A Photo in a Photo The Optics, Politics and Powers of Hand-held Portraits in Claims for Justice and Solidarity
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Abstract
This paper is about a popular kind of photograph associated with demonstrations for the cause of missing persons. It focuses on Cyprus, where the demonstrators are often women who lost family members in the events before and during the Turkish Army invasion of 1974. In documenting these demonstrations, photojournalists capture a typical kind of image, here called ‘the photographic Pietà’. Although the photographic Pietà first came to the author’s attention in Cyprus it is not limited to that country, and this paper will establish some of the political, temporal and religious parameters in which it is prevalent. The paper establishes links with similar forms of representation in protests that appear in the context of other wars, and it isolates the uniqueness of the photographic Pietà among other kinds of photographs. One of the main attributes of the photographic Pietà is a kind of disappearance, which is
related both to the basic rules of visual perspective and the mechanisms of photographic reproduction, and this is described here by way of example and experiment, then reviewed in the contexts of social science, political photography, gender and the media.
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Keywords
gender, media, photography, demonstration, human rights, politics, Cyprus
References
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Toufic, J. (2005) Ashura: This Blood Spilled in my Veins. Lebanon: Calligraph.
Toufic, J. (2014) ‘A Hitherto Unrecognized Apocalyptic Photographer: the Universe’, E-Flux Journal, (May) No. 55.
United States Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. Available at: [http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/], last accessed on 1 March 2012.
Ward, O. (2015) Lisson gallery. Personal email communication 30 October 2015.
Ware, K. (1979) The Orthodox Way, revised edition. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Azoulay, A. (2012) Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. London: Verso.
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. Translated by R. Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (original work published in 1980).
Benjamin, W. (2003) ‘The work of Art in the Age of its technical reproducibility’, 2nd version, Translated by E. Jephcott, R. Livingstone, H. Eiland and others, in Jennings, M.W., Doherty, B. and Levin, T.Y. (eds), The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, And Other Writings on Media. cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 19-55 (original work published in 1935).
Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) (2016) retrieved from: [http://www.cmpcyprus.org], last accessed on 3 February 2016.
Cyprus News Agency (2014) ‘Successful Protest turns Tourists Away’. retrieved from: [http://www. hri.org/news/cyprus/cna/1996/96-10-20.cna.html], last accessed on 2
October 2014.
Cyprus News Agency (2015) ‘Motorbike rally to Kyrenia in Occupied cyprus ’96’. retrieved from: [http://www.argyrou.eclipse.co.uk/rally.htm], last accessed on 12 October 2015.
Daniels, D. (2011) ‘Hybrids of Art, science technology, Perception, entertainment, and commerce at the interface of sound and Vision’, in Daniels, D. and Naumann, S. (eds), See This Sound, Audiovisuology 2. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, pp. 9–2 .
Davis, E.A. (2014) ‘Archive, evidence, Memory, Dream: Documentary Films on Cyprus’, in Constandinides, C. and Papadakis, Y. (eds), Cypriot Cinemas: Memory, Conflict and Identity in the Margins of Europe. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 31–60.
Fragko, G. (2002) ‘Panagiota solomi: i insist to learn what Happened to my People’, in Phileleftheros, 20 January 2002.
Hoak-Doering, E. (2014) ‘The Photographic Pietà: A Model of Gender, Protest, and Spatial Temporal Dislocation in Modern cyprus’, in Wells, L., Stylianou-Lambert, T. and Philippou, N. (eds), Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity. London: I.B Tauris, pp. 167–190.
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1990) ‘Objects of ethnography’, in Karp. I. and Levine, D. (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington DC: The Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 386–443.
Leepson, M. (2015) ‘The Story of the POW/MIA Flag’, in HistoryNet, 12 August 2015. Available at: [http://www.historynet.com/the-story-of-the-powmia-flag.htm], last accessed on 14 October 2015.
Mugiyanto et al. (2008) Reclaiming Stolen Lives. Philippines: Asian Federation against involuntary Disappearances (AFAD).
Papadakis, Y. (1993) ‘The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Cyprus’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Vol. 3, No, 1, pp. 139–154.
Payton, J.r., Jr. (2007) Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition. Downers Grove, IL: interVarsity Press.
Perlstein, R. (2015) ‘The Story Behind the POW/MIA Flag’, in The Washington Spectator, 10 August 2015. Available at: [http://washingtonspectator.org/the-story-of-the-other-racistflag/], last accessed on 14 October 2015.
Pew Research Center (2007) ‘The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Survey’. Retrieved from: [http://religions.pewforum.org/reports], last accessed on 1 March 2012.
Psaltis, C., Beydola, T., Filippou, G. and Vrachimis, N. (2014) ‘Contested Symbols as Social Representations: The Case of Cyprus’, in Moeschberger, S.l. and Phillips Dezalia, R.A. (eds), Symbols that Bind, Symbols that Divide: The Semiotics of Peace and Conflict. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, pp. 61–90.
Sant Cassia, P. (199 –1999) ‘Missing Persons in Cyprus as Ethnomartyres’, in Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, a publication of Mediterranean, Slavic and Eastern Orthodox Studies, Vol. 14/15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, pp. 261–284.
Sant Cassia, P. (2005) Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Sontag, S. (1989) On Photography. New York: Doubleday (original work published in 1977).
Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sturken, M. (1997) Tangled Memories. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sturken, M. and Cartwright, l. (2009) Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thornhill, T. (2014) ‘Did this woman Order the Massacre of 43 students in Mexico?’ in the Daily Mail, 30 October 2014. Available at: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2 13976/
Did-woman-order-massacre-43-students-Mexico-Mayor-s-wife-dubbed-lady-Murder-orderedpolice-stop-protesters-ruining-party.html], last accessed on 23 September 2015.
Toufic, J. (2003) Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press.
Toufic, J. (2005) Ashura: This Blood Spilled in my Veins. Lebanon: Calligraph.
Toufic, J. (2014) ‘A Hitherto Unrecognized Apocalyptic Photographer: the Universe’, E-Flux Journal, (May) No. 55.
United States Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. Available at: [http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/], last accessed on 1 March 2012.
Ward, O. (2015) Lisson gallery. Personal email communication 30 October 2015.
Ware, K. (1979) The Orthodox Way, revised edition. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
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“A Photo in a Photo: The Optics, Politics and Powers of Hand-Held Portraits in Claims for Justice and Solidarity”. 2017. Cyprus Review 27 (2): 15-42. https://cyprusreview.org/index.php/cr/article/view/45.