The focus of this article is a speculative argument on the relation between
photography and testimony as one that situates the viewer on a particularly
powerless, but responsibility-laden position. Articulating Nilufër Demir’s viral
2015 photograph of Aylan Kurdi, and Walter Kleinfeldt’s 1918 photograph of an
unknown fallen soldier, as images bearing the marks of shifts in biopolitics, the
article takes up on Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Georges Didi-Huberman
and Giorgio Agamben, and reflects upon the possibility of addressing and
responding to images beyond a moral level. As such, it inquires on the need to
relate to images on a level that considers power relations. Ultimately showing
that observers, or viewers, of photographs are necessarily tied to the unfolding
of human history, no matter how distant they may be from its events, the article
proposes a response to the need of assuming a political stance when facing
images.