1980s photography lacks the sixties’ pervasive register of violence and pain

Evidence

Some difference in temperature between the sixties and the eighties, for example, can be taken by reflecting on what J. G. Ballard might have called (in The Atrocity Exhibition) the spinal landscapes of Oliver Wasow’s photographs. (See #146 reproduced in chapter I.) What is absent from Wasow, indeed, is the background level of sixties violence and pain, in which Vietnam and the Congo retrieve Hiroshima in the form of multivehicle car crashes on the lunar landscape of decaying high rises and collapsing superhighways. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 410

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s larger periodization thesis in later sections — the ‘waning of affect’ mapped onto postwar decades. — connects to: Sixties debates lack the generational emotional experience of the period — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 955
• QUESTION: Testable claim: can one actually measure a decay of violence/pain register in image culture between the sixties and eighties? Relevant to reader’s falsifiability push.