Last week I presented my paper, “An Ethics of Unidentifiable Suffering: Spectatorship, Responsiveness, and Photographs from the War in Syria,” at the Photography and Its Publics symposium at Monash University’s Prato Center in Prato, Italy. Thanks so much to the organizers for the invitation – it was a marvelous conversation in a beautiful place.
The abstract for my paper can be found here. I originally conceptualized the paper’s theoretical intervention in terms of a cosmopolitan spectatorship, but subsequently realized that something more is required: hospitality. I’m looking forward to thinking more deeply about how this ethic can be translated into the practice of spectatorship and the particular demands that this conflict places on such an optic.
