Roger Hallas

Roger Hallas writes and teaches on documentary media, LGBTQ studies, and photography studies. His first two books examined how visual culture performs mediated acts of bearing witness to historical trauma. The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2007), which he co-edited with Frances Guerin, analyzes how different visual media inscribe acts of witnessing and how the image itself can serve as witness to historical trauma. Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Duke University Press, 2009), illuminates the capacities of queer film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. His two subsequent books have explored the intermediality between documentary film and other media/arts. His edited collection Documenting the Visual Arts (Routledge, 2020) investigates the contemporary art documentary, while his latest book A Medium Seen Otherwise: Photography in Documentary Film (Oxford University Press, 2023) elucidates how the incorporation of photography in documentary film opens up new perspectives on both media.