The Story of the Head: The Suicide-Bomber, the Medusa and the Aesthetics of Horror in Photography - Meir Wigoder

• Terror in Zion Square is a painting by Ivan Schwebel which portrays two separate moments of a suicide-bomb attack that photography is unable to capture simultaneously. The actual explosion is visible in the background, while the bodies of the victims are already lying motionless in an exaggerated perspective. From the monochrome tones of this photographically inspired urban view rises a colourful decapitated head, as if the explosion has released a genie from the neck of a bottle.
• The painting was inspired by that of Medusa, which has become an image that has a symbolic representation of horror.
• Medusa’s ability to be both petrifying and petrified is reflected in this painting. For my project, I could build on the distinction between the act of terror and the gesture of terror - my subject could look scared or be the one producing the fear.
  
• In 1998, a suicide bomber created a collage in three stages. First, he was photographed holding out the palm of his hand; his head is positioned so the dome appears like a halo behind him. He then cut and pasted his ‘decapitated head’, photographed separately and reduced in size, onto the palm of the outstretched hand. He added paint to represent blood dripping from the severed head and then photographed the whole collage. His death brought the release of the image. Double exposure in similar to this, except the photos taken at different times are then merged in post-production techniques. The suicide bomber has died and is going to die as well, showing he exists in both the past and the present, frozen in time.
• Thierry de Duve said 'the term ‘time exposure’, characterised as a ‘picture’, usually designates portrait photographs typified by a prolongation of time in which the subjects exist in an infinite tense with no connection to the past, present or future. The term ‘snapshot’, connected with the idea of an ‘event’, represents a fragment of reality concerning something we are unable to see that is still going on outside the frame (represented by the snapshot’s ability to abduct the detail from reality).’