Civil Contract Of Photography Research Articles

(In)visible Subjects: Pranlal Patel's Women at Work in Ahmedabad, India, 1937

Abstract Approximately one hundred photographs of women at work in the city of Ahmedabad, India, were taken in 1937 by Pranlal K. Patel, at the request of the premier women's social reform organization, the Jyoti Sangh. Rather than depicting women's contributions as peripheral to the productivity of Ahmedabad's economic life and isolated from the public, Patel pictured women as subjects working in the city's major marketplaces and as integral to the city's industrial productivity. This article argues that historical photography may provide what Elizabeth Edwards terms a “historiographical think-space” that challenges conventional historical sources and the narratives they produce. By engaging Ariella Azoulay's ethical spectators in the civil contract of photography, historians can use historical photography to confront the historical roots of inequality that shape our world today.

Intimate recordings: mediated acts of touching in Future Lasts Forever and Giraffe

ABSTRACT The act of recording testimonies and memories of events through audio as well as visual means can forge intimacy between people. Following a recent discursive turn toward connectivity, intimacy, and tenderness in contemporary European cinema studies, this essay examines recording’s potential in the creation of community in Özcan Alper’s Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer, Turkey, 2011) and Anna Sofie Hartmann’s (Giraffe, Denmark/Germany, 2019). Through a comparative reading of these films, I propose an approach to recording as touching, which plays out through processes of familiarity, listening without demands, care, and trust. Examined with Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of touch at a distance as the underpinning of being-with and being-in-common and Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the civil contract of photography, the act of recording in these films presents itself as an agreement between recorder, recorded, and spectator, or listener for that matter, that recognizes the recorded persons––photographed, voice recorded, or filmed––first and foremost as subjects and citizens with rights. Against distinct political and geographical backdrops of dispossession and loss, scenes of recording in these films demonstrate possibilities for communication, intimacy, and even reparative redress.

Aestheticising Atrocity: George Osodi’s Series Oil Rich Niger Delta

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the aestheticisation of environmental disaster in George Osodi’s series of photographs Oil Rich Niger Delta (2003–2007). Depicting the horrific effects of oil drilling in his home country, Osodi chose to make art from real life suffering caused by environmental disaster. Visual analyses of individual photographs reveal carefully chosen compositions and colour selections. Next to building on traditions of art history, Osodi draws on the aesthetics of travel photography. Unlike many National Geographic photographers, such as Steve McCurry, Osodi evades exoticising his subjects by anchoring them in their contemporary environments and providing additional facts. Osodi uses a distinct visual strategy which consists in first drawing the viewer close to his photographs through their beautiful appearance and then revealing their motifs as structural problems of global extent via sequencing and contextualising. His series was not only consumed by the art world, with over 200 photographs shown at documenta 12, but also, due to his profession as photojournalist, in the news. The crossing of categories raises ethical questions related to the medium. This paper argues that the beautified photographs oppose a re-victimisation of their sitters by entering into the civil contract of photography. Highlighting the nature of the atrocity Osodi captured, the limitations of visually representing human rights violations connected to environmental crisis and the photographer’s ways of dealing with them are examined. This paper concludes that Osodi succeeds in visualising the invisibility of environmental crises as a particular form of atrocity through aestheticisation, sequencing, spatiotemporal anchorage and textual framing.

How art practices can commit to the pursuit of social and environmental justice – from and beyond the civil contract of photography, lessons from the Amazon

This paper seeks to reflect on the political agency of artworks as well as to propose insights towards potential ways photography could be employed, in the context of the twenty-first century, to support the development of fairer future scenarios in social and environmental agendas. It draws upon the author’s experiences in her fieldwork in the Amazon intertwined with Ariella Azoulay’s assertions on photographs as agencies of empowerment, and Jacques Rancière’s perspectives on the impact of art practices upon the systems that rule society.

Children and Print Visual Culture During the Chilean Popular Unity Government

This article analyses the visual figuration of children during the Chilean Popular Unity government (1970–1973) in a diverse archive of photographs, posters, album covers, magazines, and comics. First, it reads the realist representation of children in photography, which emphasises the dramatics of poverty as a form of establishing a photographic “civil contract” (Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008). Second, it interprets posters and texts concerning the Allende government’s Plan de Leche (Milk Plan) as an affirmative biopolitics. It concludes by showing that the children on illustrated posters are the idealised version of childhood projected by adults as a way of imagining a coming community.

Contract or Disobedience?: Reframing Azoulay

The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay has profoundly reshaped the critical study of photography. The concept of “the civil concept of photography” is as intriguing as it is ill-defined. This essay seeks to clarify it. It begins by situating Azoulay’s theory in the single context that has most dramatically stamped her thinking — Palestine. It is in her thinking through photography and the Palestinian question that her debt to, and divergence from, the tradition of social contract theory is clearly seen. It concludes that Azoulay’s central concept — “the civil contract of photography” — is better understood when seen from the combined perspective of Schmitt’s theory of decision and Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience.

Crisis and Visual Critique

AbstractPerspectives from this special issue on Greece are folded into a discussion of the current post‐Foucauldian and “neo‐Benjaminian” moment of contemporary photographic theory and visual culture. Bourdieu's ethnography of photography is contrasted with his own photographic practice and considered in light of Azoulay's Civil Contract of Photography. The return to the “event” of photography and an understanding of its contingency reawakens its revolutionary potential. [visual culture, crisis, Pierre Bourdieu, Ariella Azoulay]

Civil Contract of Photography in India

Pinney’s essay explores, in the context of both colonized and contemporary India, Ariella Azoulay’s argument about the prophetic nature of photographic citizenship. The use of photographs in a number of key Indian National Congress reports reveals the destabilizing potential of the camera. This photographic counter-narrative presents a challenge to certain Althusserian and Foucauldian accounts for which the state is ultimately the arbiter of “evidence.” As Pinney shows, political claims could be advanced in the space of photography that were disallowed in everyday life. This possibility was predicated on smaller and faster apparatuses, that is, a changing technics of media. However, in contemporary India an increasingly miniaturized technics is provoking widespread anxieties about the public visibility of what was formerly private and intimate. The changing form of photographic technics thus drives a social narrative that transforms the camera as a utopian tool of liberation into a dystopian means of transgression.

Of civil and social contracts: Azoulay after Hobbes

Abstract Ariella Azoulay’s concept of ‘the civil contract of photography’ innovatively responds to the long tradition of social contract theory inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes. I argue that a comparative analysis between Hobbes and Azoulay (through a Schmittian lens) exposes both Azoulay’s debt to ‘the monster of Malmesbury’, while simultaneously exposing to view the profound limits this debt imposes on Azoulay’s ethical project to wrest the concept of citizenship free from the ideology of the nation state.

Zanele Muholi's Affective Appeal to Act

ABSTRACTThis article provides a theoretical framing for Zanele Muholi's visual activism in South Africa. Despite colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal ideologies that have imaged her community of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people as invisible citizens of a larger society and hypervisible deviant outsiders of that same collective, Muholi's photographs attempt to shift the conventions of the gaze. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay's photography theory and Jill Bennett's affect theory for art, I argue that Muholi's photographs bring forth an affective appeal to act. Azoulay's notions of “citizenship” and the “civil contract of photography” call on photography's responsibility to act on behalf of those depicted in images of atrocities. Bennett's “empathic vision” describes a relational perception of art, where one is affectively struck by the visual imagery. Reading Azoulay's political, ethical vision and Bennett's embodied methodology for visual culture together, I suggest that Muholi's practice moves her audience to see differently—where seeing the photographed in and of itself becomes an act of political restoration.

Photography and the Future in Jansje Wissema’s Images of District Six

This paper focuses on photographs taken in District Six during the time of forced removals by South African photographer Jansje Wissema. It explores both the history of their making and how these images can be deployed as tools for thinking the post-apartheid condition. The paper engages with Ariella Azoulay’s argument in the Civil Contract of Photography (2008) about the connections between photographic practices and citizenship in order to think about how photographs taken under apartheid can be understood as addressed to the future. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the work of visual artist Haroon Gunn-Salie and considers how contemporary art practices intervene in the ongoing scripting of the history and making of the future of District Six.

The Politics of Transparency

This article investigates society’s increasing obsession with transparency through the medium of photography and WikiLeaks. It suggests that Julian Assange’s fixation on exposure as a means to reveal the truth about government systems is reflective of the processes of an ideology of publicity that also works in a society governed through the processes of the spectacle. In this investigation, Retort’s work, claiming that the spectacle hides the violence inherent in neoliberal militarism, is employed to support the ways in which WikiLeaks has become a spectacle in and of itself through its implication in processes of capitalism and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The paper also investigates the ways in which the increased desire for transparency has accorded itself with the right to visibility, which is ultimately linked to a desire for truth. Judith Butler’s theory of framing is explored to highlight the ways in which information cannot always be entirely contained by the frame (of reality and photography). Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography also becomes a departure point for elucidating the problematic tendency for those who attempt to reveal what is hidden to become too invested in the potentiality for truth in what is intentionally excluded from the field of visibility.

“Angie was Our Sister:” Witnessing the Trans-Formation of Disgust in the Citizenry of Photography

In 2009, Andre Andrade was convicted for the murder of Angie Zapata, an 18-year-old Latina transgender woman living in rural Colorado. This essay traces the way Angie's friends, family, and community countered the assertion of transphobia in the courtroom and larger public discussion by circulating self-portraits of Angie on t-shirts at community vigils. Displaying Angie's portrait not only resists the mobilization of transphobic disgust, but also enacts a way of seeing trans people as citizens within the civil contract of photography. The mourners' resistance enacts a politics of witnessing that contests the bureaucratization of gender and the aesthetic norms of legal culture. These rhetorical performances illustrate the emotional politics of visuality, and how citizenship is a category of of embodied sociality, public emotionality, and performative enactment.

In Naked Repose

This paper examines the role of the face as it is caught suspended in private contemplation in candid photography. It starts with a celebrated lineage of photography of anonymous faces that promise the revelation of a secret, absorbed self: Paul Strand's 1916 portrait of a blind street peddler, made with a special right-angled lens; Walker Evans's New York subway portraits (1938–41), shot clandestinely from under his coat; Luc Delahaye's L’Autre (1995–97), “stolen” from the Paris Metro in the 1990s; and Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Heads (2001), gigantic strobe-lit portraits on the streets of New York. The paper then turns to Australian photographer Cherine Fahd, whose work insistently alludes to the redemptive potential of this promise. This potential is interpreted in terms of Emmanuel Levinas's ethical responsibility to the other, Ariella Azoulay's “civil contract of photography” and Giorgio Agamben's eschatological understanding of photographic testimony.

Ariella Azoulay . The Civil Contract of Photography . Translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli . New York : Zone Books . 2008 . Pp. 585. $36.95.

Ariella Azoulay . The Civil Contract of Photography . Translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli . New York : Zone Books . 2008 . Pp. 585. $36.95.

Intolerable Gaze: The Social Contract of Photography

The publication of Ariella Azoulay's The Civil Contract of Photography not only provides a new theoretical model for understanding the agency ascribed to the photographic image in social relations, it also proposes a series of paradigmatic shifts of the ontology and historiography of photography to place it within emergent discourses of citizenship, technology and political relations. This review essay explores the key propositions outlined by Azoulay in shifting the dualistic concern of spectator and image embedded in much philosophical thought on image ethics, towards a triadic model that embraces photographer, the photographed subject and spectator as participants in what she identifies as the ‘citizenry of photography’. It identifies the central theoretical arguments that underpin Azoulay's intervention into discourses of the social relations of the photographic image and assesses the books contribution to re-thinking the role of the photo-journalistic image within the spheres of conflict, citizenship, democracy and spectatorship.

The Civil Contract of Photography by azoulay, ariella

The Civil Contract of Photography by azoulay, ariella

Jorge Ribalta. Review of "The Civil Contract of Photography" by Ariella Azoulay and "The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning" by John Tagg.

Jorge Ribalta. Review of "The Civil Contract of Photography" by Ariella Azoulay and "The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning" by John Tagg.

Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2008–2009

Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2008–2009 Phyllis E. Wachter (bio) Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story. —Sven Birkerts Memory has multiple truths, so to judge a memory by only limited criteria amounts to cutting entangled threads with scissors. If we do this, we will lose the threads of the memory. —Hyunah Yang Books Adams, Katherine. Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Nineteenth century life writing by and about US women writers reveals an emerging discourse of privacy opposing increasing forces of market capitalism and commodification. Angelou, Maya. Letter to My Daughter. New York: Random House, 2008. Angelou reflects that she “gave birth to one child, a son,” but that she has “thousands of daughters” of every racial and ethnic background. Atkins, Kim. Narrative Identity and Moral Identity: A Practical Perspective. New York: Routledge, 2008. This book “takes as its guiding theme two philosophical questions: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How should I live?’ These questions cannot be considered in isolation from each other.” Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. Brooklyn: Zone, 2009. Explores the political and ethical status of photography by focusing on the power relations that sustain and make possible photographic meanings. Bal, Mieke. Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. [End Page 696] Different tellings of the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife complicate our readings of the story, and shed light on the processes of canonization. Banco, Lindsay. Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature. Routledge: New York: 2009. Interlocking representations of travel and drugs show how metaphors of mobility help conceptualize the experience of intoxication. Barnard, Teresa. Anna Seward: A Constructed Life. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Unpublished letters and manuscripts complicate Seward’s carefully constructed narrative of her life. Barnett, Paul. Finding the Historical Christ. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Combs the book of Acts, the four canonical Gospels, and the writings of Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny for the historical figure Christians later worshipped. Beard, Laura J. Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Americas. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2009. Through paired life narratives by women from different countries and traditions, focuses on testimonio, metafiction, and the family saga as the story of a nation. Beizer, Janet. Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women’s Biographies. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. Shows how biographers of women who write about earlier women rehearse and rewrite relationships to their own mothers. Belli, Robert F., Frank P. Stafford, and Duane F. Alwin. Calendar and Time Diary Methods in Life Course Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. Shows how to use diary methods and calendars to conduct life history research. Benedict XVI. The Fathers of the Church: From Clement of Rome to Augustine of Hippo. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Thirty-six short accounts place early church fathers in their own and in contemporary contexts. Benton, Michael. Literary Biography: An Introduction. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Introduces current issues, controversies, conventions, and directions in life writing, while demonstrating how biographical context can enrich the study of authors. Bernard-Donals, Michael. Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance in the Wake of the Holocaust. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. Argues that contemporary representations of the Holocaust in memoirs and other literary genres, films and photographs, museums, and political discourse exist at the intersection of remembrance and oblivion. [End Page 697] Birkerts, Sven. The Art of Time in Memoir: Then Again. Saint Paul: Grawyolf, 2008. For Birkerts, when memories start “coming in loud and clear” and seem to fall “into some new alignment” so as to take on meaning, the story that is memoir starts to emerge. Blaak, Meroen. Literacy in Everyday Life: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Dutch Diaries. Trans. Beverley Jackson. Egodocuments and History 2. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Analyzes four early modern Dutch diaries whose authors document their daily lives and recount their reading. Blocker, Jane. Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Critiques the implicit authority of witnessing to...

Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before by Michael Fried, and The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay

Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before by Michael Fried, and The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay