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JMK, Stockholm University, P.O. Box 27861, SE-115 93 Stockholm, anden@jmk.su.se

The Trauma of RepresentationVisual Culture, Photojournalism

and the September 11 Terrorist Attack

KARI ANDÉN-PAPADOPOULUS

What is the cultural significance of the fact thatnews photographs of 9-11 are being appropriatedand recirculated in different cultural contexts: in of-ficial museums and popular make-shift galleries, inmemorial books and semi-private sites on the web,and in the form of souvenirs sold by street vendorsnear the World Trade Center site? What happens tothe meaning and function of journalistic imageswhen they are transplanted into high cultural, ormoreover, into downright popular-commercial dis-courses? How are we to account for this wide-spread cultural circulation of photographic images inthe wake of 9-11, of the wish to create them, look atthem, buy, collect and keep them? Are they, as JeanBaudrillard would have it, ’sites of disappearance ofmeaning and representation’, detached signifiersthat overtake and do away with referential reality?Or, on the contrary, are they sites that process andhelp us re-connect with the real, tangible objectsthat serve as visual verification that these incom-prehensible events actually took place? And are weto believe the oft-repeated statement that 9-11 im-plies a comeback for the pre-television medium ofstill photography, which has succeeded where tele-vision seemingly failed in enabling memory, mourn-ing, and working through of these traumatic events?

This article discusses these questions by exam-ining and comparing the recirculation of journalisticimages in two different contexts: the grass-rootsphoto show here is new york: a democracy of pho-tographs, which sells images from 9-11 and its af-termath taken by both press photographers andamateurs alike, and the phenomenon of street ven-

dors selling knockoff press photographs by theWorld Trade Center site. The overall aim is to dem-onstrate the necessity of a visual culture perspec-tive to photojournalism: an approach that takes ac-count of the fact that many news images tend tocross not only cultural and national boundaries, butmedia and genre boundaries as well. Clearly it takesa perspective like visual culture to examine whathappens to the meaning and function of news pho-tographs when they start circulating in the widerculture, as well as how we as individuals and groupsuse them to make sense of traumatic historicalevents like the September 11 attacks.

Unreality TVFrom a media perspective, the events of September11 first and foremost stand out as a landmark in thehistory of television news. All over the world, peo-ple were glued to the television news from America,repeatedly watching the same loops of video foot-age, as the plane exploded into the second tower ofthe World Trade Center and the Lower Manhattanskyline disappeared under a grey cloud of dust anddebris. The incredible live images were replayedthroughout the day, as news journalists and viewersalike struggled to make sense of the catastrophicscenes.

In psychoanalytic theory, repetition plays an es-sential role in the different processes of both ’actingout’ and ’working through’ (Freud, 1914; Freud,1917). The latter process entails the self-consciousrepetition of a traumatic event – in actions, dreams,words, images – coupled with sustained efforts to-wards interpretation, in order to integrate thetrauma into a psychic structure, a symbolic order.Acting out, on the other hand, is repetition as com-

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pulsion, an obsessive fixation on the traumaticevent, a manic re-enactment of it without anyhermeneutic attempts. This notion of shocked sub-jectivity and compulsive repetition applies to Sep-tember 11: the television networks seem to havefunctioned much as a traumatized psyche, invadedby and helplessly repeating the gruesome imageswithout being able to integrate them into an inter-pretative framework. Furthermore, following HalFoster’s line of thought, the replaying TV-imagesmay have involved not only a reproducing of trau-matic effect, but also a producing of it. As a CBS ex-ecutive states, by the end of the day news editorsbegan to realize that ’the moving images were hurt-ing people. It wasn´t good for the viewers, and notfor us journalists either’.1 Instead, the televisionnetworks started using still images of the definingmoments of the attacks, since they were consideredless upsetting.

This journalistic bewilderment was, of course, asymptom of a wider cultural shock. The overall re-action to the terrorist events, in New York City, inAmerica and the rest of the world, seems to havebeen disbelief. Watching the scenes of chaos and de-struction, whether on the spot in Lower Manhattanor on TV, was to witness ’the inexpressible, the in-

comprehensible, the unthinkable’ as the front pageof The New York Times stated the day after.

Faced with the September 11 attacks, peopleseem fundamentally to have responded in the sameway regardless of whether they were direct eye-wit-nesses to the events or second-hand viewers of it onthe television screen: this was unreal, beyond words,an out-of-body experience, pure fiction – like a Hol-lywood disaster movie. Unable to make sense of thebrutal drama as reality, to account for it as a categoryof the real, people in and outside of the media con-stantly referred to it in terms of popular movie fic-tion. How are we to understand these ubiquitousHollywood comparisons? As a psychic defenseagainst an overdose of reality whereby the statement’it was like a movie’ easily slips into ’it was amovie’? As a fundamental, culturally determined in-ability to deal with reality other than in the good-ver-sus-evil format of Hollywood melodrama? As a signof the ultimate triumph of the image and imaginaryover referential reality, the final collapse of the twocategories – reality as fiction, fiction as reality? Arewe to believe Baudrillard when he makes the case incustomarily provocative terms that the images tookthe events of 9-11 ’hostage’ and derealised them(Baudrillard, 2002)?

Photograph taken by amateur September 11, from here is new york.

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Arguably, these Hollywood references must beunderstood figuratively, as indicating the (initial)difficulty of adequately making sense of the disas-ter. It is a cliché, simply expressing the sense of un-reality in the face of these traumatic events. This re-action is comparable to the limits of sensibilitywhich, as the prominent Holocaust scholarGeoffrey Hartman points out, frequently surfacesin survivor narratives: ’So threatening was theshoah that disbelief […] touched the survivorsthemselves and added to the silence of the world.When speech returns, two phrases stand out in theirtestimony: ’I was there’ and ’I could not believewhat my eyes had seen’ (Hartman, 1992: 326). Inthe case of 9-11, the question that looms large iswhat role the mediations of television played in thisconflict between what was seen and what is believ-able. Did television serve to connect or disconnectpeople with the real, to verify or derealise the trau-matic events? This question invokes a tangled sub-ject, related to media event theory (Dayan andKatz, 1992), which over the last decade has re-ceived increasing attention in televison studies:what are the similarities and differences between’first-hand’ and ’second-hand’ witnessing? Howdoes the experience of being physically present atan event compare to the experience of being an ab-sent television viewer? Can television close the fac-

tual gap between here and there, now and then (ifnot a live broadcasting) and elicit from viewershighly engaged and empathetic viewing positions,helping processes of bearing witness, healing andworking through (Ellis, 2000)?

TV-scholar John Corner makes the case thattelevision as a medium has a unique power to en-gage the viewer’s personal and social identity as’witness’, due to its visual capacity to let people’see for themselves’ (Corner, 1996: 30). However,as Corner himself stresses, more inquiry is neededinto the precise ways in which audiences view tele-vision. One should therefore be careful with gener-alizing statements about ’the television experience’or the power of ’the television medium’. In contrastto John Corner’s thesis that the power of televisionto call viewers into empathy and understanding in-heres in its ’visual immediacy’ (Corner, 1996:30),the case of 9-11 implies rather that this power in-heres in its genre specific mediation – narrativeframing, symbolic representation – of historicalevents. Obviously, during the day of the terrorist at-tacks television initially failed exactly to provide anarrative frame for the live broadcast images of theWorld Trade Center disaster. Insights from the fieldof trauma studies point to the danger of forcing ’im-mediate’ visualisations of violence on the spectator:what is presented ’becomes an offense, an aggres-

Photograph taken by amateur September 11, from here is new york.

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sion, and may arouse such strong defenses that – ina profound way – we do not believe that what weare made to feel and see is part of reality’(Hartman, 1992: 326). Thus, an imaging that allowsreflection and interpretation, that ’invents allu-sions’ to the traumatic real rather than somehow at-tempts to present it as such, may be more likely tomove rather than overwhelm and incite disbelief inthe viewer.

If people couldn’t make sense of television’s livebroadcasting and compulsive instant replay of disas-ter images the first day, it may be because of the ini-tial lack of a coherent narrative framework. What wesaw was the news organizations own confusion andstruggle to create a story, to invent a framework tohelp them and their audiences make sense of theseemingly incomprehensible. In order for these grue-some events to be conceived as a category of the real,journalists and citizens alike needed them to be fil-tered into a symbolic order. History as experience isarguably not possible without history as representa-tion. Thus, one can argue that, paradoxically, it is ex-actly the narrative format of televison news as an es-

tablished informational genre – rather than the foot-age by itself – that connotes reality, and in the caseof 9-11 helped us affirm the realness of the attacks.This is something that Corner actually implies,stressing the importance of acknowledging the view-er’s awareness of ’television as style’ (Corner, 1996:30) in audience research, interacting with a more di-rect perception. Different genres, program formatsand aesthetics evidently engage the viewer in differ-ent ways of meaning-making.

Even if the television news format, through itsconventionally established credibility, can be as-cribed the power to connect people with reality, the9-11 events do not seem to have been real enoughon television. Many have made the case that 9-11was a strong come-back for still images as a meansto connect with reality (Zelizer, 2002). Where therewere no words, seemingly, there was an abundanceof photographs, and the demand for these documen-tary images is unprecedented. Again, in my viewJohn Corner somewhat to hastily dismisses thepowerful function of photographs when he pitstelevision’s ’visual immediacy’ against still photog-

The media gather at the site of the disaster in the wake of the terrorist attacks, from here is new york.

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raphy as a more indirect medium: ’Even the most’graphic’ piece of print journalism cannot help butretain a distance between the events described andthe reader’s experience of them’ (Corner, 1996: 30).This is to overlook the notion of the photograph asa trace, or index, which makes up a material, physi-cal and thus extremely potent connection betweenimage and referent. Furthermore, the still camerahas the advantage of turning cultural and natural oc-currences into graspable objects, material things. Asthe sociologist John Urry notes, it allows us to al-most literally close the gap between representationand reality: ’To photograph is in some way to ap-propriate the object being photographed’ (Urry,2002: 127).

’Here Is New York’With the events of September 11, photographs tookcenter stage in the American culture (Zelizer, 2002).Not only were they frequently (re)circulated innews papers, news magazines, and eventually year-end reviews and comemorative volumes. Several ofthe most prestigious galleries and museums in NewYork City organized well-attended exhibitions withphotojournalistic images from 9-11, among them

The New York Historical Society, the InternationalCenter of Photography and the Museum of ModernArt. The fact that influential cultural institutions to-day define news images as cultural artifacts worthyof high modes of display and contemplation can beseen as an acknowledgement – and a reinforcement –of the increasing centrality that such images hold inour constructions of knowledge, history andmemory. However, in addition to these officialchannels for the (re)circulation of photo journalisticimages in the wake of 9-11, perhaps the most sig-nificant exhibition dedicated to this event is ’Here IsNew York: A Democracy of Photographs’. Thispopular grass-roots photo show opened September28, 2001 in an empty storefront on Prince Street inSoho. A year later it seems to have been establishedas a semi-permanent exhibition, touring around theU.S. and Europe, and a collection of the photo-graphs has also been published in the best-sellingbook ’Here Is New York’. The main purpose of theproject is to collect, display and preserve for his-torical purposes as broad and varied a view as pos-sible of this event and its aftermath.

The subtitle, ’A Democracy of Photographs’,captures the basic concept of the whole project: toprovide an undiscriminating venue for everyone to

The photo show here is new york on Prince Street in Soho, New York City.

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bear photographic witness to what happened. Theimages on display have been submitted not only byworld famous photo journalists but also by ama-teurs of every age and background. Each photo-graph is digitally scanned, printed on archival pa-per, and casually clipped to wires strung along thewalls or across the room in the makeshift galleryspaces. All photographs are displayed in what theorganizers describe as a ’truly democratic style’ –anonymously, without labels or captions, and with-out frames. All of the prints are for sale to the pub-lic at the same fixed and nominal price of $25 apiece. Net proceeds from the exhibition are donatedto the Children’s Aid Society for its World TradeCenter relief efforts.

’Here Is New York’ testifies to the taking andviewing of photographs as a common human re-sponse to the events of September 11. By May2002, the organizers estimated that the collectioncontained about 7 000 photographs, that 750 000people had visited the gallery spaces, and that 600000 prints had been made and sold. The continu-ously upgraded web site, www.hereisnewyork.com,had by that time had around 260 million hits fromall over the world. The site, which allows for on-line sales of prints, has had an average of 1,5 millionhits per day.

The organizers themselves explicitly dissociatetheir project from the hierachical, one-iconic-pictureideal of the mainstream press. Michael Schulan, awriter and owner of the SoHo gallery space states:’September 11 has no single photograph to helppeople remember. No soldiers raising the flag at IwoJima. No soldier kissing a girl at Times Square. Nofirefighter holding a baby at Oklahoma city’. In con-trast to traditional photojournalism – the edited,out-of-context, usually sensationalist presentationof one dramatic picture – the goal of this exhibitionis to represent a collective, people’s view of the his-torical events of 9-11. The concept of ’unframing’ isalso essential to the project. Charles Traub, one ofthe main organizers, stresses that the guiding princi-ple has been to allow the photographs ’to speak forthemselves […] unframed either by glass, metal orwood, or by preconception or editorial comment’.Part gallery, and part memorial and public mourningspace, the on-location show has brought people ofall classes, ages, and nationalities together. Mr.Traub describes it as a ’physical web site’, a kind ofreal Internet were all kinds of people can come to-gether in a material space and contemplate (the im-ages of) the historical event of the attacks. Clearly,the strong emphasis on locality and the local is a de-cisive factor behind the sucess: the gallery consti-

People fleeing after the collapse of the twin towers. Photograph taken by the world famous photographerGilles Peress, from here is new york.

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tutes a locally situated global meeting place, an inti-mate room that invites visitors to take personalmeasurement of the public event. This is furtherstressed by the strong local focus of the photos: thestreets, buildings and people of New York City dur-ing and after the attacks emerge as an almost palpa-ble presence in these images.

The exhibition has obviously answered to, andencouraged a widespread desire for community in thewake of the 9-11 attacks. In contrast to much of thetop-down, one-way or ’para-social’ communicationof traditional news media, it allows for popular socialinteraction and participation, offering a sense ofplace, sharing, and belonging. The show’s lack of hi-erarchy not only makes the experience of viewing theimages less formal and exclusive, it also erases thetraditional borders between the artist-photo journal-ist and the beholder. Here everyone is a potential con-tributor, any visitor can identify his or her own pho-tograph in the collection.

However, what makes ’Here Is New York’popular is also what opens it to critique. Ulti-mately, the project seems to be founded on the ideathat somehow, by the massing and ’unframing’ ofthese photographs, history as such will emerge in adirect and self-evident presence. This notion of na-ive historical realism is exactly what propagandistsand myth-makers make their living on: the more un-narrated and non-explicit the ideological message ofan image, the more quiet and effective its impact.Consequently, I would argue that the more specificinformation we get about when, where, by whomand how a photograph was created, the stronger itspower as a historical statement, and the lower therisk of it being misused for disparate and possiblymanipulative purposes.

In contrast to what Charles Traub states, thatthe show has ’raised consciousness on a world levelin a non-political, non-ideological way’, a good casecan be made for the highly ideological character of’Here Is New York’. As the title makes clear, in itsoriginal version the show has been constituted by,and feeds a national and cultural ethnocentrism.With its myopic focus on New York City, on ’us’as opposed to ’them’ (non-Americans, non-West-erners), the rest of the globe has to a large degreebeen excluded from concerns. In an overall perspec-tive, the project’s collection of photographs echoesmuch of the official self-glorifying rhetoric of theU.S. in the wake of the attack. Americans are al-most exclusively depicted in the roles of self-sacri-ficing (male) hero – policemen and firefighters – orinnocent (female) victim; as patriotic, peace-loving,good Christians still standing tall in the face of fa-

natic, Muslim evil. Understandably, the main themeof the photographs is emotional reassurance andconfidence-building. However, this therapeutic pa-triotism excludes a more nuanced political under-standing of the disastrous events. That is, an ac-knowledgement of the U.S. as a nation among na-tions, the world’s sole, self-satisfied superpowerwith a debatable record of geopolitical and eco-nomic alliances and actions.

By the late spring of 2002 the organizers startedtaking this short-sightedness into account, and arenow encouraging contribution of images from therest of the world. However, a closer look at the col-lection available on-line in August 2002 reveals that4708 of 4779 photographs are from New York City.The category ’Afghanistan’ contains only 22 im-ages – less even than the category ’Rescue dogs’,which contains 29 photos. Not surprisingly, themost requested photos – a sample of which is alsopresented on-line – are all from New York City.They are either of a romantic-heroic character(Lower Manhattan in sunset with the twin towersstill intact or firefighters raising the American flag in

Photograph taken by amateur in the wake ofSeptember 11, from here is new york.

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the rubble of the World Trade Center) or disasterpictures (terrified New Yorkers watching the twintowers in flames, the second plane about to hit thesouth tower). Considering the fact that these imagesare unprecedented bestsellers – according to Traubseveral of them are by now the most sold photo-graphs in history – and that the collection as awhole is planned to be institutionalized as an offi-cial 9-11 visual archive and memorial, the politicalimplications of this ’apolitical’ project would needto be more explicitly acknowledged than the current’hands-off’ abdication.

If the popular success of ’Here Is New York’can to a large extent be explained by its local, par-ticipatory, community-engendering profile, there isanother factor that needs to be ackowledged: thepossibility to buy photographs at an affordableprice. Whether you visit the show on-location oron-line, you can bring a materialized memory intoyour home. This is obviously a main attraction ofthe project, arguably related to the phenomenon ofstreet vendours selling disaster pictures by theWorld Trade Center site itself.

Disaster TourismThe unathorized hawking of goods by street ven-dors, conducting business with simple folding ta-Street vendors around ground zero selling clothes...

...and knockoff press photographs.

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bles around ’ground zero’, has stirred considerablepublic debate in the U.S. The criticism has focusedon the selling of baseball caps, knitted wool hats andT-shirts bearing F.D.N.Y. and N.Y.P.D. logos. It hasbeen considered ’tasteless’ and ’dishonorable’ to ex-ploit the New York police officers and firefighters,the proclaimed heroes of September 11 and workersin service of the public good, for private gain. Incontrast, the selling of knockoff press photographs– some of them by star photographers such asSusan Meiselas and James Nachtwey – has notcaused any public criticism. This is remarkable con-sidering the obvious copyright violation. The newsimages are sold as postcards, as individual photo-graphs (ready to fit into the family photo album),and printed or embroided on T-shirts. They are alsopresented in the form of seemingly ”official” me-morial photo books, and pocket format, ’personal’photo albums. The last item is particularly interest-ing: a mass fabricated, anonymous commodityevoking the authenticity of a private memory al-bum. It offers the disaster site tourist a ready-made’memory’ of the terrorist attack, a souvenir – if notto say trophy – demonstrating that the owner hasreally been there, implicating her or him as a direct

eye-witness to the world historical event. A publicsite is turned into a (quasi)private sight, the ’incom-prehensible’ catastrophy into a tangible, graspableobject. Furthermore, the illicitly appropriated pho-tographs in the album are also enscribed into a Hol-lywood narrative format, with masculine heorismand patriotism as its lead motif, which further as-similates the traumatic events into a normalized,easily consumable commodity.

Like with ’Here Is New York’, the marketingstrategy of the street vendors is to convert the pub-lic into the personal, the strange into the familiar,distance into intimate presence. They ’re-territorial-ise’ (Morley and Robins, 1995: 18) the global newsevent, perform a local (re)appropriation of it, re-connect it with the particularities of place and con-text. The physical nearness of the street vendors tothe World Trade Center, the actual site of the disas-ter, is decisive in this respect. As James E. Youngobserves in his analysis of the Holocaust memorialcamps at Majdanek and Auschwitz, ’The magic ofruins persists, a near mystical fascination with sitesseemingly charged with the aura of past events, as ifthe molecules of the sites still vibrated with thememory of their history’ (Young, 1993: 119). In

Thomas E. Franklin's photograph has become an unrivalled icon of 9-11.

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other words, the spirit of the place serves to bridgethe distance in time from the historical event andlend authenticity to the street vendors’ enterprise.

Hand in hand with this fetishization of thephysical remnants of history, of the materiality ofthe historical place, goes the wide-spread promo-tion of Thomas E. Franklin´s press photo to be-come an unrivalled icon of 9-11. The street vendorsrecirculate it not only in books and albums, but inthe form of postcards, framed and glazed pieces ofphotographic ’art’, as T-shirts, drawings and paint-ings. What the image depicts, three firefighters tri-umphantly rasing the Stars and Stripes amidst theruins of the World Trade Center, is exactly a re-claiming of the local territory attacked by outsider,global terrorists. The photo places us at the veryscene of the crime, the still smoking ashes ofground zero, a mythical notion of place analogousto what Germans call Stunde Null, or the Zero Hour.It is the point of absolute defeat and destruction,but also the beginning of time, a pure moment – and,in this case site – of origin, where the traumatic pastcan be eradicated once and for all, the end and begin-ning of history. Franklin’s picture glorifies the vic-torious resurrection of the American nation, bornagain, innocent but hard. The flag-raising by men inuniform gives notice to the world that Americansstand united and eternally ready to ensure their he-gemony – by force of arms, if necessary. The ex-plicit iconographic reference to Joe Rosenthal’sphotograph of American soldiers raising the flag onIwo Jima is not without ideological implications.Franklin’s picture activates the political agenda ofthis touchstone for American culture: the cold wardoctrine of armed deterrence, interventionism withglobal reach capabilities, and expanded militarypower.

Like ’Here Is New York’, the street vendors dis-play and sell documentary photographs of 9-11 in apopular, informal setting. However, the differencesbetween the two enterprises are more conspicuousthan the similarities. ’Here Is New York’ enjoys theprestige and legitimize stature of a cultural (if notart) institution. Located in a serene gallery space,the show invites viewers into serious contempla-tion of the images. Since the profit goes to charity,one can buy a 9-11 photograph with the blessing ofserving a good cause, rather than the curse of vo-yeuristic exploitation. The participatory, grass-roots concept also grants the project a stamp of au-thenticity. In contrast, the street vendors, locatedon the sidewalks of New York City’s commercialdistrict, are disqualified from any cultural legiti-macy. Theirs is an enterprise associated with com-

mercialism, tourism, inauthentic souvenirs, cheapentertainment, spectacle and raw American capital-ism. Yet, can we really say that there is an absolute,or at least significant, difference between the mean-ing and function of a photograph in the gallery andin the street? Do people buy the images for differ-ent reasons in the two different contexts; do they in-terpret and use them differently? Obviously, muchmore work needs to be done considering the mean-ing, reception and practical use of disaster images.This is a task that now leads me to make a case forthe field of visual studies.

The Politics of Viewing and ValuingAlthough the interdisciplinary project of visual cul-ture has been around for more than a decade now,and in spite of the rapidly growing number of aca-demic courses, publications and conferences on thesubject, the field is still fluid and subject to contro-versy. Visual culture emerged, according to oneview, as a response to the media convergence andglobal flows of images in the late 20th century(Cartwright, 2002), centered on understanding howimages function in a broader cultural sphere and onhow people use visual media to make meaning ineveryday life.

While one could have hoped for a broad range ofvisual scholars to take on the challenge of this openventure and help promote and specify it produc-tively, much of the discussion has unfortunatelybeen clouded by the defensive criticisms from thefield of art history. In 1996, October published thenow infamous ’Visual Culture Questionnaire’,which more or less set the terms for subsequent de-bates on the subject. The respondents – mainly arthistorians – were focused more on airing anxietiesabout the dissolution of traditional art history thanon seriously exploring what a visual culture ap-proach could bring to the analysis of how imagesand their viewers make meaning in an era of culturalglobalization. Apparently they were provoked bythe growing preference for an ’anthropological’ or’relativist’ model of cultural analysis in the emerg-ing field of visual studies. Thomas Crow, for exam-ple, dismisses it as a ’a misguidedly populist im-pulse’ (Crow, 1996: 34), a complaint echoed byMartin Jay who speaks of ’a pseudopopulistleveling of all cultural values’ (Jay, 1996: 44).

To refute this critique is like engaging inshadow-boxing, since so little of it is moored in ac-tual work in visual and cultural studies. As DouglasCrimp’s incisive critique of this debate makes clear,we are left with a ’projection’ in which ’a social and

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historical de-contextualization of visual culturetakes place that is quite the opposite of what muchwork in cultural studies strives to achieve’ (Crimp,1999:153). Crimp not only presents a substantialdefense of visual studies, refuting the Octoberissue´s critique by citing factual research in thefield, but also concretely demonstrates the signifi-cance of a visual cultural approach to contemporaryart. By invoking the important, but in many ac-counts missing, link between Andy Warhol´s workand the queer counter-cultural milieu that inspiredhis early filmmaking, Crimp alters our view of bothWarhol´s art and the history of gay identity poli-tics.

In the recently released Journal of visual culture,Martin Jay is asked to reflect upon his cautions inthe 1996 questionaire against visual culture´s’democratic impulse’, that is, its readiness to in-clude, in his words, ’all manifestations of optical ex-perience, all variants of visual practice’ (Jay, 1996:42). Interestingly, six years later he qualifies hisprevious statement, recognizing the fundamental ad-vances of visual studies. Jay states: ’By democrati-zation, I simply meant the growing willingness totake seriously as objects of scholarly inquiry allmanifestations of our visual environment and expe-rience, not only those that were deliberately createdfor aesthetic effects’ (Jay, 2002: 88).

It is hard to think of a stronger overall case madefor visual culture than this acknowledgement of tra-ditional disciplines’ inclination to exclude vital areasof visual culture that are more than worthy of seri-ous academic study. The field of photojournalism isbut one example of this scholarly oblivion. If Mar-tin Jay thus may seem to have reconsidered his ear-lier dismissal of this approach, what the one handgives the other curiously takes back. After elo-quently presenting a case for the inclusiveness ofvisual studies, he turns around and reiterates thecomplaints from the October questionnaire. Toovercome ’the danger in such an indiscriminate lev-elling’, he finds it necessary to ’maintain the vexeddistinction between genuine works of art and de-rivative kitsch, high and low, avant-garde and aca-demic art, at least as a way to avoid the promiscu-ous reduction of everything to the same level of cul-tural significance’ (Jay, 2002:88). Jay leaves it atthat, without presenting any argument as to why,for whom, and to what purposes fixed notions ofquality and excellence are so important to maintain– notions, which he himself implies in the excerptpreviously quoted, that are deeply ideological, un-democratic, and elitist. As others have argued be-fore me (Rogoff, 1998: 20), visual studies’ rejection

of antiquated value hierarchies does not mean that itadvocates an undifferentiated relativism in whicheverything is equal to everything else. Rather thandifferentiating between the supposed value inherentin objects and images, proponents of visual cultureanalyze and make distinctions between differentviewing practices and processes of cultural assess-ment in particular historical situations.

Aesthetics and PoliticsTo a certain extent, the defensive positions that Jay(and others) take towards this emerging arena of in-quiry is explicitly rooted in a fear that it rules outconsiderations of the aesthetic in and of itself. Intheir view, the aesthetic specificities of images, es-pecially those that have been deliberately workedout in terms of an aesthetic ideal, cannot be madejustice to within the culturalist paradigm.

However, if Jay thus manifests a distaste for thepoliticization of the aesthetic, a fear of the reduc-tion of aesthetic works to political realities, I sus-pect that an even stronger fear can be distinguishedin his and others’ resistance to visual culture: thatof the aestethicization of politics – that is, of the ab-sorption of all political realities into images and’simulacra’. The loss of the idea of referential real-ity is a fundamental aspect of our postmodern pre-dicament. In the society of the image – of simula-tion, screen, network, spectacle – the hyperrealthreatens to overtake the real. Baudrillard saysabout contemporary images: ’if they fascinate us somuch it is not because they are sites of the produc-tion of meaning and representation – this would notbe new – it is on the contrary because they are sitesof disappearance of meaning and representation’(Baudrillard, 1985: 133).

As long as we confine our methods and objectsof study to traditional art history, there is not muchat stake in Baudrillard’s theory of a psychotic col-lapse of representation and reality. Such an ap-proach entails applying our interpreting skills tocontemplate the aesthetic specificities of artistic im-ages – often produced as self- or medium-reflexive –within the narrow, de-politicized context of a reifiedart history. Baudrillard’s claim becomes more of anissue if we open up the study of artworks to themore expansive, politically motivated inquiry ofvisual culture; the project of contextualizing art-works in terms of broader social practices almost in-evitably evokes the complex question of how repre-sentation relates to reality, aesthetics to politics.

However, when we apply Baudrillard’s argu-ment to a radically different category of images, a

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category usually expelled from the art historian’slist of objects worthy of aesthetic consideration, itreally comes to a head. I am, of course, referring todocumentary news photography: images that arenot only subjective expressions but also, in a tech-nical sense, objective imprints of the physicalworld. They are proof of wars, famines and naturaldisasters around the globe, proof of indisputablyreal people and real suffering. Can we really buyinto the argument that these types of images are’sites of disappearance of meaning and representa-tion’, detached signifiers that overtake and do awaywith the referential reality that in some sense gener-ated them? If these images ultimately refer only tothemselves, and there is no outside to them, ’no re-treat’ (Baudrillard 1985: 133), how do we accountfor the blood and tears shed by the people por-trayed? How do we account for the social and po-litical injustices that these images set out to notonly document but also, in the spirit of journalism’sEnlightenment ideals, counteract?

I suspect that it is exactly this nightmarish sce-nario of the disappearance of reality into a limitlessinterplay of self-mirroring images that deters somescholars from the idea of subjecting documentaryphotographs to aesthetic analysis. If we are to takeMartin Jay at his word, and also consider news im-ages as ’complex figural artifacts’ worthy of exami-nation on their own terms, we obviously run therisk of reducing political realities to aesthetic de-vices. If we analyze them in terms of iconography,rhetoric and symbolism, will there be anything leftbut style? Furthermore, is it at all defensible ethi-cally to talk about style when we are dealing withimages that, after all, document the tormented anddead bodies of others? In particular, deeply trau-matic events like the September 11 attacks, eventsso extreme that they seem unclassifiable, would bymany be held to defy the very possibility of his-torical, let alone aesthetic, representation.

Representation of/as TraumaThe big existential crisis of our time, and a core is-sue in the contemporary epistemological debate onhow to establish historical knowledge, historical’truth’, stems from the difficulty to gain footing inan irreducible reality that exists before or beyonddiscourse. However, this fact does not necessarilyimply that referential reality is purely absent orcompletely coded, that it is but an effect of repre-sentation. Rather, as the case of documentary newsimages clearly shows, we need a concept of realitythat goes beyond mere conventionalism, and a

model of representation that goes beyond binaryoppositions between the image as referential or assimulacral. Not either-or, not Baudrillard’s apoca-lyptic collapsing of one category into another, butboth at once.

In this regard, Hal Foster’s nuanced notion of’traumatic realism’ is arguably more productive(Foster, 1996: 130). In his analysis of AndyWarhol’s repetitions, Foster points to a ’third way’of reading images as both ’connected and discon-nected’ (1996: 130). They screen and protect usfrom the traumatic real, at the same time as theypoint to the real and allow it to poke through thescreen of repetition. This concept of traumatic real-ism is extremely useful as a key to understandingthe frantic (re)circulation of documentary photo-graphs in the wake of September 11. The wide-spread creation, viewing and collecting of these im-ages can be read exactly as a way of dis/connectingwith a traumatic real: as ’a warding away of trau-matic significance and an opening out to it, a de-fending against traumatic effect and a producing ofit’ (Foster, 1996: 132).

The complex issue of if, how, and when to repre-sent historical trauma inevitably evokes referencesto the Holocust – the ultimate event of suffering.The commonplace assumption is that this event –’Auschwitz’, ’the Final Solution’ – is the extremelimit case that threatens our traditional conceptualand representational categories. The obligation tobear witness to and document this traumatic past isundercut by the notion that the record should notbe distorted or trivialized by inadequate representa-tion. Usually the aesthetic is the first category to betargeted in this debate about proper Holocaust rep-resentation: Theodor Adorno’s ’to write poetry af-ter Auschwitz is barbaric’ is notorious (Adorno1949/1981:34). For Adorno, all forms of artistic ex-pression seemed irrelevant or even criminal in theface of torture and death. Moreover, beside theapologetic temptation of artistic renderings, theyalso effect pleasure, which for Adorno seemed anti-thetical to the historical event of the Holocaust.However, it is rarely acknowledged that Adorno re-turned to ’Auschwitz’ again and again, revising hisoriginal stance by holding up the unique potential ofart to give an authentic voice to suffering (DeKovenEzrahi, 1992: 260, Weissberg, 2001: 14).

Moreover, Andreas Huyssen points to a way togo beyond the stalemate in debates about how torepresent the Holocaust ’properly’ or how to avoidaestheticizing it by emphazing another of Adorno’skey concept: mimesis (Huyssen 2001). Huyssenreads Adorno against the lingering effects of the high

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culture versus mass culture dichotomy that, ironi-cally, were first and most influentially articulated byAdorno himself. Looking at Holocaust representa-tions in terms of their mimetic dimensions, allowingfor all kinds of narrative and figurative strategies in avariety of media and genres, is, as Huyssen demon-strates, more productive than trying to construct aHolocaust canon based on narrow aesthetic catego-ries that pit the unrepresentable against aestheti-cization, art against mass culture.

This line of argument undermines Martin Jay’sposition, which still rests on the unquestioned mod-ernist dichotomy that pits mass culture against formsof high art, aesthetic quality against political rel-evance. He, like many other critics of visual culture,seem to pre-suppose a bipolar positioning of the aes-thetic and the political, where the one categorythreatens to collapse into the other if they are notprogrammatically separated. In contrast, I want tostress the possibility of a skillful examination of theaesthetic, not only in itself but also of how the aes-thetic functions within and feeds a particular politicsor ideology. We cannot fully understand the powerand popular resonance of documentary news imagesif we do not account for their aesthetic and rhetoricalqualities. Such an analysis does not imply afetishistic denial of the documentary image’s referen-tial relation to reality, on the contrary, it promotes aricher understanding of its political and historicalcontingency.

ConclusionThe notion of a pictorial turn, of a culture totallydominated by pictures, of an age of ’spectacle’ and’surveillance’, seems, uncannily, to have material-ized in the iconomania accompanying the Septem-ber 11 terrorist attack and its aftermath. This is byfar the most photographed event in history, and thepopular demand for documentary images – in par-ticular still photographs – representing it seems tohave reached a point few could have anticipated.How, then, are we to understand the social and psy-chological role of documentary photography in con-nection with 9-11? On the one hand, critics talk ofvoyeurism and pornography of violence. The pic-tures of people jumping from the twin towers, topick the most extreme example, obviously run therisk of invading the privacy not only of these help-less human beings, but also of the viewer beingforced to witness their fatal descent. The moral andpolitical implications of the exposure – not to sayexploitation – of the ’distant suffering of others’(Boltanski, 1999) has received increasing attention

in media studies, disqualifying the simplistic jour-nalistic argument that shocking images serve to raisepublic consciousness and counteract violations ofhuman rights. So far, there is no evidence that im-ages of atrocity, no matter how graphic, stopsatrocity from reocurring (Moeller, 1999; Perlmutter,1998; Zelizer, 1998).

On the other hand, many who have seen orhelped organize the exhibition ’Here Is New York’have made the case that the photographic imageshave helped people respond to and make sense ofwhat happened on September 11. The taking aswell as viewing of photographs is believed to havehelped the public bear witness and promote its ownhealing. By reclaiming the haunting disaster imagesfrom the media flow and offering the public a con-secrated space to contemplate them in the presenceof fellow human beings, ’Here Is New York’ seemsto have enabled a unique sense of communitas andworking through of the 9-11 event. However, thepictures sold by the street vendors could very wellplay a similar therapeutic role for people viewingand buying them. This ultimately points to a blankspot in the field of media studies: We still knowvery little about the precise ways in which peopleview documentary photographs, whether in thestreets, in the paper or in gallery spaces. What pre-cisely does the sight of these photographs awakenin viewers? Historical knowledge? A sense of evi-dence? Fear, grief, excitement, relief? Why do peo-ple buy disaster pictures? To remember or, rather,to forget? What do they actually do with the pic-tures – put them away in a drawer, include them intheir private photo albums, hang them on the wall?Is there any significant difference between the expe-rience of viewing culturally ’legitimized’ photo-graphs (in the news media, official commemorativebooks, museums and galleries) and the appropri-ated, commodified images sold in the streets? There is also reason to caution against the ten-dency among some television scholars to pit the’abstract’ and ’distancing’ medium of still photog-raphy against the ’visual immediacy’ of television.The case of 9-11 can be used to complicate this ar-gument, since it indicates that the postmodern, im-mediate medium of television to some degree failedto connect the audience with reality. To a remark-able extent, people turned to the older, pre-tele-vision medium of still photography in order to de-fictionalize the unfathomable terrorist deeds. It isworth citing the Village Voice critic Vince Aletti: ’Ioverdosed on TV coverage long ago, but I keeplooking for a picture that will make it all real, helpme understand, jolt me, make me feel something be-

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sides numb’. Arguably, it is the phenomenologicalqualities of photographs that make the difference.They are material things, objects that you can hold,scrutinize, share, keep, own, put away and take outagain. Further, at work here is also the popular be-lief in the power of photography to magically resur-rect reality. The photographs (re)circulated in thewake of 9-11 seem to take on the function of relics.They are perceived not (only) as representations ofthe real, but as actual pieces of the real. To walkaway with an image related to 9-11 is to walk awaywith a piece of the event, as was the case whenpeople carried off parts of the Berlin wall. There is,as W.J.T. Mitchell points out, a prevailing supersti-tious attitude towards images and objects in our cul-ture. Practices like totemism, fetishism, idolatry,and animism are far from eradicated. Mitchell says:’We are stuck with our magical, premodern attitudestoward objects, especially pictures, and our task isnot to overcome these attitudes but to understandthem’. For all the rhetoric about the power of newsimages to change the world, shock the public andset the agenda for governmental policy, we still donot know much about how they operate on viewersand on the world (redundant?). A lot more work isneeded on how they communicate as signs andsymbols, and what sort of power they have to af-

fect human emotions and behaviour. Considering theincreasingly important role news images play in theformation and documentation of historical events,and how deeply enmeshed they are in our political,social and cultural everyday life, there is an obviousneed for an overall, interdisciplinary approach likevisual culture. With its dismantling of antiquatedvalue hierachies, it has paved the way for an aca-demic legitimization of the study of journalistic im-ages, and of how they function not only within thecontext of news journalism, but in culture at large.The strength of visual culture is that it emphasizesboth the importance of studying the social field ofthe visual, the everyday practices of looking, and ofthe reconsideration of non-art images – like newsphotography – as complex artifacts worthy of ex-amination in their own right. As I have argued inthis article, the strong resistance to the visual cul-ture approach from several prominent scholars inthe field of visual studies can be ascribed to a deep-rooted fear of conflating aesthetics with politicswhich, after all, was the ultimate strategy of fas-cism. However, the political and psychological im-pact of documentary photographs cannot be fullyexplored unless their aesthetic qualities are takeninto consideration. We cannot understand thepower and popular resonance of Franklin’s photo of

People bying photographs at gorund zero. To walk away with an image related to 9-11 is to walk away with apiece of the event, similar to when people carried off parts of the Berlin wall.

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the three firefighters, for example, if we don’t takeaccount of its aesthetic devices – and the way thesedevices feed the official self-glorifying rhetoric ofthe U.S. in the wake of the attack. Reading the 9-11photographs as cultural artifacts with rhetoricalqualities endows us with a richer understanding ofhow they make us percieve this historical event indifferent ways. It is precisely as representations,not presentations, that documentary photographshelp us connect with the real and integrate trau-matic historical events like 9-11 into a symbolic,

that is comprehensible, order. However, as Hal Fos-ter’s notion of traumatic realism makes clear, theirpower to do so is nevertheless given by their para-doxical ability to let the real ’shine through’ thescreen of representation. Quite contrary to Baud-rillard’s iconoclastic thesis, I believe that the mostamazing thing with these documentary photo-graphs, and the challenge for any scholar interestedin understanding their power, is that, coded andconventional as they are, they can still be so real tous that we even kill and die for them.

Note

1. Andrew Heyward, President CBS News, stated atthe seminar ’Television and the War on Terrorism’at The Museum of Television & Radio, NYC,Monday February 11, 2002.

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