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Susie Linfield, former director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU, is author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence.
While “left” in the West is now a virtual synonym for anti-Zionism, the same is far from true in Israel.
For many critics, photography has become a duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.
Heinrich Jöst’s photographs of the Holocaust dwell in what Jean Améry called “the waiting room of death.”
The photographer wanted to show what freedom, and the people who made it, looked like.
In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the weapon of choice was not the gun but the spectacle of public shaming.
Memory, like everything else in the world, can be clumsily used, or unintelligently used, or used for false purposes or in bad faith.
Do we approach the photograph as spectators, or as citizens of the world?
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