Imageless Angola: Photography and Political Violence in a Transnational Age

This thesis investigates the intersection of political violence and photography in contemporary art and visual culture, focusing on the transnational context around the liberation and civil war in Angola (1961-2002). Though the longest period of conflict in the twentieth century, and one of the deadliest and most internationalized to date, it has always been presumed to be without images. Structured around four case studies, this thesis explores, and brings together for the first time, the wide range of experimental strategies with which artists in Angola, Cuba, Portugal, South Africa, or the US, among other places, have been systematically responding to and dealing with such colossal events over the last decade, through the mutual interrogation of photography and history.