Traces of the Virtual: Aesthetics, Affect, and the Event in Joel Meyerowitz’s Photography of Ground Zero
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article approaches Joel Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero photography in Aftermath through a theorization of aesthetics and the event. I attempt to move beyond the common scholarly claim that Meyerowitz’s images of ruins and destruction have simply functioned as government propaganda for the War on Terror. I draw from Jill Bennett’s recent work on aesthetics and Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense in order to conceptualize photography as an affective and aesthetic encounter with the event in its becoming. I contend that Meyerowitz’s more recent publication of his photography in Aftermath enables affective encounters through sublime and uncanny aesthetics. Approaching aesthetics as an affective encounter, a kind of sense event that is distinctive through its abstraction of the historical event, I argue that an examination of the affective dimensions of ruins might map the potential for viewers of Meyerowitz’s photographs to be caught between multiple and contradictory histories and geographies, memories and temporalities, affects and imaginings. I outline how the aesthetics of Meyerowitz’s Aftermath align with reactionary politics, but I also attempt to recover some of the ethical possibilities in these aesthetics, which are overwritten through the dominant discourses surrounding Ground Zero. Ultimately, I maintain that Meyerowitz’s Aftermath confronts viewers with the repressed imagery of ruins of destruction, imagery that uncannily communicates political anxieties, which both serve and run counter to the intense memorialization and victory culture narrativization of Ground Zero.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".