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Serie, Unlearning Decisive Moments of

Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

Von Ariella Azoulay

06.09.–31.10.2018

In her series of statements, Ariella Azoulay will depart from the common theories and histories that present photography as a sui generis practice and locate its moment of emergence in the mid-nineteenth century in relation to technological development and male inventors. Instead, she proposes to locate the origins of photography in the “New World,” in the early phases of European colonial enterprise, and study alongside early accounts of imperial expeditions. The posts have their origin in Ariella Azoulay's forthcoming book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (: Verso, 2019).

Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, a documentary film director and an independent curator of archives and exhibitions. Her publications include Aïm Deüelle Lüski and Horizontal Photography (Leuven University Press and Cornell University Press, 2013); The Resolution of The Suspect (with photographer: Miki Kratsman; Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press, 2016); From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012) and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); co-author with Adi Ophir of The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2012). She directed the following films: Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012), I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004).

1. Unlearning the Origins of Photography

2. Unlearning Images of Destruction

3. Unlearning Expertise Knowledge and Unsettling Expertise Positions

4. Unlearning Imperial Rights to Take (Photographs)

5. Unlearning Imperial Sovereignties

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1. Unlearning the Origins of Photography Von Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 06.09.2018 in 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 of photography as framed by those who were crowned its inventors and other private and state entrepreneurs, as well as its association with a technology that can be reduced to discrete devices held by individual operators. In The Civil Contract of Photography, I proposed to displace photography’s origins from the realms of technology to the body politic of users and reconstruct from its practices a potential . My attempt to reconfigure photography was still defined by the assumption that it can be accounted for as a domain apart, and hence situated in the early nineteenth century. In what I’m going to post here in the coming weeks, based on my forthcoming book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, I also question imperial temporality and spatiality and attempt to account for the world in which photography could emerge. It is not about questioning the exact moment of the inception of photography and proposing that it was this optical device or that chemical substance that made it possible. It is about questioning the political formations that made it possible to proclaim—and institutionalize the idea—that certain sets of practices used as part of large-scale campaigns 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 the question directly: How do those who wrote different histories and theories of photography 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 accounting for imperial violence on the terms of those who exercised it, claiming that they had discovered a “new world.”

The invention of the New World and the invention of photography are not unrelated.

Suggesting that the origins of photography go back to 1492 is an attempt to undermine the imperial temporality that was imposed at that time, enabling people to believe, experience, and describe interconnected things as if they were separate, each defined by newness. To put it another way, for photography to emerge as a new technology in the late 1830s, the centrality of the imperial rights on 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 its operation as a technology. Foregrounding these rights requires a simultaneous exercise—unlearning the accepted origins of photography and those of the “new world,” their familiar spatial and temporal connotations, which even today are still closely associated with modernity and “the era of discoveries,” and attending instead to the configuration of imperial violence and its manifestation in rights. By imperial violence I refer to the entire enterprise of destroying the existing worlds of signs, activities, and social fabrics and replacing them with a “new world” of objects, classification, laws, technologies, and meanings. In this so- called “new world,” local populations and resources are perceived as problems or solutions, opportunities or obstacles, and are assigned specific roles, places, and functions. Through these processes, existing sets of rights that were integral to each world and inscribed in its material organization are destroyed to allow

2 imperial rights to be imposed. Among these rights are the right to destroy existing worlds, the right to manufacture a new world in their place, the rights over others whose worlds are destroyed together with the rights they enjoyed in their communities and the right to declare what is new and consequently what is obsolete. The attachment of the meaning “new” to whatever imperialism imposes is constitutive of imperial violence: it turns opposition to its actions, inventions, and the distribution of rights into a conservative, primitive, or hopeless “race against time”—i.e., progress—rather than as a race against imperialism. The murder of five thousand Egyptians who struggled against Napoleon’s invasion of their sacred places and the looting of old treasures, which were to be “salvaged” and displayed in Napoleon’s new museum in Paris, is just one example of this. In the imperial histories of new technologies of visualization, both the resistance and the murder of these people are nonexistent, while the depictions of Egypt’s looted treasures, which were rendered in almost photographic detail, establish a benchmark, indicating what photography 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 and the apparatuses that sought to render obsolete and bury the just claims of the marchers under the “statute of limitations,” negating their attempt to rewind the declaration of a “new” state in their homeland.

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

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

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

3 extraordinary advantages which could have been derived from so exact and rapid a means of reproduction during the expedition to Egypt; everybody will realize that had we had photography in 1798 we would possess today faithful pictorial records of that which the learned world is forever deprived of by the greed of the Arabs and the vandalism of certain travelers. To copy the millions of hieroglyphics which cover even the exterior of the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis, Karnak, and others would require decades of time and legions of draughtsmen. By daguerreotype one person would suffice to accomplish this immense work successfully.” 1

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

“Around 1900, technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. In gauging this standard, we would do well to study the impact which its two different manifestations—the reproduction of artworks and the 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 the way photography, like other technologies, was rooted in imperial formations of power and legitimization of the use of violence in the form of rights exercised over others. For both Arago and Benjamin, the existence of images and objects that were not meant to be part of an imperial depository of art history, contained physically and symbolically in works of art waiting to be reproduced, is not a question or a problem but a given assumption. Reproduction is understood in this context as a neutral procedure ready to be used by those who own the proper means for it, and regardless of the will of those from whom the objects have been expropriated. It is based on this assumption and this understanding of reproduction that photography could be perceived and discussed as a new technology of image production and reproduction. A lineage of previous practices had to be invented for photography to be conceived of as a novel addition, a technology that alters and improves—substantially and on different levels—the quality of the end product. In this means-end relationship, not only is photography construed as a means to an end but the end is also construed as a given, and the existence of objects as simply given to the gaze—of the , in this case—is thus assumed and confirmed.

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

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

4 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 Destruction Von Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 17.09.2018 in 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 with and through photography—requires one to abandon the imperial linear temporality and the way it separates tenses: past, present, and future. One has to engage with the imperial world from a non-imperial perspective and be committed to the idea of revoking rather than ignoring or denying imperial rights manufactured and distributed as part of the destruction of diverse worlds. In order to clarify this trajectory, I will start with a few photos taken in different times and places, which I propose to explore alongside early accounts of imperial expeditions. Obviously, we do not have photos of the mass destruction of the late fifteenth century, but nor do we have images showing the destruction of so many other places that took place at a time when photography could have been used to record them. This doesn’t mean that destruction didn’t take place, or that it occurred differently, if the goal was to eliminate any elements in these existing worlds that resisted the implementation of imperial enterprises. It means that documentary protocols are insufficient and may even obstruct the attempt to understand destruction not as a contingent, discrete, or local event but as pervasive and constitutive of modernity—its major enterprise. For what has become pervasive since 1492 and changed our perception is not this or that technological device, such as the Kodak Brownie, or its products, namely photographs—a claim that is made again and again in the discourse on photography—but rather destruction. 1 Hence, rather than conceiving of photography as a means to document discrete cases of destruction, we need to ask ourselves how photography participated in the destruction and ultimately examine if and how, on the basis of this acknowledgement, it can play a part in imagining ways out of it.

6 Three drawings of general view of Algiers: El-Djezaïr, “Dutch ships in the port of Algiers,” by Jan Luyken (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 have in common is the point of view of foreigners approaching the city from afar and looking at it from the outside. With the French invasion of Algeria, this point of view 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 safe position at the heart of the Casbah—where, it should be said, he was not welcome —and to generate multiple images of the city. Taken from within,

7 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 he showed, shortly after its production, in one of the many panorama facilities in Paris. Without decades of imperial bombardment and the city’s final colonization by the French in 1830, this panoramic point of view of a foreign city from which the inhabitants had disappeared, as John Zarobell reminds us, would not have been 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’s notebook. For a more comprehensive account of the destruction, we should look elsewhere and through a different lens. As already implied in the first post, my assumption is that the ubiquity of destruction both precedes and enables the ubiquity of photographs. The latter is derivative of the former and should be read in connection with it.

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

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

8 the destruction of Algeria. This enterprise was conducted by the Neurdein brothers and funded by the French government. While the military regime carried on its program of destruction, another group of imperial agents continued to capture and salvage, for a shorter or longer period, the “best sample” of doomed Algeria’s architecture.

Here, in these photographs and in others taken a few hundred years after the invention of the new world, I invite you to see the exercise of these same imperial rights that were already proclaimed and enacted in early letters written by Amerigo Vespucci at the turn of the fifteenth century. These new rights, whose exercise involved mass destruction, are manufactured under the pretext of the promotion of knowledge involved in the discovery of “new worlds.” At the beginning of the first of his four letters, Vespucci describes what was given to them by the people he and his expedition encountered: “Whatever was asked of them, 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,” Vespucci continues, “we discovered an infinite number of people and various languages until having sailed four hundred leagues along the coast, we began to encounter people who did not want our friendship” (Vespucci, 11). Shortly thereafter, Vespucci starts depicting these people as enemies, since they stood in the way of their invaders and “prevented our landing, so that we were forced to fight with them” (11). What is assumed to be their right to pursue their mission and have unlimited access to any place, sacred places included, cannot be curtailed by other people, who are described as well installed in a world of their own, 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 feeble mind” (13–15). Vespucci and his men continued to fight against the local inhabitants who objected to their invasion, until they “routed them and killed 150 of them, and set fire to 180 of their houses” (12). Vespucci concludes the first letter with the achievements of this expedition articulated in the form of the goods they “brought back.” This harvest is not described as the outcome of the exercise of violence against the native inhabitants of the places they invaded. It is instead depicted as an expression of the invader’s sharp eye, of his connoisseurship of what might be appreciated by their sovereigns, and the outcome of the exercise of the right to appropriate others’ wealth, resources, and labor: “We brought back pearls and gold in its nascent or crude state. We brought back two stones. . . . We brought back a large piece of crystal. . . . We brought back fourteen pearls the of flesh” (16). I propose to proceed by reading these letters outside of the constraints of the archive, which invites us to assume that they pertain to an early phase of imperialism, capitalism, or globalization, and instead reconstructing from them the set of imperial rights that continue to lie at the basis of our political regimes. It is well known that these expeditions didn’t stop with Vespucci: “we” brought back—with much care, against many challenges, and under well-established preservation protocols—types, precious objects, art, and wealth and destroyed the social fabrics, the political structures, and the systems of rights and beliefs of which they were part.

9 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 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 and Unsettling Expertise Positions Von Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 28.09.2018 in 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 and mobilized to fit larger schemes of production and world engineering. Through these schemes, different groups of governed peoples were crafted and assigned access to certain occupations, mainly non-skilled labor that in turn enabled the creation of a distinct strata of professions with the vocational purpose of architecting “new” worlds and furnishing them with new technologies. Such professions housed experts in distinct domains—economics, law, politics, culture, art, health, scholarship, and so on—which were differentiated and kept separate in racialized worlds engendered by imperialism. Experts in each domain enjoy the right to shape societies according to their vision or will, to study them, and to craft visionary templates in order to provide solutions to problems generated by other experts.

Photography was shaped into such a model, with its own strata of experts. This class of expert professionals denied their implication in the constitution and perpetuation of the imperial regime and quickly convinced themselves that they were not exercising imperial rights but rather documenting and reporting the wrongs of that regime, acting for the common good. This is epitomized in the notion of the “concerned photographer,” which is also the title of an influential exhibition, one among others in which the figure of the photographer is construed as a hero apart.

11 “Concerned Photographers,” selection of book covers.

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

12 Pages from the Concerned Photographer catalogue.

Thus, for example, Magnum/ICP photographers such as David Seymour or Robert Capa could depict the plunder of Palestine as the creation of a new state or world in which Jewish sovereignty could triumph, conflating the plight of the Palestinians with the difficulties encountered by the migrant Jews, who at that point were made guardians of the new sovereignty. Misled by the documentary protocols that they were using, and thus becoming implicated in what was misleading about them, acting as if lived worlds are reducible to their real-estate components and nation-building campaigns, these photographers dismiss the plight of the indigenous population as well as the destruction of the common. 1 Differences between situations were blurred in such a way that perpetrators could be depicted as victims or law enforcers even though they were responsible for the destruction 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—destroyed Palestine, the newly declared state of Israel—and shown last year in Paris were displayed only with their minimalist original caption “Palestinian Prisoners.” Both the display and the captions take the imperial narrative for granted and assume that there is no harm in reiterating it nor any need to question the authority of those who acquired their imperial rights and sovereignty against the Palestinians, whom they expelled from their homes. These Palestinians are not “prisoners.” In the photos taken in 1956 in Gaza, they are rather brutalized, either as they attempt to 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

13 embody imperial categories such as “refugee” or “infiltrator,” which endow modern citizenship with a set of imperial rights to keep them in this role. They were made into the unacknowledged participants in such photographs: those whose spaces have been invaded through the exercise of imperial rights so that their images can continue to circulate, tagged with imperial categories that photographers often use as if they were spokespersons of imperial regimes. Contrary to certain rights that people enjoy within their communities, imperial rights do not emanate from the community in which people are members, on behalf 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 the destruction of the worlds in which those others enjoy certain rights. Not surprisingly, these imperially unrecognized subjects reject the meaning of photographs 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: 09.10.2018 in der Serie Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

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

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 go almost anywhere they wanted.” As Magnum’s official history states,

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

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

Given that free or cheap labor is extracted from others, photographers act as middlepersons between those photographed—the objects of their craft—and other imperial agents. It is in exchange for this that they could benefit from the imperial domination of photographic markets and could claim single authorship of 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 large corporations, collections, and institutions to benefit from the free labor and from the 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 be revoked as easily as they were given, and with no remorse, and photographers could always be dispensed with if no longer needed—as photographers experience with the mass appropriation of photography by image bank corporations that claim exclusive ownership of “their” work: this can be seen here in the screenshot of a random Google search with the categories “types / Algeria”—what was once the property of the Neurdein brothers is now distributed as the property of Alamy image bank. 2 16 As cultural agents, photographers didn’t enjoy the same privileges as those imperial agents who crafted and distributed imperial rights the world over. In exchange for their privileges and symbolic capital, photographers were expected to conceal the exploitative meaning of the photographic encounter—an encounter in which those stripped of their rights in their own communities had to become free resources for growing markets, skilled artists and artisans, fields of knowledge, and disciplines. The dominant discourse of human rights, however, ignores these rights when referring to photography, and the discourse of photography is mostly limited to describing how violations of rights are represented in photographs and can be advocated through them (as in “photographs of human rights”) or to discussing rights pertaining to the “end product” of photography—i.e., the photograph—including rights of ownership and authorship (copyrights) and rights of protection, dissemination, and management. In both ways, such an approach excludes in advance the recognition of the participation of different parties in the photographic event. The right to take photographs was imposed from the start as given, unlimited and inalienable, 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 Sovereignties Von Ariella Azoulay

Veröffentlicht: 24.10.2018 in der Serie Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography

Cameras are a product of imperialism’s scopic regime. However, imperial rights are not fully inscribed in the device. The unifocality of the camera and what Aïm Deüelle Lüski calls its verticality partition the space where it is located into what or 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 by Ariella Azoulay

Photographs are, however, metonymical records of an encounter between those convened around the camera, figures whom the unifocal camera is designed to separate 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 rights to them as if they were private property. This dissociation is predicated on one of the camera’s features, thus belittling the role of its other features. One of the most important of them is the opportunity that the camera creates for people to coincide with others in the same space and time and thus participate in generating something in common, something that could not be produced otherwise—that is, without the presence and participation of others. It is only through powerful institutions such as museums, archives, the press, or the police, as well as economic and political sanctions, that such other features and the participation of the many are devalued, prohibited, or outlawed in an attempt to deprive the participants in the photographic event of their rights and power, making photography subservient to the imperial project. This is what keeps the unilateral right on which photography was institutionalized—the right to roam around

18 with a tool that penetrates people’s lives and to take their pictures without being invited to do so—ungrounded and reversible. To be recognized not as the exercise of violence but as a lawful right, this right needs to be materialized and redeemed in a common world, one which is irreducible to the sheer, ongoing attempt to accumulate ever more capital, profit, wealth, distinction, and power. Given that the right to take a photograph of others was imposed regardless of their will or consent, destruction creates the conditions under which such a right can be exercised. The imprint of the right to destroy—while not necessarily a “theme” of particular photographs—is encapsulated in almost every photograph taken where imperial agents stepped in, even if it is not immediately decodable as such. At the same time, when the depiction of destruction is understood as the expression and style of concerned photographers, one tends to ignore the fact that, together with the built environment that was destroyed, the rights inscribed in 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 have become.

19 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 the Congolese, taking away their place within the social, cultural, and political formations of which they were part, none of what we see would have been possible. At the heart of the film, Martens attempt to engage a group of young men who had been connected with a small photography store, schooling them in how to compete with Western photojournalists in taking photographs of the misery of people from their communities. The lesson focuses on the photojournalistic expectation of photographers who seek to get physically closer to the photographed persons, but the lesson that we as spectators are invited to learn concerns the distance required by photographers in order to point the camera at people, as if an imagined curtain separated them from each other, a prerequisite for the middleperson placed in between hypothetical agents of the free market of images with all its demands and those on whom the success of the photographic image actually depends.

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

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

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

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

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

21 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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