The History of Photography is Built on Centuries of Violence

In the context of the paradigm of art, the spectator plays an active role in judging art and determining the fate of the image in the public discourse.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay - Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem won the 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award for

his picture of Inas Abu Maamar clutching the lifeless body of her five-year-old niece, Saly.

She is wearing a blue dress and a brown headscarf. Her arms is cradling the small body of Saly. The

image is relatively simple, it contains no blood or depiction of horrific injury. However it has clear

echos of motifs of Palestinian art but also reminds us of other images of suffering for instance

those of Kathe Kolliwitz.

Salem is only one of the hero photographers of Gaza who along with other journalists, have paid a

high cost in terms of their own lives to bring us news and images of the great genocide, the new

Nakba.

Rolling Stone magazine has published a carousel of some of the images from photographers such

as Ahmed Zakot, Haitham Imad, Ismael Abu Dayyah and others documenting the horror inflicted

on the Palestinian people but also celebrating their resilience and their resistance in the simple fact

of continuing to exist.

How are we to understand these photographs?

German philosopher Theodore Adorno wrote “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist

barbarisch” (“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”) What I think Adorno was grappling with was that in the face of such horrors how is it possible to consider the creation of a piece that has

to consider aesthetics, meter, rhyme, length in the case of poetry or in the case of photography,

composition, focus, colour and so on?

I think that Adorno’s statement means that everything after the Holocaust is barbaric in the sense that we continue to live on, to eat, breath, go to work and carry out everyday tasks. This thought is often expressed by people looking at the horrors in Gaza. How can we carry on walking down the street whilst children are being slaughtered every day? Adorno’s statement is sometimes misunderstood to mean that poets should stop writing. I don’t think this is what he was saying. Perhaps his intention was to say that art has to start from a new place, a rougher, more barbaric place? It can only look at the world in a changed context. The photography coming out of Gaza is of course not happening after the horror but during it, indeed the horror is happening to the photographers themselves.

Judith Butler after 9/11 noted that some dead were seen as worth mourning but others not. This we

can see today, 40,000 Palestinian dead are not considered by the Western media to count for as

much as dead Israelis. It is in these contexts, Butler argues, that to simply appear in the streets is

a form of resistance. The photography coming out of Gaza is a form of resistance. The Palestinian

people are seen, in their suffering but also in their everyday struggle to stay alive, they are not

simple victims, they go on.

I think that it is important to consider wider matters raised by Adorno. Yes, show what is

happening, report, document, be political - but should we be making art? Should consideration of

aesthetics play any part in this?

Looking back at photography it is clear that such considerations have always been present.

A look at the photography of Don McCullin for instance shows how he uses technique to get his

message across. Even in the midst of death his aesthetic is part of the communication he desires.

However he says

“This is why I really believe photography is about making an emotional

commitment to where you are and what you are doing. I try to cut out the technical side as much as

possible.”

Of course for McCullin as for any artist how “good” your work is is dependent on how

much you have absorbed and embodied technique in order to deploy it when necessary.

This question is one of the themes of Ariella Azoulay’s book Civil Imagination: A

Political Ontology of Photography.

Two Modes

Azoulay posits two paradigms, the political and the aesthetic. These come from her critical engagement with Walter Benjamin's writings after the NSDAP, the Nazi Party, took power in Germany and World War Two began.

Benjamin wrote of humankind that,

“Its self alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme

aesthetic pleasure.

Such is the aestheticization of politics as practiced by Fascism, Communism replied by

politicising art.”

Thus Benjamin seems to be saying there is a contradiction in the world between the aesthetic and

the political. In the face of repression and alienation it is the artists job to be political.

This politicisation of art arises, Azoulay argues, from the opening up of art to the public. After the

opening of the Louvre, the former Royal Palace, by the French Revolution the public were able to

look at the artworks previously reserved for the aristocracy. Once art was open to other classes,

other opinions, it became necessarily political.

Azoulay however finds an elision in Benjamin, or rather the common interpretation of Benjamin.

There is not, she argues, a perfect opposition between aesthetics and politics.

Nevertheless art industry gatekeepers denounce works as not being sufficiently one or the other -

too political, thus not sufficiently artistic or too aesthetic, not sufficiently political.

This is an important discussion for Azoulay, a Palestinian Jew concerned with challenging the

oppression of the Palestinian people and involved in artistic production to that end. How should we

look at art and photographs recording the oppression and the resistance?

Azoulay proposes that we view the aesthetic/political dichotomy as two axes of a graph on which

we can plot the location of a given work. The axes representing two modes of transmission of

images. As she says two traditions, one, the aesthetic that seeks to stabilise and sanctify the

image and another that seeks to alter the image in its transmission.

Crucially in this view the photograph no longer remains the sole property of the photographer. The

people in the photograph, the critics, spectators, viewers and others have a say in its meaning.

Aesthetics can be applied by the artist but its politicisation occurs immediately it is viewed.

This stands in contradiction to the Kantian view in which images can be attributed to have universal

properties regardless of their theme, intent or referents. It also de-centres the photographer and

brings into view, the photographed.

That the photographed should have a place in photography and the history of photography is for

her central because Azoulay says

“The history of Photography is built on centuries of violence”

In Palestine this is clear, in the early Israeli State only Zionist photographers were allowed.

Indigenous Palestinian photographers were banned. This was before the hand held 35mm camera was common and when the equipment available to Arab street or portrait photographers would have

been large 8x10 cameras.

Moreover photography was used in many ways to project, amplify and justify the Zionist

occupation. In an earlier essay Azoulay shows us a screenshot of album pages from photographer

Beno Rothenberg series of photographs taken in Palestine, 1949, titled “Arab women from Tantura

going to Jordan,” They are passively ‘going’ according to the title however we can also see another

interpretation of what was happening.

Another photograph of an elegant elderly man is captioned: “Kfar Yona, Jewish front line. A former

prisoner of war is interrogated in the presence of a delegate from the ICRC.”

The man is refusing to move. He was part of what was called a ‘repatriation’ an expulsion, where

approximately 2,000 Palestinians of Arab origin—mostly women, children, and elderly

people—were left with little choice but to sign papers proving that they agreed to be evacuated to

Jordan as part of “family reunification” their relatives having been expelled a few months earlier or incarcerated in camps.

According to Azoulay,

“Out of the 2,000 women fated for “transfer” through this kind of expulsion, conducted “willingly,”

about 800 refused to evacuate in spite of being threatened by the Jewish forces”

In a survey of hundreds of photographs take by Israeli photographers of the Nakba Azoulay

noted something odd. The Palestinians are never show to protest. Azoulay notes that this is unlikely to have actually been the case. She deduces that the violent events are never shown by the photographers, only their aftermath.

Thus photography plays a part in the Nakba, it is used to categorise the Palestinians into what the

zionist forces wanted them to be become, refugees, but it does so in such a way as to hide the

violence and imperialist nature of what took place. Nor is the simply a matter of history. Azouly tried

to use the photograph of the elderly man refusing to leave in an exhibition. She was told by the

ICRC (International Committee of The Red Cross) archives that she could only use it with the

existing misleading caption, that the man was ‘a former prisoner of war’ rather than an expelee.

Thus the categorisation remains as a force influencing the present day view of events but also the

status of Palestinians today.

Destruction

What was destroyed in the Nakba was not only the homes and physical buildings of Palestine but

it’s culture too. Azoulay argues that there existed in Palestine a mixed Arab/Jewish culture. This

was evident in professional photography.

She records that in Jaffa Street, Jerusalem:

“The lovely street captured in a famous photo from the collection of the American Colony was

densely inhabited by numerous photographers’ studios—those of Militad Savvides, Boulos Meo,

Elia Studio, Khalil Raad, Garvad Krikorian who worked with David Sabunji of Jaffa, Jacob Ben Dov,

and others—animated sites where diverse types of encounters and activities took place. Alongside

these studios, there were photography stores such as Photo Prisma, Photo Europa, Ganan, and

Abraham Yehezkeli. This is one of the major sites where much of the history of early photographic

activity in Palestine took place: an urban open- ended space where many photographers had their

studios, and persons came by to have their photos taken or to buy those of others, and distant

spectators acted and interacted according to variegated protocols that they shaped and adopted.

In a dense, fruitful, and challenging urban fabric, frequented by at least 1,000 people each day,

male and female professionals labored together as operators of cameras, assistants, those

preoccupied with lighting, those who developed the negatives and those who printed them, those

who retouched photographs, and others who designed the space with accessories to

accommodate different photographed persons’ taste and helped them find the right dress. Those

spaces were frequented by collectors and travelers, tourists and local clients, photographed

persons of all kinds who came to buy photographs and postcards of themselves and of others, of beloved or exotic places and varied landscapes. This street and the entire neighborhood were the beating heart of the photographic field of Palestine.”

This physical location was destroyed after 1949 as Jaffa St became a no mans land following the

Jordan-Israel settlement of the war in 1948. Not only were the studios destroyed but the archives

of photographs that they held were destroyed or seized by the Zionist forces. Thus burying the

memory of a mixed and multicultural society.

Whilst the oppressor manipulates and tailors what is shown in its photography to suit its own ends I

think that we have to acknowledge from Azoulay that the oppressor helps determine the

photography of resistance too. It literally crops the frame of the photographers in the field in Gaza.

They are restricted as to their movements, hampered by the need to find food and shelter as they

too are part of this great displacement and ultimately they are rendered unalive - to adopt the

vocabulary used online to evade the censoring algorithms. So the image we get is always partial and incomplete. The Italian photographer and theorist Luigi

Girri said

“ I get the impression that behind what I see is another Landscape”.

For Azoulay meaning is not determined by the photographer only nor even by the imperialist

oppressor. When images are received into the world they are subject to the democratic gaze of

millions of people. People in the former colonial countries, anti-imperialists, leftist, trade unionists,

students and workers. All these bring their knowledge and experience to bear on the images. Their

meaning can be determined by activity.

In this way the images and the art of the heroes of Gaza become part of a global resistance that feedback into the particular and necessary resistance of the Palestinian people.

They also present a challenge to the existing aesthetic of photography.

Can we go on in the old way when children are being slaughtered everyday?