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Circulation 49

gaze, destructive gaze, male gaze, sadistic gaze, tourist gaze, Western gaze,
an Oriental gaze…
When giving a closer look to the practice of gazing, one realizes that the
relationship between the spectator and the tortured is rarely symmetrical.
The asymmetries are shaped by different ways and hierarchies of looking
and being looked at. In his analysis on historical portraits, Allan Sekula
argues about “shadow archives” containing images of the heroes, leaders
and moral exemplars of society and images of its poor, diseased, insane,
criminal, and somehow radically “inferior” members (Sekula 1986; see also
Lury 1998: 44). According to Sekula, every portrait has to take its place
either implicitly or explicitly in this social and moral hierarchy of types of
genres:

The private moment of sentimental individuation, the look at the frozen
gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed by two other more public looks: a
look up at one’s “betters” and a look down at one’s “inferiors.”
(Sekula 1986: 10; emphasis in original)

The two AG images can be considered portraits subjected to looks
(whether private or public) that categorize the other stimulated by Sekula’s
shadow archives. However, it is worth noting that because of the complexity
of circulation, the “shadow archives” themselves are also pushed into a
move. Another source of asymmetry has to do with scopic regime—a concept
coined by film scholar Christian Metz and further developed by Martin Jay
(1988)—the idea that every era is characterized by certain kinds of visual
structures that suggest some interpretations more likely than others. I argue
that in the two AG images, there is an explicit structural asymmetry between
the representations of the tortured as a passive victim subjected to the gaze
of an onlooker. In the first image, the tortured is hooded, blinded, and
objectified for a penetrating gaze; in the second one, the tortured is escaping
the eye of the spectator by looking away from the camera. Composition
in both images favors a superior gaze that looks down at the tortured as
inferior, as also described by Sekula.
Another source of asymmetry has to do with recognition. There are at
least two ways of approaching the question of recognizablity. The first one
has to do with the physiological and mental perception of the image, such as
we can recognize that there are humans in the AG images (see e.g. Pylyshyn
2006). The ability to recognize such an element is a first precondition for
making sense of the images but not enough to understand them. The second
approach to recognition has to do with the cultural and social perception of
the image. It can be called “a politics of recognition,” referring to a demand
to be seen as an actor with a status acknowledged by others. In a classical