Paper short abstract:

This paper contrasts two photographic traces of political deaths, their dissemination and their communities to consider not only whether an anthropologist should help to facilitate these and similar photographs to 'speak', but also the extents and means through which this could, or should, be done.

Paper long abstract:

This paper begins with a common ethnographic context—that of a researcher sitting with a family to review and discuss their photo albums. Then, a seemingly innocuous photograph of a smiling man elicits a moment of rupture in which a trace, "a tiny spark of contingency" (Benjamin 1985 [1931]), reveals their connection to a man's traumatic death for political ends. The paper contrasts this event with another in which a political party pastes posters across the streets of a city in south India containing newly surfaced war trophy photographs of bullet-ridden bodies. The aesthetics and profilmic contents of the photographs, the contexts in which they were shared, and the desires of the communities with whom the researcher worked, will be examined to consider not only whether the anthropologist should help to facilitate these and similar photographs to 'speak', but also the extents and means through which this could, or should, be done. Does an open secret about a political murder permit a researcher to share pertinent images and stories? Should the requests of the community disseminating a photograph be heeded when the image is from a civil war in another country? What impacts should potential personal, political and affective consequences of circulating such traces be considered by a researcher when the dead can no longer directly speak for themselves, the circumstances of their deaths or the representations of their bodies? When and how do such photographs speak for themselves?