Considering the readings of this week, I would like to continue with my thoughts and ideas of the last post. What does it do to us, spectators, and to victims themselves of them being “incapable of returning the gaze“? (Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator” p.96)
Rancière describes it as one of the reasons for why and how horror through images is being banalized- not due to the amount of images- it is the lack of the victim looking at us; objectified bodies without names.
I deeply appreciate the way that Ariella Azoulay writes in “The Civil Contract of Photography” about the different gazes and expressions of the photographed in the daguerreotypes. ” These photographed people address someone who is not present, an addressee who opens up the space in which they are placed, who undoes – albeit very slightly – its oppressive limits. Though they know nothing of the category of a universal addressee, their gaze is addressed to someone like her whose existence they assume when they address their gaze to her, revealing something of their feelings toward their enslavers.” (p.173)
Their gaze has power as it goes beyond the very moment of being “violently fixed”; this gaze goes out of the image, and therefore out of time. Does the claimed truth carry true affect?
The spectator does not know if the gaze of the ones becoming stationary through photography has been choreographed or decided by the photographer/ director, therefore she needs to look with a “gothic lens” at the ones who became “gothic subjects”.
(gothic lens / gothic subject are concepts by Bonnie Honig, included by Christina Beltrán in her text “Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic”.)