Abstract
Combining photographic portraits and testimony, Andrea Gjestvang’s En dag i historien: 22. juli concerns the experiences and thoughts of 43 young people who survived the terror attack at the Labour Party youth camp on Utøya Island, outside Oslo on 22 July 2011. Published the year after the events, the book captures a moment in time in which memories of what happened were still very raw, and the various attempts at commemoration in diverse cultural forms were yet to be conceived of, and subsequently contested. Drawing on recent writings on photography (by Ariella Azoulay, Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, Susie Linfield and John Roberts) as well as an interview with photographer Andrea Gjestvang, this article is an attempt to come to terms with how the ‘image-text’ in En dag i historien invites a form of committed spectatorship that unfolds over time.
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