The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture is a timely interdisciplinary collection of original essays concerning the ethical stakes of the image in our visually-saturated age. It explores the role of the material image in bearing witness to historical events and the visual representation of witnesses to collective trauma. In arguing for the agency of the image, this unique collection debates post-traumatic memory, documentary ethics, embodied vision, and the recycling of images. It discusses works by Chris Marker, Errol Morris, Derek Jarman, Doris Salcedo, Gerhard Richter, and Boris Mikhailov, along with images from popular culture, including websites and home movies. Films discussed include Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Blue (1993) and Level 5 (1996).

Frances Guerin is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent, and the author of A Culture of Light (2005).

Roger Hallas is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University.

October 2007
256 pages
978-1-905674-19-0    £16.99 (pbk)
978-1-905674-20-6    £45.00 (hbk)

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chapter samples
introduction

reviews

'This timely interdisciplinary anthology applies trauma theory and other ethical, aesthetic and theoretical frameworks to a transcultural selection of films, videos, photography and other media that bear 'witness' to twentieth-and twenty-first-century man-made 'catastrophes' – from the Armenian genocide to 9/11. The Image and the Witness is a crucial contribution – in the richness and diversity of the corpus and selected authors, in its impeccable scholarship and forceful writing, and in the fruitful deployment of emerging paradigms to the textual and historical analysis of cultural objects about social trauma. The editors’ expansion of the traditional range of documentary studies to include visual arts and interactive digital media (such as installations and video games) is especially exciting. Guerin and Hallas’s impressive spectrum of historical periods and cultural contexts will certainly challenge the insularity of English-language media culture and scholarship. This book is a must: fiercely but serenely engaged with the escalation of both skepticism and panic around imagemaking across our scarred and fragmented planetary community, this collective reflection on visual witnessing is a shot in the arm for our collective thinking about the documentary image, inside or outside the academy.'
– Thomas Waugh, Concordia University

'This is an important collection for anyone interested in how images shape the way we remember traumatic events. With readings that range from World War Two aerial photography to the Baader-Meinhof paintings of Gerhard Richter, from Vietnam home movies to the politically-charged work of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo, this collection brings together two separate field – trauma studies and visual studies – in unprecedented ways. I have no doubt that many courses will be designed around this provocative book. With its superb summation of the various issues at stake, the introduction alone is worth the price of admission.'
– Randolph Lewis, University of Oklahoma