The contemporary visual technologies of the war on terror are as much about invisibility as visibility, as much about what is moved out of sight or rendered visually taboo, as about what images are circulated and rendered hyper-visible. This chapter seeks to conceptualise erasure, by focusing on how images of dead bodies circulate in the war on terror. Rather than focus on soldier bodies, as often form the basis of such framing, I seek instead to understand the framing of what is seen and unseen in dead enemy bodies.

Why should we look at images in the discussion of erasure? Discussions of photography frequently focus on understanding how images are made and the narratives of what is left out in the decisions surrounding what is visually depicted (Sontag 2001, Sliwinski 2011). Beyond this, securitised images become dispersed through the schemas of viewing associated with cinema and other mechanisms of display, which often act as a filter for what can or should be viewed. From Facebook to Twitter, contemporary technology has shifted the frame, wherein war is rendered hyper-visible; at the same time these visualities are managed via a technology of erasure that blurs parts of images, and removes others from our line of sight, so as to manage the context under which the visual encounter occurs.

This chapter uses the cases of Muammar Qaddafi and Osama bin Laden to explore the purposes for which particular dead bodies are rendered (in)visible, and further, the visual politics of the encounter with the bloody body in a political context where bodies are often key sites inscribed with and resistant to power. To do so, I argue that obscenity is mustered as a visual and political tool, to both place a taboo on the viewing of certain dead bodies, and invite the viewing of others. Obscenity here provides the framing concept for visual engagement, precisely because what constitutes or is suggested to constitute the obscene is a political decision, one which generates particular erasures and legitimates particular narratives.