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(Practitioner Research)

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Surreal Photography of Christopher Mckenney that will Haunt you in your Sleep

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Christopher McKenney is a conceptual photographer from Pennsylvania specializing in horror surrealist photography. Get inspired with his work here!

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Surreal Photography of Christopher McKenney that Will Haunt You in Your Sleep

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(Website Research)

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Dedicated to surrealism art, pop sureal, lowbrow, collage, and strange figurative contemporary art.

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Kathleen Rogers - the Dark Matter of the Genome

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Kathleen Rogers - the Dark Matter of the Genome

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https://research.uca.ac.uk/5531/2/Writing%20in%20the%20Body%20-%20the%20Dark%20Matter%20of%20the%20Genome%20%2318.ART%20%282019%29.pdf

(Academic Research)

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Billy Glew - Screen Dreams: A Practice-Based Investigation of Filmic Dream Sequences, Using the Dream Theories of Freud, Jung, Revonsuo and Hobson

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Billy Glew - Screen Dreams: A Practice-Based Investigation of Filmic Dream Sequences, Using the Dream Theories of Freud, Jung, Revonsuo and Hobson

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https://www.proquest.com/docview/2460785848?accountid=14178&pq-origsite=summon

GLEW, B., 2020. Screen Dreams: A Practice-Based Investigation of Filmic Dream Sequences, Using the Dream Theories of Freud, Jung, Revonsuo and Hobson, Lancaster University (United Kingdom).

(Research on Previous PhD Papers)

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Claire Raymond - The Photographic Uncanny : Photography, Homelessness, and Homesickness (Book Research)

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Claire Raymond - The Photographic Uncanny : Photography, Homelessness, and Homesickness (Book Research)

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https://www.proquest.com/docview/2319558763/bookReader?accountid=14178

Raymond, Claire. The Photographic Uncanny : Photography, Homelessness, and Homesickness, Springer International Publishing AG, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://www.proquest.com/legacydocview/EBC/5983982?accountid=14178.

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Jessica Catherine Lieberman - TRAUMATIC IMAGES (Research Article)

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Jessica Catherine Lieberman - TRAUMATIC IMAGES (Research Article)

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https://www-tandfonline-com.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/17540760701788283

Jessica Catherine Lieberman (2008) TRAUMATIC IMAGES, photographies, 1:1, 87-102, DOI: 10.1080/17540760701788283

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Donna MF Brett - The Uncanny Return: Documenting Place in Post-war German Photography (Research Article)

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Donna MF Brett - The Uncanny Return: Documenting Place in Post-war German Photography (Research Article)

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https://www-tandfonline-com.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/17540760903561074

Donna MF Brett (2010) The Uncanny Return: Documenting Place in Post-war German Photography, photographies, 3:1, 7-22, DOI: 10.1080/17540760903561074

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Clark P. Heard - Home at a Forensic Mental Health Unit: A photographic essay (Photographic Essay)

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Clark P. Heard - Home at a Forensic Mental Health Unit: A photographic essay (Photographic Essay)

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https://www-tandfonline-com.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/17540763.2011.593965

Clark P. Heard, Allan Tetzlaff, Dan O'Brien, Rick Borecki, Client ‘A’ (anonymized), Client ‘B’ (anonymized) & Client ‘C’ (anonymized) (2011) Home at a Forensic Mental Health Unit: A photographic essay, photographies, 4:2, 229-260, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2011.593965

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Harriet Riches - Projecting Touch: Francesca Woodman's Late “Blueprints” (Research Article)

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Harriet Riches - Projecting Touch: Francesca Woodman's Late “Blueprints” (Research Article)

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Harriet Riches (2012) Projecting Touch: Francesca Woodman's Late “Blueprints”, photographies, 5:2, 135-157, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2012.701598

https://www-tandfonline-com.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/17540763.2012.701598

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Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández - ALBERTO BARAYA’S DECOLONIAL AND POSTTRAUMATIC PHOTOGRAPHY: DISPLACED DIFFERENCE AND CULTURAL TRAUMA (Research Article)

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Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández - ALBERTO BARAYA’S DECOLONIAL AND POSTTRAUMATIC PHOTOGRAPHY: DISPLACED DIFFERENCE AND CULTURAL TRAUMA (Research Article)

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https://www-tandfonline-com.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/17540763.2020.1774920

Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández (2020) ALBERTO BARAYA’S DECOLONIAL AND POSTTRAUMATIC PHOTOGRAPHY: DISPLACED DIFFERENCE AND CULTURAL TRAUMA, photographies, 13:3, 341-364, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2020.1774920

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Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani - Light from darkness, truth always rises: archiving memory and war trauma (Research Article)

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Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani - Light from darkness, truth always rises: archiving memory and war trauma (Research Article)

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Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani (2021) Light from darkness, truth always rises: archiving memory and war trauma, photographies, 14:1, 29-41, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2020.1847174

https://www-tandfonline-com.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/doi/citedby/10.1080/17540763.2020.1847174?scroll=top&needAccess=true

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Lisa Lackney - Ero-Guro-Nansensu: Modernity and Its Discontents in Taishō and Early ShōWa Japan (Mental Health)

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Lisa Lackney - Ero-Guro-Nansensu: Modernity and Its Discontents in Taishō and Early ShōWa Japan (Mental Health)

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Harvard Reference: LACKNEY, L., 2020. Ero-Guro-Nansensu: Modernity and Its Discontents in Taishō and Early ShōWa Japan, Vanderbilt University.

(Research on Previous PhD papers)

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Romi Mikulinsky (PhD) - Photography and trauma in photo-fiction: Literary montage in the writings of Jonathan Safran Foer, Aleksandar Hemon and WG Sebald

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Romi Mikulinsky (PhD) - Photography and trauma in photo-fiction: Literary montage in the writings of Jonathan Safran Foer, Aleksandar Hemon and WG Sebald

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(Research on Previous PhD papers)

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Photography and trauma in photo-fiction: Literary montage in the writings of Jonathan Safran Foer, Aleksandar Hemon and WG Sebald

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Photography and trauma in photo-fiction: Literary montage in the writings of Jonathan Safran Foer, Aleksandar Hemon and WG Sebald

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Amber Leigh Francine Shields (PhD) In-Between Worlds: Exploring Trauma Through Fantasy Amber Leigh Francine Shields

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Amber Leigh Francine Shields (PhD) In-Between Worlds: Exploring Trauma Through Fantasy Amber Leigh Francine Shields

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(Research on Previous PhD papers)

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Matthew Ryan Smith - Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma and the Viewer in Contemporary Autobiographical Art

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Matthew Ryan Smith - Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma and the Viewer in Contemporary Autobiographical Art

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(Research on Previous PhD Papers)

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Sabina Gill (PhD) - Traces of Trauma in Post-War Polish Photography

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Sabina Gill (PhD) - Traces of Trauma in Post-War Polish Photography

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(Research on Previous PhD papers)

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Dalibor Veselý - Surrealism and the Latent World of Creativity (Dreams)

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Dalibor Veselý - Surrealism and the Latent World of Creativity (Dreams)

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Harvard Reference: Veselý, D. (2011) ‘Surrealism and the Latent World of Creativity’, Umeni / Art, 59(3/4), pp. 267–273. Available at: https://search-ebscohost-com.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=65463658&site=ehost-live (Accessed: 7 October 2021).

(Academic Journal)

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Surrealism and the Latent World of Creativity

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Brainstorm Key Word - The case/need/value for Surrealist Symbolic Photography to explore contemporary experiences mental health / PTSD - increased incidents due to multiple factors of early 21st today.

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Brainstorm Key Word - The case/need/value for Surrealist Symbolic Photography to explore contemporary experiences mental health / PTSD - increased incidents due to multiple factors of early 21st today.

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• Freud -  Uncanny
• Mental Health Surrealism
• PTSD
• Unconscious Mind
• Trauma.
• Repression
• External representation
• Oedipal Complex
• Dreams

Complex layered photography

Frameworks - Freud, Lacan, Jung, June Campbell,

How to show these states of being - simulacrum (systems & objects)  mechanical automation
(objects come to represent a state of being/feeling - they transfigure - anthropology)  Fragmented

WHAT I HAVE RESEARCHED - who has looked at this - haven't found work-related specifically to PTSD / Surreal / Uncanny that is contemporary.

An explosion of new ways of representing and thinking in early 20th century arguing that there parallel case of a seismic cultural shift in early 21st century that is comparative...post-parallel surrealism school?

FIRST 30 YEARS 20th and 21st Century - parallel layers of trauma / PTSD

Descriptions of
Expressionism
Surrealism
Post-Modern / Post Memory photography
Symbolic Art (art history, objects religious culture)

Undermining the reading - the method of photography and the representing via canvas, prints or space / video.

How this Representing - Traces    Liminal  Unsettled Unresolved Unworldly sense when experiencing MH

INTRIGUE / Ambiguity / Curio / Thought provoking /playing with perception - high quality - high level of craft

Autobiographical self and others

SURREALISM - revisit surrealism and see how it has relevance, presence work that is meaningful for looking at today's issues around PTSD and mental.  Review of work in relation to trauma experience of early 20th century important tool / German expressionism.  It has a place today to explore these very difficult concepts to represent visually. avoiding the documentary style. speaks to a wider audience.

Ethics - don't need to approach people can do a desktop review of research and studies to help inform the work.  See also (medical, psychological studies - dreams pandemic, war, social conflict etc of early 21st century).

How my work is to be exhibited: Like the Geography of the Brain where different brains waves (nerve pathways) take you to a different area of the exhibit showing you something different depending on what is being discussed about PTSD or Mental Health.

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https://paperpile.com/shared/kfOkM3

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Herschdorfer N "Afterwards : contemporary photography confronting the past" Thames & Hudson, 2011 * "Photography and migration" Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018 * Iversen M "Photography, trace, and trauma" The University of Chicago Press, 2017 * Baer U "Spectral evidence : the photography of trauma" MIT, 2002 * Frosh

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Margaret Iversen - Photography, Trace, and Trauma

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Margaret Iversen - Photography, Trace, and Trauma

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(Book Research)

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Photography is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma: the automatic nature of the process, wide-open camera lens, and light-sensitive film record chance details unnoticed by the photographer-similar to what happens when a traumatic event bypasses consciousness and lodges deeply in the unconscious mind.

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(Practitioner Research)

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Photographer Nicolas Bruno has been haunted by episodes of sleep paralysis since he was 15-years-old. To understand his trauma, imagine waking up but being unable to move. While your mind is caught between sleeping and waking, you are confronted with terrifying visions such as an intruder in the room but are unable to react or even call out in fear.

Finding himself in a personal rut after having to deal with such horrible nightmares regularly, Bruno began to write down his experiences and drew inspiration for his conceptual photography from the recurring visions of silhouetted and masked figures. Photography became his way of pushing through the situation by expressing his creative conscience.

The reenactments of his dreams were a bittersweet homage and although these photographs were derived from terrible nightmares, they convey much more than just fear. In the dark surreal world of gas masks, bowler hats, and lanterns inspired by Caspar David Friedrich and Caravggio, Bruno is able to express himself and make something stunning and beautiful from an otherwise awful situation.

Now 19, Bruno is studying photography at SUNY Purchase in New York while he continues to create his incredible and surreal images of a dark dreamworld.

Nicolas Bruno's website
via [ ViralNova]

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Photographer's Sleep Paralysis Inspires Dark and Surreal Images

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Photographer Nicolas Bruno has been haunted by episodes of sleep paralysis since he was 15-years-old. To understand his trauma, imagine waking up but being unable to move. While your mind is caught between sleeping and waking, you are confronted with terrifying visions such as an intruder in the room but are unable to react or even call out in fear.

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(Practitioner Research)

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Photographer, educator, speaker, and writer, exploring the world of art with you.

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(Practitioner Research)

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Details

Written by Marina Valcárcel

Published: 28 December 2015

If, in a nod to surrealism, Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958) metamorphosed into something from one of his own photographs, it would most likely be a little turtle whose shell harboured a poetic soul. Since his first photographs in the 80's, of superimposed veins branching out over human forearms, his camera has never stopped capturing images of hum-drum, everyday objects as we've never seen them before coins, books, clocks, scales, tin-openers stripped of any and all superfluous connotations, objects whose reality he skews, sets free and offers to our imagination as simple signs, loosed from the chains of meaning. Madoz wants his images to slow us down and halt us in our tracks. He wants them so deeply imbedded in our minds and for so long that they become our very own. He wishes them "to always have something different to say to the person who wakes up with them on their wall every morning.

If, in a nod to surrealism, Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958) metamorphosed into something from one of his own photographs, it would most likely be a little turtle whose shell harboured a poetic soul.

Since his first photographs in the 80's, of superimposed veins branching out over human forearms, his camera has never stopped capturing images of hum-drum, everyday objects as we've never seen them before coins, books, clocks, scales, tin-openers stripped of any and all superfluous connotations, objects whose reality he skews, sets free and offers to our imagination as simple signs, loosed from the chains of meaning.

And it was from this poetic wordplay, this expressivity, this expansion of meaning that his exhibition Madoz wants his images to slow us down and halt us in our tracks. He wants them so deeply imbedded in our minds and for so long that they become our very own. He wishes them "to always have something different to say to the person who wakes up with them on their wall every morning. To never wear out". Chema Madoz 2008-2014: The Rules of the Game came into being. But also as a homage to the Renoir film of the same name.

While we wait for Madoz, who is patiently dealing with the media days before its inauguration at Sala Alcalá 31 in Madrid, we have a chat with the event's organizer Borja Casani who tells us: "Chema's photos are, ultimately, the photographic portrait of an idea".

If objects had souls, Madoz would be the one to portray them. He is a seeker of simplicity. He lays all things bare, his aim being to achieve an image that is "austere, almost monastic in its frugality". That's his way of understanding beauty, interpreting it and then offering it to the spectator's imagination, divested of its usual meaning: books built up as the voussoirs and keystones of an arch, water droplets threaded onto a necklace of aqua pearls, a glass watch, an astral card, ... Casani goes on to say: "With Madoz, what you get is a hieroglyph that is already deciphered. He reveals to us a hypothesis and what then happens is that people feel comforted by the fact that they understand it. He presents us with objects we all feel familiar with. They're everyday items to an African, a European or a Latin American. And from this point of view, it's really satisfying to see Chema's success in so many countries. We've exhibited in, for instance, Egypt and people there understood. It's so gratifying, seeing day-to-day objects on display and communicating something to us."

Madoz arrives and what strikes us is his gaze. Shy but scrutinizing at the same time, taking everything in, from top to bottom, fixing on and dissecting whatever grabs the attention of his mind's eye at that moment, lodging itself there, nagging at him until finally it makes its way into one of one of his sketch books in the form of a drawing. And from those pages into an almost surgical transformation on an operating table come carpentry bench where a woodwork square and tools become the sails of a toy boat or the grille bars of an iron door contort themselves into musical notes.

Madoz speaks slowly. He likes a slow rhythm. And silence. These are requisite traits in someone who observes the minute details differently, just as children absorbed in contemplation of an anthill invent a make-believe world around it. "I was an only child and I got used to playing all by myself very early on. I do like people but I need my solitude, too."

Following earlier exhibitions (Reina Sofia Museum, 1999; Telefonica Foundation, 2006) and Spain's National Photography Prize (2000), the Sala Alcalá 31 exhibit is a compilation of Madoz's work over the previous 6 years, all invariably in black and white, analogue, and on baryta-coated paper, hung side by side under the dome of a basilica-like building that once housed a bank. Curiously, it was Madoz's first ever and much-despised job in a bank that caused the existential crisis that eventually freed him to devote himself full-time to photography.

The harmony of blacks, whites and greys along with the sheer Madrid sunlight flooding the gallery combine to create the very sensation of calm and silence that the artist intended. He would like his audience's attitude to be one of measured serenity, like the reading of a haiku. "This space is wonderful, if a little complicated by so many columns. What Borja and I tried to create here is a simple, elemental setting that "breathes", which I think, happily, we achieved with just the three divisions that permit a certain repose and tranquillity."

Whilst talking to us, Madoz is drawn to specific photographs and we follow him, observing his choices. There have been a few tangents during his evolution as an artist, albeit subtle ones because the crux of his language has always remained intact: everything hinges on and revolves around the object itself, and always will. However, in this exhibition, he adds or extends some personal obsessions, namely; his passion for calligraphy and the written word; the as yet timid appearance of some pencil drawings; and animal figures. Incidentally, over the course of his trajectory, he has dropped the human portraits from his field of interest due to the fact that, by stripping away their entire identity, their very selves, all he reduced them to in the end was a kind of pretext.

Now, though, he replaces them with mannequins: St Sebastian on a pillar, pierced by arrows that are better known to us as acupuncture needles or the two hollow, wax, pianist-like hands of a woman, their fingers twisting a thread of letters into a geometric puzzle; a reminder of that childhood pastime whereby two friends face to face, and their twenty fingers, manipulate one long piece of taut string into myriad patterns.

And then he confesses to another partiality: "There's one photo in the exhibition, just an empty glass tumbler on a white background and inside it is written The End. I think it's a lovely photo. The beauty of it and the glow of the glass really move me. And it's that simplicity that leads, ultimately, to something beautiful. They're very simple scenarios montages, lit from side on, the object effectively laid bare for us and within our reach. Nevertheless, it isn't the beauty of a flower that's being appropriated, or what is generally considered to be beautiful, or whatever represents the idea of beauty."

From painting, we move on to literature: "It's about the ability of verbal language to give us visual images. Gómez de la Serna would be, for instance, an obvious example but also Jorge Luis Borges, Bioy Casares, Boris Vian and Tanizaki. All of them, consummate writers with very personal imaginary worlds."

Madoz's studio is a suite of rooms not unlike a treasure trove or Borges' The Aleph: "a point in space and time that contains all spaces and all time", his micro cosmos of enough items and ideas to last him an entire lifetime. Out of them all, there's one to which he returns again and again and always will, one that plays on his mind in a never-ending loop: "Books. So simple, so quintessential, that rectangle offering so many possibilities, such varied interpretations and points of view, such depths of semantic richness. That's why you'll find them so consistently and repeatedly throughout my life's work. But I always get the sinking feeling that, maybe, one day, I'll run out of ways to use them, not because there are no other uses but because of my own lack of ability. I have my limits but the possibilities of the objects themselves are endless." We stop now to face a picture of a map in which there appears to be the silhouette of a fish. It's one of his photos that have been heavily influenced by Japanese prints: "It's two negatives, one on top of the other; one is the map lit from above and the other is the fish sketch; and then I projected them both together." They start to resemble animals or animal shadows. Beside this is a picture of the grains and rings of a tree trunk marked out with letters, which confirms the importance of not only the written word but the whole realm of literature to Madoz. He never titles his work: "I have too much respect for writing. I well know a title can give a suggestive dimension to the reading of a piece. I, however, prefer not to give any clues at all and thereby give free rein to the spectator's interpretative possibilities."

The art of capturing an object's essence begins, for Madoz, with the search for it. He is a regular at Madrid's open-air flea markets where he often finds himself as if overcome by a feeling of stalking the prey that's been snooping around his subconscious for some time previously. So what causes these "light bulb moments"? "It's the mystery. I sometimes come across objects that are, essentially, weird. It's more like them making me feel unsettled and confused. Something tells me to acquire them and make something of them and, generally-speaking, that's what I end up doing."

Madoz lives surrounded by the subjects he photographs, as does Kemal, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's novel "The Museum Of Innocence", who steals everyday household items from the woman he is stubbornly in love with only to make a museum out of them. Madoz, however, is not keen on following in the wake of the trend set in the 1920's and 30's by the likes of André Breton and, even more so, Marcel Duchamp during his 'readymade' period - a trend whereby the object gets top billing in the art world and has exhibitions to show for it. "I've always felt that photography places these objects in a much more attractive and interesting setting. Somewhat like a dream state. Something in your mind or on your mind that's difficult to put your finger on, intangible. I really like that distance."

He is well used to living with the objects he's photographed. They are part and parcel of his predilection: "I'm surrounded by them in my studio. I store them there, often exactly as they were when photographed and sometimes as re-usable material. It's quite amazing the significance and implications that objects have and how we endow them with powers of evocation. We associate them with life events, moments in time, people and ideas. For me, this was a huge discovery when I first started working with them. I remember once finding a badge I used to wear at school and I was amazed at how it transported me right back to my classmates, even my old desk ..."

And so we finish our guided tour with the photograph that Madoz considers his most representative. It's one of a lightplane seemingly made out of a child's self-assembly cut-outs, black against a white background. Childhood here hinted at as a magical time of creation. On its propellers, Madoz has placed a compass: "At times, I identify with it. It corresponds to my mood; my being always on the move, somewhat disorientated." And here is where our artist resides, between imagination and contemplation: Chema Madoz, a photographer of few words.

Last Updated: 13 June 2019

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Chema Madoz. A photographer of few words

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Details Written by Marina Valcárcel Published: 28 December 2015 If, in a nod to surrealism, Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958) metamorphosed into something from one of his own photographs, it would most likely be a little turtle whose shell harboured a poetic soul.

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(Practitioner Research)

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Absence gives texture to the object and provides a frame for the thinking of distance. Absence does literally not accept the past. The distant is then what brings us closer and the absent - rather than absence - is a figure of return, as one says of the repressed.
Pierre Fedida

The aim of this paper is to discuss the relation between trauma and representation in the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar (born 1956), mainly his installations dedicated to Africa, in particular the Sudan and Rwanda. I shall take a closer look at how the artist engages with atrocities, whether of famine or genocide. I shall also examine how his installations both provoke and disarm our voyeuristic gaze, which so often underlies our engagement with the spectacle of atrocities. I shall argue that the artist toys with the mechanisms of trauma, reprogramming the shock dynamics of trauma and substituting the aesthetics of the wound with the 'document', which I understand as 'the contextualisation and integration of image and event beyond and against the politics of global information'. In the 'document', the post-traumatic gaze is both revived and buried, acknowledged and mourned. The space of denial, which is a matter of shock or politics, is obliterated in the time and space of the 'document' where the viewer can finally encounter, engage with and be present in the missed encounter of the traumatic event.

The 2007 Alfredo Jaar retrospective at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, shown later that year at the South London Gallery, displays some of his earlier, as well as more recent, inquiries into the politics of the image. Alfredo Jaar has extensively investigated the power relations which affect, govern and structure images, in particular, their perception and reception by the viewer/witness/consumer in the age of globalisation. The art of Alfredo Jaar exposes and frames the mechanics of power of the image. His art productions perform a critique of the act of seeing by revealing and exposing the underlying operations of montage and editing which sustain our perception of the world and its global events, that is the reality presented by the media and the world of so-called 'information'. 'Information' is as much about disinformation as it is about information because images are selected, edited, presented and promoted while others are ignored or denied on a basis which ultimately obeys a political agenda. Jaar exposes the disjunction between reality and information in an act of resistance to the master narrative of global information, an artistic engagement that one could understand, following Georges Didi-Huberman, as an 'art of counter-information'. 2

This gesture of contestation appears in Jaar's Untitled (Newsweek) 1994 which displays all the Newsweek covers that appeared during the unfolding of the Rwandan genocide. Every cover is accompanied by the historical facts pertaining to the genocide and its monstrous body count which every week added up another hundred thousand additional unreported and anonymous victims. The reality of genocide is absent from the Newsweek covers which focus instead on, in comparison trivial Americana, such as the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Jackie Kennedy, the trial of O.J. Simpson and the high-tech 'gender gap'. It is only in August 1994 that the first Newsweek cover dedicated to the Rwandan genocide appears.

Jaar challenges us as viewers/consumers by confronting us and even, in the case of The Sound of Silence 2006 (fig.1), by trapping us into the political fabric of the image. Images are not facts, nor documents as the events of Timisoara demonstrated when real bodies were used as evidence of a fake massacre (images which prompted the Romanian revolution against Ceaucescu's regime), or the Daily Mirror's fake images of abuses of Iraqi prisoners by British troops in Basra, abuses which did happen but, unlike those of Abu Ghraib, were not photographed. In order to counter the gimmicky effects and affects of the visual image, Jaar often translates the image into words in order to conjure an objective narrative and 'document', operation that Georges Didi-Huberman qualifies as 'documentary poetics'. 3 Only the 'document', where an image and reality are coupled and integrated, can do justice to the complexity, genesis and destiny of the event which by far exceeds the frame of the image.

In Field, Road, Cloud 1997, three photographs can be viewed which, as the title suggests, are pictures of a field, road and cloud in Rwanda. The poetic nature of the images is challenged when the image is translated into a 'document' and the translation is juxtaposed with its photograph. We then learn that the three images are sites related to atrocities where people were brutally murdered. Jaar also uses documentary photographs to undermine certain unchallenged data. In Rushes 1986, the gold rate is juxtaposed with a photograph of a Brazilian gold digger or garimpeiro, a virtual slave whose work benefits the Brazilian government before being exchanged on the global market, a shocking reality Jaar had himself witnessed and documented in the Serra Pelada. The 'document' in Jaar's work becomes a critical tool against the politics of global information as much as against globalisation itself.

In order to set up the 'document', Alfredo Jaar contextualises the image/data by recreating a unique environment and public space which enables the visitor to experience and understand the political fabric of global information, that is, the tension, and in some cases opposition, between image and information, fact and reality. This operation is not dialectical in the sense that the tension and opposition between information and reality is maintained and never resolved. The art of counter-information of Alfredo Jaar establishes this opposition in order to undermine, attack and bring down the so-called reality of information. The 'document', as weapon of counter-information, is much more than a mere text because it articulates, as Griselda Pollock remarked, an 'encounter for viewers'. 4 This encounter collapses traditional separations between object and subject. The viewer is not external to the work of art or to the fabric of history but integrated within the frame of the image, often through the use of mirrors where the viewer becomes a participant within the historical frame of the event staged by the artist. Alfredo Jaar thus expands the double surface of the 'document' by expanding time as well as space in order to set up a spatio-temporal armature specific to the historical event captured in the frame of the image. In the 'document', the event becomes an architectural space which can be experienced and visited by the viewer.

Fig.1
Alfredo Jaar
The Sound of Silence 2006
© Alfredo Jaar courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

One such work of art is The Sound of Silence 2006, the most recent and most powerful work displayed in Lausanne's Palais de Rumine. The Sound of Silence contextualises the infamous Pulitzer-Prize winning Kevin Carter photograph first published in the New York Times in 1993 which shows us a child starving on its way to a feeding centre in the Sudan under the hungry gaze of a vulture. Instead of telling the story of the little Sudanese girl whose fate is unknown, Jaar focuses on the man behind the famous image, on what happens behind the frame. The historical event of famine in the Sudan captured by the photojournalist is no longer an iconic image of famine belonging to the world of 'information' but a complex and radical encounter where Kevin Carter, who, as reporter, embodies the pole of 'information', is the one most affected by the encounter, although his presence is not embedded in the image. While the little girl supposedly finally made it to the feeding centre (without the help of Carter) and might still be alive, the journalist is dead. The image which marks the encounter between Carter and the little Sudanese girl is a moment of reversal and exchange.

The Sound of Silence sets up the space of the image in a large cube. One of the external sides of the cubic structure is illuminated by a series of blinding white neon lights, violently contrasting with the dark interior of the cube. It takes eight minutes in this small camera obscura to understand and experience the multiple and interwoven tragedies of the Kevin Carter photograph. The story of Kevin Carter unfolds in writing and silence on the screen. The biographical narrative of the South African freelance photographer is a narrative of failure, soul-searching and trauma which enables the viewer to identify and empathise with Carter, who sadly committed suicide in 1994, aged 33. Kevin Carter's narrative culminates in the traumatic encounter with the starving little girl in the Sudanese bush. The cruel subtext lies in the fact that Carter waited twenty minutes, watching the little girl crawl in desperation in the hope that the vulture would spread its wings - which it does not - in order to get a better photograph. The text is only interrupted once by four violent and blinding flashes turned against the viewer. The violent breach of the scopic field reverses the position of the viewer/voyeur, now violated by the flash and victimised like the Sudanese child. Carter's picture then appears furtively on the screen and the narrative ends with the destiny of the image and suicide of the photographer. The image has only appeared for a fraction of a second - the actual time it took for the image to be recorded - but the frame of its cruel history and destiny will haunt the viewer throughout the rest of the visit.

The Sound of Silence manages to stage what Stanley Cohen named the 'atrocity triangle', which he understands in the following way: 'in the one corner, victims, to whom things are done; in the second, perpetrators, who do these things; in the third, observers, those who see and know what is happening'. 5 As Stanley Cohen further remarks, these roles are not fixed, on the contrary they are often exchanged and rotate among the participants of the 'atrocity triangle'. The Sound of Silence collapses the separations between the three figures of the atrocity triangle. The photographer as witness is a perpetrator (a predator like the vulture who is waiting for the right moment to strike) but he is of course also a victim of his own photograph (he never forgave himself for not assisting the little girl). The ghost of the little Sudanese victim has haunted the memory of Kevin Carter until his death, thus turning into a kind of 'mnemonic monster'. The scopic cruelty which sustains our own voyeuristic gaze, as witnesses, is violently inverted and thrown back at us and we find ourselves all of sudden on the receiving end of the peep hole, abject and stained by our own voyeuristic gaze mirrored by the screen. The Sound of Silence, as trap for the post-traumatic gaze, stages and disables the very mechanisms of scopophilia at work within the 'atrocity triangle'. The image in Jaar is thus a site of trauma, with its violent breach of the subject's protective shield and phenomenal increase of stimuli, which disrupts the psychic order and 'fractures the fragile webs that provide the framework for our interface with the social, political, cultural and emotional realms in which we function'. 6 The excessive visual stimuli of the traumatic event are never represented in Jaar's work but indexed in abstract form through the use of blinding neon lights or flashes.

The traumatic nature of the image is particularly present in his Rwanda Project (1994-2000) which explores the remnants of the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, a few weeks after the end of the genocide, Jaar leaves for Rwanda where he takes some 3,000 pictures. He spends a lot of time in the company of victims, debriefing survivors. It then takes him six years to process the material, attempting to do justice to events and encounters which on many levels cannot be understood, nor represented. The Real is what cannot be apprehended nor represented, yet what is most sensitive and intimate to the subject, what survives in waiting or as the French say, en souffrance. The Real points towards a failure of representation, a failure which sustains Jaar's engagement with the subject matter of genocide: 'If I spent six years working on this project, it was trying different strategies of representation. Each project was a new exercise, a new strategy, and a new failure... Basically, this serial structure of exercises was forced by the Rwandan tragedy and my incapacity to represent it in a way that made sense'. 7 It is this failure of representation - undeniable when it comes to the traumatic visual culture of atrocities - that Jaar seeks not only to show and expose but to bring about in the radical interface articulated by his installations. In his visual and material strategies dealing with atrocities, Jaar has made a point to avoid the too easy and banal trappings of empathy which are inevitably attached to the pathos of visual suffering, thus disarming the compulsive identification with the victim which drives the viewer faced with representations of atrocities. This gesture recalls Jochen Gerz's burial of memorial monuments as well as Claude Lanzmann's approach to the Holocaust where the scandalous images of the genocide itself were discarded and the simple narratives of those involved privileged. Instead of the visual pathos of suffering or the horror provoked by the sight of mutilated or dead bodies, the viewer is caught and trapped, as in The Sound of Silence, within the historical nature of the 'document'.

Fig.2
Alfredo Jaar
Real Pictures 1995
© Alfredo Jaar, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

Real Pictures 1995 is an installation where Jaar's Rwandan pictures are not visible but buried and 'entombed' in black boxes. 8 Every box bears the factual description and narrative of the photograph and the visitor is overloaded with the narratives of genocide which contrast with the minimalist aesthetic arrangement of the scene. The image, buried in its box/tomb, is transformed into a 'document' where the image is suppressed and the narrative exposed, like in The Sound of Silence. One of the narratives reads as follows:

Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, is standing in front of the church. Dressed in modest, worn clothing, her hair is hidden in faded pink cotton kerchief. She was attending mass in the church when the massacre began. Killed with machetes, in front of her eyes, were her husband Tito Kahinamura (40) and her two sons Muhoza (10) and Matirigari (7). Somehow, she managed to escape with her daughter Marie-Louise Unamararunga (12), and hid in a swamp for three weeks, only coming out at night for food. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the African sun.

The boxes are piled onto each other, monumental mass graves of various sizes and heights but also archive, and the darkened room of the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts is transformed into a mausoleum and non-place of memory where Jaar's Rwandan photographic experience rests. Real Pictures is an obsessive monument dedicated to a traumatic encounter between an artist/witness and the people of Rwanda. We now better understand the special connection, identification and tribute to Kevin Carter with his traumatic encounter with the little Sudanese girl: both men have encountered the Real on African soil. Real Pictures is a site of mourning, not only for the victims of the Rwandan genocide captured in the images but also for the artist's 'own private Rwanda'. In a gesture similar to Claude Lanzmann who said that he needed to resuscitate the anonymous victims of the Holocaust and kill them a second time in order to accompany them, Jaar revives and buries his traumatic memories, never abandoning them. 9 This life-preserving operation, which borders on exorcism, is the very one that might have protected and saved Kevin Carter.

The photo-reporter as witness and predator is often assaulted by those ambivalent memories of helplessness laced with the scopic cruelty of voyeurism, a traumatic disjunction which lies at the very core of their profession. The story of the surrealist muse and Vogue war reporter Lee Miller presents some interesting insights into the psychic drama of the photo-reporter as well as parallels with the narratives of both Carter and Jaar. Miller had photographed, like Jaar in Rwanda, genocidal remains (in Buchenwald); she had also witnessed like Carter the spectacle of a child dying (in a children's hospital in Vienna). She cabled the following report of the event:

For an hour I watched a baby die. He was dark and blue when I first saw him. He was the dark dusty blue of these waltz-filled Vienna nights, the same colour as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons, the same imaginary blue as Strauss' Danube. I'd thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies; there are many faces of the dying. This wasn't a two months baby, he was a skinny gladiator. He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched. There was nothing to do. In this beautiful children's hospital with its nursery-rhymed walls and screenless windows, with its clean white beds, its brilliant surgical instruments and empty drug cupboards there was nothing to do but watch him die. 10

Lee Miller's account illustrates the ambivalence that sustains the traumatic visualisation of atrocities: the scopic drive (the ordeal of the baby as 'skinny gladiator' recalls the cruel spectacles of ancient Rome) is coupled with and inseparable from helplessness ('there was nothing to do but watch him die'). The witness is compelled to watch the cruel spectacle but is unable to stop the event, nor suspend the voyeuristic gaze as it unfolds. This is what connects, on some level, the psychic drama of trauma with tragedy, this 'painful mystery' tied up with what it is to be human. 11 Tragedy, in so far as it stages the dynamic forces of irreparable loss which animate the subject, is a 'negative ontology', 12 something that Jaar's 'document' seeks to objectify from a phenomenological perspective. Lee Miller never 'documented' her own trauma and suffering (this would be later undertaken by her son Anthony Penrose), just blanked out her traumatic experience, never talked about the war and became depressive and alcoholic, trapped in the post-traumatic reality of her atrocious encounters. While she shunned therapy, she did manage to survive through a new-found obsession with cooking which literally saved her life but because of its excessive nature still obeyed a compulsive need to obliterate the memories of the Muselmänner and starving children she had watched and photographed.

Alfredo Jaar through the 'document' resurrects, objectifies and engages with the archive of his traumatic memories. In Real Pictures, the traumatic memory is both acknowledged and mourned, laid bare within the non-place of the Rwandan archive. The 'document' as it appears now also works as a tool and weapon against trauma in the sense that the psychic reality of the event (the Real) is not denied but acknowledged in Real Pictures and ritually buried, a healing gesture which mirrors the work done by psychiatrists working with victims suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), who are asked during psychological debriefings to factually 'document' the genesis of the traumatic event. While his Rwandan installations are serialised and obey an obvious logic of compulsive repetition, Real Pictures is an attempt to ward off and lay at rest the post-traumatic content of his Rwandan photographic encounters.

Fig.3
Alfredo Jaar
The Eyes of Gutete Emerita 1996
© Alfredo Jaar, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

The most haunting of his works on Rwanda is probably The Eyes of Gutete Emerita 1996. In The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, the viewer is not directly confronted with the atrocities of the genocide but is faced with the eyes of Gutete Emerita, the gaze of a survivor whose narrative has been mentioned earlier and who has been a direct 'witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to'. 13 The aporia of The Eyes of Gutete Emerita is that there is a fundamental disjunction between the narrative of trauma which can be told but not represented (or can only fail in representation) and her gaze which has witnessed the genocide but is unable to 'show' it. This disjunction is also present in Field, Road, Cloud where the legendary beauty of the Rwandan countryside does not show any wounds (trauma etymologically signifies wound) nor signs of the atrocities which have taken place. Jaar once again manages to disable and disarm the viewer's scopophilia by refusing us the obscene sight of the wound - which is in a way refused by Gutete Emerita and even by Rwanda itself. Alfredo Jaar confronts the viewer's desire and need to see the traumatic wounds with the survivor's need - be it the Rwandan trees or Gutete Emerita - to live beyond the event. The uncomfortable viewer is left with the impossible task of searching for traces of a horrifying event which was once there but is no longer present. The traumatic gesture is a returning and a revisiting of the event; this is what the viewer both attempts and fails to do. There are no visible traces. Here lies the cruelty of Jaar's 'document' which refuses to show us the special affects and effects of the traumatic event, only the failure of the Real, which is in the end, as Lacan suggests, a missed encounter. 14

Gutete Emerita and Kevin Carter both belong to Jaar's pantheon of missed encounters. Kevin Carter was unable to assist the little girl, something which would haunt him for the rest of his life. Alfredo Jaar, as witness, pays tribute through his work to his own missed encounters with the Rwandan survivors such as Gutete Emerita whose experience of the impossible he can only fail to understand, let alone represent. The traumatic nature of this missed encounter is indexed by the hundreds of thousands of serialised slides of her eyes, heaped upon a white neon screen. The traumatic white neon screen, so present in the work of Alfredo Jaar, indexes the emptiness and excess of absence, the excessive and violent 'white pain of the absent'. 15 The post-traumatic gaze of loss, like the buried images of Real Pictures, is here again sculpted into a mass grave or funerary heap, laid bare within a blinding field, in a gesture which attempts both to revive and bury at the same time. The powerful and haunting nature of The Eyes of Gutete Emerita lies in the shaming gaze of this missed encounter, which is not only a missed encounter between Jaar and his subject, but a missed encounter between the West and Rwanda. It is only through the 'document', that the failed encounter can finally be in a way 'rectified' - made right - when the viewer finally engages with the missed encounter that is, with the material of absence itself. What Alfredo Jaar manages to conjure within the space of the museum is the very experience of our failed engagement with not only certain images or realities but also the very political fabric that make those realities possible.

Through the 'document', Alfredo Jaar has staged the 'atrocity triangle' and trapped the post-traumatic gaze. He has re-created and re-orchestrated the missed encounter of the traumatic event which can now be experienced by the viewer in the re-organised and specific time/space of the 'document' tailored for the traumatic narrative, which always exceeds and violates the frame of the image and therefore can only fail in representation. Through the 'document', Jaar has managed to reprogramme the very mechanisms which sustain the shock dynamics of trauma. The absence specific to trauma - this disjunction between the subject and the event - is conjured in the 'document' where the viewer can now engage with the painful reality of this absence, and be present to it. What the 'document' achieves on an operative level is to obliterate the space of denial because the artist has emptied the 'document' of the shock-value of the wound and demystified the political master narrative. The 'special affects' of shock are defused when the visual effects are substituted with the contextualisation of the image/event as 'document'. If Jaar uses shock tactics in his work like the flashes of The Sound of Silence, these tactics are less intent to shock than to operate a shift in the scopic field. These external excitations act as barrage against the scopic drive of the viewer which is mis-en-échec and disarmed.

What the art of Alfredo Jaar tells us is that we have to move away from the scopic trappings offered by the sight of traumatic images which show and excite but do not explain. The spectacle of these images is costly from a psychological perspective, as the tale of Kevin Carter's 'failed mourning' demonstrates. The excessive and overbearing presence of the traumatic image will trigger a process of impossible denial; they will haunt the viewer and return until they are dealt with, that is acknowledged and mourned. The other danger that the spectacle of these images articulates is apathy (apathy being an excessive response similar to shock and also related to trauma), as Griselda Pollock explains: 'The more we see what we appear to need to see to believe in their reality, the less we are able to respond affectively to what we are shown. We have become inured to the pain of others in direct proportion to our apparently insatiable need to be shown the horrors of the world and to be exposed to the suffering of others'. 16The 'document' provides an alternative to the scopic trap of the 'atrocity triangle' and the PTSD shock/apathy continuum by fostering acknowledgement and providing an interface with the missed event, of which the sight of the wound is crucially absent. Instead of the 'negative ontology' of trauma, the art of Alfredo Jaar has relentlessly sought to reawaken and affirm a 'positive ontology', that is a compassionate ethics of presence, a political consciousness oriented towards being present to those who most need our assistance and protection. Traumatic events such as the Rwandan genocide can and, in this very case, have resulted from our daily or, as Jaar pointed out in Untitled/ Newsweek, weekly failure to understand, engage and address certain realities - from our own absence within the political frame. Global events are not foreign, nor exterior to us; on the contrary, as Jaar has relentlessly demonstrated, we are very much part of their fabric. Whether we chose to be absent or present is entirely up to us.

Download the print version

How to cite

Olivier Chow, 'Alfredo Jaar and the Post-Traumatic Gaze', in Tate Papers, no.9, Spring 2008, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/09/alfredo-jaar-and-the-post-traumatic-gaze, accessed 5 October 2021.
Tate Papers (ISSN 1753-9854) is a peer-reviewed research journal that publishes articles on British and modern international art, and on museum practice today.

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alfredo jaar and the post-traumatic gaze

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Alfredo Jaar and the Post-Traumatic Gaze - Tate Papers | Tate

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Absence gives texture to the object and provides a frame for the thinking of distance. Absence does literally not accept the past. The distant is then what brings us closer and the absent - rather than absence - is a figure of return, as one says of the repressed.

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(Practitioner Research)

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About

What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world.
-Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson's photographs have entered the American visual lexicon, taking their place alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as indelible evocations of a silent psychological interzone between the everyday and the uncanny. Often working with a large team, Crewdson typically plans each image with meticulous attention to detail, orchestrating light, color, and production design to conjure dreamlike scenes infused with mystery and suspense. While the small-town settings of many of Crewdson's images are broadly familiar, he is careful to avoid signifiers of identifiable sites and moments, establishing a world outside time.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Crewdson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. He lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has produced a succession of widely acclaimed bodies of work, from Natural Wonder (1992-97) to Cathedral of the Pines (2013-14). Beneath the Roses (2003-08), a series of pictures that took nearly ten years to complete-and which employed a crew of more than one hundred people-was the subject of the 2012 feature documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro.

Photo: Juliane Hiam © Crewdson Studio

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Learn about the work and career of artist Gregory Crewdson. Artworks, biography, exhibitions, editorial content, news, museum exhibitions, press, and more.

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Connar L’Ecuyer - Using Photos to Shine a Light on PTSD

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Connar L’Ecuyer - Using Photos to Shine a Light on PTSD

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(Practitioner Research)

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My name is Connar L'Ecuyer, and one of my main ongoing projects is photographing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, in military vets and first responders. Some people may have heard of PTSD and not know much about it, or have loved ones that suffer from PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is NOT a topic to hide in the background, and you are not weak for asking for help.

There is a stigma that asking for help makes you weak and that you should just bury what you've seen or done. That is not the case. You are not alone. And I am here to prove it to you.
Note: This article and the photographs may be difficult for some to read, as it deals with PTSD and suicide. If you or someone you know is suffering from PTSD or is having suicidal thoughts, please call or text the Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255, or call 911 for an immediate response.
PTSD is an anxiety based mental health disorder that is caused when a person goes through a traumatic event. People often associate this with the military, with good reason, but it also affects first responders, such as police and firefighters. Seeing and being in moments like these don't just go away, but stick with someone for the rest of their life.

Events such as this can lead to people committing suicide at an alarming rate. In California, the state fire department called CalFire, in the 2016 fire season, where there were over 100 firefighter suicides reported, but firefighters suspect that there are more suicides and they are written off as death in the line of duty. With military vets, the average suicide rate is about one veteran every five minutes. By the time you finished reading this article, another veteran has died. And in the police departments, these numbers go largely unreported as well.

With my project, I'm working to bring to light the issues of PTSD, and I want to remove the stigmas surrounding PTSD. Each photograph is of a real military vet, law enforcement officer, or firefighter, and the text and imagery in each image relate directly to their stories. Not only am I photographing just the individuals, but I am also creating photographs of family members, to show how they have to deal with their loved ones' PTSD, and what it's like for the family while staying home on a deployment.

In addition, with each piece of the PTSD Project sold, 40% of the sale will go back to the individual photographed so they can donate the money to a mental health charity or VA Office of their choice. I want every step of the project to be able to help those who need it. For those who are in the project, they get to help show others that help is out there, and they get to help donate as well.

People are out there to help, and there are more people who share the same thoughts and feel the same. No one is alone, and suicide is not the answer. Suicide makes it worse for everyone around you and all those who love you, as they feel guilty for not being able to help. Reaching out for help is the strongest thing you can do, no matter how much others tell you not to.

If you or someone you know suffers from PTSD, there are resources for you to choose from the VA to counseling, to the Suicide Hotline, which you can call to just talk about PTSD.

If you want to be in the PTSD Project, or would like to purchase a piece from the series, get in contact with me on my website!

Editor's note: Photographer Michael McCoy is another photographer (and a veteran himself) who uses photography to fight PTSD.
About the author: Connar L'Ecuyer is a fine artist who specializes in photographing landscapes of Southern California and working with Veterans and First Responders to showcase and battle stigmas surrounding PTSD. If you would like to see more, you can check out his website, Facebook, and Instagram.

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My name is Connar L'Ecuyer, and one of my main ongoing projects is photographing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, in military vets and first responders. Some people may have heard of PTSD and not know much about it, or have loved ones that suffer from PTSD.

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6 Creatives Who Used Photography to Overcome PTSD

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6 Creatives Who Used Photography to Overcome PTSD

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(Practitioner Research)

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6 Creatives Who Used Photography to Overcome PTSD

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PTSD is extremely traumatic. And for this six creatives, it was photography that helped them come out of their darkness and into a new light.

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(Practitioner Research)

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Save the date:
Acts Without Words
Falling Awake
Catherine Edelman Gallery
Chicago, IL
November 15 to January 4

Currently on VIEW:
Baden Photography Festival
through September 30, 2019
Baden, Austria

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Save the date: Acts Without Words Falling Awake Catherine Edelman Gallery Chicago, IL November 15 to January 4 Currently on VIEW: Baden Photography Festival through September 30, 2019 Baden, Austria