Description

This paper will focus on Barthes's second punctum and how it relates to time and not to elements within the photograph. In this sense it has immediate relevance to many photographs of trauma. A detailed description of the famous massacre in Maale Akrabim in 1954 will ensue including information on the re-creation of the chilling scene around the ambushed bus. These widely distributed propaganda photographs of the stiff bodies inside and outside the bus are raising questions about morality, ethics and the 'truth' value of photographs. Using examples from the Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia and the Yom Kippur war in Sinai, the article will argue that in general, photographs of trauma raise two polar sensations. The first is the clear confrontation with the horrific events, the second is the unanswered questions that are resultant from such a description. This aspect of the photographs, the way we reach and un-reach them, the conflicting closeness and forced remoteness, our ability to grasp and un-grasp them is their noeme or in other words their sound of silence.