The Civil Contract of Photography.

• Author: Cram, Emily Dianne
• Position: Book review

The Civil Contract of Photography. By Ariella Azoulay. New York: Zone Books, 2008. pp. 585.

Ariella Azoulay's The Civil Contract of Photography is a simply stunning challenge to the ways in which visual culture scholars imagine the productive possibilities of photography as a mode of political contestation, domain of argument, and site of ethical engagement. Azoulay asks a worthy question: in the face of political disaster, catastrophe, and state violence, how might photography enable identifications and obligations amongst citizens, abandoned, and stateless persons within the contemporary geopolitical landscape? Contra understandings of photography embraced by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes that see photography of implicit and explicit violence as politically and ethically bankrupt, Azoulay formulates a powerful theory--one she calls the "civil contract of photography"--as an imaginative mode of cultivating controversy and resistance against the whims of abusive state sovereignty. Over the course of nine chapters following a detailed introduction, Azoulay meticulously outlines and performs a method of reading photographs, foregrounding the importance of visual argument in articulating a formation of citizenship productive for intervening in the violent spectacles of late-modernity.

Argumentation critics have grappled with the particular problematics of images-as-argument, highlighting the need to attend to the rhetorical conditions of an image's emergence and circulation, i.e. asking how audiences, contexts, persona, and composition collide to generate a web of meaning for potential argumentative usage. Although Azoulay does not explicitly theorize argument, she addresses a number of themes relevant to the readers of this journal: first, how do photographs function as argumentative fragments within a larger discursive economy or "regime of statements" (p. 191); second, how should spectators of political violence experience and witness photography so as to articulate an "emergency claim" as a way of defining rhetorical exigencies (p. 145); and third, how might a distinctly "civil gaze" transform technical or "professional" knowledges and ways of seeing (pp. 96-7). Azoulay's claims about the political relations forged within photography are contextualized by her broader critique of liberal democratic citizenship. In a sense, challenging the ways in which we articulate the meanings and habits of citizenship radically transforms the kinds of...