viz.

Image credit: screen shot of Harlan County, USA 

Over the past few weeks my students have been discussing several documentary films and a recurrent topic has been the line between an emotional appeal and an exploitative image of the body in pain.  We have considered key scenes in the documentary Harlan County, USA (1976) in which director Barbara Kopple closely trains her camera on a man struggling to breathe through the pain of black lung.  We will also discuss the inclusion of several open-casket shots of a child’s dead body in Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984).  The ethics of documentarians is a topic I’ve considered before on this site, but this week my student’s surprised me by probing the distinction between images of an actual body in pain and simulated images of a body in pain. 

Now I wish I had anticipated this turn in the discussion—had I been prepared I might have thought to bring in clips from several documentary filmmakers and images from several photographers.  Re-enactment scenes from historical documentaries, images of torture of popular films such as Saw and violent clips from video games like Grand Theft Auto, along with Cindy Sherman’s film stills series might have helped us consider the many ways image-makers have troubled the line between representation and reality.

Image credit: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #14

In his article, “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere,” Mark Seltzer contends with the condition of postmodernity and although he does not explicitly address photography I think some of his work might have been applicable to our discussion.  Seltzer posits a postmodern “wound culture” in which there has been a breakdown in distinctions between external/internal, public/private, self/other.  This breakdown occurs because the “virtual and figurative look just like and hurt just as much as, the literal and the real: perception and representation change places” (Seltzer, 24). For Seltzer is the site of the wound that collapses the boundary between real and representation by splaying the private body before public eyes.  At the same time, the wound fascinates us because, despite the trauma of this collapse, it seems to maintain such a clear distinction between what is real and what is not.  What can be more real than the wound?  It is hard to argue with blood and guts.

Selzter’s analysis of the would as the site of all this blurring of boundaries can be extended to the photograph: a private moment captured and circulated for the public eye, an image that is both of reality and a representation of reality.    Several of the distinctions Seltzer notes —between external/internal, public/private, self/other—are broken down within photographs.  The shots of miners struggling to breath and the open-casket images prompt questions about the use of violent images or images of violence.  Is there really a difference between images of an actual body in pain and simulated images of a body in pain?  Is there any connection between violent images and violence in the world?  Is the act of taking a photograph always violent?  Seltzer seems to suggest that in a “wound culture” it is impossible to imagine any experience not marked by violence.  It seems worth asking whether we can imagine a photographic experience that is not violent?