ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the visual representations of the terrorist attacks in New York, London and Oslo to critical analysis through the lens of a cultural and visual victimology. It introduces in turn our three case study photographs taken in New York, London and Oslo. The chapter focuses on how these representations enable us to witness trauma at a distance, but are also mobilized to generate particular cultural and political meanings. The complex relationship between witnessing and bearing witness as a way of raising broader questions about how harm, violence and victimization are composed and responded to: for the purposes of this chapter it conceptualize this to be the poetics of justice. The culture of fear, from which this and other cultural myths have grown, is where our cultural victimological analysis of trauma and the poetics of justice begin: in the pursuit of a visual victimology.
