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The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

Author: Liat Berdugo

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1838602747

Drawing on unprecedented access to the video archives of B'Tselem, an Israeli NGO that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Liat Berdugo lays out an argument for a visual studies approach to videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine. Using video stills as core material, it discusses the politics of videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine by demonstrating that the conflict is one that has produced an inequality of visual rights. The book highlights visual surveillance and counter surveillance at the citizen level, how Palestinians originally filmed to “shoot back” at Israelis, who were armed with shooting power via weapons as the occupying force. It also traces how Israeli private citizens began filming back at Palestinians with their own cameras, including personal cell phone cameras, thus creating a simultaneous, echoing counter surveillance. Complicating the notion that visual evidence alone can secure justice, the Weaponized Camera in The Middle East asks how what is seen, but also who is seeing, affects how conflicts are visually recorded. Drawing on over 5,000 hours of footage, only a fraction of which is easily accessible to the public domain, this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies and battlegrounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship

Author: Vered Maimon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-26

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1000096769

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This book analyzes recent artistic and activist projects in order to conceptualize the new roles and goals of a critical theory and practice of art and photography. Vered Maimon argues that current artistic and activist practices are no longer concerned with the “politics of representation” and the critique of the spectacle, but with a “politics of rights” and the performative formation of shared yet highly contested public domains. The book thus offers a critical framework in which to rethink the artistic, the activist, and the political under globalization. The primary focus is on the ways contemporary artists and activists examine political citizenship as a paradox where subjects are struggling to acquire rights whose formulation rests on attributes they allegedly don't have; while the universal political validity of these rights presupposes precisely the abstraction of every form of difference, rights for all. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, photography theory, visual culture, cultural studies, critical theory, political theory, human rights, and activism.

The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory

Author: Mark Durden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-07

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1317541588

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With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory’s direction, relevance, and purpose. This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to ‘see’ an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means. Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.

Civil Imagination

Author: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2024-03-19

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1804292591

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"This remarkable book enhances Ariella Azoulay’s position as the most compelling theorist of photography writing today." –Jonathan Crary, author of Scorched Earth A groundbreaking work on the power of photography as a vehicle for civil protest Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted. Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the “civil” must be distinguished from the “political” as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay’s book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship—inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct. Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.

Photography and Imagination

Author: Amos Morris-Reich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0429853424

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As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography’s capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself.

Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013

Author: Emilie Le Febvre

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-22

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1003817599

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Introducing a novel anthropological study of photography in the Middle East, Emilie Le Febvre takes us to the Naqab Desert where Bedouin use photographs to make, and respond to, their own histories. She argues Bedouin presentations of the past are selective but increasingly reliant on archival documents such as photographs which spokespersons treat as evidence of their local histories amid escalating tensions in Israel. These practices shape Bedouin visual historicity, that is the diverse ways people produce their pasts in the present with images. This book charts these processes through the afterlives of six photographs (c. 1906–2013) as they circulate between the Naqab’s entangled visual economies – a transregional landscape organised by cultural ideals of proximity and assemblages of Bedouin iconography. Le Febvre illustrates how representational contentions associated with tribal, civic, and Palestinian-Israeli politics influence how images do history work in this society. She concludes Bedouin visual historicity is defined by acts of persuasion during which photographs authenticate alternating history projects. Here, Bedouin value photographs not because they evidence singular narratives of the past. Rather, the knowledges inscribed by photography are multifarious as they support diverse constructions of history and society with which members mediate a wide range of relationships in southern Israel. This book bridges studies of anthropology, photography, Palestinian-Israeli politics, and Bedouin Middle East history.

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Craft, and Visual Culture Education

Author: Manisha Sharma

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 570

ISBN-13: 1000901742

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This companion demonstrates how art, craft, and visual culture education activate social imagination and action that is equity- and justice-driven. Specifically, this book provides arts-engaged, intersectional understandings of decolonization in the contemporary art world that cross disciplinary lines. Visual and traditional essays in this book combine current scholarship with pragmatic strategies and insights grounded in the reality of socio-cultural, political, and economic communities across the globe. Across three sections (creative shorts, enacted encounters, and ruminative research), a diverse group of authors address themes of histories, space and land, mind and body, and the digital realm. Chapters highlight and illustrate how artists, educators, and researchers grapple with decolonial methods, theories, and strategies—in research, artmaking, and pedagogical practice. Each chapter includes discursive questions and resources for further engagement with the topics at hand. The book is targeted towards scholars and practitioners of art education, studio art, and art history, K-12 art teachers, as well as artist educators and teaching artists in museums and communities.

Activestills

Author: Vered Maimon

Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780745336695

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Examines and exhibits the role of photography in enabling and exposing political and social struggles in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip

Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities

Author: Haim Yacobi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 1317231171

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Presenting the current debate about cities in the Middle East from Sana’a, Beirut and Jerusalem to Cairo, Marrakesh and Gaza, the book explores urban planning and policy, migration, gender and identity as well as politics and economics of urban settings in the region. This handbook moves beyond essentialist and reductive analyses of identity, urban politics, planning, and development in cities in the Middle East, and instead offers critical engagement with both historical and contemporary urban processes in the region. Approaching "Cities" as multi-dimensional sites, products of political processes, knowledge production and exchange, and local and global visions as well as spatial artefacts. Importantly, in the different case studies and theoretical approaches, there is no attempt to idealise urban politics, planning, and everyday life in the Middle East –– which (as with many other cities elsewhere) are also situations of contestation and violence –– but rather to highlight how cities in the region, and especially those which are understudied, revolve around issues of housing, infrastructure, participation and identity, amongst other concerns. Analysing a variety of cities in the Middle East, the book is a significant contribution to Middle East Studies. It is an essential resource for students and academics interested in Geography, Regional and Urban Studies of the Middle East.