Abstract
This chapter examines erasure as an aesthetic approach in Syrian artist Khaled Barakeh’s photographs The Untitled Images. Noting that Barakeh’s images paradoxically materialize the invisible, the chapter shows how this way of representing suffering sidesteps both the aestheticization of pain and the reduction of affect some critics see as endemic to contemporary visual culture. Paying careful attention to the dynamic interplay between invisibility and visibility and, correspondingly, between absence and presence in the photographs, the analysis contextualizes Barakeh’s work with reference to an artistic tradition defined by gestures of radical reduction. The chapter furthermore argues that such a poetics of erasure is ripe with a rare ethical potential to resist the processes of commodification so widespread in our current image ecology.
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
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke, “The Pain of Images.” In Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, edited by Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Barakeh, Khaled, “The Untitled Images (2014).” Cinema Journal 57, no. 4 (Summer 2018): 142–45.
Bernstein, J.M., “Preface.” In Ethics and Images of Pain, edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Bok, Sissela, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment. Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1998.
Bowditch, Lucy, “Power in Partial Invisibility: Reframing Positions on Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Photography.” In Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture, edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019: 179–99.
Butler, Judith, “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Chouliaraki, Lilli, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Daney, Serge, “The Tracking Shot in Kapò.” Translated by Laurent Kretzschmar. Senses of Cinema 30 (2004). http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/feature-articles/kapo_daney/.
De Ferrari, Guillermina, “Opacity and Sensation in Reynier Leyva Novo’s Historical Installations.” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 22 (2015). https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/opacity-and-sensation-in-reynier-leyva-novos-historical-installations/.
Demos, T.J., The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Dworkin, Craig, Reading the Illegible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003.
Dworkin, Craig, No Medium. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.
Grønstad, Asbjørn, Film and the Ethical Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Grønstad, Asbjørn, “Transaesthetic Temporalities: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of Deceleration.” In Literature in Contemporary Media Culture: Technology, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, edited by Sarah J. Paulson and Anders Skare Malvik. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016: 223–36.
Grønstad, Asbjørn, and Henrik Gustafsson, “Introduction.” In Ethics and Images of Pain, edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson. New York: Routledge, 2012: xv–xxiii.
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
Kenaan, Hagi, The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Melville, Herman, Moby Dick; Or, The Whale. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851.
Mitchell, W.J.T., “Offending Images.” In Unsettling ‘Sensation’: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, edited by Lawrence Rothfield. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001: 115–33.
Mitchell, W.J.T., What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Pollock, Griselda, “Death in the Image: The Responsibility of Aesthetics in Night and Fog (1955) and Kapò (1959).” In Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.
Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004.
Rivette, Jacques, “On Abjection.” Translated by David Phelps with Jeremi Szaniawski. Order of the Exile. http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/ok/abjection.html.
Saxton, Libby, “‘Tracking Shots Are a Question of Morality’: Ethics, Aesthetics, Documentary.” In Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters, edited by Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton. London: Routledge, 2010: 22–35.
Sontag, Susan, On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 [1977].
Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Grønstad, A. (2019). Invisibility and the Ethics of Erasure: Khaled Barakeh’s The Untitled Images. In: Grønstad, A., Vågnes, Ø. (eds) Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16291-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16291-7_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16290-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-16291-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)