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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