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.

"Giving Ground" is prompted by two phenomena whose paradoxical convergence is currently altering our experience and conception of urban relations and city planning. On the one hand, forces of globalisation push towards conditions of homogenisation and deterritorialisation, while, on the other, a surging politics of identity barricades various groups behind particular claims and ignites violent persecutions. The covert relation between these phenomena, wherby territory/ground is both disavowed or abstracted "and" jealously reclaimed, is the focus of the essays in this volume, at the heart of these investigations are the notions of propinquity and neighbourliness whose redefinitions and redeployments serve widely divergent ends: from the fortification of the 'new urbanist' fantasy about the possibility of re-creating small towns, to the validation of the exclusionary tactics of 'sanitization' that guide zoning decisions, to assisting in the reimagination of an ethical and reasonable urbanism. Directed against the contracting limits of tolerance, this volume attempts to reinvent the troubled notion of the 'right to the city'.
The individual contributions range from examinations of the crises in specific cities--Jerusalem, New York, and the network of 'global cities' throughout the world--to considerations of specific urban issues, such as the physical instrumentalities by which people a brought into physical proximity and the implementation of 'new urbanist' projects; and reworkings of physical concepts, such as Levina's notion of the face-to-face, Lacan's notion of sublimation, in urbanist terms. Several focus on the relation between cities and sexuality, which figures, for different reasons, as the 'eternal irony' of urbanity.