A Painful Labor: Photography and Responsibility

Despite the avalanche of objections regarding documentary\u27s false promise to awaken social conscience, this paper considers the tension between photography and responsibility. By examining the encounter with images of suffering through a psychoanalytic register, the paper tries to articulate what Barthes describes as the ‘painful labour’ of responding to the photographic other – an encounter that illuminates the limit of the spectator\u27s ability to respond. Photographs provide an occasion to register this limit, which, I argue, opens up the spectator\u27s traditional notions of responsibility from a set of moral duties towards a questioning of the ethical relation