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November 11, 2024 – Review
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay”s “Unshowable Photographs”
Jeremy Millar
In 2009, the curator, filmmaker, and writer on visual culture Ariella Aïsha Azoulay visited the archive of the International Committee of the Red Cross (CICR) in Geneva to look at photographs taken in Palestine during the years 1947–50. Azoulay had already worked extensively in the Israeli state archives, creating from these another archive which she called Constituent Violence 1947–1950 (first published in book form in 2009), and hoped that the photographs held by the CICR would be somewhat different from those she had, in her words, “been able to view in Zionist archives.”
These are the years of the establishing of the state of Israel, of course, and of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the violent displacement of approximately half the Arab population in Palestine—around 750,000 people. While the CICR had been present “at places in Palestine where massacre, expulsion, and destruction had taken place,” they had relatively few photographs, and most of these were not taken during the Nakba. Indeed, many of them were similar, though not identical, to those seen by Azoulay in Israeli archives—the same people, the same place, the same ongoing event, but just shown from a slightly different angle, a slightly different point of view.
But …