"Heart in the Wound"

Ann Cvetkovich and Lisa Kessler

Lisa Kessler’s “Heart in the Wound” combines journalism and art in order to create a public sphere around the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Her photographs are unusual because they don’t provide documentary evidence in any conventional way. Instead, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the cord of Cardinal Bernard Law’s phone, or the photographs on the signs carried by protestors, or the icons of the Catholic Church, and that arrested attention complicates the process of designating good and evil. This body of work has been enabled by Kessler’s close relations to those she has photographed and thus also differs from conventional journalism’s often more impersonal and hurried conditions. The photographs demand of the viewer a similar kind of contextualization. Their publication here with an accompanying interview provides one example of such contextualization and reflects Kessler’s ultimate goal of displaying them alongside audio material and other media in order to create forums for public discussion.

“Heart in the Wound” extends the forms of publicity that survivors have brought to the Catholic Church scandal through demonstrations, legal battles, and solidarity groups. It does so not just through advocacy on behalf of the survivors but through what Kessler describes as a “layering” of perspectives that does something more than choose sides. Indeed, one of the values of her work is that her long history of photographing the Catholic Church offers an unusually intimate portrait, one that opens up questions about the perpetrators and those who shielded them from scrutiny, rather than simply condemning them. Her project thus tackles sexual abuse as a complex form of violence that lives in our midst rather than just in other people’s homes or churches. Because such violence is systemic and institutional, rather than a series of isolated incidents, justice can-not be achieved simply by settling lawsuits or removing (and shaming) priests, however important these actions might be. The wounds of sexual abuse, which tear apart both families and institutions, such as the church, that are like families, call for forms of emotional justice that have not yet been created. In its creative approaches to both documentation and exhibition, “Heart in the Wound” imagines the public cultures that might do this work.

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