Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography

A 2019 monograph by Henrik Gustafsson on how film and photography treat crime scenes and the places left behind by violence after the Second World War.

The book follows a lasting tendency in postwar art to look at places emptied of people after violent encounters. It maps the afterlife of landscape in search of the political and ethical agency of the image, setting landscape studies beside Walter Benjamin and Georges Didi-Huberman on memory, trauma and secondary witnessing. Its sites include Beirut, the West Bank, postwar Germany and Poland. Palgrave Macmillan issued it in 2019 in hardcover with 285 pages, colour illustrations and an index.

Gustafsson is professor of media and documentation science at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, in Tromsø. His research covers postwar cinema and photography, memory, and the ethics of spectatorship. He co-edited Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (2014) and Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing (2017).