“The photo… is the outcome of focus, excision and framing. Yet the image retains a direct connection with the depicted object, because it was written by the object’s own reflected light, by its aura” (Azoulay, 149).
Ariella Azoulay’s theorizing of the “horror photo,” which, in the work of Jacques Rancière, is called “the intolerable image,” is caught up in an institutional complex–of “structures, mechanisms, and positions”–that is prepared to manage it at any time and place. The “horror photo” must be more shocking every time we see it, if we are to be reconciled with death, so as not to be insensitive to it (155). This line of thinking is positioned as a point of departure for Azoulay, who, in her book chapter “The Spectator Is Called to Take Part,” orients her theory of the civil contract of photography towards the act of prolonged observation, telling us that this act by “the observer as spectator” has the power to “turn a still photo into a theater stage upon which what has been frozen comes to life” (159). Thus, following her statement quoted at this essay’s opening, we see that it is not always only the photo that is the outcome of “focus, excision and framing,” but also the “coming to life” of that which “has been frozen.” It is interesting to interpret these two outcomes as ‘photos’ and ‘figures’ (respectively), performing in various unpredictable ways, resting on the hinge of the image–that is, the futurism of the ‘world picture’, which was “photography’s vision from the very beginning” (Azoulay, 138).
According to Azoulay, the object of photography, present in the world of experience, “imprints an image on the emulsion that… always contains an element that exceeds the world of experience, thus exceeding interference” (149). I think what Azoulay is getting at here is of tremendous gravity: it is both similar and different that the transcendent experience sought after in Kant’s aesthetics, and that aesthetic experience sought after by Barthes. Here is where we begin to understand her theory of the civil contract of photography as a theory of image economy: a circulation of meaning, affect, figuration, coalescing time and time again in unpredictable ways in multitudes of performative contexts, exceeding the world of experience, bringing life to the frozen, turning observers to spectators. Her theory is of excess, surplus production, even while protecting the negative (death; dead object, addressee). It is deterritorialization: “the photo acts, thus making others act…oriented toward the future” (129).
Thus, the connection between the “horror photo” and the “horror figure” are clear. But what do some of these “horror figures” look like? Christina Beltrán, in her essay “Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic,” provides us with an account of the figure of “the foreigner” as the “truest citizen,” noting the harm this has done in public discourse as well as in its manifestations in immigration policy: “… the very attributions used to make immigrants attractive (they work hard; they value family and tradition) can easily become the same qualities that make them threatening (they take our jobs; their patriarchal and homophobic traditions threaten our capacity for progress). Rendering immigrants as forever foreign, the logic of xenophilia feeds into the xenophobia that pro-immigrant advocates are trying to overcome” (86). I am recalling here Balibar’s statement in his essay “Politics and the Other Scene” that all protest can turn into legitimation (Balibar, 7). This goes both ways and in various other unpredictable directions too though, as we return our thoughts to Azoulay’s assertion that “photography functions on a horizontal plane”: it is a tool of the masses (134, 138).
I am interested in what this all means when the “emulsion” upon which the “object of photography…imprints an image” (Azoulay, 149) is the body; when the body is also the “horror figure,” formed through an image economy of “horror photos.” In the surplus production of the image, how are bodies transformed? How do ‘we’ participate directly in image economies in ways that meaningfully address and radically transform scenes and spacetimes of horror without reinscribing or reifying it? As Jacques Rancière tells us in his book chapter “The Intolerable Image” that “there are images in language as well. They consist in all those figures that replace one expression by another, in order to make us experience the sensible texture of an event better than the ‘proper’ words would” (94). Rancière’s attention to the experience of the sensible texture of an event certainly rooted in his theory of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, but I think there is much more here. I’ll say first that my interest in the “horror figure” as it develops through economies of “horror photos” (both discursive and photographic images) stem from an interest in the genre studies that have been done within Black studies, trans studies, disability studies, and queer theory that have provided close readings and rich accounts of figures attached to bodies. For example, discourses around social death and the figuration of the living dead, the zombie; or, the trans body as a body always in transition, neither here nor there, real nor fake, like a ghost. In connecting Azoulay, Beltràn and Rancière to these discussions, I think the turning of the observer to spectator blossoms into a yet deeper investment in transforming the very process of figuration that turns a still photo into a theater stage, that brings to life that which has been frozen.
“The treatment of the intolerable is thus a matter of dispotif of visibility. What is called an image is an element in a system that creates a certain sense of reality, a certain common sense. A ‘common sense’ is, in the first instance, a community of sensible data: things whose visibility is supposed to be sharable to all, modes of perception of these things, and the equally sharable meanings that are conferred on them. Next, it is the form of being together that binds individuals or groups on the basis of this initial community between words and things. The system of information is a ‘common sense’ of this kind: a spatiotemporal system in which words and visible forms are assembled into shared data, shared ways of perceiving, being affected and imparting meaning. The point is not to counterpose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense–that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings” (Rancière, 102). *For an example of this in action, see the queering of immigration politics in the cyber-testemonios of undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic youth on social media (Beltràn).