Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Episode III: Enjoy Poverty : An Aesthetic Virus of Political Discomfort Caitlin Frances Bruce Department of Communication Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA his article considers Renzo Martens’s controversial 2008 ilm, Episode III ( Enjoy Poverty). Martens’s ilm is a conceptual ilm that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such images. It argues that the ilm, which creates troubling identiications and disidentiications for a Western spectator, ofers a politically productive lesson on the power of discomfort to disrupt unethical image practices. Communication studies scholars have engaged in these conversations via studies about identiication and disidentiication and the documentary genre; afect in cinematic media; and more directly, through work that investigates the perils of cookie-cutter frames for representing (racialized) poverty. Keywords: Identiication, Disidentiication, Documentary Film, Afect, Photography, Sentimentality, Politics of Representation. doi:10.1111/cccr.12109 “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.” Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977) Susan Sontag’s opening salvo in her landmark essay, On Photography, encapsulates a longstanding anxiety about photographic practice. To picture the world is to have (or believe one has) power over it. Moreover, the passage implies that belief in such knowledge feels powerful, yet, such agentive inlation involves an act of unsanctioned capture. hus, in Sontag’s view, photography occupies a slippery ethical location and, at best, a questionable epistemological one. From the muckraker journalism of Jacob Riis and fellows photography has played a key role as political and documentary tech- nology, relied upon heavily to promote humanitarian aid projects (Chouliaraki, 2010; Manzo, 2008), using images as forms of evidence with the implied belief that seeing can be tied to action. Lamentably, such well-intentioned practices frequently serve to Corresponding author: Caitlin Frances Bruce; e-mail: bruce.caitlin@gmail.com Communication, Culture & Critique (2015) © 2015 International Communication Association 1