The black box of the occupation revisited: photography, responsibility, and the Israeli occupation.

This article considers two exhibitions organized by Israeli writer Ariella Azoulay (1), "Everything Could Be Seen," held at the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery in 2004 and "Act of State: 1967-2007 [An historical exhibition]," held at the Minshar Art Gallery in Tel Aviv in June 2007. Both exhibitions raised questions about the relationship between photography, spectatorship, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The latter exhibition also explored the value of photography as a means of understanding the historical processes and structures of the occupation. Azoulay's curatorial projects provide new understandings of how photography can contribute to the development of a broader opposition to the occupation within Israeli society. Central to such concerns is the visibility of the occupation for Israelis. Nicholas Mirzoeff recently called for the establishment of general "visual rights" for people in the context of globalization, primary among which are "the right to look at the obfuscated and concealed operations of globalization" and "the right to be seen by the common as a counter to the possibility of being disappeared by governments." (2) These visual rights can be usefully adapted to the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories. In this context, most Israelis cannot or do not want to see the plight of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, while the Palestinians have consistently struggled to bring their condition into the Israeli (and international) field of vision. The following will explore the ways that Azoulay has used photography in attempts to make the occupation visible.

RESPONSIBILITY AND VISIBILITY

In 1994, Azoulay wrote an article entitled "The Black Box of the Occupation (Who will acclaim the heroisms of Israel?)" in which she described the press photographs upon which the Israeli artist David Reeb based certain paintings produced during the 1980s, as "'eye-prints' of Israel as an occupying society." She continued: "David Reeb's paintings interpreted these eye-prints as though they were remnants of inscriptions from the 'black box' of the Occupation." (3) Here Azoulay uses the informal name for an aircraft flight recorder to suggest that photographs of the occupation can be collectively treated as a means of understanding its structures and as evidence on the basis of which political actions can be taken. As Azoulay observes in a later text, locating the images in the "black box" is the first step in enabling the occupation to "appear in full view on the occupier's side." (4) But for these images to contribute to the process of making the occupation visible, they must be viewed in ways distinct from their standard presentation in the print media. As part of this reframing process, these images need to be relocated within what the Israeli media critic Daniel Dor calls the "discourse of responsibility": a discourse that "understands that Israel, and Israelis, have to assume responsibility for the solution of the conflict, because at present, in reality, the Palestinians are under Israeli occupation and not the other way around." (5) Within this discourse the mechanisms of the occupation, already familiar to Israelis through media imagery, would no longer be viewed as acceptable actions on the part of the Israeli state. To this end, Azoulay organized the exhibition "Everything Could Be Seen" in 2004 as a means of providing Israelis with the opportunity for a "fresh gaze at what apparently has already been seen" in the media, with the objective of persuading viewers that the situation of the Palestinians is a manufactured "state of emergency" toward which they should take responsibility. (6) Azoulay thus brought together a range of visual representations, some of which were similar to those in the mainstream press while other pieces made reference to conventional media images of the occupation. For example, Reeb's 2002 series of paintings, "Garbage Dump" were worked from a Miki Kratsman photograph of Palestinian boys lifting their shirts in response to being surprised by Israeli Border Police at Um el-Fahem in 2000. The paintings transform aspects of the photographic image into flattened areas of color in line with formal considerations particular to the history of modernist painting, perhaps allowing for the reconsideration of how press images frame the occupation. Similarly, Sharif Waked's 2003 film Chic Point (7) re-presents the checkpoint scenario as a fashion show involving models dressed in clothing designed to reveal the parts of the male anatomy deemed suspect by the Israeli military gaze. By adopting a satirical approach, Waked creates a new frame for viewing the photographs of Palestinian men in humiliating states of undress at checkpoints that he includes at the end of his film.

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There is no guarantee that this kind of artistic reworking of media images will have the desired effect. Relocating press images within the space of art is just as likely to mute their political meanings, as it is to radicalize them. Yet Azoulay's project is also concerned with using any possible cultural space from which to complicate the ways that most Israelis see the occupation. Despite its practical limitations, Azoulay holds that the "[r]enewed contemplation of what has already been seen," enabled by the works collected in her exhibition, "reveals ways of fighting which are partially formulated by the photographed themselves." (8) This means that efforts to make visible the horrifying content of already existing images of the occupation, on the Israeli side, form a counterpart to the Palestinian struggles pictured within them. Thus she proceeds from the assumption that the fight for a just solution to the occupation "is a common civilian struggle against a ruling power that abandons some of those under its rule." (9) Making the occupation visible is therefore a combined effort between Palestinians and Israelis, but it requires a "special intention" on the part of Israelis, which is "manifested by the responsibility of an addressee towards what is seen." (10) Without this intention, the "horrific meaning" of the occupation would not "succeed in becoming visible." (11) This suggests the need not only for ongoing work to retrieve and reframe the visual record of the occupation contained within Azoulay's "black box," but also continuous critical work to redefine Israeli spectatorship.

ARCHIVING THE OCCUPATION

In the summer of 2005, the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman took part in a discussion with Palestinian planners about how to reuse the settlements in Gaza that were to be abandoned by the Israelis in August that year. One suggestion was that buildings in the Netzarim settlement would house an archive of "documents, testimonies, films and photographs" related to the occupation. (12) This idea emphasizes the political importance placed upon an archival record of the occupation by the Palestinians, while the inclusion of photographs in this proposed archive emphasizes the significance of photography as a documentary record. The fact that this archival project was not fulfilled because of the destruction of the Gaza settlements also underlines the significance of Azoulay's recent efforts to transform the inchoate contents of the "black box" into a visible archive. This archive took the form of the exhibition, "Act of State," for which she collected six hundred photographs taken by some seventy-seven photographers between 1967 and 2007. Azoulay's aim was to use photography to show "the daily lives of Palestinians subjected to the rule of the state of Israel" in "an attempt to narrate history through the pictures themselves." (13) But her concern was also to interrogate the relationship between the "acts of state" that have constituted Israeli rule in the occupied territories and the visual framing of these actions. As she observes, "the term 'Act of State' represents a legal doctrine granting impunity to people sent by their state to commit actions that would otherwise be defined as crimes." (14) This impunity is not just a matter of the representatives of the Israeli state being beyond the law, but also the public discourse that legitimizes the repression of the Palestinians as a "security" necessity. If the occupation has failed to become fully visible, despite all its visualization, then this is because the visual record of the occupation in the "black box" is not yet viewed as evidence of criminality.

To make these acts visible as crimes, Azoulay organized the photographs into a chronology, while also arranging some photographs thematically so that she could explore specific aspects of the history of the occupation. The chronology is arranged horizontally along the gallery walls (with a painted time-line beneath the photographs). The themes are arranged vertically, meaning that a photograph from 1969, for example, can be brought into a relationship with photographs from later periods that are presented above it. Although Azoulay did not want the exhibition to look like an ordinary art exhibition, (15) this arrangement resembles certain archival displays by contemporary artists and particular examples of photo-Conceptualism from the late 1960s and early 1970s. (16) Yet the intention and overall experience of "Act of State" is far removed from the idiosyncrasies of artistic archiving. In contrast to such artistic practices, Azoulay's archive is resolutely systematic and purposeful in its representation of the history of the occupation.

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