Category Archives: Theory

Tagg on Documentary photography

February 15, 2013

“Documentary is not documentation. While documentary practice may have traded rhetorically with the quasi-scientifc techniques of nineteenth-century documentation, it no longer functioned as a jealously guarded technical discourse produced by experts for experts. While the authority of documentary may have… Continue reading →

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Foucault on Language

February 1, 2013

“At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its… Continue reading →

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Barthelme on not knowing

February 1, 2013

“What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation” — from “On Writing” in Not-Knowing by Donald Barthelme. Photograph by Eva Vermandel, from Splinter.

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Cavell on Photography

February 1, 2013

“To say that photographs lie implies that they might tell the truth; but the beauty of their nature is exactly to say nothing, neither to lie nor not to. Then what purpose may be served, or disguised, in attempting to… Continue reading →

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Azoulay on Citizenship & Photography

September 16, 2012
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W.J.T. Mitchell on the image

September 16, 2012

If the stakes seem a bit lower in asking what images are today, it is not because they have lost their power over us, and certainly not because their nature is now clearly understood. It is a commonplace of modern… Continue reading →

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Empson on Ambiguity

September 16, 2012

“The English prepositions, for example, from being used in so may ways and in combination with so many verbs, have acquired not so much a number of meanings as a body of meaning continuous in several dimensions; a tool-like quality,… Continue reading →

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Horsfield on Art

May 25, 2012

“Art, whilst it may be many things, may also be this: an accounting to others of the world which we together inhabit, to the end not that we escape history, but that we together may stand face to face with… Continue reading →

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One off: Ariella Azoulay.

May 25, 2012

“My mother wouldn’t allow me to go to the beach on Fridays. That’s the day the Arabs go. “They go with their clothes on,” she muttered. Ever since, I’ve carried around in my head an image of Arabs half-submerged in… Continue reading →

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Makdisi on the Separation Wall

April 6, 2012

“Seen from the Palestinian side, the wall is, unmistakably, a wall. Its brutalist design communicates unequivocally to the Palestinians what Israel thinks of them. Seen from the Israeli side, however, the wall is often not really a wall; in many sections, it… Continue reading →

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