Ariella Azoulay at ICP Infinity Awards 2023 | Critical Writing & Photograp

This lecture series examines how photography can address restitution and repatriation challenges. The series was conceived by Carlos Guerra with Ariella Azoulay as the first speaker. Photography faces unique challenges in repatriation because photographs exist as paper copies or digital files rather than physical objects that can be returned. The 'Migrant Mother' case demonstrates how photography can both visualize injustice and create new forms of injustice through the immutability of iconic images. Ariella Azoulay introduced the 'civil contract of photography' in 2008, describing photography as a pact between the photographer, the subject, and the camera. Her work combines political philosophy with photography to provide tools for understanding photography as a space for new struggles and new rights. The Paparenti case involves daguerreotypes taken in 1850 of enslaved people, including Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, commissioned by Louis Agassiz to prove his polygenesis theory. These images are held by Harvard University as private property, but Tamara Lanier, a direct descendant, has filed a lawsuit claiming these daguerreotypes are her ancestors, not museum assets. The case connects to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced everyone to recognize enslaved people as property rather than human beings. Harvard's continued possession of these images operates under this same legal framework, compelling viewers to recognize enslaved people as private property rather than as human beings with ancestral connections. The lawsuit uses three key terms: 'relinquish,' 'restitution,' and 'repatriation.' Relinquish means voluntarily ceasing to keep something, framing the approach as offering Harvard a gift rather than demanding something they should give back. Harvard's lawyers argued that photographs are the property of the photographer, not the subject, even when subjects did not consent. However, in the 1850s, photographers did not have exclusive property rights in images they produced. Visitors to photographer studios purchased daguerreotypes by their presence in front of the camera. In 1860, a court ruled that a commissioned photograph was the painter's property, not the photographer's. This suggests that the regime making all photographs private property should be abolished, particularly for images produced through force and in the service of violent regimes.

Land acknowledgment, regardless of sincerity, can never adequately give land back to indigenous people upon which settlers have built. Without developing ways to return lands stolen from indigenous communities, these acknowledgments serve as performative gestures that cannot replace actions of restitution necessary for actual decolonization. The archive of constraint functions as a site of refusal in which holdings constitute materials removed from circulation across online marketplaces. In every instance of an object's listing, sellers produce numerous photographs serving as condition reports, producing new kinds of colonial images while indexing a legacy of ownership predicated on colonial forms of possession. Institutions like the University of Michigan and Field Museum house large collections of images depicting indigenous peoples, supported by anthropologists and financiers. As Lyle Hughes Watkins contends, mainstream archives make decisions about existence, preservation, and availability on the basis of wealth and power distribution. These institutions have begun confronting their colonial legacies by reaching out to community members to develop reparative structures. The goal is not censorship but to question the act of framing itself while considering portions of photographs intentionally left out.

Restitution is a question of justice before it is a question of objects. Cultural rights are human rights, and when Africans cannot look after their own cultural objects, they are told they will be stolen. The British Museum case shows that when you steal somebody's property, it can also be stolen in your own backyard. The West must repair colonial wounds inflicted on African people and cultures. When objects and archives are in the continent, Africans can celebrate Africa within the continent. The process of self-representation involves exhibition making, filmmaking, and storytelling - a marathon requiring going the polar distance to do the best out of seeing oneself and telling one's own stories.

This segment explores the challenges of working with colonial archives and alternative models for restitution. The curator discusses working with 2,600 colonial propaganda films from Dutch colonial archives, raising questions about who has the right to use images of people who are long dead. She explains that the CBC collective proposed an alternative solution to the Balo sculpture restitution: instead of the museum owning the object, the collective would own it, but the museum could keep it as long as they wanted, with the collective having final say about display. This model addresses practical problems of inadequate museum infrastructure while maintaining community control. The curator argues that museums themselves are 'colonial vessels' that perpetuate colonial systems, often requiring countries of origin to build Western-style museums before they can receive returned objects.

Western ethnographic collections contain millions of objects and human remains obtained through fraudulent consent, coercion, and deception during colonial periods. These items reside in inaccessible depots, including those under the Louvre in Paris, where they sleep in holdings of ships built for slavery. The video demands provenance research, retrieval of object biographies, and restitution of artifacts acquired or stolen during colonial times. It criticizes the current state of museums as 'quarantined objects' with hyper-restrictive access and sequestering discourses that control future interpretations. The call for action emphasizes stepping away from blind restitution and instead pursuing step-by-step legislative changes between major Western museums.

Analytic practices of refusal involve active resistance to trading in pain and humiliation, providing rationale for blocking the settler colonial gaze that wants stories but does not want accountability. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang theorize that refusing to code subjects means refusing to continue the damage already undertaken by history and the archive. This approach challenges art historians, curators, and cultural practitioners to consider object-less analysis when subjects require attention and sometimes demand it. Anti-racist creativity requires anti-racist futurist creativity that refigures absences of image through speculative performance. The Renegade Monument project by artists Jeanette Eilers and Lavonne Bell exemplifies this through 3D imaging technology that morphed and blended their bodies into a liquid hybrid vessel for the spirit memory of freedom fighter Queen Mary Thomas, allowing her to appear and endure in cities and nations' consciousness.

Refusal is introduced by Eve Tuck and KW Yang as asking how do we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires and stories that we overhear while refusing to portray or betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze. The speaker states that they haunt back, or as Eve Tuck would say haunting is the refusal to stop. This concept applies to indigenous peoples who must refuse to be portrayed through colonial frameworks and instead assert their own agency and presence in technological and social spaces.

This section develops Camp's concepts of refusal and opacity as strategies for resisting Western epistemic violence. Refusal is a politics of prefiguration involving living the future now as imperative rather than subjunctive—a creative, nimble modality refusing terms of negation and dispossession. Opacity, following Glissant, represents strategic disengagement from imperial knowledge projects that categorize subjects as Negro, immigrant, or prisoner. Recognition in archival encounters is not Hegelian objectification nor psychoanalytic giving, but embodied haptic allottee—a capacity to feel through others and for others to feel through you, grounded in archives as contact zones demanding response and responsibility.

To elaborate a clear method, one must undo a certain humanism that is an expression of Western narcissism aimed at producing one's own satisfaction—the pleasure of looking at oneself in the mirror of one's goodness and universal reason. Undoing this artificial humanism is the prerequisite for any truly anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist project. Refusal policies have a long minority history, whether working-class, racial, or feminist. The idea that refusal is unproductive must be discarded because refusal, like all forms of strike and radical subtraction, is productive of new conditions and negotiation that advance struggles. This distances itself from neoliberal thinking which imagines fruitful dialogue in asymmetrical conditions for the benefit of the strongest.

Hunger strikes, land occupations, student movements, and embodied art in performance represent important forms of refusal that operate within and against power structures. These aesthetic-political expressions create affiliations and solidarities, often led by indigenous women, queer people of color, youth, and Black activist mothers who challenge heteronormative nation-state frameworks.

This section traces the persistence of the colonial gaze from 19th-century ethnographic photography to contemporary digital culture. The speaker introduces Screen Walks, a collaborative digital curatorial program investigating the changing role of photographic images in networked and digital forms. The central argument is that images from 19th-century books like 'The People of India' are still being recreated by Indian photographers, demonstrating how certain sites have become hotspots of orientalist photography. According to Bromberg and Chanarin, trust is the central aspect of portrait photography, and there is an inherent structural bias that favors the person behind the lens. The colonial gaze represents visual exploitation where photography was used as a tool of control, with subjects reduced to typological examples. The digital archive perpetuates this violence by decontextualizing images when placed side by side with price lists. The project 'Rage Against the Archive' was an act of electronic civil disobedience designed to question how cultural institutions should be digital custodians of visual spoils of history.

Shadow knowledge represents a critical framework for engaging with contemporary digital culture, involving analysis and active change through speculative thought processes. In the shadows, things lack definition and exist in ambiguous, fluid spaces that are blurry and liminal. Digital archives face fundamental instability because image rendering depends on software and operating systems that change over time, potentially causing images to appear as particular forms one time and become syntax errors the next. Every image compression algorithm contains inherent biases that become visible when data files are disturbed or 'glitched.' Personal trauma can become embedded in digital image creation, as demonstrated when an artist covered herself in white paste for a desired skin tone but experienced bloodshot eyes and emergency room visits. Color test cards used by engineers to test image processing color settings often feature Caucasian women, reflecting strong bias for Caucasian skin that has been ingrained into image processing technologies over decades. While digital photography seems to reduce image-taking to a straightforward click, photos stored in imaging technologies involve biased, gendered, and racist protocols that intervene in saving faces to memory. The artist created 365 Perfect Decalibration using mobile imaging software that offers virtual makeup filters, applying them hundreds of times to amplify the absurdity of beautifying standards and create an exploration of generation loss.

Rather than seeing digitization as progress, one must recognize continuity with how people were deprived of what they had even when they didn't own it earlier. Once documents were produced, they were appropriated by the state rather than held by their creators. The archive is not only about collected objects and data but functions as technology forcing people today to exist in states of refugee, asylum seeker, indentured worker, or undocumented status. We're deceived by progress in digitizing documents and libraries giving free access, when much is based on plunder. The archive continues to perpetuate violence through contemporary categorizations.

This segment examines how algorithmic systems reproduce colonial language and classification frameworks. When researchers search colonial archives online, they encounter historical terminology that may be offensive today, and the search process itself reproduces colonial language. Catalog structures for colonial collections often prioritize white administrators and landscapes, reproducing colonial worldviews about who holds power and control. The segment also addresses how classification systems developed during colonial periods carry colonial assumptions that are reproduced when rebuilt in digital contexts.

The digital age creates its own canon through algorithms rather than human curators, perpetuating historical biases. Traditional art canons systematically marginalized non-Western traditions, fiber arts, and women's work—patterns algorithms now inherit through training on biased historical datasets. Digital platforms prioritize popularity and interaction metrics, favoring dominant cultural narratives. Visual imagery reinforces narrow definitions of success, typically depicting white men in business suits with confident expressions. A practical framework for examining digital tools includes five questions: Who made this and why? What is it built on or trained on? How is it framed or presented? Who benefits and who is harmed? What's missing or silenced? Applying these questions reveals underlying assumptions. Wikipedia's 2017 study showed majority editors were middle-aged white men, reflecting whose voices dominate knowledge creation.