Elisaveta Dvorakk: Affect and Identification: Aesthetic and Epistemological Potentials of Aftermath Photography. (GER)

Aftermath photography engages with the traces and repercussions of violence without depicting the actual event. This lecture analyses the epistemological potentials of this photographic genre, which operates at the intersection of aesthetics, image critique, and knowledge production. The starting point is the question of how aftermath photography functions within an episteme of visibility, in which violence is often either rendered invisible or circulates in the media as hyper-affective and hyper-aestheticised shock imagery.

The focus lies on selected photographic series by Sophie Ristelhueber (*1949). Her works are examined through two central lines of critique: the critique of hyper-aestheticisation, which accuses aftermath photography of maintaining an aestheticising distance, and the critique of indexicality, which questions the possibility of a direct reference to the depicted subject matter. Furthermore, the role of viewer identification with the image content is explored. While embedded journalism and classical war photography often aim at eliciting affect through direct confrontation with violence and fostering an essentialising identification with the subject, aftermath aesthetics creates a more complex mode of reception. It encourages viewers to engage with traces and absences, inviting them to reflect on their own position as spectators.

Finally, the lecture discusses to what extent aftermath photography not only evokes affective responses but also enables a critical reflection on the representation of the aftermath of violence, thereby acting as a form of resistant visual politics.

Elisaveta Dvorakk is an art and image historian and works as a research coordinator at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg | Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation at Humboldt University of Berlin. Previously, she worked as a research associate at the Chair of Eastern European Art History at the Institute for Art and Image History at HU Berlin. Her dissertation, “Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Image Reports 1937-38: Journalistic Travel Photography and Political Aesthetics of the Documentary”, was awarded the 2024 Rudolf Arnheim Prize by the Institute for Art and Image History at HU Berlin. Elisaveta Dvorakk’s research encompasses the theory and history of photography, postcolonial, queer, and postsecular theories, media memory politics and (post-)digital heritage, as well as model theory and the epistemological critique of image-based knowledge production. Most recently, her monograph “The Hashem el Madani Collection in the Arab Image Foundation: Postcolonial Discourses on Commercial Studio Photography in Lebanon, 1950-1980” (2022, in German) and the co-edited volume “Feminist Visions Before and After 1989: Contributions to Gender, Media, and Activism Studies in the GDR/FRG and Eastern Europe” (2022, in German) were published.

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
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Beginn: 18.45