Fourteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Aftermath photography as an offspring of photojournalism has become a common feature in the visual language of photographers since live news of conflicts are covered increasingly by social media. Nevertheless, the resulting narrative remains in the realm of testimony. In order to pursue new narratives in the particular context of unfinished conflicts, this study explores the traces of absence (being a shared consequence of human crisis) in photography and thus seeks to articulate anti-photojournalism with a new perspective on aftermath. Parting from a philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical inquiry about the implications of absence, and analysing photographic works that have portrayed a range of conflicts and crises, we discuss the difference between ‘traces of absence’ versus ‘marks of the facts’. Traces are defined, in opposition to marks, not as remnants with an unequivocal significance of the past, but as a continuous process in which absence emerges like relational frameworks in ongoing transformation. Consequently, ‘traces of absence’ operate within the image from a kind of creative and reflective silence in front of the notion of ‘it’s not anymore’, and so attends to the very specific temporality of the experience of absence. In other words, this work encourages the consolidation of a photographic language and a visual framework of interpretation in which, first, the power of absence within the image implies the counterfactual reading of the present; and second, the power of the image itself reveals the performative agency of absences in the shaping of the future allowing for new and open-end narratives.