Aftermath Photography: A Lacuna between Embracing and Resisting Mass Culture

Abstract

Since the Ancient Greeks the artisans of Mass Culture have continually attempted to define their domain in contradistinction to High Culture while trying to break away from the Plebeian-Patrician dichotomy. After centuries, it is only around the early 1800s that Mass Culture witnessed an exponential growth and a greater autonomy, which resulted in establishing new media of its own, such as: radio, television, comic books, detective stories, science-fiction, and most notably photography. For Walter Benjamin, photography was inherently linked to the masses due to its inborn potential of reproducibility, which replaced the domain of tradition with plurality of copies. What links photography to the masses, literary critic Eduardo Cadava argues, is that both have their origins in techniques of reproduction: “they both belong to the production and reproduction of images”. There is, however, a contemporary photographic genre that both embraces and resists the speedy consumption of Mass Culture imagery: aftermath photography. By discussing photographs taken by the contemporary Dutch artist Gert Jan Kocken (1971), this article argues how this photographic genre simultaneously invites and excludes the masses through a particular way it juxtaposes landscape images next to quasi-news captions.