In re-imagining representations of war, especially contemporary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I find it difficult to continue viewing the images that are the sources of my reinterpretations. They relocate my attention to some dark space where perception seems limited, limiting, its limits palpable—dense, static, circumscribed, uncertain. 

Elaine Scarry writes of the language-, perception-, and world-destroying aspects of pain—of its “totalizing” potential to “eliminate all that is ‘not itself.’”(1) My images of other’s photographs have become less “descriptive.” Some retain corners or elements of legibility that anchor them in this world as photographs of printed matter. Others blur into abstractions that are tearing from their referents. Collapsed or expanded into moody fields of amorphous color, space becomes indeterminate. Where can a viewer locate him/herself in these images? Where is the ground? Are we refused entry and left at the surface, or do we enter a space of disorientation and uncertain depth? Scarry suggests that pain’s destruction is spatial in nature—that it is experienced “as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.”(2) Pain is “objectless,” Scarry writes—it “is not ‘of’ or ‘for’ anything—it is itself alone. This objectlessness . . . almost prevents it from being rendered in language . . . [from being] objectified in any form, material or verbal.”(3) It is, to use Scarry’s descriptive, an “unmaking” experience or a state that refuses, walls, obstructs. 

1. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the 

World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 54 – 55. 

2. Ibid., 35.
3. Ibid., 162.