#civil_contract

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1

For me, the argument from Azoulay's text that continues to sit with is that photography and photographs are actions as well as objects. They do not have a beginning, middle, and end; they don't end. This borrows Arendt's definition of work as something that ends. Is there something that makes photography different from, say, architecture, which is also something that can continue to speak to some truth after it is put into the world? Is there something about images that operate through a different ontology? 

I am thinking about the layers of citizenship and statehood in photography. I am drawn to Azoulay's claim that even stateless people enter into a declared citizenry of photography when they participate in an action. And yet what is the nature of that citizenry? It is certainly not in control. The examples Azoulay gives show photography as a controlled surface that actions exist on. The citizenry has a "public edge". Photography controls visibility; in the some of the passages I read, it creates the image of the female body and never shows assaults on individual bodies, it sterilizes the Gulf War, it Is an instrument of torture masquerading as a truth in Palestine. The description of the photograph of Palestinian man with the blindfold on his forehead, and the Israeli state maintaining the power to hide his vision, plunging him into darkness again (and inviting the photograph itself from the collaborating journalist), still sticks with me. I can still see this idea, this image of a photograph that I have never seen.  

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1

The groundwork that Ariella Azoulay establishes with the premise in ‘The Civil Contract of Photography’ binds the tacit agreement that is established in the relationship between photographed and photographer. The author thoroughly surveys the evolution of the role photography as a joint discipline that has expanded and developed its scope since its origins. Providing the tools for people to sense an event, or a vision, collectively, photography has turned into an essential social tool for documentation. Azoulay acknowledges the importance of photography as a civic tool, helping to reconstruct and interpret how events occur, leading to a public collective gaze in the way that events have occurred mostly since the 20th century Photographs then, are able to depict not only the personal realm but the collective, and thus, the political.

Additionally, Hannah Arendt’s ‘Reflections of Violence’, helps establish the role of violence as a societal concern, supplementing my understanding of the scope that photography is able to depict. As long as humanity has lived in a society, violence has been a recurrent instrument closely intertwined with its relationship to power. Although it is true that violence goes hand in hand with power, it is important to remark the risk of interpreting power and violence “in biological terms”. Violence, often a result of rage, most probably always leads to “a more violent world”.

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1

The idea that the distinction between amateur and professional photographers is not emphasized in the community of photography speaks more to community than anything. Azulay’s emphasis that photographs are encounters, underscores the previous idea in that our encounters are rarely seen as amateur or professional. In fact, we oftentimes are surprised by our own encounters—or at least our responses to them in the moment. It also de-professionalizes photography from a capitalistic point of view, distributing the power of the photograph between photographer and subject in ways that are not done where profit is concerned. This, to me, makes photographical encounters more citizen-oriented, as power in this case appears to be distributed evenly to anyone with a camera. 

The theme of violence is revisited in Arendt’s essay, not only in a way that evokes #La_Haine  and Childish Gambino’s This is America, but in a way that reminds me of the complete power of the photographed subject—their voice all consuming when set in violence. This power all but insists that the subject and its photographer are unified by citizenship and the civil contract of photography. 

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1

The question of ownership in photography is perplexing to me, there are so many possible scenarios, each contract /instance unique. I have read Ariella Azoulay’s work before, in the context of family photography. Photography is an intimate contract, fulfilled by multiple players and multiple roles––the spectator, the subject, the photographer. Who owns the photograph, the photographic encounter – the photographer, the subject, the spectator, etc.? Azoulay contemplates this question in the legal dimension, arguing then that such concepts of “private property and ownership are foreign to the logic of photography” (98). There is a kind of violence imbued within the claim some photographers make of ownership over the photographed person. 

I wonder at the notion of archive – at the level of the institution and the private. We accept the above morally, ethically but in the world in which we live, photographs (as pieces of art, as records of time and moments) are collected. What does it mean when the enemy, who may be feared and beloved above all else, owns your likenesses, your private faces? Are there not faces which we keep private? What happens when the private is stolen and made someone else’s public, without our consent? I found this especially evocative: "In the Israeli context, for instance, the Palestinians became citizens of the citizenry of photography long before there was any possibility of their becoming citizens in the full meaning of the word," (123); as I think on what it means to be represented in a context, any context, at a given point in time when you may not have had the option to not be.   

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1.2

In Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence, Hannah Arendt offers an analysis on the relationship between violence and power that I found lacking at best. As this text was published in 1969 during a historical moment of increasingly publicized state-sanctioned violence, I understand the desire to offer critical commentary on the cultural moment and what the future could possibly hold if the status quo prevailed. However, Arendt’s definition of violence and blatant misunderstanding of the racial context of the time makes it hard to digest this piece in its totality. To begin, I think this piece offers a reductive definition of violence that centers on immediacy, weaponry, destruction and the “barrel of a gun.” She contends that violence and power are opposites, stating that “where one rules absolutely the other is absent” and that violence “cannot be derived from power.” For me, it is not so simple. Violence, which includes structural violence, insidiously upholds the power dynamics of a sovereign nation or government and cannot be described as “opposite to power.” It can be described, as Arendt said, as a means or as a tool for power, but violence operates at different temporal scales with structural violence operating much more slowly than violence on a battlefield for instance. Violence includes the systemic inequities that are entangled into the very fabric of western society: education, housing, food justice, job opportunities, access to healthcare, etc. to say that these inequities persist because the “strength of the regime lies in the civil obedience of people” is just too simple. Yes, I think obedience is a significant factor, but it’s a privileged take to presume that civil support and collective disobedience can even arise when society consistently reminds certain groups of people that they are relegated to the periphery of society. Furthermore, to say that “violence appears where power is in jeopardy” is to further negate the existence of structural violence that is used to uphold systems of power. Violence exists and persists. However, Arendt makes it clear that this is not her experience of the US, particularly when she berates the “organic metaphor.” (12) For, I maintain that when there is violence being enacted on people on a daily basis this equates to a sickness in society. Poverty is state-sanctioned violence, hunger is state-sanctioned violence, failing educational systems are state-sanctioned violence, poor infrastructure is state-sanctioned violence. Violence encompasses a lot more than simply the barrel of the gun and to promote the idea that under these repressive conditions that a society is sick or that it is infected isn’t a promotion of violence but rather a critical identification of exactly what is happening, an identification of exactly what Arendt proclaims in the beginning of the article is being taken for granted. Lastly, I let out an audible sigh when I read, “the greatest danger is…in which case violence and riots may disappear from the streets and be transformed into the invisible terror of a police state.” The political landscape of 1969 was for many people– mostly Black and Indigenous people of color–already one of terror within a police state, and it had been their lived reality for centuries.

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1

Because of the publishing dates, I read the Arendt piece first and after seeing that Ariella Azoulay uses Arendt as an interlocutor for her work, I was a little skeptical. However, I am interested in continuing to think through the notion of the act of photography as violent. Through a Marxist lens, whoever controls the means of production has power and Azoulay likens the photographer as controlling the means of production–therefore likening the camera as a tool or a means to power and thus a violent act. She denotes how photography can be exploitative and extracting, connoting a violence that robs the photographed of their privacy, their story, etc. Azoulay explains what she has coined as the civil contract of photography, a contract in which questions of ownership, privacy, private property, and power become entangled, within a contract that ideally would address this violence. She speaks on the photographer, the spectator, and the person whose likeness is captured as each having a civil contract where none is the true owner of the photograph, in fact, in many cases the photograph belongs the public. The question of authorship is also unclear, using the example of the photograph of Napoleon III’s son and concludes that the photograph does not exclusively represent the photographer’s will and intention, those of Napoleon III or those of the photographed boy, a phenomenon very relevant now particularly in the age of social media, Azoulay states that the “citizenry of photography…acknowledged that they have no rights to their images.” (112). (I think it’s important to situate this piece within the context of the West because I know there are cultures around the world in which photography is not allowed, it is regulated/ capturing the likeness of certain religious figures or governmental figures are not allowed, etc.) Nevertheless, the exploitative component of photography is something that I have personally grappled with before. The weaponization of photography to become a tool for surveillance and the tracking of movement/bodies all highlight the camera as a tool that can be used for significant harm. That said, at the scale of the individual, I think it is important to take the position that although you have the means of production/you have the tool that you are anti-ownership and begin to think through what that means or what that could look like. I am interested in the camera as an extension of the gaze. And while Azoulay touches on the “economy of gazes” stating that the modern citizen has thus renounced the exclusive right to his or her image in favor of an economy of images that in principle include the individual and all others,” and even goes so far as to identify each member of the citizenry of photography as a member of a collective, she stops short of identifying what could be a foundational principle. To me, what makes the civil contract of photography interesting is that it is a cooperative model locked within a capitalist framework. In our society, it is hard to imagine multiple owners, worker-owners, etc. We understand and gravitate towards private ownership and authorship being controlled by she who controls the means of production, but as Azoulay is pointing out, within photography that relationship is not a binary; it is multi-directional with multiple point of entry and stakeholders. What if in addition to each member of the collective renouncing their exclusive ownership over their likeness the photographers also renounced exclusive ownership over the image they’ve captured? What would a cooperative economy of gazes truly look like, and could this be a solution to the inherently violent nature of photography?

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1

Attribution of credit and association of events to a particular person (specifically a photographer) is always at best a partial truth, but is frequently a mistruth. Azoulay begins her contract with a discussion of the invention of photography and the daguerrotype where this invention is attributed to the French Daguerre, although the technology that made this invention possible was created by a diversity of people across many countries. The invention of photography leads directly to discussion of the photographer as the creator and the subject of the photograph, while the photographed is treated as an agentless object. Specific examples are given with Napoleon, his son, and their photographer — where Napoleon and the photographer are in their own ways in control of the photograph, while the son is merely an object being posed. However, the son of Napoleon is still being presented from a position of enormous power and privilege, despite having no power over his direct representation. Further, the taken photograph is revealed to have stolen a profile of Napoleon himself as well as his son. This demonstration of a photographer’s power over even the emperor himself makes the power differential even more stark when discussing the photographed who are disenfranchised irrespective of someone taking an image of them. The photographer has innate power and reach, and this voice can make it beneficial and desired to be photographed. This can be for something as benign as wanting fame or visibility, or for more desperate needs such as when experiencing disaster — whether natural or political. Those experiencing disaster are extremely disenfranchised, but visibility of the disaster they are experiencing allows for aid to be sent and those with power to be held accountable.

A photographer who choses to work with, or even for, those they are photographing, rather than independently of them, is capable of giving voice and visibility to those who would otherwise be overlooked. This goes into a discussion of citizenship of photography, where-- by virtue of photographing and being photographed -- a citizenry is capable of documenting and disseminating their experience, their community, and their culture regardless of their recognition by a nation state. Conversely, a nation state is capable of surveilling their and other populaces and taking their image as a form of violence or as a threat.

This discussion of violence and power is at the center of Arendt's reflections as well. Arendt discusses obedience and domination as two sides of the same coin — two traits that must exist simultaneously in order for one to have a consistent worldview. Arendt views violence and power as substitutes for one another, and distribution and obfuscation of power as often leading to violence as obedience falters when there is no one to take power and accountability. Although violence and power can substitute for one another, they often appear together as there is infrequently absolute power or administration purely through violence. She notes violence is merely an instrument to achieve power.

Azoulay's discussion of violence with regard to photography directly references Arendt’s work. However, Azoulay's discussion of taking a photograph as an act of violence is intriguing when you consider that Arendt would take this as indication that a photographer does not have the power or authority to be in control of an image. This take is consistent with Azoulay's point that photography can be used as an instrument to take power -- whether in a benign sense where one may use it to lift up voices as a citizen of photography, or in a malignant sense where one (whether individual or state) may use it to oppress another. In either case, photography and violence are instruments to take power, and require substantial accountability for those wielding this power.

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost 1: The Civil Contract of Photography

In The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay, Azoulay describes photography as a form of citizenship and that its defined space is the civil contract of photography. That it is something that cannot be reduced to certain photographic practices or uses and is certainly not a result of their accumulation. The reason why she believes so is because ‘‘the camera modifies the way in which individuals are governed and the extent of their participation in the forms of governance.’’ It is interesting to think about how Azoulay accredits the lack of more violent clashes happening in the actions of shooting an image to the civil contract regulating the encounters, ‘‘reducing and most of the time eliminating the possibility of direct violence.’’

To add to her claim that this civil contract is what governs the space of photography, Azoulay describes how the beginning of photography was not due to some single inventor, but arose due to the emergence of a professional community. Without the people to give power, the professional community, the power would no longer exist, photography. Daguerre is often coined as the founder of photography not because he alone invented how to inscribe an image onto an object, but because he created ‘‘photography as a practice.’’ Photograph itself prevent the claim to property rights, like the idea of citizenship, because of its inherent property of being taken and being viewed. Ownership belongs neither to the photographer or the spectator, the two are just adhering to the civil contract of photography.

The act of photography, according to Azoulay, sits somewhere between contemplation and action. Not fully one or the other, but filling the in-between. It ‘‘doesn’t seek to control the visible, but neither can it bear another’s control over the visible,’’ and she calls this the civil gaze. And the participation in the process of photography is tacit agreement between the photographer and the photographed, where both understand the expectations of the encounter, regardless of whether the photographed choose to reject or accept the presence of the camera. They both follow the civil contract. ‘‘Photography reorganized what was accessible to the gaze, in course of which everyone gained the opportunity to see through the gaze of another. In order to create this economy of gazes, each and every one had to renounce his or her right to preserve his or her own, autonomous visual field from external forces, but also acquired an obligation to defend to gaze in order to make it available for others to enter and intermingle.’’

The photograph itself is only a deposit that’s is temporarily placed under someone for safekeeping because it is ‘‘neither the product of a single person, despite the concept of ‘author’ having been established in relation to photography, nor is it even solely a product of human hands.’’

The spectator is also without a doubt a key role within the space of the civil contract of photography: ‘‘This spectator's eye deterritorializes photography, transforming it from a simple. convenient, efficient, (relatively) inexpensive and easily operable tool for the production of pictures into a social, cultural, and political instrument of immense power.’’

It is interesting to think about how power given to images through the civil contract could make images cause much more violence, even when it is indirect, like how A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence by Hannah Arendt shows that the two albeit distinct phenomena, almost always appear together.