⁰¹ Alfredo Jaar, The Sound of Silence, 2006, installation with wood, aluminum, fluorescent lights, strobe lights and video projection. Software design by Ravi Rajan. Installation view at Galerie Lelong, New York, 2009. Dimensions variable; as installed at Galerie Lelong: 431.8 × 457.2 × 914.4 cm (170 × 180 × 360 inches). Courtesy the artist & Galerie Lelong, New York.
⁰² Ghada Amer, Happily Ever After. Photo credit: John d’ Addario.
⁰³ Leandro Erlich. Window and Ladder: Too Late for Help, 2008, metal ladder, underground hidden metal structure, aluminum frames, fiberglass brick wall. Photo credit: John d’ Addario.
⁰⁴ Sebastián Preece, Tanto Tiempo – Cantera Galvez 5415 Transplante de Nivel [Galvez Quarry 5415 Levels Transplant 5640 Burgundy], installed at Tekrema Center for Art and Culture as part of Prospect.1 New Orleans. Photo credit: John d’Addario.
⁰⁵ Jonathan Torgovnik, Annet with her son, Peter, from the book Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape. Photographs and Interviews by Jonathan Torgovnik, (Aperture, 2009).
⁰⁶ Jonathan Torgovnik, Beatrice and her sons, Antoine and Geoffrey, from the book Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape. Photographs and Interviews by Jonathan Torgovnik, (Aperture, 2009).
⁰⁷ Jonathan Torgovnik, Justine with her daughter, Alice, from the book Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape. Photographs and Interviews by Jonathan Torgovnik, (Aperture, 2009).

‘Suffering is one of the existential grounds of human experience … It is also the master subject of our mediatized times.’
— Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, Social Suffering, 1997

‘Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don’t become inured to what they are shown … because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.’
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003

‘There are definitely not too many images. Nor are there too many artists to reflect — going beyond critical stereotypes — on what making images means.’
— Jacques Ranciere, Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of Images, 2007


It is a tired commonplace that photography has made the representation of suffering an ethically suspicious and ineffective means for both artistic and journalistic statements of political value. By raising awareness of the natural or man-made miseries of others, it more often than not only plunges us deeper into the waters of complacency and reinforces the chains of complicity in regard to this changeless world’s injustices and atrocities. Meanwhile, it camouflages the residues of imperialist sensibility that befits the lethargic consciousness of the audience of our post-industrial, post-political era’s inevitable surrender to the laws of the spectacle.

There are various issues involved in the diverse discourses, which analyze the contemporary lust for gruesome images of disaster and death and prove the ineffectiveness of their documentation. For instance, the anaesthetisation of the spectator, resulting from overexposure to media images of violence, and the aestheticisation of suffering come first to mind, though as cliché reductions of complex and interdisciplinary arguments.[i] Anchored in theorisations that range from the first critiques of mass culture by the Frankfurt School to the latest confirmations of the inescapability of the society of spectacle, they argue against the merits of depicting violence, pointing to the ideological foundations of the impossible radicality of re-presenting harrowing images of violence and suffering — their inevitable reification and commodification, the lame and co-optable populist agendas of sentimentality that support them, the pitfalls of the aestheticisation of horror — while also alerting us to the troublesome ‘thinning out’ of the experience via cultural representations of suffering in the era of its globalisation. [ii]

Despite recent calls for a reconsideration of the validity of images of suffering as tools for socially concerned photojournalism and art — precipitated by the photographic documentation of the 9/11 attack and the so-called social turn manifested by the advocates of relational aesthetics — I find myself in agreement with many of the old and new arguments, which express fear of the pseudo-truths that gruesome or aesthetically beautiful images of pain may conjure in galleries, and of their institutional and state acceptance.

Yet there is no easy answer regarding the validity of such images’ utilisation in media and art, as manifested by Susan Sontag’s shift from her early vitriolic critique of the representation of suffering to her recent embrace of its awakening of knowledge and compassion — as first steps for action, at least. Acknowledging the contradiction of Sontag’s historically conditioned change of thinking on the topic as inherent in the controversy over the merits of images of violence and pain, rather than as a personal change of perspective, with this article I do also refuse — however strategically ambivalently — to turn my back to aesthetically intriguing and intentionally humanitarian documentations of inhumanly human atrocities that, whether reconfiguring the radical in art or not, do manage to e/affectively carry their makers’ social concerns, awaken their audiences — to various degrees — to the real contents of their horrific representations, and above all problematise, or help us problematise, the nature of our looking at images of horror. This is why, quite a few months after I first saw Alfredo Jaar’s installation The Sound of Silence (2006) at Galerie Lelong, New York, and Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape (2006-9) at Aperture Gallery, New York, I still feel compelled to discuss them as two distinct yet meaningful gestures in imagistically dealing with the calamities of others, not to mention our complicity in them.

The trauma in Torgovnik’s photographs is not as visible as its current sources. His subject is the most devastating legacy of the sexual violence that accompanied the genocide in Rwanda: the mothering of children of rape who, fifteen years after the massive massacre by groups of the Hutu militia, have grown into nightmarish reminders of the atrocious murders and the sexual crimes that their variously tortured mothers witnessed and experienced, supplanting the lasting trauma of the genocide with the daily stigma of nurturing the unwanted fruits of their enemies with all the unthinkable emotional, physical and social repercussions.

At first glance the portrait gallery that comprises the visual part of Torgovnik’s installation, Intended Consequences, is indeed somewhat disturbingly aestheticized. Thirty pairs, trios or quartets of smile-less women and children have been posed in front of the camera, in tight embraces or stylized juxtapositions, against backgrounds of natural beauty, bareness or architectural signifiers of African destitution. The expressive beauty of Torgovnik’s subjects is accentuated by the coloristic richness of the sitters’ surroundings and outfits—whether western T-shirts or colorful African textiles. Stunning portraits in and of themselves, they are evocative of the tropes of times past: of orientalizing, even exoticizing, others in photographic documentations. And inasmuch as the child-ness and girl-ness of their suffering subjects — what Griselda Pollock has distinguished as ‘favoured signifiers of atrocity upon which we can bear to look’, given an archaic linking of femininity with death — are combined with their black-ness, such familiar ‘pre-determined elements of iconicity’ make their ‘pre-troped otherness’ ideal for today’s photojournalist’s search for the iconic signification of suffering in Africa. [iii]

Collected during the course of three years (2006–09) as a personal response to the multiple traumas of these unfortunate survivors of genocide, [iv] Torgovnik’s images have not escaped our mediatised culture’s perverse and commodified demand to see human suffering as images to be bought and commended without having to really know their human content or the institutional litanies that condone and mask the ongoing, criminal indifference that allows such man-made suffering to continue elsewhere; a picture from the series received an award, and Torgovnik’s work was included in UN-hosted events in New York commemorating the infamous genocide. It is by the coupling of his images of both rape victims — mothers and children — with his interviews of the mothers, displayed next to the photographs via wall text or projected in the center of the installation (through a multimedia projection produced by Media Storm), that Torgovnik has managed to limit the photographic spectacularisation of others’ misery. Bypassing photography’s ‘inability to indicate causality’ [v] and its predicament ‘to bury history’, [vi] the victims’ voices aid him in re-reporting the historic crimes through the volunteered testimonies of their unimag(in)able martyrdoms and allow the constitutive heterogeneity of the motherhood to resurface, as variously experienced by the photographed rape victims, whose feelings toward their children born of rape range from hatred to unconditional love. ‘I love my first daughter more because I gave birth to her as a result of love … The second girl is a result of unwanted circumstance — I never loved her father. When the younger girl was a baby I used to leave her crying. I fed the older one more than the younger one, until people in the neighborhood told me that that was not the right thing to do. My love is divided, but I am slowly beginning to appreciate that this other one is innocent’, Valentine confesses. Annet, however, disagrees: ‘It was all brutal. I was still a virgin at the time of genocide. When I realised I was pregnant, I became depressed: I had suffered enough. But when I saw my son for the first time, I felt, I had been given another brother … he is a gift, he is my consolation. I look at the people who killed our families not necessarily as enemies but as people who should be forgiven … ’

I found hard finishing viewing this installation. Reading and hearing these mothers recounting their memories of the genocide, their multiple and prolonged rapes, and the conflicted and inassimilable feelings of hatred and love toward their children, was rather nauseating. The combination of word and image overcame photography’s aesthetic burial of history with utmost shocking revelations of the heinous crimes at Rwanda, but also displaced any spectatorial anaesthesia with convulsions of anger, guilt and compassion. While making me embrace rather than dismiss its fostering of affective knowledge both about the genocide and its less-known repercussions — children of rape, the spread of AIDS, mothers multiply traumatized by loss, torture, the raising of unwanted children as often sole relatives and their own exile from their community because they chose to raise the children of their enemies — the exhibition kept stirring in me thoughts about the value of my visceral response to such an artistic by-product of a photojournalistic sensibility. By encountering the voices of these extraordinary mothers, however, the ordinariness of mediatized suffering was shattered to smithereens. And the fact that Torgovnik cofounded a foundation that raises money for the education of the estimated 20,000 children born of rape in Rwanda as well as therapy for their mothers — as a way to direct the compassion engendered by his talking images to action, an earnest attempt not to let ‘passivity dull feeling’ — my certainty, that bringing images and stories of misery into galleries can do nothing but feed our media era’s lust that perpetuates both while purporting the awakening of (impotent) compassion, was further shaken.

Visceral reaction is also elicited and sought by Jaar’s The Sound of Silence, yet the piece is far more radical and complex in its spatiotemporal combination of word and image. It is also distinctly critical of the photojournalistic witnessing of suffering, in line with the iconoclastic logic that underlies several other photo-based installations and public interventions by this reputed ‘humanistic political’ Chilean (New York-based) artist, whose oeuvre has never stopped addressing the suffering that derives from all kinds of governmental, financial and media power structures, while constantly questioning the role of photography in its communication of, and ability to represent, the tragic. In fact, Jaar has extensively recorded, via photography, the ghoulish face of the Rwanda massacre, beginning soon after it took place, when he flew there. Although with his installations he has multiply alerted the world to the atrocities there, he has in many ways resisted the allure of shocking images. He programmatically refused, for instance, to exhibit his photographic archive of Rwandan genocide, choosing instead to overlay in one version of his Rwanda series, photographic representations of the Rwandan victims with narrative descriptions of the images buried beneath his words, in order to release the tragic reality of which their media dissemination had depleted them.

In the architectural video installation The Sound of Silence, Jaar has anachronistically returned to an iconic image of starvation in Africa, a Pulitzer Prize winner featuring a famished little girl paralysed on all fours on her way to a food station, next to a menacing vulture — a photograph taken in Sudan during the 1993 famine by African photojournalist Kevin Carter and eliciting controversy after its publication in The New York Times. While a momentary apparition of the photograph does indeed awaken the viewer to Africa’s ongoing miseries by capturing human suffering from famine in Sudan, its subject is not limited to photography as an index of tragic reality. In fact, the work puts photojournalism, with its master subject of suffering, on the spot, not only questioning, as rightly observed, the limits of what is representable and the act of looking, but also dramatically tackling the issue of the responsibility of the photographer (the professional, detached bystander of mediatized culture, as Pollock paints him), of those who control the circulation and dissemination of images, and of all of us who fuel demand for such iconic images of suffering while fostering it through our indifference and consuming it with apolitical ignorance about its sociopolitical causes.

The spatiotemporal staging of the picture, and the details of the story of Kevin Carter (1960–1994) that poetically frame the image, encapsulate some of Jaar’s agenda. In its display at Galerie Lelong, the viewer is first confronted with the back of a mausoleum-like, aluminum-clad viewing room that, covered with fluorescent light bulbs, blinds the viewer, perhaps hinting through light — the quintessential medium of photography and symbol of enlightenment — at the blinding effect of the alleged truths of photographic reality in the media era. This, however, can only be grasped after the full experience of the piece and familiarity with the history of the aforementioned image, which the viewer can watch for eight minutes, only when the green light is on at the entrance of the theater-like room — which evokes both the camera obscura and the camera apparatus itself — inviting him or her to seriously and intensely contemplate the repercussions of such acts of witnessing.

In complete silence and darkness, punctured only by the rhythmic unfolding of white words on a screen that, as if typed with an old-fashioned typewriter, are gradually projected, we are verbally informed about the biography of the image’s maker, photographer Kevin Carter, and the controversy over the picture. We learn that South African Carter rebelled against apartheid while serving as a soldier, turned to photojournalism to document its effects and, when in Sudan in 1993 to cover the famine caused by the war, photographed a little emaciated girl stalked by a vulture. We find out that the photo was published in The New York Times and won him the Pulitzer Prize, but brought fierce criticism: readers reproached Carter for not helping the girl, choosing instead to wait for twenty minutes (and in vain) for the vulture’s ultimate move — the openings of its wings — in order to achieve an even more perfect icon of human suffering. We also read the last words he wrote before he committed suicide — a result of his inability to live after witnessing so much horror, perhaps precipitated by the scandal about the picture. Carter’s infamous photo appears momentarily as an afterimage, a nightmarish apparition before the eyes of the shocked spectator after four flash bulbs emit a sudden blaze of light. At this admittedly dramatic point, the narrative resumes to complete Carter’s story and bluntly adds that the photographic rights are managed by Corbis, the large photographic agency then-owned by Bill Gates, and that the girl’s fate is unknown.

Jaar, who has not forgotten to mention Carter’s sobbing after he took the photograph and repeats Carter’s farewell note — ‘the pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist’ — has also honestly defended in the press both the heroism and contribution of photojournalists in seeing what otherwise will remain unseen, and the aestheticism of all representation.[vii] It is hard, however, to miss Jaar’s framing of the viewer as the ultimate accomplice in the death of humanity, to which his/her lust for the iconic picturing of human suffering attests, and perhaps in the criminal indifference to the sociopolitical dimensions of all man-made, and most seemingly natural, miseries — such as the Sudanese famine — that sustains them. This is especially apparent if we take into consideration the double-blinding of the viewer with light by both the installation’s exterior and the shocking flashes inside.

Conjuring aspects of Jaar’s and Torgovnik’s dissimilar works, rather than thoroughly reviewing them, I did not want merely to cursorily review two striking shows but rather to argue that we cannot rule out the representation of suffering, whether critical, affective or aestheticized. Instead, we have to look closer to grasp the ways in which the artists try to help us see the old and new pains that photojournalists endanger themselves to document, as well as the realities that the images conceal. Because the thorniness of the issue demands, in my opinion, no dogmatic positions, I will somewhat paradoxically close with a counterpoint to the photographic — whether artistic or journalistic — witnessing of calamity and the problematizing of representations of misery discussed so far: a curatorial gesture that, framed programmatically by a disaster, managed to eschew its mediated face and displace the representation of a major recent natural disaster and its repercussions with the active awakening of the art world to the man-made pains that it masked. Advocating for both the use and the avoidance of images of horror, I want to dispel the academic mannerisms that advocate correct ways for a socially meaningful art, while inviting us to think of the responsibility of curatorial praxis in managing the art audience’s death-and-disaster voyeurism when raising awareness about sociohistoric incidents that have caused both.

I speak of Dan Cameron’s vision of Prospect.1, the first biennial to be hosted by New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. With minimum concessions to documentary representations of its recent tragedy, in a radical refusal to reiterate the mediatized representation of the strife of those devastated by the hurricane, the exhibition staged instead a pilgrimage to the sunken neighborhoods of the mythic town where site specific responses to the tragedy took place and instigated a personal discovery of the pleasure principle that underlies not only the city’s reconstruction, but the incommunicable insistence of its survivors not to leave this genuine postmodern [viii] melting pot of the South, e/affectively revealing both the known and forgotten wounds of an American city whose pains — old and new — are mostly man-made (poverty, illiteracy and racism being but a few indicative ones overlooked by media coverage of the disaster), though masked by the naturalness of the hurricane.

Despite works that dealt directly with the ensuing losses, the exhibition left relatively unpictured the unimag(in)able pain of the not-so-different others of the American South. While I cannot pay respect to the work of the artists that contributed, whether selected or commissioned, to this first step for the insertion of New Orleans in the worldwide cultural map and for its own economic revitalisation, I can sum up my own impression of its effective plotting around the city. For no picture could initiate the mourning for the lives lost better than the wandering involved in finding several site-specific installations amid the houses that the hurricane had destroyed. No work about Hurricane Katrina’s visit could rival the visitors’ discovery of the thresholds of those houses removed from their foundations or the marks on the doors of the extant ones, signifying the number of human and animal victims found dead, or not, upon their inspection. No photojournalistic commentary could better illustrate the deeply racist financial divide that keeps apart the worlds of the poor and the rich — making the impact of the natural disaster barely felt in the elite neighbors of Southern eclectic architectural splendor — than the itinerary carefully plotted in various parts of the city for the search of old and new venues where exhibitions took place. Along with the discovery of New Orleans’ cultural history, through the housing of exhibitions in venues such as the New Orleans African American Museum, came the tasting of the city’s distinct edible and audible pleasures (also desirable for the biennial’s architect), and the interaction with its people — those who faced the horror as well as those who came to rescue them from it, those who thrive on New Orleans’ joys and those, often artists, who came to live outside the box of old and new American dreams. For those of us lucky enough to be at the preview, the well-planned coincidence of it with the Halloween weekend also communicated a bit of the genuine joie de vivre that the Mardi Gras tradition preserves, shaking off the ill reputation of its commodification and explaining why these people, whose music and singing enhance their funerals as much as their weddings, chose not to cancel its celebration in the aftermath of the hurricane. [ix] The belated, corpseless funeral of a recently deceased survivor and renowned local musician was a further exhilarating proof. For all of us who witnessed the natural terror and the suffering of the people of New Orleans from the television, the Internet, newspapers and magazines, Prospect.1 reminded us — replacing as a curatorial artwork the iconic images of suffering — how indeed immune we have become to pictures of extraordinary pain that both make suffering ordinary and camouflage its sources.

My reminiscences from a rich exhibition season in the U.S. that has focused on the imaging of pain are meant to be inconclusive. We cannot go on believing in that old thing, art, without reinforcing that, if some pictures of suffering seem inadequate as forms of resistance, we must resist neither looking at the pains of others and ourselves nor searching for ways to look at pictures of suffering in ways that make them meaningful — even more so than they intend to be. If some cannot even capture human suffering but through marketable iconicity, others do so with dignity, in intriguing reformulations of the aesthetic and the conceptual, thus probing us not to shy away from their beauty nor from the emotions they arouse and the revelations they make, asking us instead to turn information back into meaningful knowledge and, alas, drastic action.


[i] See David Levi Strauss, ‘Nikons and Icons: Is the aestheticization-of-suffering critique still valid?’, Bookforum, Summer, 2007, and Abigael Solomon-Godeau, ‘Lament of Images: Alfredo Jaar and the ethics of representation’, Aperture, Winter 2005.
[ii] Arthur and Joan Kleinman, ‘The Appeal of Experience, The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times’, in Kleinman, Das, Lock, (eds.), Social Suffering, p. 2.
[iii] Griselda Pollock, ‘Not-Forgetting Africa’, in Nicole Schweizer, (ed.), Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of The Images, JRP/Ringier, 2009.
[iv] Distinct from the photojournalist project, an article focused on another African wound: AIDS, that, assigned to him by Newsweek magazine, first brought him to Rwanda in 2006. During this visit Torgovnik met Odette, a survivor who had been raped during the genocide and contracted AIDS. Her story led him to return to Rwanda to work on this project about women who were victims of the same crimes and left pregnant.
[v] Solomon-Godeau, ‘Lament of Images: Alfredo Jaar and the ethics of representation’, Aperture, Winter 2005.
[vi] Alfredo Jaar, quoted in ibid.
[vii] Alfredo Jaar, ‘In Conversation with Phong Bui, Dore Ashton, and David Levi Strauss’, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture, April 2009.
[viii] Dan Cameron, ‘A Biennial for New Orleans’, Prospect.1. New Orleans, Brooklyn, Picturebox, 2009.
[ix] See ibid.