Abstract
Through a series of heterogeneous examples, this chapter examines the interweaving between the immanence of gestures loaded with pathos that take shape under catastrophic circumstances and the transcendence of the representative models through which suffering and precariousness have taken form in the West over the course of centuries. Humanitarian communications, it is shown, can be conceived of and investigated as a form of “secularization” of Christian iconography. The chapter concludes with three photographs explicitly inspired by works by Caravaggio that best express the temporality and spatiality that typify “everyday life.” Humanitarian photography, too, is shown to promote the immanence of intersubjective relations: the small gestures of people living under emergency conditions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For the UNICEF campaign posters, see the official page at http://www.unicef.it/web/landing/2015/bambininpericolo/#campagna.
- 2.
See Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text, essay selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 26. On the idea that the “relation of photography and language is the principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representation of reality,” see again Mitchell , Picture Theory, 281.
- 3.
These evangelical events are described in the Gospel according to Mathew 2:1–16 and 2:13–23.
- 4.
For an overview on the theme, with explicit anachronistic reference to the massacres of children in the humanitarian present, see the catalog edited by Pierre Rosemberg, Le Massacre des Innocents. Poussin, Picasso, Bacon (Paris: Flammarion, 2017).
- 5.
In particular, see the Gospel according to Mathew 2:2.
- 6.
“Meeting with the People of Lesvos and with the Catholic Community. A Remembering of the Victims of Migration,” Visit of His Holiness Pope Francis to Lesvos (Greece), https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2016/april/documents/papa-francesco_20160416_lesvos-cittadinanza.html.
- 7.
On the idea of analyzing the arts and images by viewing them as the “symptom of a crucial transitional phase,” see Aby Warburg, “Artistic Exchanges between North and South in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 275. On the “image-symptom” paradigm in Warburg , see Didi-Huberman , The Surviving Images, 174–339.
- 8.
See Aby Warburg, “The Emergence of the Antique as a Stylistic Ideal in Early Renaissance Paintings,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 271–274, and Warburg , Gesammelte Schriften. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 76–77.
- 9.
Gian Guido Vecchi, “Papa Francesco tra i profughi a Lesbo: ‘Catastrofe umanitaria enorme’. Rientro a Roma con 12 profughi,” Il Corriere della Sera, April 16, 2016, http://www.corriere.it/esteri/16_aprile_16/papa-partita-visita-lampo-lesbo-andra-campi-profughi-tsipras-e4e1ecba-0392-11e6-b48d-5f404ca1fec7.shtml. Beyond Pope Francis’ choices, for more on the migrants’ condition of precariousness and vulnerability, which must be demonstrable by wounds or marks on the body as a criterion for recognition of refugee status by state authorities, see Fassin , Humanitarian Reason, especially 83–157.
- 10.
For a defense of the role of photography in contexts where human rights are being violated, see Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
- 11.
Victor I. Stoichita, L’image de l’Autre, Noir, Juifs, Musulmans et “Gitans” dans l’art occidental des Temps modernes 1453–1789 (Paris: Editions Hazan, 2014), 150–152.
- 12.
For a new look at the issue of the “figural” as a tension between forms and forces that animate the representation, see Roberto De Gaetano, La potenza delle immagini. Il cinema, la forma, le forze (Pise: ETS, 2012), 59–75.
- 13.
On Bellori’s repulsion and attraction toward Caravaggio’s pictorial solutions and iconographies, in a study that focuses on the representation of the gypsy in The Fortune Teller, see Todd P. Olson, “The Street Has Its Masters: Caravaggio and the Socially Marginal,” in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Genevieve Warwick (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2006), 69–81.
- 14.
Giovanni Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, with notes by Hellmut Wohl, and introduction by Tomaso Montanari (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 184.
- 15.
Longhi, Caravaggio, 63 (translated from the Italian edition); English edition, 41–42.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Regarding the question that Longhi raises about the relationship between the history of art and anthropology, that is, the idea that the former must be conceived in connection with a “historical psychology of human expression” (historischen Psychologie des Menschlich Ausdrucks)—see also Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 585.
- 18.
On the notion of the passions in pedagogy and performance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as expressed in religious art and especially in the Sacred Mountains tradition, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 192–245.
- 19.
Longhi, Caravaggio, 63; English edition, 44.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Beyond the problem of the representation of pathos, for a reflection on the role that the Council of Trent assigned to images, see Pierre Antoine Fabre, Décréter l’image? La XXVe session du Concile de Trente (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013).
- 22.
On this point, see again Careri , Caravaggio. La peinture en ses miroirs, 253–297.
- 23.
On this point, and for a discussion of some of the photographs described in the following pages, see André Gunthert, “Visual Journalism, or the Hidden Narration,” in The Public Life of Photographs, ed. Thierry Gervais (Toronto: Ryerson Mage Center Books, 2016), 154–171.
- 24.
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Image, événement, durée,” Images-Revues. Histoire, anthropologie et théorie de l’art, Hors série 1 (2008): 6–9.
- 25.
For a historical reconstruction of how this shot was created, as well as a discussion of related theoretical issues, see Joseph McGonagle, “Dispelling the Myth of Invisibility. Photography and the Algerian Civil War,” in The Violence of the Image. Photography and International Conflicts, eds. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 78–83.
- 26.
For more on these positions, see Juliette Hanrot, La Madone de Bentalha: Histoire d’une photographie (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), especially 5–8 and 132–148.
- 27.
For a reflection on the viewer tendency to “appropriate the suffering,” as well as for a critique of this kind of “trap, frequently discussed within trauma studies,” see Mieke Bal, “The Pain of Images,” in Beautiful Suffering, 110–113.
- 28.
On the relationship between altering the caption and reusing the image, see Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 11–13.
- 29.
Judith Butler, Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 71.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), 25–26.
- 32.
Although the work by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially 25–48, does not address the photographs mentioned here or humanitarian communications and its peculiar characteristics, it does offer a study on the idea of a media icon, its traits, and the modes of production and circulation of images that rise to this status. On the idea of icon, see also Griselda Pollock, “Photographing Atrocity: Becoming Iconic?,” in Picturing Atrocity, 65–78.
- 33.
For a psychological conception of “repression” and “reaction-formations,” see Sigmund Freud, Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety, trans. Alix Straichey, revisited and edited by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1977). For a return to the Nietzschean problem of the will to power through the concepts of “active forces” and “reactive forces,” see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, foreword by Michael Hardt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 39–43.
- 34.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizofrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 12–15.
- 35.
Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 60.
- 36.
On the mechanism of “inclusionary exclusion” or “exclusion by inclusion,” see Esposito , Immunitas, especially 45–51.
- 37.
On Warburg’s “Ambition to liberate the analysis of images from all ethnocentrism,” see Carlo Severi, The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination, trans. Janet Lloyd, foreword by David Graeber (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015), 33.
- 38.
Starting from the concepts that Warburg developed, over the decades a huge literature has expanded, leading in multiple research directions. As reference texts, which set out the various possible translations and meanings of these terms, see, for example, Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Phaidon, 1986); Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and with an introduction by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 89–103; Didi-Huberman , The Surviving Image.
- 39.
Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ and ‘Spring’,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 107.
- 40.
Aby Warburg, “Manets Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Die vortragende Funktion heidnischer Elementargottheiten für die Entwicklung modernen Naturgefühls,” in Kosmpopolis der Wissenschaft. E.R. Curtius und das Warburg Instititute. Briefe 1928 bis 1953 und andere Dokumente, ed. Dieter Wuttke (Baden Baden: Saecula spiritalia, 1989), 262.
- 41.
See Aby Warburg, “The Mergence of the Antique as a Stylistic Ideal in Early Renaissance Painting,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 271–273.
- 42.
Andrea Pinotti, Memorie del neutro. Morfologia dell’immagine in Aby Warburg (Milan: Mimesis, 2001), 132.
- 43.
Ibid., 113.
- 44.
Besides Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche , see also Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 36–89. On the theoretical affinities between Warburg and Deleuze, via Nietzsche , see Didi-Huberman , The Surviving Image, 104–105.
- 45.
On the “Iconology of the Intervals” (Ikonologie des Zwischenraumes) in Aby Warburg, see Matthewa Rampley, “Iconology of the Interval: Aby Warburg’s Legacy,” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 17, (2001): 303–324. On the relationship between montage, interval, and displacement, see also Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 282–287. On the practice of the “interval” as an exercise of the memory and elaboration of trauma, see Angela Mengoni, “Documents après coup. Exploring Fragments, Performing Memory,” in Beyond Evidence. Das Dokument in den Künsten, ed. Daniela Hahn (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), 121–137.
- 46.
Carlo Ginzburg, Fear, Reverence, Terror: Five Essays in Political Iconography (Calcutta; London; and New York: Seagull Books, 2017), 62–63.
- 47.
Ibid., 109–110.
- 48.
Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, trans. Rico Fransen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- 49.
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, introduction by Conrad Leyser, preface by William Chester Jordan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Among Louis Marin’s many works, see Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle, foreword by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
- 50.
See, respectively: Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007); William J. Thomas Mitchell, Cloning Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- 51.
Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 37.
- 52.
Aby Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and Florentine Bourgeoise,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 185–221.
- 53.
Warburg is cited as one of the “archaeologists of secularization” in Giacomo Marramao, Potere e secolarizzazione. Le categorie del tempo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2005), 130.
- 54.
Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 130–133.
- 55.
On the idea of “remediation,” please refer back to the introductory chapter. For a treatment of Pope Francis’ communications strategies as forms of remediation of the historic and artistic repertoire, with particular reference to the iconography of the works of mercy, see Isabella Pezzini, “La rimediazione di Papa Francesco,” in Il racconto di Francesco. La comunicazione del Papa nell’era della connessione globale, eds. Anna Maria Lorusso and Paolo Peverini (Rome: Luiss University Press, 2017), 13–22.
- 56.
Agamben, Homo Sacer I: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 133–134.
- 57.
For an attempt to direct the analysis of a “non-governmental viewpoint” in this direction, see Ariella Azoulay, “Regime-Made Disaster: On the Possibility of Nongovernmental Viewing,” in Sensible Politics, 29–49.
- 58.
For a survey on NGO communication formats and brand guidelines, see Sanna Nissinen, “Dilemmas of Ethical Practice in the Production of Contemporary Humanitarian Photography,” in Humanitarian Photography: A History, 297–321.
- 59.
Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 3–17.
- 60.
Judith Butler, Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), especially 66–98 and 154–192.
- 61.
In addition to the artists cited in the text, for a critical reflection on forms of media witnessing and on attempts to regenerate a testimonial function, see Marco Dinoi, Lo sguardo e l’evento. I media, la memoria, il cinema (Florence: Le Lettere, 2008). On the artistic possibilities of exercising an “oppositional force directed against the disenfranchising division of human life from political identity, which define the status of the refugee,” see T. J. Demos , The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), XV. Specifically on how Renzo Martens critically surpasses the rhetoric of humanitarian communications in his work, see Nicola Perugini and Francesco Zucconi, “‘Enjoy Poverty’: Humanitarianism and the Testimonial Function of Images, Visual Studies 32 (2017): 24–32. On the impersonal aesthetic typical of Sylvain George’s “border cinema,” see Francesco Zucconi, “Mediazione radicale, coscienza impersonale. ‘Qu’ils reposent en révolte’ di Sylvain George,” Fata Morgana. Quadrimestrale di Cinema e Visioni 31 (2017): 245–252.
- 62.
See Mina Gregori, ed., Come dipingeva il Caravaggio: atti della Giornata di studio, Firenze, il 28 gennaio 1992 (Milan: Electa, 1996), 7–88. For further examination of the diagnostic analysis of the paintings, see Rossella Vodret, ed. Dentro Caravaggio (Milan: Skira, 2017).
- 63.
Charles Dempsey, “Idealism and Naturalism in Rome around 1600,” in Il Classicismo: Medioevo, Rinascimento, Barocco, ed. Elena De Luca (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1993), 238.
- 64.
For a possible juxtaposition between Caravaggio and the philosophy of Bruno, Campanella , and Della Porta , see Bologna, L’incredulità del Caravaggio e l’esperienza delle “cose naturali,” as well as Biagio De Giovanni, “L’età moderna tra scienza nuova e rivoluzione figurativa,” in Caravaggio. Tra arte e scienza, eds. Vincenzo Pacelli and Gianluca Forgione (Naples: Paparo, 2012), 221–227. In his study on the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze makes a brief reference to Caravaggio in suggesting a juxtaposition with Bruno. See The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London, New York: Continuum Books, 2006), 186, footnote 32.
- 65.
Obviously, this list makes no claims to exhaustiveness. For a publication that brings together a variety of gazes from different photographers (including some of those cited in the text) on the migratory phenomenon of the new millennium in the Mediterranean region, see Nicola Kassianides, ed., Chemin d’exil. Catálogo resultante de la exposición colectiva itinerante “Caminos de exilo” (Madrid: Turner Libros, 2016).
- 66.
Bellori, The Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 185.
- 67.
John Vink, Réfugiés: Photographies de John Vink, 1987–1994 (Paris: Centre national de la photographie, 1994). In addition to this publication, for a wider overview on the work conducted in refugee camps worldwide, see the photographer’s official webpage: http://www.johnvink.com/JohnVinkSite/.
- 68.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. and introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, with and afterword by Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 39.
- 69.
Michael Fried, After Caravaggio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 77.
- 70.
Ibid., 82.
- 71.
For an image-based reflection on forms and spaces of contemporary slavery, through the eyes of photographers such as Abbas, Ian Berry, Stuart Franklin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Chris Steele-Perkins, and Alex Webb, see Mark Sealy, Disposable People: Contemporary Global Slavery (London: Hayward Publishing, 2008).
- 72.
Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, “Reimagining the Common: Rethinking the Refugee Experience,” in The Human Snapshot, eds. Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolghadr (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013), 136. On the importance of recognizing the refugee status not only as a manifestation of “bare life” but also a form of political identity, as well as on the role played by the media, see Amy R. West interviewed by Soenke Zehle, “The Refugee-Media Nexus,” in Nongovernmental Politics, eds. Michel Fehrer, Gaëlle Krikorian, and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 407–417.
- 73.
Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 180.
- 74.
For a formal analysis of the hidden diptychs in Caravaggio’s composition of space and figures, see Wolfram Pichler, “Il dubbio e il suo doppio: le evidenze in Caravaggio,” in Caravaggio e il suo ambiente, eds. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Julian Kliemann, Valeska von Rosen, and Lothar Sickel (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2007), 9–33.
- 75.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley; Los Angeles; and London: University of California Press, 1988), XIX–XX.
- 76.
For a revival and transformation of the semiotic notion of “actant” in critical thought on the Anthropocene, with the aim of going beyond an anthropomorphic conception of life, see Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge and Medford: Polity, 2017), especially 133–134.
- 77.
With regard to the capacity of Caravaggio’s work to lead the Utrecht artists “back to their own northern roots,” revealing the potential of seventeenth-century Dutch art as the “art of describing,” see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), XXIII.
- 78.
Tzvetan Todorov, Éloge du Quotidien. Essai sur la Peinture Hollandaise du XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 107–108.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zucconi, F. (2018). Pathos, Survival, and “Quasi Immanence”. In: Displacing Caravaggio. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93377-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93378-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)