The Empathetic Trap — Elaine Tam

‘A certain kind of photographer must hunt for his image. To stalk, to shoot, to capture, to crop: it is no accident that in a lexicon of the image we find words commonly associated with hunting. Some 2.6 million years ago, homo sapiens learned to hunt big-game and entered the club of competitive predators. They acquired the basic principles of the hunt – tracking, chasing, ambushing – through the observation and mimicry of carnivorous predators in their surroundings. But while their competitors could follow on the heels of a creature almost entirely by scent, homo sapiens relied on movements, patterns, prints and the occasional sound. Hunting then, as much as it is now, is anendeavour belonging to visual culture.
Less apparent is that hunting is partly responsible for the abstract thinking that spawns the virtual-visual: the production of mental images. Causal cognition is a form of abstract thinking that is argued to have developed with the hunter personage. An understanding of cause and effect ist ethered, if not necessary, to the relations of predator and prey, thus the mindset of the hunter is constituted by the question of how one’s every move may implicate the future success of the hunt. As homo sapiens pursued big-game, they began to depend on cunning and cooperation far more than strength. Tools emerged as one of humanity’s earliest technologies, along with inter-species alliances and the development of oblique strategies such as the laying of traps. To capture an image, the photographer must enter a predator-prey dynamic; they must envision their subject, predict their whereabouts, and anticipate the perfect moment to seize it. The photographer lurks and adopts the sit-and-wait technique, all the while alert to presences and other invisible goings-on. In an exercise of weaponised empathy, they must inhabit the prey’s point of view to lay the perfect trap. It is as such that causal cognition, a game of infinite variation, connects the photographer’s process with the anatomy of the hunt.’

[Excerpt from ‘The Empathetic Trap’, 2025]

Francis Alÿs, The Nightwatch (2004), 19 minutes, still.

Selected 35mm photographs by Sophie Calle comprising Suite Vénitienne (1983), as they appear in the eponymous first edition book, with an introduction by Jean Baudrillard.

If you’ve ever wondered what Sophie Calle’s 1983 Suite Vénitienne and Francis Alÿs’ 2004 The Nightwatch have to do with projective identification, imaging technologies and the stalk of the hunt... this essay I wrote with designer Arthur Gouillart titled ‘The Empathetic Trap’ answers to exactly that. Published in the quarterly Amsterdam-based print magazine Simulacrum, we do a close reading of these two works of art created 20 years apart using a bit of media theory, psychoanalysis and botched evolutionary ideas.

Available for purchase here.

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