ABSTRACT
This chapter is an enquiry into the fascination or preoccupation with the damaged or ruined image. It notes how twentieth-century aesthetics celebrated the random assemblages and accidental collages in publically displayed imagery as it became weathered and torn. It discusses art movements that either appropriated such objects or damaged their own works as part of the working practice and how some have argued that such art movements represented a mirroring of the destruction and chaos of war and occupation in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter examines work that uses decay and damage as aesthetic methods, as ways of meditating on the effects of nature, on mortality and the transience of all representations. Some use the damaged image to reflect on contemporary injustices and suffering, that is, as equivalents of the assaults on human bodies and identities. Some express the frailty of memory by means of the decaying image. There is also the use of the damaged image to exemplify the beauty of decay or as a means of revealing the materiality of the photograph. All approaches are engaged in the project of representing what William E. Connolly has termed, “the fragility of things”.
