![]() It is from this observation that he launches his project. ![]() 1 Baer reads in several of these photos not the scientific desire to make visible in order to name and organize, but precisely the delinking of seeing and knowing. Charcot was both an early doctor of hysteria and an early user of photography: in his attempt to document hysteria as a recognizable disease, he produced an "iconography" of photographs of his hysterical patients, often in a state of catalepsy brought on, in fact, by the photographic flash. In fact, by opening his book with an examination of Charcot's photographs of hysterics, Baer suggests that the link between trauma and photography was present from something like the beginning. ![]() "Because trauma blocks routine mental processes from converting an experience into memory or forgetting, it parallels the defining structure of photography, which also traps an event during its occurrence while blocking its transformation into memory" (9). Baer, however, is not interested in how photography might fill in the gaps in memory that trauma leaves, or in reintroducing specific traumatic images into a world that might have forgotten them, but rather in the structural similarities between photography and trauma. From Weegee's photographs of New York disasters, to news photos of the liberation of Nazi death camps, to Luc Sante's published collection of discarded police photos of murder victims, photographs have often been used to give visuality to the traumatic. Certainly, Baer's work is not the first to link photography to trauma. ![]()
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