Citizens of the 'Photography Nation' unite - Haaretz

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Citizens of the 'Photography Nation' unite

By Gideon Ofrat

Ha'amna ha'ezrahit shel hatzilum ("The Civil Contract of Photography") by Ariela Azulai (Hebrew), Resling Press, 515 pages, NIS 98

This is a book about perspective under conditions of violence: the perspective of the victim, of his fellow sufferers, of the observer, of the person recording the scene and of the combination of all these points of view in the photographic act. Equally, it is a book about the absence of some of these perspectives. As such, it is a post-modernist text that sees no boundaries between art and non-art.

Let's just come right out with it: As a book that focuses on photography in the contexts of occupation, exploitation, extortion and rape, it is one of the most vital books to have been written here in recent decades. Even "alumni" of the work of journalists Gideon Levy and Amira Hass will find much of interest in this illuminating and wrenching book about what the occupation does to one's way of looking at things, or, to put it another way, about the occupied point of view.

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Azulai embarks on her critical- theoretical effort along the way paved by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but before long she comes to the unpaved and deeply potholed (and occupied) paths of non-citizenship. A "non-citizen," by her definition, is someone who is ruled but is devoid of citizenship, that is, without any permanent status; someone who does not participate in the political game, is not entitled to the protection of the sovereign power and is thus left open to disaster. At the center of her study are two main groups of non-citizens whose rights are violated: residents of the occupied territories, and women whose bodies have been exposed to rape.

In relation to these groups, and to all other non-citizens, the author composes a sentence that could serve as a foundation for the entire book: "The absence of citizenship poses an obstacle to any attempt to turn the presence of the non-citizens' suffering into a political object, into a matter that can be spoken of in a political context and for which political claims can be directed at those responsible for this suffering, or those capable of preventing and limiting its expanse." The reference is to systems of rule and oppression that have excluded the subject from a domain in which he or she has rights over his/her life and body, by the clever transformation of this domain into a secret space, kept outside the public discourse and the social law. So it is in cases of rape, and in incidents of violence, oppression and humiliation perpetrated on the Palestinian population beyond the Green Line. The equation is simple: Non-citizenship is violence; "Wherever the non-citizen is found, the traces of extreme violence are to be sought." The state of "non- citizenship" is liable to be an ongoing state of "being on the brink of catastrophe," as Azulai puts it, citing the situation in the territories. It serves the occupying or ruling body - a situation in which the violation of the non-citizen population is both visible and invisible, a situation in which the ruling system is careful to remain hidden from view, but at the same time allows partial exposure, whether through the inclusion of humanitarian organizations in the ruling system or by permitting selective photographic exposure. The partial transparency keeps the catastrophe at bay, and makes it invisible, even as it is right there for all to see.

Azulai offers a sharp and incisive analysis of the visible and the invisible, with the aim of producing "declarations of emergency." Thus, a seemingly innocuous photograph, such as Miki Kratsman's shot of a visit by Physicians for Human Rights to an Arab village (2000) becomes a declaration of emergency about intolerable living conditions. All the more so an Alex Levac photograph from Hebron (2000), in which a Palestinian is seen lying on the road, bleeding from his knee while an armed Israeli soldier stands by indifferently. "The photograph bears silent witness to the suspension of urgency even when it would seem impossible to banish."

The tendency to conceal the photographed image is most evident when it comes to rape ("Has Anyone Ever Seen a Photograph of Rape?," is the title of the fifth and longest chapter in Azulai's book). Despite today's feminist discourse, which is more open than ever, Azulai points to a growing abandonment of the woman's body in the civic, legal and visual arenas (such as photos of naked women in the context of advertising and pornography, among other things), an abandonment that has tenaciously sought "to purify" rape of any visual image: "Rape is not an object for viewing or for visual representation. Its appearance in the new discourse is as an unseen object." Even the blurring of the rape victim's face (Remember "A." from the President's Residence?) places her "in the realm of identification, leaves her within the police discourse, alongside suspects and criminals."

This is the point in the book in which Azulai focuses on a very small collection of rape photographs - from the rape perpetrated by Japanese soldiers on Chinese women in 1937, to Bosnia and Abu Ghraib prison in more recent years. But a meticulous analysis of these still leads her to conclude that rape remains out of bounds in terms of visual imagery. As a partial exception, Azulai cities an installation presented by Karen Russo at the Israel Museum in 2000, in which the girl who is pictured lying inert on the bed could be perceived as having experienced a sexual assault. Surprisingly, Azulai does not mention Tamar Geter's paintings from the 1990s of a rape victim (which were based, among other things, on photographs of such). In any event, images of rape, says Azulai, have been removed from the gallery of images in the public arena and consigned to absence (even taking into account the nearly 2,000 pornographic, and apparently staged, images of the rape of Iraqi women by American soldiers). As absent images, argues Azulai, they have reinforced an oppressive gap between men and women.

The whole function of the photographic image in the oppression of "non-citizens" is what propels Azulai's critical-moral enterprise, what she calls "the civil contract of photography." It is a covenant of conscience, which aims to institute a set of civic relations between the photographer, the subject, the viewer and the photograph, one that will bypass the ruling body, which uses photography as a tool of power.

The civil contract of photography releases the photograph from the hands of the ruling system and entrusts it to those who participate in the encounter. By recognizing the photograph as a "declaration of emergency" and opening that declaration up to critical discourse, citizens fulfill their duty toward non-citizen photography subjects who have been hit by disaster, and take a step toward advancing the civil rights they've been deprived of. A real civil contract of photography would compensate the subject of the photograph for the relative violence perpetrated against him by the photographer (who often forces his camera on him). Most of all, it would enable photography to be transformed into a tool for human rights, a tool in the hands of the ruled who make civil demands of the ruler.

Parallel histories

Ariela Azulai takes her readers on a journey along two parallel paths: The first is the history of the human and civil rights movements (including the feminist struggle); the second is the history of the camera and of photography. Her learned, precise and clear study of these two tracks enables her to declare that "Photography is sometimes the only civil coverage available to one who has been deprived of his citizenship." After years in which the camera was nationalized for state purposes, the modern age has given rise to a new situation of a broadening of perspective (the globalization of persective and the creation of a supra- local "photography nation"), the production of masses of visual images and of accessibility to a perspective that is not controlled by a sovereign power.

This new situation makes possible, even demands, the social covenant of photography; the covenant as "mutual consent regarding the power of truth that is in photography, regarding the fact that what it contains is indeed what 'was there.'" In other words, the photography that concerns Azulai in this book is a medium of truth. In this regard, perhaps some thought should have been devoted to the fictitious imagery of computerized and/or staged photography, two critical aspects of contemporary photography that threaten the truth of a photograph.

However, even in the absence of such a discussion, the scope and relevance of documentary photography, of political photography, is enough to make Azulai's work a tome of great ethical value. It says that photographs can impart a civic responsibility, that is, it can turn the photograph into a moral accusation.

Post-modernist developments have only heightened the need for a social covenant of photography. Assertions like that of Jean Baudrillard, for example with regard to the 1991 Gulf War, describing it as a war denuded of true images, are rejected by Azulai, who cites an abundance of photographs of that war, which she perceives as an effort by the American administration to attain a monopoly on the visual imagery. In the author's view, the access of the masses to cameras is continually eroding any governing monopoly (which seeks to cleanse the territory under its control of images). This, then, is the post-modernist situation: "The existence of images within a discourse that does not cease to describe their absence." It's clear, then, that for Azulai, the photograph is more than an "object." The photograph is the expression of a complex statement. When she puts the photograph of a soldier photographing two other soldiers laughing next to the body of a Palestinian (Yariv Katz, Baka al-Sharqiya, 2002) under her analytical microscope, Azulai deciphers the multitude of overt and covert perspectives, the perspectives that are there and those that aren't, that together make up the statement of photograph (including those Palestinians who are prevented from approaching the body to cover and bury it, those Palestinians who are not present in the photograph because they are hiding or imprisoned in their homes or shops). Accordingly, the three soldiers in the photograph "underscored the Palestinians' deprivation of citizenship, not only from the dead man but from all those who were prevented from approaching him." This photograph is therefore an invitation to, or call for, moral action, a provocation of my civil-moral perspective in reaction to the harm done to the photographed subject. By this involvement of mine, by my transformation of the photograph into action, into a moral encounter and discourse, my citizenship is no longer limited to the country of my nationality; now my citizenship is in the global "photography nation." And this is a dual citizenship, as noted: the citizenship of the victim, the photographed subject, but also the fuller citizenship of he who is considered a citizen (me, you, readers of this article), and the circumstances that permit him to serve in the position of viewer.

Frequently, says Azulai, the subject of the photograph has requested to be photographed for the purpose of sparking civil action: As in the case of Mrs. Abu-Zuhur, who asked photographer Miki Kratsman to photograph her legs after they had been wounded by rubber bullets (Balata refugee camp, 1988). Abu-Zuhur insisted on this, being a "signatory" to the civil contract of photography and seeking to be viewed by newspaper readers who are also "signatories" to the same covenant. The latter are asked "to reconstruct what occurred there from what is seen and from what is currently unseen and could in principle become what is seen in that same photograph." A further exploration of the perspective of the photographer, Miki Kratsman in this case, can be found in an interview with him recorded by Azulai in her book "Eikh zeh nireh lekha" ("How Does it Look to You?").

The elusive 'punctum'

What the viewer-citizen is asked to do with the photograph is to formulate for himself the meaning of the "punctum," a term coined by Roland Barthes regarding the elusive "remainder" contained in a photograph beyond what the photographer sought to include in it. But while Barthes considered the punctum an aesthetic criterion for measuring the quality of the photograph, Azulai sees the punctum as a moral territory of social relations (within whose framework the photograph was taken). Such, for example, is a 2002 photograph by Michal Heiman, in which she reproduced Eadweard Muybridge's multiple-angled photograph (of a woman spanking a young girl) and stamped it with the words "Photo Rape." The term "rape," contends Azulai, "draws the viewer's attention to the fact that behind the scientific cover of the study of movement hides a violence that the photographer is exerting upon his subjects." The "punctum," in this instance, would be the territory that is hidden in the photograph, the space comprised by the photograph and what actually took place in it. A look at this elusive territory - and Azulai demonstrates impressive analytical powers here - will show that the photographer, who purports to be engaged in a scientific study, "has placed himself in the role of the angel, as if saying to the woman 'Lay not thine hand upon the child.'"

Just as impressive is an analysis of the daguerreotypes taken by Joseph Zealy in 1850, which depict seven Negro slaves. Azulai dissects the background information, the negotiations between four white men over the photography's conditions and purpose (to prove the inferiority of the negro race) that completely ignore the subjects (who, on top of everything else, were prohibited by law from looking back), and she describes this negotiation as "a 'performative' event, in which the white man's superiority over the black man and the latter's inferiority and subordinate status are played out."

The citizenship process taken upon himself by he who accepts the burden of the civil contract of photography requires of him to interpret as "declarations of emergency" photographs that are not presented as such (for example, photographs in which Palestinian detainees are shown blindfolded). The moral demand leaves no room for compromise: "A lack of response by the viewer-citizen to the plight of the non-citizen places him, even unwittingly, in the position of having hurt the chances of a 'declaration of emergency' appearing." The blindfold, notes Azulai in chapter 8, enables the solder to remove the Palestinian from the field of vision; it "occupies" the Palestinian's perspective. Now, only the soldier's perspective can act within the space. As noted, the governing system has cleverly acted to simultaneously block and provide different perspectives. Thus, what appears to be an absence of photographs of torture from prison, is balanced out by a vast quantity of photographs taken by the army and the Shin Bet security services for the purpose of "running the penal colony."

And so, in one especially fascinating chapter, Azulai examines the phenomenon of photographers working in the service of the Shin Bet. This mainly involves photographs of torture, such as a photograph of the prisoner with the sign "collaborator," a familiar pressure tactic, causing the apparent collaborator to be in danger of assassination by masked assailants. These photographs are not accessible to the public's view: The author can report upon them only through testimonies and re-enactments recorded by the human rights group B'Tselem. These are instrumental photographs in the service of the occupation system. At base, they are photographs that distort and deny identity.

In contrast to the "penal colony" (the occupied territories), there is the image of what Azulai calls tehum hamoshav (referring to the settlements and what connects them). Alternate traffic routes keep the view concealed, but beyond that, writes Azulai, they ensure that the Jew rather than the Arab is the one "to see and be seen." This is the Jewish appropriation of the field of vision, the removal "of the possibility that the Jew will see the Palestinian seeing him." An insightful analysis of photographs of settler homes taken by Efrat Shvili in the 1990s, proves the point: "The subject of the photograph appears devoid of any context of time and space... The buildings seem to be floating, as if not tied to anything but themselves." Nonetheless, it's clear that the encounter between subject and viewer will always be less than complete. From within the photograph, the subject makes demands of the viewer, but at the same time remains silent, distant, beyond reach. A direct look between the parties to the civil covenant of photography is not possible, says Azulai. The relationship is more complex.

In this context, she analyzes a photograph of two Palestinian women, Amia Zakin and Khayra Abu Hassan, which was shot by Miki Kratsman in 2002. The two women are victims of soldiers at the checkpoints who prevented them from getting to the hospital when they were in labor; their babies died as a result. "From the human faces" of these two women "radiated a silence upon which the gaze rested," writes Azulai. The silence that radiated from the photograph was actually strengthened by Abu Hassan's smile, a possible result, says Azulai, of being caught in front of the camera, or else "[the smile] just points up the gaping abyss between occupier and occupied, the observer's helplessness to understand as well as the helplessness of empathy and sorrow." Hence, to the photographer's perspective are added other perspectives, which all meet in "the perspective of the camera" and in the photograph, as a montage of different points of view. Azulai illustrates this well with a photograph of the funeral of a killed Palestinian, taken by Kratsman in Nablus in 1989: The subject of the photograph, the dead man, has no perspective; his eyes are shut. The crowd of Palestinians that surrounds the coffin signals a promise of vengeance for the dead man. But in fact, "the crowd is addressing the dead man in order to address the photographer." At the same time, the photographer is not the final addressee of the photograph; rather he is standing in for another addressee, namely the citizen, who is supposed to be well-able to see and who is free from any subordination to another. Because the social covenant of photography binds different people, different camps, and certainly different nationalist affiliations.

The covenant binds together all citizens of the "photography nation," the cosmopolitan and humanist nation to which Azulai's book is addressed; and while the members of this "nation" may be quite few in number (unless we're talking about a potential nation, which could be expanded thanks to a book of this kind), the people of this nation will recognize in the photographs the exploitation of the subject's inferior (or nonexistent) status, as in the photograph of Sharbat Gula, the beautiful Afghan girl photographed in 1985 by Steve McCurry for National Geographic magazine. And even when the photographer embarked on a search for the girl, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, anyone who is a party to the social covenant of photography would see that this act was really intended to solidify the photographer and the magazine's ownership of the image, that is, of the Third World subject who is devoid of rights. The critical-moral perspective of the viewers is what has the power to extend "citizenship" to Sharbat Gula.

Photograph is everywhere

In this book, Azulai has done the work that most of us avoid: She read and studied B'Tselem reports, examined the subjects of torture and the use made of them on camera. And in opposition to all these horrors she cites the "civil contract of photography," in order to remind us that "photography is found everywhere, and exists within a multiplicity of relations, whose development, even in the darkest situations, cannot be completely controlled or predicted." A petty criticism: The author has a sometimes infuriating tendency to use rigid socio-philosophical and pseudo-scientific language. Another petty criticism would point out the repetitiveness of certain points throughout the book (which was originally written in the form of separate articles, clearly). The same petty criticism might also say that the author at times employs overly fancy language to state the obvious, which is the moral duty, in the tradition of Brecht-Adorno, to adopt a critical view under "a state of emergency."

But this book was not written in Switzerland or Sweden, but in Israel, 40 years after the start of the occupation, and it is addressed to all of us, who are a necessarily a party to the violence of the occupation. Given these conditions, Azulai's book is to be greatly lauded. Its immeasurable importance transcends the Middle East discourse, and belongs with the finest contemporary critical- international discourse on photography.

Gideon Ofrat is a historian of Israeli art and a curator.

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