Painful Photographs: From the Ethics of Spectatorship to Visual Politics

This essay approaches the problems of picturing pain by focusing on cases in which photography is integral to the infliction of suffering or perpetuation of domination, taking American spectacle lynchings as the primary example. Though morally disturbing, such cases reveal the need to move from a narrow focus on the ethics of spectatorship to a broader analysis of the multiple ways and power-saturated contexts in which images are deployed. Yet this focus on photographic pragmatics cannot slight the formal properties of images but, rather, should sustain an understanding of the ineliminable importance of aesthetics to visual politics.