I am thinking about the layers of citizenship and statehood in photography. I am drawn to Azoulay's claim that even stateless people enter into a declared citizenry of photography when they participate in an action. And yet what is the nature of that citizenry? It is certainly not in control. The examples Azoulay gives show photography as a controlled surface that actions exist on. The citizenry has a "public edge". Photography controls visibility; in the some of the passages I read, it creates the image of the female body and never shows assaults on individual bodies, it sterilizes the Gulf War, it Is an instrument of torture masquerading as a truth in Palestine. The description of the photograph of Palestinian man with the blindfold on his forehead, and the Israeli state maintaining the power to hide his vision, plunging him into darkness again (and inviting the photograph itself from the collaborating journalist), still sticks with me. I can still see this idea, this image of a photograph that I have never seen.  

Additionally, Hannah Arendt’s ‘Reflections of Violence’, helps establish the role of violence as a societal concern, supplementing my understanding of the scope that photography is able to depict. As long as humanity has lived in a society, violence has been a recurrent instrument closely intertwined with its relationship to power. Although it is true that violence goes hand in hand with power, it is important to remark the risk of interpreting power and violence “in biological terms”. Violence, often a result of rage, most probably always leads to “a more violent world”.

The theme of violence is revisited in Arendt’s essay, not only in a way that evokes #La_Haine  and Childish Gambino’s This is America, but in a way that reminds me of the complete power of the photographed subject—their voice all consuming when set in violence. This power all but insists that the subject and its photographer are unified by citizenship and the civil contract of photography. 

I wonder at the notion of archive – at the level of the institution and the private. We accept the above morally, ethically but in the world in which we live, photographs (as pieces of art, as records of time and moments) are collected. What does it mean when the enemy, who may be feared and beloved above all else, owns your likenesses, your private faces? Are there not faces which we keep private? What happens when the private is stolen and made someone else’s public, without our consent? I found this especially evocative: "In the Israeli context, for instance, the Palestinians became citizens of the citizenry of photography long before there was any possibility of their becoming citizens in the full meaning of the word," (123); as I think on what it means to be represented in a context, any context, at a given point in time when you may not have had the option to not be.   

In Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence, Hannah Arendt offers an analysis on the relationship between violence and power that I found lacking at best. As this text was published in 1969 during a historical moment of increasingly publicized state-sanctioned violence, I understand the desire to offer critical commentary on the cultural moment and what the future could possibly hold if the status quo prevailed. However, Arendt’s definition of violence and blatant misunderstanding of the racial context of the time makes it hard to digest this piece in its totality. To begin, I think this piece offers a reductive definition of violence that centers on immediacy, weaponry, destruction and the “barrel of a gun.” She contends that violence and power are opposites, stating that “where one rules absolutely the other is absent” and that violence “cannot be derived from power.” For me, it is not so simple. Violence, which includes structural violence, insidiously upholds the power dynamics of a sovereign nation or government and cannot be described as “opposite to power.” It can be described, as Arendt said, as a means or as a tool for power, but violence operates at different temporal scales with structural violence operating much more slowly than violence on a battlefield for instance. Violence includes the systemic inequities that are entangled into the very fabric of western society: education, housing, food justice, job opportunities, access to healthcare, etc. to say that these inequities persist because the “strength of the regime lies in the civil obedience of people” is just too simple. Yes, I think obedience is a significant factor, but it’s a privileged take to presume that civil support and collective disobedience can even arise when society consistently reminds certain groups of people that they are relegated to the periphery of society. Furthermore, to say that “violence appears where power is in jeopardy” is to further negate the existence of structural violence that is used to uphold systems of power. Violence exists and persists. However, Arendt makes it clear that this is not her experience of the US, particularly when she berates the “organic metaphor.” (12) For, I maintain that when there is violence being enacted on people on a daily basis this equates to a sickness in society. Poverty is state-sanctioned violence, hunger is state-sanctioned violence, failing educational systems are state-sanctioned violence, poor infrastructure is state-sanctioned violence. Violence encompasses a lot more than simply the barrel of the gun and to promote the idea that under these repressive conditions that a society is sick or that it is infected isn’t a promotion of violence but rather a critical identification of exactly what is happening, an identification of exactly what Arendt proclaims in the beginning of the article is being taken for granted. Lastly, I let out an audible sigh when I read, “the greatest danger is…in which case violence and riots may disappear from the streets and be transformed into the invisible terror of a police state.” The political landscape of 1969 was for many people– mostly Black and Indigenous people of color–already one of terror within a police state, and it had been their lived reality for centuries.

Because of the publishing dates, I read the Arendt piece first and after seeing that Ariella Azoulay uses Arendt as an interlocutor for her work, I was a little skeptical. However, I am interested in continuing to think through the notion of the act of photography as violent. Through a Marxist lens, whoever controls the means of production has power and Azoulay likens the photographer as controlling the means of production–therefore likening the camera as a tool or a means to power and thus a violent act. She denotes how photography can be exploitative and extracting, connoting a violence that robs the photographed of their privacy, their story, etc. Azoulay explains what she has coined as the civil contract of photography, a contract in which questions of ownership, privacy, private property, and power become entangled, within a contract that ideally would address this violence. She speaks on the photographer, the spectator, and the person whose likeness is captured as each having a civil contract where none is the true owner of the photograph, in fact, in many cases the photograph belongs the public. The question of authorship is also unclear, using the example of the photograph of Napoleon III’s son and concludes that the photograph does not exclusively represent the photographer’s will and intention, those of Napoleon III or those of the photographed boy, a phenomenon very relevant now particularly in the age of social media, Azoulay states that the “citizenry of photography…acknowledged that they have no rights to their images.” (112). (I think it’s important to situate this piece within the context of the West because I know there are cultures around the world in which photography is not allowed, it is regulated/ capturing the likeness of certain religious figures or governmental figures are not allowed, etc.) Nevertheless, the exploitative component of photography is something that I have personally grappled with before. The weaponization of photography to become a tool for surveillance and the tracking of movement/bodies all highlight the camera as a tool that can be used for significant harm. That said, at the scale of the individual, I think it is important to take the position that although you have the means of production/you have the tool that you are anti-ownership and begin to think through what that means or what that could look like. I am interested in the camera as an extension of the gaze. And while Azoulay touches on the “economy of gazes” stating that the modern citizen has thus renounced the exclusive right to his or her image in favor of an economy of images that in principle include the individual and all others,” and even goes so far as to identify each member of the citizenry of photography as a member of a collective, she stops short of identifying what could be a foundational principle. To me, what makes the civil contract of photography interesting is that it is a cooperative model locked within a capitalist framework. In our society, it is hard to imagine multiple owners, worker-owners, etc. We understand and gravitate towards private ownership and authorship being controlled by she who controls the means of production, but as Azoulay is pointing out, within photography that relationship is not a binary; it is multi-directional with multiple point of entry and stakeholders. What if in addition to each member of the collective renouncing their exclusive ownership over their likeness the photographers also renounced exclusive ownership over the image they’ve captured? What would a cooperative economy of gazes truly look like, and could this be a solution to the inherently violent nature of photography?

Azoulay's discussion of violence with regard to photography directly references Arendt’s work. However, Azoulay's discussion of taking a photograph as an act of violence is intriguing when you consider that Arendt would take this as indication that a photographer does not have the power or authority to be in control of an image. This take is consistent with Azoulay's point that photography can be used as an instrument to take power -- whether in a benign sense where one may use it to lift up voices as a citizen of photography, or in a malignant sense where one (whether individual or state) may use it to oppress another. In either case, photography and violence are instruments to take power, and require substantial accountability for those wielding this power.

It is interesting to think about how power given to images through the civil contract could make images cause much more violence, even when it is indirect, like how A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence by Hannah Arendt shows that the two albeit distinct phenomena, almost always appear together.