Time, Trauma, and Photography

"Where the Birds Never Sing", but images tend to

Abstract

In contemporary photographic art, the representation of atrocities committed in the past meets several degrees of critical and ethical challenges for articulation. Particularly in the case of state-sponsored violence, it requires wading through scarce archival resources and testimonies from survivors under volatile political circumstances. There is, however, also a structural problem in revisiting past violence and reconstituting narratives through photographs from negligible traces of material history. Contemporary photographers, therefore, often resort to fictional narratives and personal subjectivity to negotiate with this gap of time and historical memory. Documentary practices in India provide an avenue to build counter-archives of violence for political atrocities repudiated by the state. In Soumya Sankar Bose’s photographic project, Where the Birds Never Sing, the long-denied Marichjhapi massacre takes centre stage. After the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh, the state government of West Bengal, India, executed thousands of refugees living in a delta island of the Sundarbans. With almost no records in the press or state archives, Bose travels back in time to the event of the massacre via oral testimonies, personal dreamscapes, found documents, and allegories surrounding the site to construct a critical-historical narrative seeped in phantasmagoria. This essay explores the relationship between photography and trauma when addressing atrocities after a caesura of time, often incorporating fictional or mythopoetic narratives. Bose’s work will be considered a point of departure to reflect upon the temporal modalities of creatively reconstituting traumatic histories and the transformative politics they engender.