Book Presentation: The Death in their Eyes: What Perpetrator Images Perpetrate
- Date: 19 September 2024, 10:00–12:00
- Location: Hugo Valentin Centre, Seminar Room
- Type: Seminar
- Organiser: Hugo Valentin Centre, Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES), Department of Peace and Conflict Research, and Uppsala Forum
- Contact person: Ivo Plsek
Seminar with Uppsala Forum Visiting Fellow Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, University of Valencia
Images that embody the point of view of the perpetrators of violent crimes, or their accomplices, force us to look at the pain of victims through the eyes of those who caused it. Accompanied by over sixty visuals of historically infamous violence, The Death in their Eyes goes beyond the visible aspects of images to reveal what is unseen outside the frame. Covering human abuse and humiliation at Abu Ghraib, the Auschwitz Album, religious desecration during the Spanish Civil War, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film made at the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1942, and detainees at the S-21 torture center in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, this book proposes a rigorous new methodology for analyzing perpetrator images, in photography and film, that continue to be used and reappropriated in today’s media.
Vicente Sánchez-Biosca is Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the
University of Valencia, Spain, and was Chairholder of Spanish Civilization at the
KJC Center at New York University in 2013. Visiting professor and research fellow
at numerous universities (NYU, Montreal, Paris-Sorbonne, Sao Paulo, Technische
Universität Berlin), he leads the REPERCRI research project on perpetrators of mass murder. His latest publications include Cine y guerra civil española: del mito a la memoria (Alianza Editorial, 2006), and Miradas criminales, ojos de víctima: Imágenes de la aflicción en Camboya (Prometeo, 2017).
Documents
The Death in their Eyes, Chapter 5 (pdf) Pdf, 1 MB.
The linked chapter will be discussed at the seminar.