Horst Bredekamp argues that images bear an agency (a presence) that is reducible neither to the projections of the viewer

Absence, then, names the condition for the possibility of imaging.20 The image presents what it is not, and in the presentation of the “is not,” the “is”—the literal image—recedes.21 This is the negation at the heart of imaging.

One of the main ways art can disrupt the carceral imagination is by refuting the eugenic classification and fragmentation of people—desirable or deplorable, worthy or disgraced, precious or superfluous. Art can remind us who we are beyond the trappings of privilege or prison.