‘Toward the Abolition of Photography’s Imperial Rights’ – Masterclass with Ariella Aisha Azoulay
‘’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.
