Unlearning Photography: In Conversation with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

The most recent period of extreme violence in Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign against Palestinians has now crossed twenty-one months, witnessing the decimation of Gaza on an unprecedented scale within a seventy-seven-year-long history of colonial occupation of Palestine. Two months after 7 October 2023, amidst horrifying impunity for Israel by the “international world order,” Ariella Aïsha Azoulay wrote an article titled “Seeing Genocide.” Published in the Boston Review, the essay opens up a way of thinking about how Israel weaponises images to obfuscate its imperial destruction of Palestine by manufacturing global consent for the genocide and strengthening the conflation between Jews and Israel so that any resistance may be punished with the charge of “anti-Semitism.” A few weeks later, in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, the contrast with Israel’s image proliferation was stark, for the case was marked by its refrain from using photographs of violence on Palestinian bodies. This was not because photographs are not significant as documents of evidence; on the contrary, it is owing to the insurmountable courage of Palestinians themselves—who continue to photograph, report and archive the terror unleashed on their lives and lands—that we have had any access to Israel’s dehumanising operations in Gaza. Rather, photographs demand that we, as Azoulay says in an interview, “ask questions about the event and the conditions under which they were taken, the meaning of their circulation... and about who should use them and for what purpose.”

As we stand today, Israel has waged war on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran to quell any resistance against its policy of “mowing the lawn” in Palestine. While some parts of the West are slowly beginning to realise the monster it has created, India has refrained from its rejection of this mass murder. Amidst the remains of missiles dropped by Israeli warplanes, one reads “Made in India.” And the Indian government, as the largest importer of Israeli arms, seems to follow Israel’s rule book for ethnic cleansing and deploys Israeli weapons to eliminate its own indigenous populations, across central and eastern India, who care for, nurture and live in a symbiotic relationship with land that is rich in mineral resources.

In this edited conversation with Ariella Azoulay together with the founder of ASAP | art, Rahaab Allana, we ask, what are the ways in which colonial photography is tied to imperial expropriation of land and resources—what Azoulay calls a “primitive accumulation of visual wealth and capital”? How does gendered violence become the site for such exploitation and the making of a world order where such violence is permissible? To what extent does the impossible relationship between citizenship and the “Jewish Question” concern the formation of minorities and the subjugation of their rights across the postcolonial world? What is the role and function of writing history in this conjuncture? In what ways and by what means do we unlearn photography so that we can partake in a practice of image-making that can act as a site and medium for anti-colonial struggle?

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her books include: The Jewelers of the Ummah—A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World published by Verso in 2024; Potential History—Unlearning Imperialism, brought by Verso in 2019; Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography, also by Verso in 2012; From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 by Pluto Press in 2011; and The Civil Contract of Photography by Zone Books in 2008. Among her potential histories, archives and curatorial work are: The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Binnale, 2022); Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order (F/Stop Photography Festival, Leipzig, 2016); and Act of State 1967-2007 (Centre Pompidou, 2016), among others. Her film essays include: One Thousand and One Jewels (2025)—which is the last chapter of her cinematic trilogy, Unlearning Imperial Plunder. The first two films of the trilogy were Un-Documented (2019) and The World Like a Jewel in the Hand (2023).

(Featured Image: Folded photograph of the expulsion of Palestinians from Ramle, 1948. From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s exhibition Potential History, 2012.)

Recorded on 28 June 2025.

To learn more about images chronicling the Palestinian genocide, read Asim Rafiqui’s two-part essay on his experience of being a journalist in Gaza in 2009, Radhika Saraf’s three-part essay unpacking W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of the colour line, Najrin Islam’s three-part essay on photography and filmmaking practices of Palestinian filmmakers, Ankan Kazi’s reflections on Abdallah Al-Khatib’s Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege (2021), Santasil Mallik’s report on Gaza Lives organised as part of Film Works for Palestine in Toronto, Anoushka Antonnette Mathews’ essay on Abdel Salam Shehada’s Ila Aby (To My Father, 2008), Kshiraja’s essay on Yousef Srouji’s Three Promises (2023) and Kamayani Sharma’s conversation with photographers Maen Hammad and Dina Saleem.

To learn more about ASAP | art’s public programming, watch our previous recordings with Salima Hashmi and Manmeet Walia on curating the show (Un)Layering the Future Past of South Asia: Young Artists’ Voices, Nathalie Johnston on art in Myanmar; Avijit Mukul Kishore on his practice as it explores home, autobiography and memory, and their inseparable link with political history; Kartik Nair and Vibhushan Subba on Bombay Horror and the spectral archive; Abeer Gupta and Natasha Ginwala discussing curating in South Asia; and Naeem Mohaiemen discussing his book Midnight’s Third Child.