A new, revolutionary history of photography from a stellar team of writers and thinkers that challenges all existing narratives by focusing on the complex collaborations between photographer and subject. Led by five of the great thinkers and practitioners in photography, and including texts by over 100 writers, critics and academics, this groundbreaking publication presents a potential history of photography explored through the lens of collaboration, challenging the dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship. With more than 1,000 photographs, it breaks apart photography’s ‘single creator’ tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration – the various relationships, exchanges and interactions that occur between all participants in the making of any photograph. This collaboration takes different forms, including coercion and cooperation, friendship and exploitation, and expresses shared interests as well as competition, rivalry or antagonistic partnership. The conditions of collaboration are explored through 100 photography ‘projects’, divided into eight thematic chapters including ‘The Photographed Subject’, ‘The Author’ and ‘Potentializing Violence’. The result of years of research, Collaboration addresses key issues of gender, race and societal hierarchies and divisions and their role in forging identity and conformity. The photographs from each project are presented non-hierarchically alongside quotes, testimonies, and short texts by guest contributors. These networks of texts and images offer perspectives on a vast array of photographic themes, from Araki’s portraits of women to archival files from the Spanish Civil War. Each chapter is introduced by the editors, who provide the keys to understanding and decoding the complex politics of seeing.

An argument that anyone can pursue political agency and resistance through photography, even those with flawed or nonexistent citizenship. In this compelling work, Ariella Azoulay reconsiders the political and ethical status of photography. Describing the power relations that sustain and make possible photographic meanings, Azoulay argues that anyone-even a stateless person-who addresses others through photographs or is addressed by photographs can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The civil contract of photography enables anyone to pursue political agency and resistance through photography. Photography, Azoulay insists, cannot be understood separately from the many catastrophes of recent history. The crucial arguments of her book concern two groups with flawed or nonexistent citizenship: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay analyzes Israeli press photographs of violent episodes in the Occupied Territories, and interprets various photographs of women-from famous images by stop-motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge to photographs from Abu Ghraib prison. Azoulay asks this question: under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and to show disaster that befalls those who can claim only incomplete or nonexistent citizenship? Drawing on such key texts in the history of modern citizenship as the Declaration of the Rights of Man together with relevant work by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, Azoulay explores the visual field of catastrophe, injustice, and suffering in our time. Her book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history-and the consequences of how these events and their victims have been represented.

Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this rule-both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates-as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In The One-State Condition, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief. Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus-the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories-Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights. Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state condition is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state solution; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma.

This book is the product of a unique collaboration between the Israeli artist and philosopher Aim Deuelle Luski and Ariella Azoulay. In their long-standing working relationship, they research how to theorize the structure of the contemporary scopic regime and to open a space for its civil transformation. On this occasion, Azoulay interprets a unique series of cameras built by Deuelle Luski, along with photographs taken by these cameras. Unlike conventional, vertical photography, Deuelle Luski's cameras seek to generate new sets of relations between the camera and the world.

Azoulay s text unfolds four different "short histories" of problems in photography, each of which deconstructs what otherwise might appear as a coherent photographic regime, yet which is based solely on principles of sovereignty and possession. Through and with Deuelle Luski s project Azoulay seeks to potentialize the history of photography, to recover long-forgotten, unmaterialized possibilities. The book contains one hundred images and a conversation between the author and the artist."

"Newtopia: The State of Human Rights" looks at human rights through the work of 70 international contemporary artists. Many of these artists come from countries or regions where human rights has been or is a particularly pressing issue, such as the Arab World, China, India, Latin America, South Africa and Russia. Much more than a straightforward exhibition catalogue, "Newtopia" is composed of three sections. The first part assesses the current state of the human rights debate in essays and philosophical reflections; the second collects contributions by various international human rights activists, in which gripping testimonies and historical reconstructions alternate with socio-political analyses; and the third reproduces a selection of artworks. Among the artists included are Hans Haacke, Taryn Simon, Kendell Geers, Taysir Batniji, Alejandro Cesarco, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Woloo, Nikita Kadan, Pia Ronike, Kostis Velonis, Zhou Zixi, Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovic, Wilchar, Simon Starling, Boniface Mwongi and An-my Le.

The interaction of politics and the visual in the activities of nongovernmental activists. Political acts are encoded in medial forms-punch holes on a card, images on a live stream, tweets about events unfolding in real time-that have force, shaping people as subjects and forming the contours of what is sensible, legible, and visible. In doing so they define the terms of political possibility and create terrain for political acts. Sensible Politics considers the constitutive role played by aesthetic and performative techniques in the staging of claims by nongovernmental activists. Attending to political aesthetics means focusing not on a disembodied image that travels under the concept of art or visual culture, nor on a preformed domain of the political that seeks subsequent expression in media form. Instead it requires bringing the two realms together into the same analytic frame. A diverse group of contributors, from art historians, anthropologists, and political theorists to artists, filmmakers, and architects, considers the interaction of politics and the visual in such topics as the political consequences of a photograph taken by an Israeli soldier in a Palestinian house in Ramallah; AIDS activism; images of social suffering in Iran; the "forensic architecture" of claims to truth; and the "Make Poverty History" campaign. Transcending disciplines, they trace a broader image complex whereby politics is brought to visibility through the mediation of specific cultural forms that mix the legal and the visual, the hermeneutic and the technical, the political and the aesthetic. Their contributions offer critical insight into the practices of mediation whereby the political becomes manifest.

In this carefully curated and beautifully presented photobook, Ariella Azoulay offers a new perspective on four crucial years in the history of Palestine/Israel. The book reconstructs the processes by which the Palestinian majority in Mandatory Palestine became a minority in Israel, while the Jewish minority established a new political entity in which it became a majority ruling a minority Palestinian population. By reading over 200 photographs from that period, most of which were previously confined to Israeli state archives, Azoulay recounts the events and the stories that for years have been ignored or only partially acknowledged in Israel and the West. Including substantial analytical text, this book will give activists, scholars, and journalists a new perspective on the origins of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this ruleOCoboth in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debatesOCoas temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In "The One-State Condition," Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief.
Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation of the ruling apparatusOCothe technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied TerritoriesOCoAzoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights.
Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state "condition" is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state "solution"; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma."

The spirit that founded the volume and guided its development is radically inter- and transdisciplinary. Dispatches have arrived from anthropology, communications, English, film studies (including theory, history, criticism), literary studies (including theory, history, criticism), media and screen studies, cognitive cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, poetics, politics, and political theory; and as a special aspect of the volume, theorist-filmmakers make their thoughts known as well. Consequently, the critical reflections gathered here are decidedly pluralistic and heterogeneous, inviting-not bracketing or partitioning-the dynamism and diversity of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences (in so far as we are biological beings who are trying to track our cognitive and perceptual understanding of a nonbiological thing-namely, film, whether celluloid-based or in digital form); these disciplines, so habitually cordoned off from one another, are brought together into a shared conversation about a common object and domain of investigation. This book will be of interest to theorists and practitioners of nonfiction film; to emerging and established scholars contributing to the secondary literature; and to those who are intrigued by the kinds of questions and claims that seem native to nonfiction film, and who may wish to explore some critical responses to them written in engaging language.

The spirit that founded the volume and guided its development is radically inter- and transdisciplinary. Dispatches have arrived from anthropology, communications, English, film studies (including theory, history, criticism), literary studies (including theory, history, criticism), media and screen studies, cognitive cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, poetics, politics, and political theory; and as a special aspect of the volume, theorist-filmmakers make their thoughts known as well. Consequently, the critical reflections gathered here are decidedly pluralistic and heterogeneous, inviting-not bracketing or partitioning-the dynamism and diversity of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences (in so far as we are biological beings who are trying to track our cognitive and perceptual understanding of a nonbiological thing-namely, film, whether celluloid-based or in digital form); these disciplines, so habitually cordoned off from one another, are brought together into a shared conversation about a common object and domain of investigation. This book will be of interest to theorists and practitioners of nonfiction film; to emerging and established scholars contributing to the secondary literature; and to those who are intrigued by the kinds of questions and claims that seem native to nonfiction film, and who may wish to explore some critical responses to them written in engaging language.