An argument that anyone can pursue political agency and resistance through photography, even those with flawed or nonexistent citizenship.

What is photography? -- Rethinking the political -- The photograph as the source of civil knowledge -- Civil uses of photography.

The point of departure of Berger and Mohr’s Another Way of Telling is what they call the discovery that ‘photographs did not work as we had been taught’. Since their book was written, the same feeling of ‘discovery’ has been expressed in other writings on photography. Often, these ‘discoveries’ have been linked with the way ‘ordinary’ people have been using photography. This paper addresses this recurrence and asks what are the discursive conditions under which this understanding of photography has been (...) perceived as a ‘discovery’ whenever it has surfaced in the last 30 years. The paper analyzes the conceptual grid within the hegemonic discourse on photography that has contributed enormously to the marginalization of this new understanding of photography — the common opposition between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘political’, and accordingly between two seemingly contradictory judgments: ‘this is too political’; ‘this is too aesthetic’. These judgments, applied frequently to photographs taken in zones of ‘regime-made disaster’, usually differ and sometimes completely prevent the possible encounter with the photographed people who, through the photograph, are co-present with the spectators in the event of viewing the photograph. (shrink)

Many interpretations have been put forward for Walter Benjamin's short essay “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin 2003), an aphoristic text written in 1940 in Paris under the Nazi occupation. Most...

Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this rule—both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates—as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In _The One-State Condition_, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief. Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation (...) of the ruling apparatus—the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories—Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights. Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state _condition_ is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state _solution_; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma. (shrink)