The historical material is normally fascinating of its own accord: it apparently provides the motive and source of interest. And yet I say "apparently" because there is always more involved. Historical writing, as its theorists from Nietzsche and Wilhelm Dilthey to Hayden White have said, is a reciprocal enterprise: the historian is drawn to the material because of something in her own life. Historical waiting and research is necessarily a dialogue between the historian's experience and the events she is seeking to understand, and understanding itself is always mutual: writing history can be a way of understanding oneself. These are platitudes of reflective historical theory, presupposed in some of the best accounts, such as Walter Benjamin's. In the day-to-day course of historical research, the reciprocal illumination of the historian's life by the historical material is not always articulated or even noticed. It becomes an insistent problem, I think, when scholars decide to study extremely unpleasant or painful material. In those cases, the conventional reasons that might be given for studying the material may not be persuasive. If Stephen Eisenman says he is studying Abu Ghraib photographs in order to better understand the current political moment*, or Valentin Groebner says he is interested in photojournalism to shed light on compassion and identification*, then those explanations are certainly true. But they can only be part of the story. (...) To the extent that the lingchi may provide a model of art historical looking in general, it may be a deep critique of the institutional protocols of the discipline of art history: its coldness, its penchant for controlling the visual, its covert interest in producing pain.
Elkins, James. <em>On The Complicity Between Visual Analysis and Torture: A Cut-by-Cut Account of <i>Lingchi</i> Photographs</em>
