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Andrea Noble

too this exhibition has become a blueprint for approaches to family photog-raphy and family looking. Indeed, what unites most writing on family photog-raphy is its articulation of the need to set up sites of resistance to the myth ofthe coherent nuclear family, to find alternative ‘points of view’ that challengeand contest the universalism and humanism inherent in the dominant familialgaze, which in a multitude of scholarly work is cast as a force of reaction.How, though, might an understanding of the affiliatory and identificatorylooks that circulate around family photography help us to grasp what is atstake in the photography of disappearance and the transcultural modalities ofits mobilization of shame? How might insights from family looking allow us toshift the focus, to offer an account of photography as integral to human rightsactivism, ‘impressing, articulating and constructing fields of social actions inways that would not have occurred if they did not exist’ (Edwards 2001: 17)?What place, finally, is there for the hermeneutics of suspicion that pervades somuch work on family looking in approaches to the material culture of humanrights? Before sketching out answers to these questions, let me be clear oncemore. In what follows, I am not advocating a return to a Family-of-Man style oftranscultural looking that would collapse difference in the name of a universalhuman family. Rather, I want to argue for a reconsideration of the possibilityof intersubjective and transcultural looking through photography by bringinginto consideration what feminist philosopher Judith Butler terms ‘the relationalties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethicalresponsibility’ (Butler 2004: 22).Writing in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centerand the Pentagon, and drawing on psychoanalytic concepts of mourning andmelancholia, in the second essay of Precarious Life , titled ‘Violence, Mourning,Politics’, Butler reflects on the possibility of international community foundedon the experience of vulnerability and loss. She acknowledges that humanvulnerability to violence is distributed unevenly at a global level and that,under current political conditions, lives lost are grieved differentially. In a globalhierarchy of ‘grievability’, some lives are rendered worthy of grief in publicdiscourse (e.g. those who perished in the attacks on 9/11); meanwhile, there areothers – for example, the countless Iraqis or Afghans annihilated in the subse-quent ‘war on terror’ – who remain nameless and implicitly unworthy of grief.In short, these are victims, not considered fully human in life, and ‘if violence isdone against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it failsto injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated’ (33). Thevisual media, it should be added, have had a crucial role to play in establishingthe hierarchy of grief in the public sphere. 15 The primary question motivating Butler’s meditations is what, in the after-math of recent global violence, might be made of grief other than a cry for war.To this end, Butler argues for making: ‘grief itself into a resource for politics’which, she states, ‘may be understood as the slow process by which we developa point of identification with suffering itself ’ (30). Such a process would involve