Precarious Images: Genocides in German Film and Visual Art

Abstract

This dissertation works at the intersection of human rights, the still and moving image, representational theory, and media theory to examine and understand how images of humanitarian disasters and genocide circulate amongst and interact with the public. How do we look at these images? What do we learn from them? And what are the implications of the technologies used to capture and produce these images? At the heart of this inquiry are works by German visual artists, photographers, and filmmakers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, situated around three major humanitarian and human rights crises of the 20th century: the Bosnian crisis and genocide of the early 1990s, the Armenian genocide of World War One, and the Rwandan crisis and genocide of 1994. In examining visual representations of these events through their circumstances of production, their dissemination, and their materiality, Precarious Images investigates ways of looking and learning and in doing so, proposes new ways of seeing and