Film still from the world like a jewel in the hand, 2022 © Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
 

A connected film screening will take place in the Foam Museum on 18 January 2023 at 19:00 (More details TBA)

‘’What does it mean to be born a citizen with a camera in a world where citizens are governed alongside millions of others who have been deprived of the same rights under the same governing system?’’

Is photography a product of imperialism? Ariella Aïsha Azoulay radically challenges the origins of photography commonly placed in the early 1830’s and invites us to imagine photography’s origin back displaced to 1492. Imperialism divided the world into parts where some of us – depending on our location -can appropriate the lives, words, objects, and desires of others while at the same time the latter have no right to claim rights. This mode of imperial thinking and being in the world provided photography and photographers the right to travel to faraway places and record lives and words that are not ours. They visually record faces and losses and destruction without questioning their right to document these worlds and claim ownership of those photographs. Although many photographers might think they are performing activist work, many tend not to question the regimes that grant them the right to see, show and display what does not belong to us in the first place.

In this special masterclass with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay we are invited to unlearn imperial violence that is reproduced through ways of seeing that ask us to engage with others through abusive categories such as ‘’refugees’’ ‘’undocumented migrants’’ and ‘’stateless’’. The right not to see and not to display everything will be central in our discussion with the hope to abolish imperial rights that have granted us such a privileged position in the world: that of the spectator. In order to refuse our privilege of documenting and displaying everything, we need to consider how those rights we assume and own were made ours and how photography uses the same rights to reproduce the practices of violence we so desperately need to unlearn.

Bio

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include: Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012); The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, (Pluto Press, 2011).

Readings and Credits

• Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. ‘’Toward the Abolition of Photography’s Imperial Rights’’. Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction. Eds. Kevin Coleman and Daniel James: Verso, 2021. 25-54.
• The Captive Photograph

*For this masterclass Ph.D students and ReMa students need to closely-read the assigned texts and to submit 1-2 questions to Yonathan Listik (y.listik@hum.leidenuniv.nl). Professor Azoulay will respond to these questions during the masterclass