The readings this week explore how civil relations are mediated. Ariella Azoulay, following Hannah Arendt, suggests that photography resembles action because the photographic act, when reaching its final product, “is in fact a new beginning that lacks any predictable end” (129). By making others act in unpredictable ways, a photo’s afterlives continue to create its real world effects. In exploring the “civil contract of photography,” Azoulay makes many important observations. One is that while not everyone is considered a “citizen” in State terms, we are all a part of this contract; “in the citizenry of photography, one is a citizen” (134). This citizenship, like the photographic event, is always an “unfinished task” (157). In discussing the photograph of the dead Palestinian, Azoulay notes the “present absentees of this photograph,” the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in their homes just a few meters away (132). Photographs, while drawing our attention to what is represented in image form, can also cause us to note what is missing from the frame.
Oftentimes, we approach an artistic intervention by considering the artist’s proposals, goals, and actions. Azoulay makes the significant claim that the addresser in a photograph is not necessarily the photographer, but rather the subject represented who is making a civil address: “the presentation of a grievance” (135). Thus, the spectator is called to action because, as a citizen of photography, “she has a responsibility toward what she sees” (135); we can qualify the existence of this responsibility within the context of Taylor’s text, which explores how certain citizens actively disavow their spectatorship in acts of percepticide. Rancière also grapples with the question of recognition, complicity, and responsibility, positing that “for the image to produce its political effect, the spectator…must already feel guilty about viewing the image that is to create the feeling of guilt” (85). This guilt is tied to the construction of the image, which is always already implicated in “a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid” (93), a dispositif of visibility (102) that make image construction an exercise of power. By acknowledging how the image comes into being through a mediated process, Rancière argues that this is why interventions such as Alfredo Jaar’s are so political, because they disturb the “ordinary regime…employed in the official system of information” (95): they question the ways we receive information, what kind of information we are receiving, and what lies outside these frames of visibility. Is this not the political action that DREAM activists are engaging in in Christina Beltrán’s piece, using social media as a “strategy of visibility” to contest the construction of citizenship and “transform (rather than simply join) the current political system”? (80). It is interesting to consider Beltrán’s focus on the digital arena. If Azoulay argues that the “civil contract of photography” was established when “photography became a tool available to the masses” (134), what kind of civil contract does the digital era create? Beltrán touches on the rise of open-source/content sites for instance and how activists have used them to create alternative public spheres (81). Within the digital context, more questions around transparency, authority, surveillance, accountability, information, and collective action are formed.
Azoulay further discusses the idea of agency within the staging of the photograph. Consider the actions of Mrs. Abu-Zohir, who “[demands] her photo be taken” and “frames the injury” (139-40), or how in Agassiz’s daguerreotypes, the imposed similarity of the slaves is “disrupted by the different looks in the eyes of each subject” (172), contesting their existence as stationary objects “accessible to immediate and exhaustive viewing” (159), a colonized gaze; interesting here to consider how “injury” dialogues with the prick of the punctum that Barthes describes as what “wounds” the spectator (152) and calls to her attention what lies outside of the studium, or context, of the frame. I found Azoulay’s critique of Barthes to be fascinating, specifically how the concept of, or rather, the expectation for, a punctum can be depoliticizing; Rancière also argues that the political potential of images of art relies on “condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated” (103). Azoulay argues that Barthes depoliticizes the punctum by establishing it as a “stable characteristic” of the photograph (153), although I would argue for its contingent nature, as that which unexpectedly pricks, and does not affect all spectators (I believe it has to do with one’s individual experience with the photograph). Still, it is true that sometimes we, considering ourselves to be engaging with the photograph through acts of looking and perception, expect or anticipate a reaction, to be pricked, thus “[transferring] the weight from the visible event that makes one shudder to merely the possibility that one might shudder” (154). Is this merely another form of percepticide? Where one is looking, but towards a certain end?
Azoulay makes the significant observation that “the photograph does not speak for itself…its meaning must be constructed and agreed upon” (143). The element of consensus in political relations here is hegemonically structured; Azoulay introduces the term “conquest of the world as picture” (143) to elucidate the expectation for the photograph to be “true,” to be an accurate representation “based on limited epistemological criteria of identification” (143) (a representative regime, perhaps, in Rancierian terms). Thus, the spectator is called to action again, not only by a responsibility towards what is seen, but returning to what is absent in the frame: she is called to “reconstruct” the image (149-50).
