Paper short abstract:

In this paper we reflect on the images produced by some of India’s most marginal indigenous communities during the pandemic, and their reframing of ethical debates around representations of suffering. We examine their circulation, materiality and effectiveness in claiming memory against erasure.

Paper long abstract:

During the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, mainstream media has been busy erasing memory and its very possibility - by tweaking numbers, censoring the most direct and brutal images of suffering, and aligning with governments’ calls to ‘move on’ and ‘get back to normal’. This process of erasure is, although for different reasons, in line with institutionalised ethical frameworks for representing suffering, for instance in academia. Within the famous ‘child and vulture’ debate, photography emerges as an act of violence - a violence that is generally perpetrated by the observer separated from, and hierarchically superior to, the sufferer. In the context of the ‘democratisation’ of the ability to produce and circulate images by communities, however, the ethics of visuality have shifted. In this paper we offer a reflection on the images produced by some of India’s most marginal indigenous communities during the pandemic, with a focus on their reframing of ethical debates around representations of suffering. In the images we discuss, and in contrast to the images that officially circulate, death is not hidden but brutally exposed, and so is the ever thin threshold between life and death, human and non human. We see humans that are in reality dead (the poor are more dead than human), we see animals that are more like humans (they have morality that humans have lost), we see humans that are more like animals. We reflect on the circulation of these images, the medium of their circulation, and on their effectiveness in claiming memory against erasure.