ABSTRACT
The photographer focused, both photographically and in terms of his desire, on the star-like cicatrices covering the women's bodies. To stress the cicatrices, the photographer had overpainted their negative inscription so that they printed white. The increasing sense of visual sovereignty empowers one not only to make images, as contemporary practitioners are doing, but to re-engage with and re-interpret historical images from radically different perspectives, to give 'voice' to images and through them to insert the human voice, breaking through the containing contexts of photographs, to articulate the submerged. While photographs may have different densities in the way that they bring together those field forces of social relations and present their contents, they nonetheless all carry with them the characteristics of photography as a medium of inscription. As such, all photographs are touched in some way, to a greater or lesser extent – official photographs, family photographs, portraits, the complex residues of cross-cultural encounter.
