ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how we can theorize images in ways that do not neutralize what they represent. It uses the “photobomb”-pervaded post-World War II consciousness as an example of how the power of a photographic image can pervade consciousness and induce fear. Paradoxically, its ubiquity reinstated the sense that this was a picture of daily life. The ethical implications of seeing the mushroom cloud, now in its multi-sited appearances as an aesthetic yet kitschy vision of power and, paradoxically, naiveté, are part of the work of oblivion, of obliteration, of forgetting and annihilating—part of the work of photography.
