Frames of war.

When is life Grievable.

Judith Butler.

Torture and the ethics of photography.

My point, which is hardly new but bears repeating, is that whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticisms, how we artuculate political analysis, depends upon a certain field of perceptiable reality having already been established. This field of perceptible reality is one in which the notion of the recognizable human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as the human; a figure of the non-human that negatively determines and potentiality unsettles the recognisably human.

embedded reporting.

throughout the bush regieme we saw a aconcered effort on the part of the state to regulate the visual field. The phonomennn of embedded reporting came to the fore...

Falklinds conflict(1982) - only two photojournalists were ever allowed and no television broadcasts.

Sontag Questions..

whether photographs stil have the power - or ever did have the power - to communicate the suffering of others in such a way that viewers might be prompted to alter their political assesment of war.

For photographs to communicate effectively in this way, they must have a transitive function: they must act upon viewers in ways that have a direct bearing on the kind of judgements those viewers will formulate about the world. Sontag concedes that photographs are transitive. They do not merely portray or represent - they relay affect.