Campbell - "Horrific Blindness - Images of Death in Contemporary Media"

Cambell, D. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 8, No. 1. Routledge, 2004.

David Campbell, a professor of cultural and political geography, uses this essay to explore the representation of atrocity in contemporary visual culture. He proposes that rather than becoming dulled to the horror of images of death due to a proliferation of images of violence, there is a “disappearance of the dead” in contemporary media, and this absence should be questioned (Campbell, 55).

T.J. Clark, like Campbell, argues against turning away from the sight of death. Campbell (67) describes the current state of media representation of war as one of “horrific blindness”. Clark also focuses on the importance of sight; his book The Sight of Death emphasises the importance of looking, looking and looking again. The book is a diary record of the writer’s repeated visits to two Nicolas Poussin paintings in the Getty Museum. Although vastly different in subject matter to Campbell’s text, Clark’s work shares with it a notion that we must look in order to learn how to look.

When looking for a chronicle such as his in the published world, Clark could not find one. He speculates that perhaps one reason a record of repeated looking is avoided is the fear that by throwing the image back into the flow of time we might unravel some fixed, tolerable state (Clark, 8). Like Campbell, who discusses how photographs change over time and in different contexts, Clark (8) reminds us that images do not live everlastingly in a fixed state. Both writers argue that the possible excuses for not looking are not acceptable. For Clark (240), the reality is that there can be no future in a culture that does not have a daily reiteration of the affliction of the present and that it is only from the depths of horror that a new sort of socialism can emerge.

What this last point makes me think about is the difference between choosing to look at images (as Clark does) and being shown images by the media. At the present, this problem is side-stepped by the media’s self-censoring, but as Campbell (71) makes clear - avoidance in this situation is not a neutral decision, it is an injustice. We must look to learn how to look.

Works Cited

Clark, T. The Sight of Death: an experiment in art writing. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2006.