Invisible atrocity images: issues of the spectatorship of atrocities between contemporary art and photography

By taking 9/11 as a starting point, this thesis examines the spectatorship of invisible atrocity images, namely contemporary artworks that render atrocity photographs invisible or stress their absence. It asks: what happens when the relation between the spectator and the photographed sufferer or dead other is visually disturbed? The analysis explores the potential of artworks in assisting one to rethink the process of looking at images of atrocities in a manner that will allow the spectator to acknowledge the invisible photographed other ethically. The argument is structured around three types of “encounter”: “the frame” (Judith Butler), “the face” (Emmanuel Levinas), and “the contract” (Ariella Aïsha Azoulay). Through the application to invisible atrocity images, these three lenses are pushed towards new directions and further expanded in a critical manner. Each chapter starts from an issue of contemporary visual culture – iconism, partial and full censorship – which is problematised by the artworks in different ways. The case studies of this thesis are artworks created after 2001 by the artists Dinh Q. Lê, Alfredo Jaar, Ina Lounguine, Thomas Hirschhorn, belit sağ, Khaled Barakeh, David Birkin, Broomberg and Chanarin, and Banu Cennetoğlu. Through the examination of the ethics of spectatorship regarding these works, the thesis provides a renewed reading also of the ethics of looking at photographs of atrocities between iconism and censorship, which are perceived as equally troublesome in terms of visibility and ethics. Finally, a recurrent visual example of this thesis is Nilüfer Demir’s viral photograph of the dead Alan Kurdi (2015). By placing this photograph in dialogue with the aforementioned theoretical frameworks and some of the artworks, the reader is asked to reconsider in what terms did they look at this contemporary atrocity image.