https://washdata.org.
- 76.
Available at the web page http://expo.caritasambrosiana.it/expoday.html.
- 77.
For more regarding the philosophical implications of this interpretation, see Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 141–142.
- 78.
On forms of control over bodies and the relationship between humanity and animality during colonial and postcolonial times in relation to the thought of Fanon , see Deepika Bahri, Postcolonial Biology: Psyche and Flesh after Empire (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2017), especially 21–36.
- 79.
On the relationship between “figurative” and “figural,” with the latter understood as a space of experimentation with meaning, see the classic work by Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, with an introduction by John Mowitt (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011). On the disruptive role of figural displacement while everything is ready “for good form, for clear and precise thinking to be restored,” see Ibid., 129–132.
- 80.
Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 49.
- 81.
Ibid., 50.
- 82.
Achille Mbembe, Politiques de l’inimitié (Paris: La Découverte, 2016), 149, emphasis added.
- 83.
See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 873–876.
- 84.
Reported by the seventeenth-century banker and intellectual Vincenzo Giustiniani in his Discorsi sulle arti e sui mestieri, ed. Anna Banti (Florence: Sansoni, 1981), 42: “che tanta manifattura gli era a fare un quadro buono di fiori, come di figure.”
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zucconi, F. (2018). Un-Still Life. In: Displacing Caravaggio. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93377-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93378-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)