Resumen

CADAVA, Eduardo. Lectura de la mano: la muerte en las manos de Fazal Sheikh. Acta poét [online]. 2007, vol.28, n.1-2, pp.13-47. ISSN 2448-735X.

In order to consider what it might mean to read an image historically, what it might mean, that is, to read an image through the lens of Walter Benjamin's meditations on the relation between photography and history, this lecture will focus on a series of photographs by the New York born, Pakistani photographer, Fazal Sheikh. Fazal Sheikh spent the winter of 1997 along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border photographing Afghan refugees, in secret, in the middle of the night, and under the light of a small lamp. He recorded innumerable images of the refugees, of the devastated landscapes, the wounded bodies, and so on. In particular, though, I am interested in a series of images of hands, just hands, holding small photographs of dead sons, brothers, and fathers. I wish to read these images in terms of what they can tell us about the relation between life and death, movement and stasis, the erasure and preservation of human traces, and memory and forgetting -all of which belong to the motives and issues we most generally associate with the photograph in general. In other words, I wish to read these images in order to think about what it might mean, in Benjaminian terms, to read a photograph, and this because these are, among other things, photographs of photographs.

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