Several years ago, while staring at a photograph of torture on the front page of the newspaper, I began seriously asking myself a question that many people had asked before: What should one do when faced with images of violence? I spent thirteen years researching the question, which became more urgent as those years passed and social media began connecting people around the globe. Every week, perhaps every day, something terrible happens somewhere in the world, and, whether it is far away or right at home, we are inundated with images of the horror. Do these images harm their subjects? Is it an ethical violation to make a photograph of suffering beautiful? Do I have a right to look at other people’s pain?
I read theorists who claim that violent images are pornographic, theorists who point out the narcissism of worrying about the effects of images on viewers, theorists who fear that looking at images of suffering extends that suffering. Then I read Ariella Azoulay’s “The Civil Contract of Photography,” which was first published, in Hebrew, in 2007, and translated into English by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli the following year. Suddenly, every question that seemed important to me felt beside the point. Azoulay, a curator, filmmaker, and professor at Brown, is not interested in viewers’ emotional responses to images of suffering. It’s not empathy she’s after; she wants action. Images can transform the world, she argues, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because we don’t know how to look at them. The problem isn’t images; it’s us.
To Azoulay, who was born in Tel Aviv and educated in Israel and France, the invention of the camera was not merely a technological leap, the introduction of a new machine. Rather, it was the “invention of a new encounter.” Cameras allow ordinary people to take pictures of other ordinary people, and they also allow ordinary people to take pictures of dictators and fascists and states committing violence. “Photography reorganized what was accessible to the gaze,” she writes. It gave people the chance to share their visual field with one another, to see more than they could see alone, to be in otherwise unreachable times and places. Azoulay calls photographs “transit visas” and insists that the camera grants a kind of citizenship that transcends borders. Through the taking and viewing of images, new lines of belonging are drawn. We are citizens not of nations but of images. We are accountable to one another, responsible for what the camera lets us see.
This responsibility, for Azoulay, is not abstract. Photographers and people who have let themselves be photographed assume that someday people will see their images and do something in response to what they see, she argues. They imagined you, their future viewer, hovering above them at the moment the picture was taken, and you must live up to their expectations. Azoulay began working on the book in the fall of 2000, at the beginning of the Palestinian uprising known as the second intifada; in the introduction, she writes that “observing the unbearable sights presented in photographs from the Occupied Territories” formed the main motivation for her writing. In some ways, the heartbeat animating “The Civil Contract” is the obligation that Azoulay feels to restore citizenship to “dispossessed citizens” and her hope that photography might play a crucial role in this work. Though not all of the included photographs depict violence and its aftermath, the book focusses squarely on images of pain and suffering—and on what to do when encountering such pictures. Viewers, through careful observation of images of horror, become witnesses who “can occasionally foresee or predict the future,” she writes. As a result, they can warn others of “dangers that lie ahead” and take action to prevent them.
In order to do this, we must learn how to look at photographs—an ability Azoulay describes as a “civic skill.” Throughout “The Civil Contract,” she models this skill, analyzing a series of photos by Eadweard Muybridge of a woman spanking a child; the photo, from 1845, of the abolitionist Jonathan Walker’s branded hand; the image of a man shot in the street in Hebron, in 2000; a photograph of Napoleon III’s son in a photographer’s studio; a young boy having his picture taken for an identity card in Gaza, in 1971; a dead and unidentified migrant worker bleeding on the ground in Tel Aviv, in 1998. She also writes about how to look at rarely seen images in a troubling chapter titled “Has Anyone Ever Seen a Photograph of a Rape?” There, she wrestles with the effects of rape’s near-invisibility outside of pornography and asks whether it is possible to fight effectively against sexual violence if it “isn’t accessible to the gaze.” Azoulay’s emphasis throughout the book is on the spectator, who bears responsibility “toward what is visible.” To be resisted, it seems, violence must be seen, and photography makes such vision possible. You could read “The Civil Contract” as a how-to manual for looking at photographs, though one that’s dense and strange and sometimes makes you cry.
Reading the book, I was reminded of “Photography’s Other Histories,” a collection of essays edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson. In the introduction, Pinney rethinks the long-held belief in the indexicality of photographs: the idea that photographs have a natural, even physical, relationship with their referents, and are thus somehow truer or more accurate than other forms of representation. Yes, photographs show what was there, Pinney argues, but what was there can be much more than what the photographer wanted the viewer to see. Unlike a painter whose brush can exclude whatever the painter wants, the photographer’s lens must be left open, and something extraneous will always enter the scene. “Margin of excess,” Pinney calls it. “Subversive code.” As a result, he argues, rather than being guarantees of certainty or proof, photographs are volatile, fertile, open, and available to uses that the photographer may not have intended.
To demonstrate how even pictures taken as exercises of domination can subvert the photographer’s intentions, Azoulay turns to a series of daguerreotypes of people enslaved in Columbia, South Carolina, on the plantation belonging to Benjamin Franklin Taylor, a graduate of Mount Zion Institute and Princeton, who served one term in the South Carolina legislature. The biologist Louis Agassiz ordered these images made; he wanted to use photography to substantiate his claim that not all human beings belonged to the same species, to prove that blacks were inferior to whites, to justify the enslavement of some bodies by other bodies. With the help of his colleague Dr. Robert Gibbes, a paleontologist, who was friends with local slavers, Agassiz travelled to the Taylor plantation, set up a studio, and hired J. T. Zealy to take the daguerreotypes. Out of the enslaved people Taylor presented to him, Agassiz chose the individuals he wanted photographed: five men of African birth and two African-American women, daughters of two of the men. Labels for each photograph record the subjects’ names, the African tribe with which they were affiliated, and the name of their owner. The images were found in the attic of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1976, more than a hundred years after they were taken.
To make humans appear to be marketable, sellable, disposable property—to create the illusion of bodies without kin—slavers separated parents from children, wives from husbands, sisters from brothers. Owners’ records largely used matriarchal attribution to trace the lineage of children born into slavery, noting a child’s mother and not her father, because the biological fathers were often the owners themselves, who raped enslaved women. Agassiz’s daguerreotypes inadvertently re-inscribed the very father-daughter relationship that slavery tried to erase, though that was likely not his intention. Azoulay argues that Agassiz chose to photograph fathers and not mothers so the picture-taking might become a “performative event” in which white men could act out their superiority on the bodies of black men. Imagine that room with the camera set up on its tripod, Azoulay proposes. Imagine enslaved men subjected to the gazes of the camera and of the white men gathered there. Imagine fathers forced to watch their daughters as they, too, were subjected to those gazes, daughters who were ordered to strip, to peel down their dresses, to expose their breasts, a reenactment of the auction block, where naked women were groped by sellers and potential buyers, their bellies and breasts grabbed so slavers could determine how many children the women could bear and nurse, how many more enslaved people they could produce. Yet even as they stood within this violence, Azoulay writes, the subjects of Agassiz’s images could see there was a small opening: the photographs could capture not their inferiority but their equality, their humanity. “Photography subverted Agassiz’s presumption,” Azoulay writes. Rather than documenting the sub-humanity of the enslaved, the images document the inhumanity of the owners. The photographed men and women knew the violent and violating gazes that rested on them that day did not exhaust all possible gazes. With their expressions of contempt and indifference and anger, the subjects in the images address someone who is not yet present. They address us.
Repeatedly, Azoulay asks her readers to project themselves into the scenes of photographs, to notice the power dynamics at play, to identify the participants, and to view the outcomes not as inevitable but as one possibility among many. Looking at photographs this way, Azoulay thinks, can loosen events from their seeming inevitability and reveal that history didn’t have to proceed the way it did. Things could have been different. Viewing a photograph becomes a kind of reanimation: the still photograph begins to move, and though this motion cannot erase inequality, it can trouble oppression that might otherwise seem intractable. Azoulay understands that actions in the past are irreversible, yet she insists that photography introduces a kind of malleability, the potential for change. “The photograph is out there, an object in the world,” she writes, “and anyone, always (at least in principle), can pull at one of its threads and trace it in such a way as to reopen the image and renegotiate what it shows, possibly even completely overturning what was seen in it before.”
The more I return to Azoulay’s work, the more I’m convinced she might actually think the past can be changed. Photography, in her hands, takes on an almost shamanic power. Viewing a picture becomes a way of offering healing or reparation to those already dead. Her book scared me—I felt overwhelmed by her proposal that every time I look at an image of a person in pain I am bound to that person, obligated to try to end that person’s suffering. I thought of a friend whose son was diagnosed with a fatal disease. When he was dying, people would say to her, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” She would respond, “Yes, you can imagine it. You just don’t want to.”
For many years, I said I didn’t know what to do when I encountered an image of another person in pain or dying or already dead. After reading Azoulay, I could no longer claim that I didn’t know what to do. She had explained the work in detail. The question for me now is whether I am up to the task.
