%0 Journal Article
%T Portraits of the enemy: Visualizing the Taliban in a photography studio
%A Jenifer Chao
%J Media, War & Conflict
%@ 1750-6360
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1750635217714015
%X This article examines studio photographs of Taliban fighters that deviate from popular media images which often confine them within the visual coordinates of terrorism, insurgency and violence. Gathered in a photographic book known simply as Taliban, these 49 photographs represent the militants in Afghanistan through a studio photography aesthetic, transplanting them from the battlefields of the global war on terror to intimate scenes of pretence and posing. Besides troubling the Taliban¡¯s expected militant identity, these images invite an opaque and oppositional form of viewing and initiate enigmatic visual and imaginative encounters. This article argues that these alternative visualizations consist of a compassionate way of seeing informed by Judith Butler¡¯s notions of precarity and grievability, as well as a viewing inspired by Jacques Ranci¨¨re¡¯s aesthetic dissensus that obfuscates legibility and disrupts meaning. Consequently, these photographs counter a delimited post-9/11 process of enemy identification and introduce forms of seeing that reflect terrorism¡¯s complexity
%K enemy construction
%K Jacques Ranci¨¨re
%K studio photography
%K Taliban
%K war on terror
%K wartime visuality
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1750635217714015