The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture

With images of disaster and cultural trauma displayed across more and more media in contemporary life, The Image and the Witness is a timely collection of new essays about the ethics of the image in the digital age. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection discusses the portrayal of trauma in contemporary media and explores the notion of the image as a witness to historical events. Subjects under discussion include post- traumatic memory, documentary ethics and the iconic power of images, as well as the work of Chris Marker, Errol Morris, Derek Jarman and Boris Mikhailov and images from popular culture, websites and home movies. Arguing for the importance of images in communicating cultural trauma, this volume corrects the bias towards the written and the spoken word in trauma studies, providing a new framework for understanding the role of the image in the media-saturated twenty-first century. Films discussed include Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Blue (1993) and Level 5 (1996).