Photographs of Catastrophe and the Representation of Vulnerable Humanity

As is now oft-noted, catastrophe conceived as the human-made possibility of species-destruction is a recent historical phenomenon that began with the Holocaust and the detonation of nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Jean-François Lyotard said that the Holocaust was equivalent to an earthquake that destroyed “the very instruments used to measure earthquakes” so that all efforts to measure its magnitude quantitatively are bound to fail. ¹ Sociologist Ulrich Beck echoes this idea in reference to a “catastrophe society” in which disasters escape clear measures, uncertainty prevails, emergencies are the normal state of affairs, and all remedies create new risks. ² According to Eric Santner and Moishe Postone, violence is the permanent condition of humanity in the twenty-first century, and catastrophe signifies “an ontological absence that would seem to escape the efficacy of social and psychic practices of integration, representation, … any kind of repair … or ‘redemption.’” ³ Once defined as “ontological absence” or immeasurable, catastrophe implies a permanent condition that is hard to conceive in historical terms. ⁴