ABSTRACT
Throughout its history, photography has had an intimate relationship with violence. Photographs not only document violence around the globe but also extend its repertoire and reach. Photographs can, for instance, prompt scrutiny of hitherto unrecognised or disavowed acts, forms, perpetrators or subjects of violence – they are part of how we imagine where violence happens, to whom and even what counts as violent. The debate over aestheticisation thus makes a good starting point for considering photography's role in the visual politics of violence. Perhaps aestheticisation, most narrowly construed, renders a scene in a way that invites such responses. Black activists waging the visual campaign against lynching earlier in the century were well aware that exhibiting constitutively violent images is fraught with peril.
