This book is the product of a unique collaboration between Israeli artist and philosopher Aïm Deüelle Lüski and visual culture theorist Ariella Azoulay. In their longstanding working relationship, they research how to theorize the structure of the contemporary scopic regime and open a space for its civil transformation. On this occasion, Azoulay interprets a particular series of cameras built by Deüelle Lüski, along with photographs taken by these cameras. Unlike conventional cameras and their vertical photography, Deüelle Lüski's cameras seek to generate new sets of relations between the camera and the world. Azoulay's text unfolds four different ‘short histories' of problems in photography, each of which deconstructs what otherwise might appear as a coherent photographic regime, yet which is shown to be based solely on principles of sovereignty and possession. Through and with Deüelle Lüski's project Azoulay seeks to ‘potentialize' the history of photography, that is, to recover long forgotten, un-materialized possibilities. The book contains 100 images and a conversation between the author and the artist.
“The instruments constructed by Deüelle Lüski are, in the true sense of the word, iconoclastic. They shatter belief in the photographic image as the sacred product of the act of photographing. Deüelle Lüski’s instruments wage a guerrilla campaign against the single-focus gaze that looks from above, dominating, observing, watching, standing guard, the gaze that seeks to normalize and police the disrupted flow of life and to disguise the traces of the civil contract left in the photograph.” – Ariella Azoulay in The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008)
€34,50, ISBN 9789058679499, paperback, 262 pp., English
