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Human Rights in Camera by Sharon Sliwinski

The book Human Rights in Camera is of unique value for the ongoing discussion of the representation of “distant suffering,” especially in the field of photography. In this regard, the book follows in the footsteps of other works that have been published in recent years, such as The Civil Contract of Photography (Azoulay 2012), Spectacular Rhetorics (Hesford 2011), and No Caption Needed (Hariman and Lucaites 2007). All of these writings bring to the fore the visual aspect as a significant dimension in the study of human rights. Yet, Sharon Sliwinski’s book also constitutes an important contribution to historiographical debates over human rights discourse and the moment of its foundation by focusing on the figure of the spectator. The book discusses the relationship between spectatorship and human rights through an analysis of prominent world-historical events. She surveys cases in which spectators were called upon to judge the human condition as reflected in publicly disseminated images. These events were experienced by their spectators as part of an imagination of a shared human community, and it was this imagination that guided their judgment. Among the events covered by Sliwinski are the abolitionist movement, the Lisbon earthquake, the movement for the liberation of Congo, photographs taken by Allied forces in concentration camps upon their arrival there at the end of World War II, and photographs of the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Sliwinski discusses the discourse of human rights from a historical perspective and argues like historian Lynn Hunt that human rights are an ongoing revolution, a claim she demonstrates by linking disparate events spanning three centuries and drawing connections between human rights and the visual. In focusing on spectatorship and the attendant development of a universal human sensibility, she critiques the conception that tethers the struggle over rights to the declaration of rights. In the “Introduction,” Sliwinski traces the process whereby the viewing of visual images of atrocities gives rise to a sensory, aesthetic matrix on the basis of which human subjects imagine the relations between them. The book deals with the effects of image production and circulation and particularly with the ways in which the spectator is exposed to ideas and ideals of human rights. The thesis of the book is that the dissemination of images of distant atrocities and disasters creates a community of spectators, a community in which the cosmopolitan idea of (human) commonality and solidarity manifests itself. Sliwinski examines how shared ideas about the human subject rest on aesthetic encounters; how the conception of justice is a principle that cannot merely be done but must also be seen. An interesting claim that appears implicitly in the book, and which goes beyond its declared purpose, is that if the distant observer is a condition for the possibility of establishing a cosmopolitan conception of belonging to a human community, then such a conception