Susie Linfield: The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010)

“In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226482529, 9780226482521
344 pages

review (Frances Richard, The Nation)
review (Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian)

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continent. journal, Issue 2.4 (2013)

continent. maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, politics and art.

continent. exists as a platform for thinking through media. text, image, video, sound and new forms of publishing online are presented as reflections on and challenges to contemporary conditions in politics, media studies, art, film and philosophical thought.

Contributors to this issue: Alexander R. Galloway, Peter Burleigh, Isaac Linder, Nico Jenkins, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, A. Staley Groves, Eileen A. Joy, Bernhard Garnicnig, Paul Thomas and Tim Morton

Edited by Paul Boshears, Jamie Allen, Nico Jenkins
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN 2159-9920

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Trevor Paglen: I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World (2007)

They’re on the shoulders of all military personnel: patches showing what a soldier’s unit does. But what if that’s Top Secret?

In a work that combines ingenious journalism and bizarrely encoded art, author/photographer/investigator Trevor Paglen uncovers 75 never-before-seen-in-public military patches that reveal a bizarre secret world of the American military. Paglen investigates classified weapons projects and intelligence operations by examining their own imagery and jargon, disclosing new facts about important classified military units—here known by peculiar names (“Goat Suckers,” “None of Your Fucking Business,” “Tastes Like Chicken”) and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. The precisely photographed patches—worn by military personnel working on classified missions, such as those at the legendary Area 51—reveal much about a strange and eerie world about which little was previously known.

The author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide, based on extensive interviews with military sources and government records, to the patches included here, making this volume perhaps the best available survey of the military’s black world—a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11.

Publisher Melville House, 2007
ISBN 1933633328, 9781933633329
136 pages

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