The Uncanny Familiar: Images of Terror

Media images of terrorist acts ingrain themselves in the collective memory with a pungency against which we seem almost powerless. This volume looks at artists who have manipulated the manipulators and interrogated the media’s representations of terrorism. Included here is the Spanish collective G.R.A.M., whose 2001 series Nach Motiven von reconstructs scenes from famous press photos such as the arrest of Ulrike Meinhof; Raymond Depardon and Malte Wandel, who both revisit the classic photographs of the Palestinian hostage crisis at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich; Naeem Mohaiemen’s film based on archival recordings of negotiations from the Japanese Red Army’s 1977 aircraft hijacking; Dennis Adams’ Patricia Hearst A-Z, in which Hearst is shown transforming from heiress to kidnap victim to terrorist and back to heiress; and several treatments of the September 11 attacks, including Fiorenza Menini’s deadpan film of the dust cloud clearing around Manhattan.