While much attention is paid –and for good reason – to the politics of visibility in news and social media in the contemporary moment, little is given to the ways that numbness and inattention are harnessed to the creation of a story (and particularly stories of war). Bombarded with images, we fail to recognize the visual fields around us that build our sense of the world. These artists take the ‘numb image’ of the horrors of war and activate new meanings, potentials, and points of view. Through the use of mixed media, Farideh Sakhaeifar, Francis Estrada, and Syed Hussain draw attention to the limits of and capacities of photography. Sakhaeifar asks the viewer to consider the meaning of the photograph in the traffic of (conceptions of) conflict far from direct American view. She pointedly appropriates reproducible generic images of war, drawing attention to their process of retrieval and commercial ubiquity and use, in which displacement, militarism, and human tragedy are abstracted to (often staged) generic referents for sale and mass viewing. Estrada looks at the photograph as evidence, denying the repressive testamentary power it can have under despotic governmental regimes. In the artist’s words, “the voiding of background of murdered and criminalized subjects amplifies relatability. The subject can be anywhere or anyplace and also the viewer can be anytime …” and is decontextualized, recontextualized, and beatified. Syed Hussain’s work deals with the dehumanization of populations caught in military cross-fire, as “collateral damage.” Focusing on the genocide of the Hazara Shia people, he contemplates loss through the family portrait – both a document of real lives and lives lost, and a site of nostalgia and community memory.