Political ReviewNet
First for Politics and International Relations Book Reviews

• Home
• Search Reviews
• About Political ReviewNet

Book Reviews

War, famine, forced displacement, epidemic, genocide, and other large-scale humanly generated catastrophes by definition generate widespread mayhem and suffering, both individual and collective. Such aggregate phenomena typically have complex political causes and induce equally complex political consequences that demand complex political remedies. How, indeed if, "we"-whether directly effected or not-understand these causes, consequences, and remedies and how that understanding enters into our sense of our selves and the world we inhabit, depends on whether and how we see them. This too, of course is a matter of politics, specifically the politics of perception, representation, and distribution. The contributors to this timely, innovative volume address a number of dimensions of politics in nearly all these senses.

Beautiful Suffering consists of five essays as well as a retrospective on an exhibition of the same name organized at the Williams College Museum of Art in the spring of 2006. The essays, occupying roughly the first half of the volume, are written by four individuals directly involved in the organizing the exhibition and one sympathetic commentator. Political theorist Mark Reinhardt addresses what might be called the aesthetics of representation and especially the real quandaries raised when, in their work, photographers capture violence, mayhem, suffering, and so forth in ways that make them seem "beautiful." This is important insofar as critics regularly insist (unconvincingly to my mind) that beautiful images either distract attention from the suffering and hardship they portray or reify the subject of the image, thereby universalizing pain and suffering as the "human condition". Curator John Stromberg focuses on the conventions of orthodox documentary photography and shows how these emerged in large measure from the sustained efforts of a handful of well-known photographers, curators, and critics. Stromberg thus alerts us to two crucial issues. First, as is the case more generally, these conventions are hardly naive but, rather, were established as a by-product of the interactions of identifiable individuals endeavoring to attain certain personal and aesthetic aims. Second, documentary practice is itself a "style" and hence does not simply amount to simply reporting or recording the "truth." As a result, the task of coming to grips with the ethical and political dilemmas that Reinhardt so incisively addresses is inescapable.

The next two essays are by Art Historians. Erina Duganne takes up the broad matter of distributional strategy, specifically questions of how images are appropriated and displayed in various media and in various venues. Holly Edwards traces the vicissitudes of a single image (a very familiar photograph from the mid-1980s by Steve McCurry of a young girl displaced by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) as it was used and reprinted and recirculated in various ways over the course of nearly two decades. In combination, Duganne and Edwards alert us to the importance of focusing less on photographs as objects than on photography as an activity, one in which differentially situated actors seek to use images, more or less successfully, for distinct purposes-journalism, advertising, fundraising by humanitarian organizations, art, and so forth.

The final essay, by cultural theorist Mieke Bal, while in many ways insightful, also is in some ways the least compelling in the volume. That is understandable because, unlike the other authors, she was not directly involved in coordinating the exhibition and so had less intimate and sustained interaction with the various images, their context, and their history. Her essay is more a comment on the exhibition than an active, constituent component of it. Bal takes the exhibition and the themes raised in the other essays in the volume as an opportunity to address the more general topic of "political art" and, while she raises a set of significant issues, loses me (and I fear will lose other readers) in a tour of Adorno, a detour into Deleuze, and a flurry of references to other less well-recognized literary and cultural theorists. Bal's essay suggests why it is important to keep discussions of the ways politics intersects with art generally, and photography in particular, grounded.

The second half of the book, subtitled "Exhibition in Retrospect," reproduces the images (59 plates, some color, some black and white) and accompanying text from the exhibition in roughly the sequence that visitors to the museum would have encountered them. It provides essential ballast for the theoretical ruminations offered in the preceding essays, each of which refers more or less extensively to the images and texts from the exhibition. Every image, in turn, is indexed back the pages in the various essays that refer to it. So, depending on one's predilections, readers might start at either end of the book and tack back and forth between theoretical reflections and images or vice versa. Indeed, the innovative design of the volume invites readers to do just that. I will note too that the design of the volume is provocative in other ways. This starts with the cover where a strategically placed thumb creates the discrepant impressions that the reader herself is holding a copy of an image from The New York Times showing a bound, hooded, and bleeding Iraqi slumped in the shadow of the American soldier who is guarding him and that she herself, rather than the soldier, is casting the shadow captured in the photograph. This seems to me subtly to pose the question of what complicity, if any, those who view photographs share with those who formulate, implement, and defend the sorts of policy that, in fact, create suffering and pain on a wide scale.

For a discipline like ours, where many practitioners proclaim their commitment to intellectual pluralism, Beautiful Suffering offers an exemplary instance of interdisciplinary collaboration. More substantively, it is a compelling work on political questions of pressing and enduring importance. In both senses, then, Beautiful Suffering is a volume that deserves wide readership among political scientists.

• Home
• Search Reviews
• About Political ReviewNet

Privacy Policy