Charles Taylor Book Award Winner 2013: Sharon Sliwinski, for Human Rights in Camera

Winner: Sharon Sliwinski (University of Western Ontario), for Human Rights in Camera (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Human Rights in Camera does that critical theoretical work Sheldon Wolin referred to as “making the familiar unfamiliar.” Sliwinski shows us that human rights are not revealed by reason alone, but through an experience of seeing, “imagined and idealized on the wings of aesthetic experience.” The spaces of human rights become difficult to map. Are they the spaces of violence and violation or are they the distant sites where the visual artifacts of those violations are circulated? Sliwinski reminds us that the language of “crimes against humanity” emerges out of the heart of darkness, from an African-American denouncing the horrors of the Belgian Congo. The time of human rights is no longer limited to the twentieth century. The history of trauma and the visual is enriched by her recollection of the effects of the Lisbon earthquake on Kant, Goethe and the Enlightenment. We are all familiar with Lee Miller’s photographs of Dachau. These have become iconic and in that transformation have been made easy to recognize, easy to read. Sliwinski unsettles those readings. She teaches us to look again, to recognize the photograph taken not only of but in the boxcar loaded with corpses, by a photographer who has placed herself among the dead. Throughout the work, Sliwinski draws on the literature of trauma; on aesthetic theory, on the politics of sensation, and on political economy. We are asked to remember the development of photographic technology, the imbrication of photographic technologies and the mass media, and that Miller’s iconic photographs of the Holocaust were published in Vogue. Sliwinski does not turn away from the difficult ethical issues presented by photography and spectatorship. She has shown us that bearing witness is not without its dark pleasures and moral dangers. We congratulate Professor Sliwinski on her admirable book. She has brought newness into the world. We look forward to seeing how her work changes the terrain of inquiry in the social sciences and the humanities.

Selection Committee:

Anne Norton, chair (University of Pennsylvania)

Raymond Duvall, (University of Minnesota)

Victoria Hattam, (New School for Social Research)