The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield (review)

The politics of looking have long been contentious for scholars in a variety of ways; even more precarious is the role of the gaze regarding issues of violence and suffering. It is vital for rhetorical scholars to engage with a variety of approaches to photography and visual culture that contribute to the continued study of visual rhetoric. In her book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, Susie Linfield offers a way to engage with images of suffering that stands in contrast to work in photographic criticism that claims that viewing such photographs perpetuates violence against the victims portrayed. Instead, Linfield argues that while a photograph maybe “created by a person of relative privilege, it might nevertheless foster ideas of human connection and a vision of a less unjust world” (237). Much of Linfield’s book works to provide support that viewing images of violence does not necessarily participate in the violence or perpetuate it; instead, viewing images of political violence can connect people in ways that develop mutual understanding and the foundation for solidarity and change. From a rhetorical perspective, Linfield’s argument speaks to ways in which audiences can create a variety of responses to a particular photograph and are not indeed limited to respond with pity or by perpetuating violence toward those pictured in photographs of political violence.

Divided into three sections, “Polemics,” “Places,” and “People,” The Cruel Radiance introduces the problem of viewing violent photographs, exploring examples and ways of reacting to them. The first section of the book, “Polemics,” begins in chapter 1 with the history of photography criticism before engaging issues of human rights in chapter 2. In this first section, Linfield enters into conversation with prominent photography critics like Susan Sontag and John Berger to counter their negative claims about the role of photography and photographs. In fact, she titles chapter 1 as “A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?” While these critics, like Sontag, Barthes, and Berger, propose that looking at photographs of violence perpetuates that violence, Linfield makes the counterclaim that instead we must look at these photographs to respond to them. At the conclusion of this section, Linfield introduces the role of photography in human rights. Photography, Linfield claims, allows us to see the absence of human rights. Widely circulated photographs of atrocity deny the possibility of ignorance. Once known, the photographic representations of violence then call for a judgment.

The second section of the book, “Places,” provides Linfield the opportunity to discuss four different settings of atrocity photographs in the following four chapters: Holocaust concentration camps in chapter 3, China’s Red Guard in chapter 4, Sierra Leone in chapter 5, and Abu Ghraib in chapter 6. Linfield looks at photographs from Warsaw, Lodz, and Auschwitz, showing how, rather than perpetuating a past violence, looking at the photographs of the Holocaust continues to defeat Hitler’s attempt to erase his victims from history and existence. From the photographs taken in China during the Cultural Revolution, Linfield demonstrates how photography can display what she repeatedly refers to as “sneezes,” or “those uncontrollable, unpredictable expressions of vitality” that connect us to humanity even in the midst of totalitarianism (113). Through photographs of the victims of civil war in Sierra Leone, Linfield explains that while one reaction to victim photographs maybe pity, solidarity and recognition are much more useful responses. And in the nearly iconic photos from Abu Ghraib, we find we have some obligation to look at difficult photographs, to “feel in our guts” the implications of violent or cruel images that implicate us in so far as we are American (171). However, Linfield does moderate the obligation with the clause that “there is a limit to the visual cruelty” that is wanted, needed, or appropriate (171).

In the final section of the book, “People,” Linfield considers three different war photographers: Robert Capa in chapter 7, James Nachtwey in...