As a result, imperialism – whose wide-ranging examples here include European colonialism, Israel’s establishment in Palestine, and the Marshall Plan’s postwar consensus – is distinguished as a profusely documented phenomenon, in fact as above all a process of documentation. Their simultaneous proliferations in the 19th century were profoundly intertwined: authorities photographed people to record them as natives, compliant or rebellious, while places were photographed to usher them under the jurisdiction of imperial power. This new book builds on her previous work, The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), and offers revitalising approaches to imperialism and to photography as a cultural phenomenon, grounded in the re-cognition of the figures ‘leaning against the edge’ of photographs.Īzoulay demonstrates that neither imperialism nor photography are comprehensible without the other. If Coetzee’s novels imply documentation’s crucial role in imperialism, Azoulay brings this relationship into the open, subjecting it to the forensic illumination of an archivist’s lightbox. Like Coetzee, Azoulay is an uncompromising critic of imperialism, preoccupied by its physical and documentary manifestations.
I thought of Mrs Curren as I read cultural theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s new tome Potential History, at the centre of which is similarly destabilising experience of photography.
A photo that’s been ‘of’ her family for 60 years becomes a photo ‘of’ a garden rife with thorny moral and political questions, even a photo ‘of’ the people whom it implicitly excludes. Photographs are used in everyday and legal contexts to prove positive veracities – these people were once here in this garden – but Mrs Curren finds the picture’s significance is unreliable, if not entirely volatile. ‘Who are the ghosts and who are the presences? Who, outside the picture, leaning on their rakes, leaning on their spades, waiting to get back to work, lean also against the edge of the rectangle, bursting it in?’ Studying a family photo taken in the garden, she wonders: Towards the end of JM Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron (1990), Mrs Curren, an elderly white South African professor, becomes newly aware of the stacks of old photographs filling her home.
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