Courses

This course explores the ways in which both war and peace since the twentieth century have been imagined and represented, and how those visual practices might be unlearned and reimagined. We will discuss the project of making images of and against war from World War I and II, to nuclear war and Holocaust, colonial wars, proxy wars, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. What do these images and imaginings of war and peace leave out of view, and how can we bring both underlying social vulnerability and extant networks of protest and resistance into greater visibility?  How might we avoid automatized reiterations of well-worn locations and scenarios of violence, for example in constructions of “the enemy,” and develop new approaches to the nationalist, racialized, and gendered stakes of conflict?  What alternative acts of intervention, witnessing, memorialization and reparation might we create so as to see emergencies more freshly –at a time of conflict, as well as in anticipation and in retrospect? Can the visual archives of violence be reframed and re-circulated to shape more firmly the potential of justice, cohabitation and peace? How can visualizations of anti-war movements and peace actions be mobilized more effectively? 

Our discussions will be based on the close study of essays, films, images, photo-books, archives, exhibitions and memorials by, among others, Leni Riefenstahl, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, Robert Capa, Keiji Nakasawa, Alain Resnais, Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Diana Taylor, Thy Phu, David Schneer, Michael Rothberg, Amitav Gosh, Sharon Sliwinski, Nina Berman, Jenny Holzer, Walid Raad, Harun Farocki, Jon Berger, Gilo Pontecorvo, Alfredo Jaar, and more.

This-team taught course is inspired by the documentary work of Susan Meiselas. Her distinctive photographic practice with communities in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Kurdistan and elsewhere, her repeated return to sites of conflict over time and her collaboration with the subjects of her images, as well as her extensive and innovative archival work, serve as one model for the kinds of approaches we want to explore and foster.