Spatial Violence and the Documentary Image

Abstract

State and corporate violence has always been waged on material space. However, with the escalation of late-capitalist and neocolonial modes of extraction, incarceration, and bordering, these processes of spatial exploitation are accelerating and morphing. In this eloquent and wide-ranging study, Patrick Brian Smith examines how the documentary image is responding—aesthetically, discursively, and politically—to these transformations in spatial violence. Forging connections between a geographically disparate set of documentary works, Smith argues that over the past two decades we have seen an increasing number of experimental documentary works that are structured around radical interrogations of the spatial. How is it that a concentrated, durational, and temporal focus on diverse political spaces and sites of contestation and conflict helps to reveal the layers of spatial violence, exploitation, and injustice embedded within them?