But even photographers acknowledge the inherent violence of their work. (57) By defining “war, conflict, or atrocity”—the traditional subjects of photojournalism—as “the main event,”175 which aftermath photography references by implication or discursively reconstructs, epistemic priority is assigned to war, rather than peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction. (7) (218) Furthermore, equating science with the production of generalizable knowledge is one approach to science among others. The second section is also presented in three parts: art and violence, visibility and invisibility, and representing the aftermath. How can they respond to conditions depicted in images when the mere number of images overwhelms them? The violations inherent in the photographic act seem acceptable on condition that the photographer, first, adheres to the notion of nonfigural, documentary photography in search of a conflict’s “truth,” “(some truth, that is)” (p. 153), and second, generates “a respect for the moment of the inhuman in the representation of truth, that is, an identification of truth with the making visible of the truth of the ‘victim’” (p. 150). 4 (2005): 372. Elkins, What Photography Is, 50. What I am offering in this contribution is neither an intellectual nor a disciplinary history of work in political science (loosely defined) on art and aesthetics,25 nor yet another defense of such work. (125) (146) (58) 211 (Summer 2013): 46–51. (66) For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.”102 (“Shock can wear off,” however.103) Even without evidence, the notion of “compassion fatigue” has become a standard ingredient of the photographic discourse, routinely rehearsed and taken for granted in connection with all sorts of images.104 More fundamentally, some authors argue that compassion is “a trap. First, being an agent of their own image is important because, based on a belief in the power of the visible, it gives the subjects the chance to present their points of view; to break with visual stigmatization and routinized patterns of representation; to transform representation into self-representation; and to confront viewers with unexpected images, thus potentially altering the ways the subjects depicted are seen by others. (95) While some artists “deliberately ‘turn up late’ after the victims, bystanders, witnesses, photojournalists, editors, cameramen, soldiers, bereaved families, distraught friends, security officers, and aid workers have all disappeared from the scene,”173 other artists acknowledge that for victims and bereaved families, the option of “disappear[ing] from the scene” does not exist, because even if they manage physically to move to another place, they carry “the scene” with them as traumatic memories. From the Italian Renaissance to modern-day America, art has played a prominent role in politics, and the two have had an often complex relationship. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text. Art is a way of creating, feeling, expressing yourself and it creates a link between your internal self and exterior, connecting them. There are questions like: Who is editing this material? Viewers’ independence, however, is precisely what some critical voices fear, suspecting that the visual is either “too open to misinterpretation” or “too engaging, for it draws the viewer into an interpretive relationship that bypasses professional mediation.”88 Especially in the context of visual representations of human suffering, however, precise contextualization is often required so as not to misrepresent and violate the people depicted. Its main purpose is not to be aesthetically appealing (although very often it is). Without such a return to the image, we would “concede ground to the perpetrators of state violence and the systematic violence of the capitalist system” (p. 161) in a world dominated by images, in which what cannot be seen can easily be, and is routinely, denied. (30) (James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington and Toronto: Lexington Books, 1989). Patterns of exclusion and inclusion can be observed with regard to both people participating (in different subject positions) in digital media and areas covered by digital media. The editor in chief of the British Journal of Photography recently wrote: “Now we live in the digital present, connecting online as global communities; communicating via vast, interlinked networks that bypass geographical, economic, and sociopolitical boundaries; using photographs where common languages don’t exist.”215 Who is this “we?” Is photography a “common language?” How can it be a common language when its interpretation is context and culture dependent?