The Surprising Detritus of Leisure: Encountering the Late Photography of War

Abstract

This paper explores the Late Photography of War created in the aftermath of conflict, violence, and atrocity and makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that the belatedness, absence, and ruin central to the Late Photography of War have the capacity to trouble the ethical viewing relations underscoring one of the dominant interpretive frameworks of war photography—that of pity. Rather than reproducing a familiar logic in which benevolent viewers are privileged over foreign landscapes and abject victims, these photographs foreground a more ambivalent set of viewing relations which elongates the moment of encounter between the viewer and the picture. Secondly, the paper explores this ambivalence through a common but unexamined motif in Late Photography: the juxtaposition of leisure and war. Focusing on the material detritus of leisure facilities that populate the photographs of Simon Norfolk and Angus Boulton (eg, bullet-marked hotels, wrecked swimming pools), the paper suggests that the tentative formations of solidarity between viewers and the ghosts populating these images constitute a provocative alternative viewing relation.

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