Abstract
This article considers the practice of witness in the world – witness to the world – in particular the character and temper, nature and purpose, significance and resonance of “moral witness,” a kind of ideal type, as conceived by the philosopher Avishai Margalit. It proposes that the artist plays an important role as a moral witness; and that the work of art itself performs the same function, even after the fact – the phenomenon of “post-witness.” In this context it identifies an ethics of precision or exactitude, and adduces a variety of exemplars, ranging from poetry to photography, including Shot at Dawn (2014), a suite of landscape photographs which are also war photographs and memorial photographs, and acts of moral witness, by Chloe Dewe Mathews.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 191-200 |
| Journal | Alternatives |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue number | 3-4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2015 |
Keywords
- Witness
- Moral witness
- Post-witness
- Exactitude
- Terror
- Torture
- War photography
Access to Document
- Alternatives-2015-Danchev_CCBY
Copyright The Author(s) 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).