Violence unseen: Activating national icons

My aim in this auto-ethnography paper is to explore particular visual images that invent and secure the power of the nation. Looking at a specific photograph that portrays my daughter's classmates during a school trip, I inscribe the relations between seeing, memory and the culture of national stereotypes. The triangular/pyramidal structure of the picture and its warm-eye (low-angle) perspective - a common depiction of heroic nationalism -instantaneously activated in my mind a specific chain of 'super icons' representing Jewish-Israeli images of wars and settling of the land. By recognizing the paradigmatic structure of Zionism photographing itself, my analysis discusses the way in which a corpus of national iconic images casts the 'empty' denotative image of the trip photo into the national order, producing the photo's unseen violence as simulacrum in the process of subjection and identification.