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Abstract

“Death in Vienna” is intended as an introduction to this themed issue on The Dark Spectacle: Landscapes of Devastation in Film and Photography. Drawing on Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, the articles gathered here address the representation of unsettling subject matter (war, ecological catastrophe, destructive urbanization) in a variety of visual media. The collection’s specific focus is on the important role played by space in the depiction of disturbing events. Do images portraying death and destruction generate documents, or do they create works of art? Does their beauty drain “attention from the sobering subject?” “Death in Vienna” addresses these and other related questions with reference to Yevgeny Khaldei’s photography, specifically a shocking image he took in Vienna during the final days of the World War II. Together with Sontag, this article also questions our “right to look” at images of extreme suffering.

Keywords

war photography beauty in ruins Susan Sontag Yevgeny Khaldei Vienna

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