Paper short abstract:

This paper is a preliminary attempt to engage the question of violence and visuality through the domain of photojournalistic practice in modern India. By using examples from certain key moments of political violence in India (communal conflict, Operation Green Hunt, and so on) I will attempt to complicate the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a preliminary attempt to engage the question of violence and visuality through the domain of photojournalistic practice in modern India. In this context I am intrigued by a recent formulation, "what do pictures want", by WJT Mitchell. Very simply, by distinguishing between picture and image (a picture being that which we 'see' - either physically, as a photo on the wall, or in our mind; and an image as a 'likeness, figure, motif or form that appears in some medium or another' - that makes its appearance as a picture), Mitchell makes an argument for the image as a 'vital sign'. These then play a key role in social life, whereby images are linked to desire and the 'surplus value' that they generate. In other words even if pictures are destroyed, images can live on - to haunt, tempt, frighten, attract. In his words, these become 'strange attractors'. However, the question for me becomes which pictures do we respond to? Or do not. Or indeed if one can ever assume a collective "we" in the viewer. So would it then be more appropriate to pose the issue in terms of a fractured viewership - where the moment of viewing is always already implicated in an ongoing politics of violence and difference. These are some of the issues of concern here.