Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma - Hardcover

Baer, Ulrich

3.87

30 ratings by Goodreads

9780262025157: Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262025159 ISBN 13: 9780262025157

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2002

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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.

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About the Author:

Ulrich Baer is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University.

Review:

"Whether he's discussing the relationship between AIDS-activist video and Charles Ludlam's aesthetic of the ridiculous, applying Walter Benjamin's concept of messianic time to the experience of living with AIDS, or exploring the ethical position of film as witness, Gregg Bordowitz is at once passionately committed to socially engaged, theoretically informed art and searchingly honest about its difficulties. Representing a unique voice that refuses to separate the personal and the political, this is an indispensable collection for anyone interested in contemporary debates about cultural politics."--Rosalyn Deutsche, Barnard College, author of *Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics*Please note: "Ludlam" was misspelled in previous version.

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

"Genuinely interesting, original, and well-written. The book's arguments will be especially relevant to scholars of the still-developing field of photo-history and criticism."--Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History, City University of New York Graduate Center

"This book introduces photography into the rapidly expanding arena of interdisciplinary debates about collective trauma, memory, and representation. Arguing that photography and traumatic events have a common structure, Baer pleads with great sensitivity for an ethical way of seeing--witnessing--that both respects and responds to the unknowable reality of trauma. A welcome contribution to an urgent discussion."--Rosalyn Deutsche, Barnard College, author of *Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics*

"Georges Didi-Huberman's *Invention of Hysteria* is an almost legendary text, so influential has it been on cultural criticism, and this even before its very welcome translation into English. Written in a style that is at once literary and philosophical, Didi-Huberman brilliantly demonstrates how a study of hysteria in the nineteenth century continues to have profound relevance for anyone interested in questions of culture and its embodiment -- that is, questions concerning the workings of power. The author's erudite combination of visual and textual research and provocative analysis has produced a book that will be equally crucial to scholars of medicine, feminism, psychoanalysis, literature, photography, art history, the body, or postmodern theory, to name only a few of the fields it touches on. But it's also simply a great read, an artful rendition of history that reminds us of the extent to which the 'weird science' of the nineteenth century still haunts our thinking to this day."--Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History, City University of New York Graduate CenterPlease note: Endorser gives permission to excerpt from quote.

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