Still Searching...Serie, Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

Unlearning Decisive Moments ofPhotographyVon Ariella Azoulay

06.09.–31.10.2018

In her series of statements, Ariella Azoulay will depart from the common theoriesand histories that present photography as a sui generis practice and locate itsmoment of emergence in the mid-nineteenth century in relation to technologicaldevelopment and male inventors. Instead, she proposes to locate the origins ofphotography in the “New World,” in the early phases of European colonialenterprise, and study photographs alongside early accounts of imperialexpeditions. The posts have their origin in Ariella Azoulay's forthcomingbook Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso, 2019).

Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and ComparativeLiterature at Brown University, a documentary film director and an independentcurator of archives and exhibitions. Her publications include Aïm Deüelle Lüskiand Horizontal Photography (Leuven University Press and Cornell UniversityPress, 2013); The Resolution of The Suspect (with photographer: Miki Kratsman;Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press, 2016); From Palestine to Israel: APhotographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (PlutoPress, 2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso,2012) and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); co-author withAdi Ophir of The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy inIsrael/Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2012). She directed the followingfilms: Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012), I Also Dwell Among Your OwnPeople: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004).

1. Unlearning the Origins of Photography

2. Unlearning Images of Destruction

3. Unlearning Expertise Knowledge and UnsettlingExpertise Positions

4. Unlearning Imperial Rights to Take (Photographs)

5. Unlearning Imperial Sovereignties

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Still Searching...

1. Unlearning the Origins of PhotographyVon Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 06.09.2018in der Serie Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

Imagine that the origins of photography go back to 1492.

What could this mean? First and foremost, that we should unlearn the origins ofphotography as framed by those who were crowned its inventors and other privateand state entrepreneurs, as well as its association with a technology that can bereduced to discrete devices held by individual operators. In The Civil Contract ofPhotography, I proposed to displace photography’s origins from the realms oftechnology to the body politic of users and reconstruct from its practices apotential history of photography. My attempt to reconfigure photography was stilldefined by the assumption that it can be accounted for as a domain apart, andhence situated in the early nineteenth century. In what I’m going to post here inthe coming weeks, based on my forthcoming book Potential History: UnlearningImperialism, I also question imperial temporality and spatiality and attempt toaccount for the world in which photography could emerge. It is not aboutquestioning the exact moment of the inception of photography and proposing thatit was this optical device or that chemical substance that made it possible. It isabout questioning the political formations that made it possible to proclaim—andinstitutionalize the idea—that certain sets of practices used as part of large-scalecampaigns of imperial violence are separate from this violence and unrelated to it,to an extent that they can even account for it from the outside. Let me frame thequestion directly: How do those who wrote different histories and theories ofphotography know that it was invented sometime in the early nineteenth century?They—we—received this knowledge from those invested in its promotion.Accounting for photography based on its promoters’ narratives is like accountingfor imperial violence on the terms of those who exercised it, claiming that theyhad discovered a “new world.”

The invention of the New World and the invention of photography are notunrelated.

Suggesting that the origins of photography go back to 1492 is an attempt toundermine the imperial temporality that was imposed at that time, enablingpeople to believe, experience, and describe interconnected things as if they wereseparate, each defined by newness. To put it another way, for photography toemerge as a new technology in the late 1830s, the centrality of the imperial rightson which photography was predicated had to be ignored, denied, or sublimated,or in any case pushed into the background and not perceived as constitutive of itsoperation as a technology. Foregrounding these rights requires a simultaneousexercise—unlearning the accepted origins of photography and those of the “newworld,” their familiar spatial and temporal connotations, which even today arestill closely associated with modernity and “the era of discoveries,” and attendinginstead to the configuration of imperial violence and its manifestation in rights.By imperial violence I refer to the entire enterprise of destroying the existingworlds of signs, activities, and social fabrics and replacing them with a “newworld” of objects, classification, laws, technologies, and meanings. In this so-called “new world,” local populations and resources are perceived as problems orsolutions, opportunities or obstacles, and are assigned specific roles, places, andfunctions. Through these processes, existing sets of rights that were integral toeach world and inscribed in its material organization are destroyed to allow

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imperial rights to be imposed. Among these rights are the right to destroyexisting worlds, the right to manufacture a new world in their place,the rights over others whose worlds are destroyed together with the rightsthey enjoyed in their communities and the right to declare what is new andconsequently what is obsolete. The attachment of the meaning “new” towhatever imperialism imposes is constitutive of imperial violence: it turnsopposition to its actions, inventions, and the distribution of rights into aconservative, primitive, or hopeless “race against time”—i.e., progress—ratherthan as a race against imperialism. The murder of five thousand Egyptians whostruggled against Napoleon’s invasion of their sacred places and the looting of oldtreasures, which were to be “salvaged” and displayed in Napoleon’s new museumin Paris, is just one example of this. In the imperial histories of new technologiesof visualization, both the resistance and the murder of these people arenonexistent, while the depictions of Egypt’s looted treasures, which were renderedin almost photographic detail, establish a benchmark, indicating whatphotography came to improve. I’ll come back to this point in my fourth statement,when I’ll discuss the Great March of Return, the march against imperialism andthe apparatuses that sought to render obsolete and bury the just claims of themarchers under the “statute of limitations,” negating their attempt to rewind thedeclaration of a “new” state in their homeland.

Dominique François Arago presenting the discovery of daguerreotype, L’Académie des sciences,August 10, 1839.

My proposition, however, is that photography did not initiate a new world; yet, itwas built upon and benefitted from imperial looting, divisions, and rights thatwere operative in the colonization of the world in which photography wasassigned the role of documenting, recording, or contemplating what-is-already-there. In order to acknowledge that photography’s origins are in 1492, we have tounlearn the expertise and knowledge that call upon us to account for photographyas having its own origins, histories, practices, or futures, and to explore it as partof the imperial world in which we, as scholars, photographers, or curators,operate. Let me briefly present an excerpt from the well-known and frequentlyquoted report by Dominique François Arago, which was delivered in 1839 beforethe Chambre des Deputes and is considered a foundational moment in thediscourse of photography. The speech is often quoted as an early attempt to defineand advocate the new practice and technology of photography. I rather propose toread it as a performance naturalizing pre-existing imperial premises, which hadprepared the ground on which the “new” invention could emerge.

“While these pictures are exhibited to you, everyone will imagine the

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extraordinary advantages which could have been derived from so exact andrapid a means of reproduction during the expedition to Egypt; everybodywill realize that had we had photography in 1798 we would possess todayfaithful pictorial records of that which the learned world is forever deprived ofby the greed of the Arabs and the vandalism of certain travelers. To copy themillions of hieroglyphics which cover even the exterior of the great monuments ofThebes, Memphis, Karnak, and others would require decades of time and legionsof draughtsmen. By daguerreotype one person would suffice toaccomplish this immense work successfully.” 1

That Arago, a statesman and a man of his time, confirms the imperial premises ofphotography and praises its goals is no surprise. What is striking, and should bealarming, is how the performance of naturalization is reiterated in the texts ofnon-statesmen, including by authors who rejected the imperial order and goals,such as Walter Benjamin in his “Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction.”

“Around 1900, technological reproduction not only had reached a standardthat permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundlymodifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of its own amongthe artistic processes. In gauging this standard, we would do well to study theimpact which its two different manifestations—the reproduction of artworks andthe art of film—are having on art in its traditional form.”2

Such reiterations do not testify to the nature of the “new” technology but to theway photography, like other technologies, was rooted in imperial formations ofpower and legitimization of the use of violence in the form of rights exercised overothers. For both Arago and Benjamin, the existence of images and objects thatwere not meant to be part of an imperial depository of art history, containedphysically and symbolically in works of art waiting to be reproduced, is not aquestion or a problem but a given assumption. Reproduction is understood in thiscontext as a neutral procedure ready to be used by those who own the propermeans for it, and regardless of the will of those from whom the objects have beenexpropriated. It is based on this assumption and this understanding ofreproduction that photography could be perceived and discussed as a newtechnology of image production and reproduction. A lineage of previous practiceshad to be invented for photography to be conceived of as a novel addition, atechnology that alters and improves—substantially and on different levels—thequality of the end product. In this means-end relationship, not only isphotography construed as a means to an end but the end is also construed as agiven, and the existence of objects as simply given to the gaze—of the camera, inthis case—is thus assumed and confirmed.

The context of Arago’s speech enables one to reconstruct the regime of rights andprivileges that were involved in the advocacy of photography. That the world andothers’ worlds are made to be exhibited is not a question for Arago, nor is it aquestion for everybody but rather for a certain audience addressed in his speechwith a familiarizing “you,” an audience made up of white men like him, Frenchstatesmen and scientists. The acquisition of rights to dissect and study people’sworlds—of which the Napoleonic expedition mentioned above is a paradigmaticexample—and render their fragments into pieces to be meticulously copied withsharpness and exactitude is not posed as a problem but is taken for granted. Forthat to happen, those who are harmed by the violence—facilitated, among otherthings by the new means of reproduction, which had been imposed and usedsystematically by Napoleon’s brigade of draftsmen during the expedition to Egypt—should be bracketed and left outside of these debates in which the fate ofphotography is discussed, while the right to operate it is directly and indirectlyaccorded to a certain class, at the expense of others.

In 1839, those who were directly invoked by Arago’s “you” had already beenresponsible for large-scale disasters that included genocides, sociocides, andculturcides in North and West Africa and the Caribbean islands, for naturalizingand legalizing these acts through international institutions and laws, and forinstituting their rights to continue dominating others’ worlds. At that point, theuniversal addressee implied by Arago’s “everybody” and “everyone” is fictitiousnot only because so many were not included but mainly because those who wereintended as universal addressees could not come into being without dissecting,bracketing, and sanctioning the experience of violence as other than it was. The

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violence of forcing everything to be shown and exhibited to the gaze is erased and denied when the right in question is only the right to see. If the right NOT to exhibit everything had been respected—as it existed in different places the imperial agents invaded—a universal right to see that endows “everybody” with unlimited access to what is in the world could not be founded. Thus, extending the right to see so as to render “everybody” a truly universal is not possible without perpetrating further violence: that of denying that objects are not universal, they have different inherent functions and varying modes and degrees of visibility and accessibility within their communities. The forced universalization of objects was required for the invention of an allegedly universalized spectator; this was made possible only because those who care for their objects had them expropriated, along with the right to handle them as an inheritance from their ancestors and use them to continue to protect their worlds. Protecting one’s world against the invasion of the “new” is not a matter of extending imperial privileges to others but of questioning the imperial authority altogether to impose a universal right on heterogeneous worlds whose members maintain a different relation to the material world in which objects are organized not simply to be looked at. If the principle that not everything should be made available for everybody to see had been respected, the existence of a universal right to see would be a complete fraud. When photography emerged, it did not halt this process of plunder that made others and others’ worlds available to the few, but rather accelerated it and provided further opportunities and modalities for pursuing it

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2. Unlearning Images of DestructionVon Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 17.09.2018in der Serie Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

Samples of destruction, different places, different times, AA.

To take this excursion to 1492 as the origin of photography—exploring this withand through photography—requires one to abandon the imperial lineartemporality and the way it separates tenses: past, present, and future. One has toengage with the imperial world from a non-imperial perspective and becommitted to the idea of revoking rather than ignoring or denying imperial rightsmanufactured and distributed as part of the destruction of diverse worlds. Inorder to clarify this trajectory, I will start with a few photos taken in differenttimes and places, which I propose to explore alongside early accounts of imperialexpeditions. Obviously, we do not have photos of the mass destruction of the latefifteenth century, but nor do we have images showing the destruction of so manyother places that took place at a time when photography could have been used torecord them. This doesn’t mean that destruction didn’t take place, or that itoccurred differently, if the goal was to eliminate any elements in these existingworlds that resisted the implementation of imperial enterprises. It means thatdocumentary protocols are insufficient and may even obstruct the attempt tounderstand destruction not as a contingent, discrete, or local event but aspervasive and constitutive of modernity—its major enterprise. For what hasbecome pervasive since 1492 and changed our perception is not this or thattechnological device, such as the Kodak Brownie, or its products, namelyphotographs—a claim that is made again and again in the discourse onphotography—but rather destruction. 1 Hence, rather than conceiving ofphotography as a means to document discrete cases of destruction, we need to askourselves how photography participated in the destruction and ultimatelyexamine if and how, on the basis of this acknowledgement, it can play a part inimagining ways out of it.

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Three drawings of general view of Algiers: El-Djezaïr, “Dutch ships in the port of Algiers,” by JanLuyken (1649–1712), Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France; El-Djezaïr, “Algiers harbor,” engraving,1690; El-Djezaïr, “Le port d’Alger,” Algiers, Algeria, fortified town/city plan.

Let me start with three random engravings of Algiers and its port. What they havein common is the point of view of foreigners approaching the city from afar andlooking at it from the outside. With the French invasion of Algeria, this point ofview is reversed. An artist embedded with the colonizing powers in Algeria,Langlois was given the imperial right by the military forces to take up a safeposition at the heart of the Casbah—where, it should be said, he was not welcome—and to generate multiple camera obscura images of the city. Taken from within,

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his images convey a view from the inside out, from the built city toward the sea. 2

Colonel Jean Charles Langlois, installation of 23 studies for the Panorama of Algiers, 1832.

Langlois used these images to create a panoramic view of the city, which heshowed, shortly after its production, in one of the many panorama facilities inParis. Without decades of imperial bombardment and the city’s final colonizationby the French in 1830, this panoramic point of view of a foreign city from whichthe inhabitants had disappeared, as John Zarobell reminds us, would not havebeen possible.

Colonel Jean Charles Langlois, Grande Place d’Alger, 1830. Musée des beaux-arts, Caen.

A moderate visual account of the demolished city is included in Langlois’snotebook. For a more comprehensive account of the destruction, we should lookelsewhere and through a different lens. As already implied in the first post, myassumption is that the ubiquity of destruction both precedes and enables theubiquity of photographs. The latter is derivative of the former and should be readin connection with it.

“Neurdein Brothers” / “Algeria” Google Search screenshot.

From this perspective, I propose to approach the vast photographic enterprise ofcapturing attractive buildings and exotic people in Algeria—a project that wasconducted explicitly for advertising purposes as a means to attract French touristsand colonizers to enjoy the country’s beauty—as metonymically part and parcel of

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the destruction of Algeria. This enterprise was conducted by the Neurdeinbrothers and funded by the French government. While the military regime carriedon its program of destruction, another group of imperial agents continued tocapture and salvage, for a shorter or longer period, the “best sample” of doomedAlgeria’s architecture.

Here, in these photographs and in others taken a few hundred years after theinvention of the new world, I invite you to see the exercise of these same imperialrights that were already proclaimed and enacted in early letters written byAmerigo Vespucci at the turn of the fifteenth century. These new rights, whoseexercise involved mass destruction, are manufactured under the pretext of thepromotion of knowledge involved in the discovery of “new worlds.” At thebeginning of the first of his four letters, Vespucci describes what was given tothem by the people he and his expedition encountered: “Whatever was asked ofthem, they gave at once, though more out of fear than of love.” 3 Not surprisingly,since twenty-two of them were “well-armed men.” “Each day,” Vespuccicontinues, “we discovered an infinite number of people and various languagesuntil having sailed four hundred leagues along the coast, we began to encounterpeople who did not want our friendship” (Vespucci, 11). Shortly thereafter,Vespucci starts depicting these people as enemies, since they stood in the way oftheir invaders and “prevented our landing, so that we were forced to fight withthem” (11). What is assumed to be their right to pursue their mission andhave unlimited access to any place, sacred places included, cannot becurtailed by other people, who are described as well installed in a world of theirown, whose houses are “built with great skill” and “full of very fine cotton wool,”but also at the same time as people who are “naked, ever fearful and of feeblemind” (13–15). Vespucci and his men continued to fight against the localinhabitants who objected to their invasion, until they “routed them and killed 150of them, and set fire to 180 of their houses” (12). Vespucci concludes the firstletter with the achievements of this expedition articulated in the form of the goodsthey “brought back.” This harvest is not described as the outcome of the exerciseof violence against the native inhabitants of the places they invaded. It is insteaddepicted as an expression of the invader’s sharp eye, of his connoisseurship ofwhat might be appreciated by their sovereigns, and the outcome of the exercise ofthe right to appropriate others’ wealth, resources, and labor: “Webrought back pearls and gold in its nascent or crude state. We brought back twostones. . . . We brought back a large piece of crystal. . . . We brought back fourteenpearls the color of flesh” (16). I propose to proceed by reading these letters outsideof the constraints of the archive, which invites us to assume that they pertain to anearly phase of imperialism, capitalism, or globalization, and insteadreconstructing from them the set of imperial rights that continue to lie at the basisof our political regimes. It is well known that these expeditions didn’t stop withVespucci: “we” brought back—with much care, against many challenges, andunder well-established preservation protocols—types, precious objects, art, andwealth and destroyed the social fabrics, the political structures, and the systems ofrights and beliefs of which they were part.

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A ceremonial ax in stone, Puerto Rico, 3rd–10th century, Musée de l’Homme, Paris, from the catalogue L’Art Taïno, Musée du Petit Palais.

Let me end this section with one photograph of a single object. Carefully collected and preserved in a French museum, this Taino object cannot be reduced to what was made out of it—a work of art that fits into its “right” place in an imperial history of art. Nor can it be reduced to the documentary value of its photograph, complete with its meta-data asserting when and where it was taken, and the identity of the captured object. It is only through imperial ideologies, such as that of the documentary or of a universal art, that we can view this isolated object not as the encapsulation of the imperial violence involved in the annihilation of the people of which it was part. Deciphering the photographic information in a different way and unlearning the documentary protocols, this image can no longer be viewed as a work of art from a bygone age but rather as an object in which non-imperial rights are inscribed that could potentially be restored.

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3. Unlearning Expertise Knowledge andUnsettling Expertise PositionsVon Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 28.09.2018in der Serie Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

Through this combined activity of destroying and manufacturing “new” worlds,people were deprived of an active life and their different activities reduced andmobilized to fit larger schemes of production and world engineering. Throughthese schemes, different groups of governed peoples were crafted and assignedaccess to certain occupations, mainly non-skilled labor that in turn enabled thecreation of a distinct strata of professions with the vocational purpose ofarchitecting “new” worlds and furnishing them with new technologies. Suchprofessions housed experts in distinct domains—economics, law, politics, culture,art, health, scholarship, and so on—which were differentiated and kept separate inracialized worlds engendered by imperialism. Experts in each domain enjoy theright to shape societies according to their vision or will, to study them, and tocraft visionary templates in order to provide solutions to problems generated byother experts.

Photography was shaped into such a model, with its own strata of experts. Thisclass of expert professionals denied their implication in the constitution andperpetuation of the imperial regime and quickly convinced themselves that theywere not exercising imperial rights but rather documenting and reporting thewrongs of that regime, acting for the common good. This is epitomized in thenotion of the “concerned photographer,” which is also the title of an influentialexhibition, one among others in which the figure of the photographer is construedas a hero apart.

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“Concerned Photographers,” selection of book covers.

However, in exchange for some of its exclusive rights, not necessarily those thatwere financially rewarding, photographers have been mobilized to represent thoseimperial rights as if they were disconnected from the regime of violence. It is outof this structural denial that the tradition of engaged photography could inventthe protocol of the documentary as a means of accounting for objects that wereviolently fabricated by imperial actors, a mode of being morally concerned amongone’s peers.

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Pages from the Concerned Photographer catalogue.

Thus, for example, Magnum/ICP photographers such as David Seymour or RobertCapa could depict the plunder of Palestine as the creation of a new state or worldin which Jewish sovereignty could triumph, conflating the plight of thePalestinians with the difficulties encountered by the migrant Jews, who at thatpoint were made guardians of the new sovereignty. Misled by the documentaryprotocols that they were using, and thus becoming implicated in what wasmisleading about them, acting as if lived worlds are reducible to their real-estatecomponents and nation-building campaigns, these photographers dismiss theplight of the indigenous population as well as the destruction of the common. 1Differences between situations were blurred in such a way that perpetrators couldbe depicted as victims or law enforcers even though they were responsible for thedestruction of the existing world and the plight of others.

Burt Glinn, photos taken in 1956 of Palestinians persecuted by the State of Israel.

These three photos taken by Burt Glinn in 1956 in the same place—destroyedPalestine, the newly declared state of Israel—and shown last year in Paris weredisplayed only with their minimalist original caption “Palestinian Prisoners.” Boththe display and the captions take the imperial narrative for granted and assumethat there is no harm in reiterating it nor any need to question the authority ofthose who acquired their imperial rights and sovereignty against the Palestinians,whom they expelled from their homes. These Palestinians are not “prisoners.” Inthe photos taken in 1956 in Gaza, they are rather brutalized, either as they attemptto return to their homes or when the Israeli occupying forces invade their homes.Either way, they were expelled from their homeland, Palestine, six years earlier,and when they insisted on their right to return to their homes, they were forced to

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embody imperial categories such as “refugee” or “infiltrator,” which endowmodern citizenship with a set of imperial rights to keep them in this role. Theywere made into the unacknowledged participants in such photographs: thosewhose spaces have been invaded through the exercise of imperial rights so thattheir images can continue to circulate, tagged with imperial categories thatphotographers often use as if they were spokespersons of imperial regimes.Contrary to certain rights that people enjoy within their communities, imperialrights do not emanate from the community in which people are members, onbehalf of their membership, or for the sake of a shared world. On the contrary,such rights are derived from the invasion of others’ communities and thedestruction of the worlds in which those others enjoy certain rights. Notsurprisingly, these imperially unrecognized subjects reject the meaning ofphotographs as private property subject to copyright.

Palestine Remembered, http://www.palestineremembered.com/OldNewPictures.html.

Thus, on the website Palestine Remembered, for example, Palestinians insist on the rights they have in these photographs, on their being part of the common, and by using them without permission, they challenge the idea of photographs as objects reducible to private property and owned exclusively. The photographer is not the one who expelled them, but as long as his permission to photograph is conditioned by those who did expel them and by the regime they established, his right is not universal but imperial.

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4. Unlearning Imperial Rights to Take(Photographs)Von Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 09.10.2018in der Serie Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

The millions, whose photographs are taken, are not referred to in any meaningfulway in the histories and theories of photography. Beaumont Newhall’s TheHistory of Photography is a paradigmatic example. His fourth chapter, forexample, is titled “Portraits for the Million.” 1 The seven-digit figure is evokedhere to celebrate the medium, not the power of the people, whose attempts to gettogether and unionize in large numbers was often crushed rather than praised.From a very early stage, it was assumed that the people photographed, not thespectators, are to provide the resources and the cheap or free labor for this large-scale photographic enterprise. The many involved in photography wereconsidered extras, secondary actors or raw material, while the work of somephotographers was singled out to constitute the spine of the history ofphotography.

Magnum photographers, selection of covers

Though they were not the big imperial entrepreneurs or profit makers,photographers enjoyed imperial rights that provided them with the license “to goalmost anywhere they wanted.” As Magnum’s official history states,

“In those days a photographer had a significant advantage: large areas of theworld had hardly ever seen a photographer. They could choose to go almostanywhere they wanted, as Rodger [George] pointed out, because in the early daysone could ‘take pictures of just about anything and magazines were clamoring forit. . . .’

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Magnum’s first move was to divide the world, rather loosely, into flexible areas ofcoverage, with Chim in Europe, Cartier-Bresson in India and the Far East, Rodgerin Africa, and Capa at large and replacing Bill Vandivert (an American who hadhelped found Magnum but soon dropped out) in the USA.”

Given that free or cheap labor is extracted from others, photographers act asmiddlepersons between those photographed—the objects of their craft—andother imperial agents. It is in exchange for this that they could benefit from theimperial domination of photographic markets and could claim single authorshipof their photographs, even though their production involved many other people.

Video stills from Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), a film by Renzo Martens

Accorded the right to deprive other participants of their share in the photograph,photographers did not necessarily enrich themselves, but they did enable largecorporations, collections, and institutions to benefit from the free labor and fromthe presence of innumerable photographed persons who fueled the industry.

Google search screenshot of “types / Algeria”

Not surprisingly, such rights that are not inscribed in any community could berevoked as easily as they were given, and with no remorse, and photographerscould always be dispensed with if no longer needed—as photographers experiencewith the mass appropriation of photography by image bank corporations thatclaim exclusive ownership of “their” work: this can be seen here in the screenshotof a random Google search with the categories “types / Algeria”—what was oncethe property of the Neurdein brothers is now distributed as the property of Alamyimage bank. 2

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As cultural agents, photographers didn’t enjoy the same privileges as thoseimperial agents who crafted and distributed imperial rights the world over. Inexchange for their privileges and symbolic capital, photographers were expectedto conceal the exploitative meaning of the photographic encounter—an encounterin which those stripped of their rights in their own communities had to becomefree resources for growing markets, skilled artists and artisans, fields ofknowledge, and disciplines. The dominant discourse of human rights, however,ignores these rights when referring to photography, and the discourse ofphotography is mostly limited to describing how violations of rights arerepresented in photographs and can be advocated through them (as in“photographs of human rights”) or to discussing rights pertaining to the “endproduct” of photography—i.e., the photograph—including rights of ownership andauthorship (copyrights) and rights of protection, dissemination, andmanagement. In both ways, such an approach excludes in advance the recognitionof the participation of different parties in the photographic event. The right totake photographs was imposed from the start as given, unlimited andinalienable, often against the will of others.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, Slought, Philadelphia, from:https://slought.org/resources/collaboration_a_potential_history

Occasionally, as explored in the exhibition Collaboration, photographers reconsider their form of involvement with others and seek alternative ways to engage with other participants in the photographic event. Constraints that are occasionally imposed upon this right by officials and representatives of imperial powers—the army, police, or the state—helped to further dissociate the common ground between photographers and those photographed and shape the persona of the photographer as if this persona is not part of these powers and not working under the aegis and protection of the violence they exercise, but is rather an agent of criticism and opposition, documenting the wrongs perpetrated by these powers. Photographers, like artists, acquire, as part of their professional habitus, the right to relate to others’ worlds as raw material, or in today’s language as “references,” as materials used for study, admiration, or appropriation. Hence, they often resist the constraints imposed on their capacity to exercise their profession by the state and its subsidiaries and inhabit the position of a sort of “freedom fighter,” struggling to keep their right to free movement and speech and remove obstacles put in place by authorities on their way to pursuing their mission. This however, is usually done without acknowledging, let alone problematizing, the inherited imperial privileges that make the photographer’s position possible

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5. Unlearning Imperial SovereigntiesVon Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 24.10.2018in der Serie Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

Cameras are a product of imperialism’s scopic regime. However, imperial rightsare not fully inscribed in the device. The unifocality of the camera and what AïmDeüelle Lüski calls its verticality partition the space where it is located into whator who is “in front of it” and what or who is “behind it.” 1

Aïm Deüelle Lüski, ball camera. An interview with Lüski, from The Angel of History (2000), a film byAriella Azoulay

Photographs are, however, metonymical records of an encounter between thoseconvened around the camera, figures whom the unifocal camera is designed toseparate and differentiate while naturalizing that separation. Thus, the what, how,and who captured in the pictures are dissociated on different levels from the what,how and who engaged in taking the photos and circulating and holding the rightsto them as if they were private property. This dissociation is predicated on one ofthe camera’s features, thus belittling the role of its other features. One of the mostimportant of them is the opportunity that the camera creates for people tocoincide with others in the same space and time and thus participate in generatingsomething in common, something that could not be produced otherwise—that is,without the presence and participation of others. It is only through powerfulinstitutions such as museums, archives, the press, or the police, as well aseconomic and political sanctions, that such other features and the participation ofthe many are devalued, prohibited, or outlawed in an attempt to deprive theparticipants in the photographic event of their rights and power, makingphotography subservient to the imperial project. This is what keeps the unilateralright on which photography was institutionalized—the right to roam around

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with a tool that penetrates people’s lives and to take their pictureswithout being invited to do so—ungrounded and reversible. To be recognized notas the exercise of violence but as a lawful right, this right needs to be materializedand redeemed in a common world, one which is irreducible to the sheer, ongoingattempt to accumulate ever more capital, profit, wealth, distinction, and power.Given that the right to take a photograph of others was imposed regardlessof their will or consent, destruction creates the conditions under which such aright can be exercised. The imprint of the right to destroy—while not necessarily a“theme” of particular photographs—is encapsulated in almost every photographtaken where imperial agents stepped in, even if it is not immediately decodable assuch. At the same time, when the depiction of destruction is understood as theexpression and style of concerned photographers, one tends to ignore the factthat, together with the built environment that was destroyed, the rights inscribedin that environment were also destroyed, and that the very loss of those rights is,in the first place, what turned the photographed persons into what they havebecome.

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Video stills from Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), a film by Renzo Martens

Think, for example, of Enjoy Poverty, Renzo Martens’s film shot in Congo.Without layers and layers of the imperial destruction that expropriated theCongolese, taking away their place within the social, cultural, and politicalformations of which they were part, none of what we see would have beenpossible. At the heart of the film, Martens attempt to engage a group of youngmen who had been connected with a small photography store, schooling them inhow to compete with Western photojournalists in taking photographs of themisery of people from their communities. The lesson focuses on thephotojournalistic expectation of photographers who seek to get physically closerto the photographed persons, but the lesson that we as spectators are invited tolearn concerns the distance required by photographers in order to point thecamera at people, as if an imagined curtain separated them from each other, aprerequisite for the middleperson placed in between hypothetical agents of thefree market of images with all its demands and those on whom the success of thephotographic image actually depends.

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Video stills from Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), a film by Renzo Martens

Not surprisingly, as photographers were and continue to be only minorprotagonists in the imperial economy of photography, they often suffer too fromits regime of violence, as it destroys the social fabrics of communities of whichthey are or could be a part. It is in those more unusual cases—when the exercise ofphotography is not based on such an alienated distance and is rather exercised inconcert and partnership with the photographers’ communities—that not only istheir labor not commissioned by lucrative markets but, additionally, they risklosing their immunity and become the direct targets of imperial agents.

Yasser Murtaja, Palestinian photojournalist evacuated after being shot by Israeli troops, The GreatMarch of Return, April 6, 2018. Photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Palestinian journalists, a protest against the killing of fellow journalist Yasser Murtaja, near the Gazaborder, April 8, 2018. Photo: Said Khatib

It is not necessarily what they would capture in their cameras that becomes thethreat that has to be suppressed; it is rather the type of proximity—symbolic,

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affective, and physical—between photographers and those supposed to be their raw material, a proximity that overrides imperial and capitalist divides, proximity to the kind of unionization of those whose interests these systems seek to keep apart, that becomes the target for law enforcers and snipers, the proxies of imperial agents. The Great March of Return by Palestinians contesting the law of the nation state erected in 1948 that made them intruders to and in their homeland, is not another episode within the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”—another imperial invention. It is the persistence of a non-imperial struggle against the imperial-capitalist enterprise of which the state of Israel is part and should be understood on a global scale. It is a struggle against the many forms and structures of violence that imperial states seek to naturalize as laws by virtue of their very existence. Within this context, it becomes clear that the large number of Palestinian journalists and photojournalists shot by Israeli snipers week after week since the beginning of the Great March of Return is not unrelated to the fact that these photographers act as part of their community and are not delegates of an international media milieu, they pursue this profession out of affectionate proximity and commitment to their own community. Moreover, in these images of them carried on stretchers by other members of the community, there is much of what the imperial state—the ally of imperial markets—is mandated to disallow.

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