Abstract

This paper analyzes the role of the viewers of photographs of violence. The main argument is that due to the characteristic of the medium, both the photographer and the photographed subjects shape the image. The customary overlooking of the photographed subjects’ agency is conceptualized as epistemic injustice first committed by the photographer and then by the viewer. A method of interpreting war photographs influenced by critical fabulation and listening to images is proposed to overcome it. Even though every case of the photography of violence is different due to its particular context, issues concerning the documentation of atrocities have been raised for many years, especially by those researching colonial or Holo- caust archives. Authoritarian regimes often leave behind many files, among them photographs (Maliszewska 2022). The following generation faces doubts as to how to read those archives and give justice to the dead. Furthermore, today—in the era of photographs immediately spreading around the globe via social media—questions about viewers’ attitudes to the photography of violence seem even more pressing. Those issues are raised, among others, from feminist and postcolonial perspectives. This paper focuses on how the theory of epistemic injustice and the two methods of interpreting—“listening to images” and “critical fabulation”—can be applied to at least some cases of violent photography to better understand the role of its viewers (p. 90).