Visual Rights and the Prospect of Exchange: The Photographic Event Placed under Duress

Chapter 4 returns to the question of the gaze as an apparatus of control, asking under what conditions of spectatorship, production, and distribution might photography become a means of intervention into, or manipulation of, the visual field that currently binds Israelis and Palestinians together under an extremely uneven distribution of visual rights. Centered on a comparative look at two photographic projects, Intimacy (2004), a photographic series by the Jerusalem-based Palestinian photographer Rula Halawani, and At the Checkpoint (2007), a photo exhibit/performance by the Ramallah-based Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, the chapter further engages in a critical dialogue with Ariella Azoulay’s conceptualization of photography’s capacity to function as a “civil contract.”