ABSTRACT
In Sans Soleil (1983), Chris Marker reflects, “I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to remember?” From painting to photography, the image world has always been a domain of memory. The advent of the camera has made it easier for mankind to frame and remember reality. But this remembrance remains a matter of framing. What does the photographer find worthy of capturing and how has the photographer decided to frame that reality, impacts the life of that memory. Different angles give rise to different frames and show different subjectivities around the same memory. Furthermore, the institutional discourse created around the image gives it a greater authority and makes it part of the collective memory. Images of war, while evidentiary, show subjective views of reality and post-war these images are canonized in archives where power is exercised in constructing a narrative about the war. As Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others, “War-making and picture taking are congruent activities” (53). The violence committed during war is often repeated through war photography in the form of omissions and appropriations. The politics of appropriation of women’s trauma and their victimization in images of war are so strong that sometimes a woman is summoned to be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time, without any regard to her own identity and self-representation. Consider, for instance, the following photograph from Bangladesh (see Figure 6.1).
