Page 70 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Circulation 53

Themes involving pain and redemption are an abiding feature of modern
media.
(Seaton 2005: 87)

And she continues later on:

There are some continuities that are hardly ever even recognized. These
may be at the level of values, but there are also powerful visual conventions
that merit examination. At the very simplest, the composition of images
plunders motifs invented by Christian art. But the attitude which we bring
to the assessment of real events is more complicated than is allowed by
our necessarily shallow everyday acceptance of them as part of life.
(Seaton 2005: 89)

However, cultural imagination drawing on Christian tradition has many
other layers than just that of imagining the sufferer as a victim. An observation
that holds true also with many other religious traditions. As David Morgan
argues, in Christianity and, for example, in Hinduism, there is also a long
tradition of treating the images as a part of contemplation and meditation
(Morgan 2005). The emotional attachment established in a contemplative
relationship with the image can be constructed also through a sympathetic
gaze, helping the spectator to create a more reflective relationship with the
suffering individual (see e.g. Morgan 1998). This can invite the viewer to
make ethical and moral judgments based on his or her worldview and to
establish a relationship with the tortured structured around perhaps more
abstract and general principals concerning how one should treat others.
Furthermore, religiously inspired cultural imagination can stimulate
iconoclasm, that is, the practice of destroying images when they fail to tell the
“truth” and are for that reason found dangerous and/or offensive (see e.g.,
Freedberg 1989: 421–8; Morgan 2005: 141–6). Iconoclastic imagination
can come in many forms and can be found in many religions and in secular
movements. Controversial images such as the AG images can stimulate a
deconstructive gaze and call for action, suggesting the need to defend the
values of one’s own religion and worldview. With the AG images, this holds
true especially when discussing the imagination potentially stimulated and
associations supposedly circulated by and around Muslim tradition, as the
tortured men were Muslim. An example of an iconoclastic association could
be imagined in the look of a devoted Muslim who sees the rules of his religion
being violated through the public exposure of nakedness and impurity.