POP 1 (1) p.

7–8 Intellect Limited 2010

Philosophy of Photography
Volume 1 Number 1
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Introduction. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.1.1.7/7

Philosophizing photography/
photographing philosophy

In summer 2009 the editors invited a number of prominent thinkers known for their writing about
photography to contribute a short text to this symposium on the present conjunction of photography
and philosophy. The resulting collection of eight essays inaugurates this journal and provides a ten-
tative agenda for future contributions by outlining a range of themes, processes, methodologies and
digressions that might be explored in greater depth, and from different perspectives, in future issues
of the journal.

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 Ariella Azoulay

Their city is under curfew, but the six boys in the

picture refuse to recognize its legitimacy. They
refuse the army’s might and its authority to limit
their movement. Getting together outdoors, in
front of the camera, and demanding to have their
picture taken at this time enables them to pro-
duce a clear link between breaking the curfew
and the photographic act. By participating in the
act of taking the photograph, each of them is an
actor who says, ‘Take my picture’ – I want to be
seen as a violator of a curfew, to show who I am,
to show what the army is. The photographic sit-
uation grants recognition of their act, recognition
of the possibility that it is not only under the
army’s watchful eye that they exist. Their gaze is
not uniform and they seem to be in the process
of learning its power as well as its various mean-
ings: fear, threat, power, vision, scorn, hesitation
and the ability to take part in the shaping of their
own reality. ‘Take my picture’, here, is a visual
equivalent of ‘I violate the curfew!’ Against the
potential use, on the part of the army, of such a
photo to criminalize these boys, a civil gaze
should seek to keep it open as a photographic
event that might criminalize the curfew as an
illegitimate state tool.

Ariella Azoulay

Eldad Rafaelie, Hebron, 2002.

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