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Contribution to Book
A Painful Labor: Photography and Responsibility
Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture (2012)
  • Sharon Sliwinski
Abstract
This paper considers the tension between photography and responsibility despite the avalanche of objections regarding documentary’s false promise to awaken social conscience. By examining the encounter with images of suffering through a psychoanalytic register, the paper tries to articulate what Barthes describes as the ‘painful labour’ of responding to the photographic other – an encounter that illuminates the limit of the spectator’s ability to respond. Photographs provide an occasion to register this limit, which, I argue, opens up the spectator’s traditional notions of responsibility from a set of moral duties towards a questioning of the ethical relation.
Publication Date
2012
Editor
Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins
Publisher
Routledge
ISBN
978-0415530378
Citation Information
Sharon Sliwinski. "A Painful Labor: Photography and Responsibility" New YorkRepresentations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture (2012)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sharon_sliwinski/18/