ABSTRACT

In the photographic album of the 9/11 catastrophe, panoramic images of the twin towers' destruction might have captured the horror of the event, but it was the ordinary snapshots and the portraits of the missing that personalized the disaster. This chapter provides the collection's background and highlights some of the parameters of an existing visual/sensory world through which the Taliban are often encountered. It then traces three ways, the photographs' status as counter-images that contest other common visualizations of the Taliban. The chapter focuses on the formal portraits, and will return to Butler's theoretical considerations of wartime visuality and ethical responses, as well as Rancière's thoughts on the politics of aesthetics and critical art. Photography's haunting quality, as related to death and Butler's conception of grievability as the precondition of life, has much to do with the medium's unique relationship to temporality.