Photography, Trace, and Trauma

Photography is often associated with trauma. Here’s why: the automatic nature of the process, the wide-open camera lens, and the light sensitivity of film that records contingent details unnoticed by the operator are not unlike what happens in a traumatic event, when the effects bypass consciousness and lodge deeply and irremediably in the unconscious mind and in the nervous system. Just as a traumatic event bypasses consciousness, indexical processes like photography?which record the trace of something now absent from the viewer of the picture--bypass artistic intention and convention. In this beautifully written, succinct book, Margaret Iversen explores the particular history of the medium that emphasizes this aspect of photography. But she also considers ?indexical” art in other media, especially sculpture that presents or simulates a trace (or ?index”) of a traumatic event, such as casting, rubbings, moulds, and holography/sculpting with light. (Please note that Iversen does not explore sexual trauma, but rather trauma that occurs in war, Holocaust, modernization, and the like.) Throughout, the book engages a wide range of modern and contemporary artists and their relationships to the photograph: Chantal Akerman, Anna Barriball, Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mary Kelly, Allan McCollum, Zoe Leonard, Susan Morris, Gabriel Orozco, Amalia Pica, Robert Rauschenberg, and Gerhard Richter.

Margaret Iversen is professor emerita of art history at the University of Essex. She is the author of several books, including Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, and coauthor of Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures, also published by the University of Chicago Press.