Other speakers, questions and conversations at the symposium gradually made ubiquitous reference to Azoulay’s influential work of distinguishing the event of photography from the photographic image, in her The Civil Contract of Photography (2008) and Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (2012). For ‘inclusion’ I used an image of high-Modernist formalism: a blank square in the writing of Maria Gabriella Llansol, text only recently translated to reveal it to be more of a generous footnote of explicatory care than poetic ‘hatred’. For ‘love’ I used a recently discovered image of my late mother as a girl of twelve, offering a unique and astonishingly elemental smile to her grandfather during a creatively inspiring interlude in a less-than-happy childhood. They included a self-portrait that architect Balkrishna Doshi left on my digital camera after months of growing intimacy in 2002–2003, risking that his undeclared ‘gift’ might not be noticed or simply deleted. To engage non-violence within-the-droplet, as it were, I resorted to discrete images that performed one or more constitutive quality of non-violence, love, gift or inclusive care. It was also not difficult to distinguish almost-but-not-quite non-violence in a range of formalist images by Jean Baudrillard, Wolfgang Tillmans and Walid Raad – all significant in other ways. It proved easy to invoke visual potentialities with my coming-in-to-land images of nocturnal Dubai in which connective pathways between labour camps and western cultural institutions left by enslaved migrant workers are obscured in blacked-out zones. This is the ethos behind the exceptional fixity of the Jains’ Rains Retreat, amongst other observances with regard to ‘tiny creatures’. Jainism supplied me with a rigorous clarifying yardstick for non-violence, extending its care to the eggs of fleas that might lurk in a droplet of water falling from a leaf or blade during monsoon season. In October 2018, I spoke about the totalising of the visual and its integral violence at a symposium entitled ‘The Violence of Images’, hosted by Camera Austria in Graz, to advocate for the non-violent image as a site and practice of resistance. Azoulay’s six-hundred-page-long Potential History offers a liveable commonworld through exacting reparations and ends with a very short but insistent affirmation: ‘The potential is there’.
There are many nuanced differences across such a crudely mapped zone but the quality that all three share is a burning desire to change, to radically redistribute the world as it is, or appears to be.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism is almost double the size of my copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism and about half the size, in turn, of Karl Marx’s first volume of Capital.