Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma - Hardcover

Baer, Ulrich

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262025159 ISBN 13: 9780262025157

Verlag: MIT Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Baer Ulrich

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

"Baer seeks to usurp our common understanding of the photograph with a richly informed and persuasive discourse." Robert Pepperell Leonardo

Reseña del editor:

In this remarkable contribution to photographic criticism and psychoanalytic literature, Ulrich Baer traces the hitherto overlooked connection between the experience of trauma and the photographic image. Instead of treating trauma as a photographic "theme," Baer examines the striking parallel between those moments arrested mechanically by photography and those arrested experientially by the traumatized psyche -- moments that bypass normal cognition and memory. Taking as points of departure Charcot's images of hysteria and Freud's suggestion that the unconscious is structured like a camera, Baer shows how the invention of photography and the emergence of the modern category of "trauma" intersect. Drawing on recent work in the field of trauma studies, he shows how experiences that are inherently split between their occurrence and their remembrance might register in and as photographic images.In light of contemporary discussions of recovered memories and the limits of representing such catastrophes as the Holocaust, Baer examines photographs of artistic, medical, and historical subjects from the perspective of witnessing rather than merely viewing. He shows how historicist approaches to photography paradoxically overlook precisely those cataclysmic experiences that define our age. The photograph's apparent immunity to time is seen as a call for a future response--a response that is prompted by the ghostly afterlife of every photograph's subject. In a moving discussion of a rare collection of color slides taken by a Nazi official in the Lodz ghetto, Baer makes us aware that it is the viewer's responsibility to account for the spectral evidence embedded in every image.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: MIT Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0262025159
• ISBN 13: 9780262025157
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 218