The Event of Photography: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Gabrielle Moser, Chris Pinney

#PhotoDemos | Citizens of Photography Day 3 - Session Two: 'The Event of Photography'
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: “He is my ancestor’ Lanier argues, not a museum asset”
The daguerreotype of Renty and Deliah, stored in the archives of the Peabody museum, are held there as precious objects, rare high-value historical images taken during the time of slavery. Tamara Lanier’s lawsuit questions the until-now-not-yet-challenged-imperial-right of the archive to continue to hold and claim property over the daguerreotype seized from her great grandfather and his daughter, and claims their restitution. The daguerreotype of Lanier’s ancestors were seized in the same photographic session during which similar images were seized from five other enslaved in the US south and whose images continue to be held by the same institutions that participated in their enslavement and in the transformation of the outcome of imperial technologies of violence into their private property. Harvard’s efforts to ignore Lanier and dismiss her claim manifest what Lanier contends in the lawsuit - slavery’s institutions were not yet abolished. This lecture explores Lanier’s lawsuit not only as restitution claim of individual items, but also as part of an abolitionist imagination, mobilized against the otherwise smooth operation of imperial technologies and infra-structures, premised on the massive accumulation of visual wealth seized from and used against people from whom it was expropriated and their descendants.
Gabrielle Moser: “When photographs fail, when monuments fall: Photography and reparations in Canada”
Photography was an instrumental tool in Canada’s Indian Residential School system throughout the first half of the twentieth century, used by the government to promote, obscure, reveal, and conceal the violence directed at Indigenous children in state care. Though these static images, designed to contain their subjects, failed to rouse civic intervention at the time, they are being revisited in the present as documents of a settler colonial past that needs to be redressed. Reading several of these archival school photographs against contemporary images of the recent toppling of a statue of Edgerton Ryerson, one of the architects of the Indian Residential School system, at a university in Toronto that bears his name, this paper considers the reparative work photographs, as events, can perform in the civic imaginary.
Chris Pinney: “From the photographic event to the event of photography”.
Provoked by Ariella Azoulay’s writing, this presentation starts by considering the contingency of the “photographic event” and its underwriting of photographic “exorbitance”. Photography’s future orientation, its escape from the singular moment of the event into the Not-Yet-Become, is then explored through the animating role of memorial portraiture in both central India and the Kathmandu Valley. The suggestion is then made that camerawork might be best conceptualized via the gerund “photographing”. Finally, what Azoulay calls the ‘event of photography’ is considered through demands that photographs should exist (an insistence on a limitless “photographability”), regardless of whether they do or not.