Book: The Civil Contract of Photography

[bmattock]

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11563

I read a review of this book online and now I want to get it. Thought it was interesting, might be interesting to others as well.

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay provides a compelling rethinking of the political and ethical status of photography. In her extraordinary account of the "civil contract" of photography, she thoroughly revises our understanding of the power relations that sustain and make possible photographic meanings. Photography, she insists, must be thought of and understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history.

Azoulay argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals to the power that governs them, and, at the same time, a form of relations among equal individuals that constrains this power. Her book shows how anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph's addressee, is or can become a citizen in the citizenry of photography. The civil contract of photography enables him or her to share with others the claim made or addressed by the photograph.

Here's the review that lead me here:

http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/archives/2010/01/photographys-us.html

However, Azoulay says that in the 1970's there was very little writing on photography within the discourse of art:

Artistic discourse turned out to be an obstacle to seeing what was in the photograph, but it was not the only one. Postmodern theorists –– such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, or Susan Sontag –– who bore witness to a glut of images were the first to fall prey to a kind of “image fatigue”; they simply stopped looking. The world filled up with images of horrors, and they loudly proclaimed that viewers’ eyes had grown unseeing, proceeding to unburden themselves of the responsibility to hold onto the elementary gesture of looking at what is presented to one’s gaze.

Azoulay adds that photography has come into the world with the wrong users’ manual.

 

[like2fiddle]

Thanks for posting this, it does look interesting.