ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the aftermath photograph as a particular form that offers an alternative way of representing war and conflict. The examples discusses in the chapter by Simon Norfolk, Rosemary Laing, Heungsoon Im, Ahlam Shibli and Rineke Dijkstra explore the way in which this approach reflects upon the issues beyond those provoked by traditional images of conflict. These works mobilize an ambivalent spectatorial position in order to direct viewers beyond the circumstances of the event itself towards a consideration of systemic causes of violence and conflict. As such, photography’s capacity to intervene in the visual field and the political order that sustains the uneven distribution of visual and other rights to refugees may not lie in direct representation, but in visualizing the political relations that demarcate the refugee from the citizen. Rather than historical or political absolutes, in Im’s work the ‘ambiguous nature of late photography thus runs parallel with the ambiguous state of peace in the Korean Peninsula’.
