Don Quijote: Sad Countenances

A Long History of Madness

Looking at Photographs

Trauma, the common insight stipulates, cannot be represented. Nafiseh Mousavi intensely enacts the role of the captive young woman as traumatised in all the senses relevant in this chapter. Looking at this photograph (Figure 6.1), which was made on the set of the scene ‘She Too’ of Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, we can see both the intense longing and the frustration of the young woman whose face is shown here. This photograph by the young Swedish artist Ebba Sund entirely adequately presents both the difficulty and the necessity of showing trauma.

Sund's photography successfully avoids the traps of representation: the appeal to voyeurism, with immodesty; the censorship that is its counterpart; the sentimentality that would function as a ‘tear-jerker’ and even as an incentive to ‘trauma envy’, the wish to appropriate the suffering of others; the sense of repetition (trauma fatigue), ‘here we go again’; and the narrative thrust that would overrule the image with its content: what happened to her? The details are both expressive and subtle. The half-open mouth of the young woman does not suggest screaming. The grain of the skin that almost merges with the thin hairs in front of her ear compels a close looking at the image. Her face turned slightly upwards, but not dramatically, expresses a relationship to the outside that is not narratively explicit.

I will be looking closely at Sund's work, especially in this chapter. My goals in such looking are multiple. First, I want to make the case for the difficulty, even impossibility, of showing trauma, yet the need to do so; the need, that is, to foreground and pay attention to, bestow empathy on, something that cannot be represented. Sund's photographs do this very adequately. This also entails, secondly, an appeal to, or task for the viewers. For, if they remain unaffected by the image, it cannot do its work. I am hoping that this chapter will yield an ‘apprenticeship’ in the kind of looking that trauma, and other vital cultural concerns, require.