“Representation is not the act of producing visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent – something that speech does just as much as photography”. (Rancière 93)
All three authors of this week brought up the idea of what action photography and videography represent and citizenship of their actors. Azoulay starts her chapter by establishing photography as a civil action in Arendt’s term that is irreversible, without “a clearly demarcated beginning and a predictable end”(129), making others act. Both Azoulay and Rancière use examples of photographs of violence and horror as intolerable images to show the act of taking an image by its different participants. For Azoulay in the photo of two armed soldiers behind the dead body of Palestinian, the actors are not only the soldiers, the corpse, their photographer, a photographer that captured the action of taking the image, but also absent Palestinians. They are invisible in the picture, but their presence is embodied in the context where they are not even able to take care of their dead citizens. The unshown is also present in Rancière’s example of Wajcman’s gas chamber witnesses, “in whose eyes we can detect the horror we have seen” (92). Beltran’s actors are invisible and undocumented in real life but appear in social media through images, speeches, and videos, making equivalent queer space of appearance for themselves and all other migrants in a similar situation. In all these cases, participants of the image go beyond what is captured on the picture, including spectators who continue the action of a photo through the feelings it invoked in them. Azoulay states that “although plurality cannot erase structural inequalities and discrepancies between the different protagonists, the space of plurality undermines the apparently stable conditions of domination” (133). DREAM activists prove this idea making their collective appearance visible to the government. While the group fought for American citizenship, Azoulay spoke for citizenship of photography equally sharing the burden of responsibility for images among multiple participants of it. I believe no matter who is seen as a protagonist, author or spectator of an image it is important to keep in mind that everyone encountering carries the obligation to give justice to it.