A Cemetery of Images: Meditations on the Burial of Photographs

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Abstract
An examination of the photograph's relation to witnessing, this article considers the work of two artists—photographer and installation artist Alfredo Jaar and photojournalist Gilles Peress—as their work confronts the Rwandan genocide. It is argued that Jaar's Real Pictures and Peress' The Silence not only attempt to bear witness to the horrors of the genocide, but also make visible the task of witnessing itself, showing the witness to be in a privileged and largely invisible subject position. In this, they reveal how the West's role as global witness is modelled after the supposed anonymity and neutrality of the camera lens.

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