This book examines how that aesthetic manifested itself in a range of national settings between 1997-2016. Particular attention is paid to how images of the figure of the imprisoned, assassinated or ‘disappeared’ political dissident, as found in private family collections and in official archives, were re-imagined as embodied media for private mourning, but also as allegories of social trauma and symbols of the struggle against socio-political amnesia. Memorials, art installations, photo-essays, street projections, and inter-medial documentary films devoted to photography are all considered as media for the reframing of these archival images from previous decades. While the turn of the millennium was supposedly marked by ‘the end of history’ and, at the same time, with the advent of digital technologies, by ‘the end of photography’, these works served to ‘interrupt’ and hence, belie the dominant narrative on both counts. Indeed, the book's overarching contention is that the viewer’s temptation towards affective identification with distant suffering when engaging these artworks is equally ‘interrupted’: instead, the viewer is exhorted to apprehend memorial images as visual traces which invite critical inquiry and, more specifically, which evoke the traditional intimacy between photography and an historical consciousness. weiterlesen