After-images: Trauma, history and connection in the photography of Alfredo Jaar

• Autores: Parvati Nair
• Localización: Quaderns-e, ISSN-e 1696-8298, Vol. 16, Nº. 1-2, 2011, págs. 51-59
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In 1994, Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean photographer and installation artist based in New York, went to Rwanda to collect first-hand testimonies of the genocide that was then taking place there. His presence constituted not merely an observation of events taking place, but also a profound personal involvement with the people and places that he encountered. The result, upon his return from Rwanda, was the Rwanda Project 1994-2000, an installation that sought to reverse objectifying tendencies in photojournalism through an intensely personal and subjective meditation on violence, loss and trauma.

    This paper seeks to explore the notion of the after-image. By this, I mean the power of certain images to follow us and impose upon us, as viewers, an agency and a historical imperative that is theirs. I shall do so by tracing this attempt by Jaar to counter what is often referred to as ‘victim photography’ and to offer, instead, the space of the photograph as one of historical reconstruction and connection. In this sense, Jaar’s work sheds light upon the otherwise largely neglected context of Rwanda and works against the silence and invisibility of those who survived the genocide that took place there. In its attempt to mediate memory, Jaar’s work crosses temporal and spatial boundaries. Thus, if photography is most obviously about loss and the death of the moment, then in Jaar’s work, we also encounter a reversal of the same, whereby the subjects of his images transpose to viewers reverberations of their silenced histories.