ABSTRACT
With the globalization of video recording and distribution technology in the first decade of the twenty-first century and the related globalization of the imagined recording and viewing communities, visual agency has emerged as an important part of the processes that make up international politics. Soldiers’ video recordings of atrocities such as those in Abu Ghraib, protesters’ visual denunciations of the repression of dissent in the Arab Spring and visual artists’ questioning of security practices attest to the power of visual agency, as do increasingly ubiquitous bans on filming. On the other hand, meta-coverage of political events has been criticized for shifting the focus from the events themselves to mediation or the media aspects of events. While the increasing prominence given to visual agency and the mediation of conflict makes these interesting themes for documentary filmmaking, they raise tricky questions about how to negotiate attention to the visual agency of documenting within a genre that, for the most part, has seen itself as neutrally observing the world.
