Thanks so much to Melissa Miles and Edward Welch for including my chapter, “Hospitable Looking: Towards a Different Way of Seeing the War in Syria,” in Photography and Its Publics. This chapter builds on the paper I presented (thanks for that invitation too!) at a symposium by the same name in Prato, Italy, a few years ago. In “Hospitable Looking,” I reflect on the pattern of optimism that global publics seem to evince about images from the war in Syria: the sense that each new photographic revelation of atrocity will be the one that finally compels an end to this conflict. Tracing the upwellings of this optimism, I explore the vexed, often solipsistic assumptions about spectatorial empathy that underpin it. Ultimately, I argue that this conflict requires a different visual ethics.
Month: January 2020
Just published an event review …
… in American Quarterly, “Immersion and Immiseration: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena.” Thanks so much to AQ for the invitation to do this work.