According to Azoulay, as soon as photography became a tool available to the masses, a new form of civil relations was enacted that was not mediated by sovereign power (Azoulay, 134) and as the visual creation can be converted into the conceptual, into knowledge, exposes the instrumental approach to photography that characterizes various fields of legal, political, or moral discourse that constantly make use of photography. Photography is thus perceived as a transparent means of achieving the same general, universal goals. Yet the image maintains a direct connection with the depicted object because it was written by the object’s own reflected light, by its aura. The secularization of photography, therefore, was accompanied by the creation of its transcendent standing.（Azoulay, 149）
In Rancière’s words, an image never stands alone. It belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit. (99) What is called an image is an element in a system that created a certain sense of reality, a certain common sense. ( Azoulay, 102)
Rancière also maintains that the image is not the duplicate of a thing, it is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and the speech, the said and the unsaid. It is not a mere reproduction of what is out there in front of the photographer, It is always an alteration that occurs in a chain of images which it alters it in turn. ( Rancière, 93-94) His opinion resonances in Azoulay’s criticize of Roland Barthes about the horror image: Azoulay believes that the Barthes’s unsatisfied feeling in front of a horror picture is based a conventional way of looking/ seeing, instead of blaming on the picture itself, Azoulay suggest the spectator take action to capture thing visualized by photographer intentionally and unintentionally.
Azoulay’s opinion also echoes in Rancière’s argument about the intolerable image: there would no longer be an intolerable reality in which the image could counter-pose to the prestige of appearances, but only a single flood of images, a single regime of universal exhibition. The assertion of the authority of the voice thus emerges as the real content of the critique that took us from what is intolerable in the image to the intolerability of the image. ( Rancière, 89) Action is presented as the only answer to the evil of the image and the guilt of the spectator.
In Beltrán’s case studies, the youth activists in the DREAMER community take action through establishing new relations between words and visible forms, speech and writing, a here and an elsewhere, a then and a now. ( Rancière, 100)By starting or joining a political group on a social network site,” noncitizens”engaging in political activity and take action.
Azoulay, A. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books. Zone Books.
Cristina Beltrán 2015. From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age. Edi. Allen, D, and J S Light. University of Chicago Press.
Rancière, J. 2014. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso Books.