This photo is looking back at me with a kind of self-mocking irony, since it's so radically different from what I'm working on this evening - a class on photography of trauma and atrocity for tomorrow. It's the first time that I've taught this material - not that it hasn't come into classes on documentary, but this, pace Sontag and others, is considering head-on what it means to look at completely shocking, shaming images - famine, and lynching, and Abu Ghraib. Or what it means to have non viscerally shocking images censored. I'll be interested to see where the discussion takes us ...
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