Document Type
Article
Publication Date
January 2009
Journal
Photography and Culture
Volume
2
Issue
3
Abstract
This paper explores the significance of photographic violence in relation to a single defaced image found during the Bosnian War. The single example of pictorial violence opens a set of questions interrogating the nature of human aggression: What is the status of violence carried out in effigy? Can this particular example of defacement open understanding into the other forms of violence that took place during the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia? How does the image come to be marked by affect but also serve as the medium of its transmission? And finally, why does photography lend itself so easily to the expression of aggression? The wager of this paper is that thinking through such instances of photographic violence can shed new light on the nature of human violence writ large.
