Dominique Somers practices a form of research photography, in which she experimentally studies how technically created images give rise to new insights and aesthetic experiences that find their way into our daily lives, ways of thinking and visual processes. For Agents of Concern. Images and Empathy, she returns to her interest in forensic photography, more specifically to the glass plates from the historical archive of the Antwerp judicial police, with which she already made an exhibition at the FOMU in 2005. For the series Power Grips(2023), she selected photographic records of fingerprints and other small traces of violence on everyday objects, kept in old files of serious assault cases (murder, manslaughter). By taking these images out of context and manipulating them in the darkroom, the photographed objects increasingly distance themselves from the original, shocking circumstances in which they were found. Yet the photographs remain highly charged, not so much because of what they explicitly show but because of the latent off-screen factors and the unmistakable aura that the objects are endowed with through the photographic record. In this way, Somers explores whether and how a (photograph of an) isolated, mute object can take on, convey or visualize the emotional weight of a violent crime. To what extent we can be empathetic with the image of a trivial piece of electric cable, a shard of glass or coat sleeve as a metaphor for the traumatic.