An untitled photograph by Miki Kratsman prefaces Ariella Azoulay’s 2005 Afterimage essay “The Ethic of the Spectator: The Citizenry of Photography,” one that is also reprinted in her book The Civil Contract of Photography (2008). A woman stands in the center of the image, in her home; she is holding her dress up high, almost above her thighs, to reveal her bruised, lacerated, and swollen legs. Her right leg seems to bear the imprint of something that has punctured it. Her pants are scrunched around her swollen and bruised ankles. She looks straight at the viewer and her expression is determined and intent. “It’s as if she were saying,” Azoulay writes, “‘I…am showing you, the spectator, my wound. I am holding my skirt like a screen so that you will see my wound” (40). Next to her, a young woman bends her head downward toward the older woman’s injured legs;...
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December 2023
Essay|
December 01 2023
Auguries of Emergency
Joscelyn Jurich
Joscelyn Jurich
Joscelyn Jurich is a writer, researcher, and educator. Her writing on the visual arts has appeared in Afterimage, Journal of Visual Culture, Studies in Documentary Film, and the collection Performing Human Rights: Contested Amnesia and Aesthetic Practices in the Global South (2021).
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Afterimage (2023) 50 (4): 127–135.
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This is a commentary to:
The Ethic of the Spectator: The Citizenry of Photography
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Joscelyn Jurich; Auguries of Emergency. Afterimage 1 December 2023; 50 (4): 127–135. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2023.50.4.127
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