Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy by Ariella Azoulay

Once photography became a mainstream commodity in the late 19th century, intellectual cogs in place enabled philosophers to draw analogies between this oddly frozen image and the ultimate end of life. Jump forward more than 100 years, and our world, having weathered much destruction and technological development, sees death everywhere. Especially within our homes, on television. We can no longer circumscribe it from our children’s awareness or colour it pseudonymically. The postmodern parameters that frame our world have done so through the media, effectively robbing death of everything — even privacy. And what better way to embark on an academic exploration of this subject than via contemporary reality? And more heatedly, the Middle East? In an elegantly written and well-designed book, Ariella Azoulay has brought the values of this reality onto the academic dissection table, gazing at it through multiple starting points: Walter Benjamin, the conflict in the Middle East, and the politics of representation.

But this is no tract on blood and guts. Using Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as a prism through which to argue, Azoulay isolates and analyses issues including the power of images of death and the use of pictures of war-induced death as propaganda, offering a wholly fresh perspective on Benjamin’s ideas. While in some respects, this confrontation of Benjamin’s words may be seen as iconoclastic, on another, it universalises his main contention, bringing the notion of the work of art out of its classically gallerized context.

The book is divided into eleven chapters, each expounding on a slightly different perspective on the dialectic set up between death, images of it, and the moral complexity of our world. But there is a transition of focus about halfway through. And another towards the end, which brings the work to a satisfying sense of unity that gives it currency both for an art-focused reader and one with an interest in the conflagrations in the Middle East.

In the first half, the memorial is examined as a vessel of capitalist exchange. This is done through the problematizing of the representation of the Holocaust in Israeli Roee Rosen’s interventional artwork To Live and Die as Eva Braun (1997), and Marie Ange Guillenimot’s (1998) Hiroshima Collection, which confront viewers in such a way as to necessitate their direct participation and thus complicity in the work. Rosen forces the viewer to ‘become’ Eva Braun, Hitler’s lover, though dialogic text and image. Guilleminot forces the viewer to integrate Hiroshima by wearing the garments or emulations and patterns of them, left in the A-bomb’s wake. Complicity as an issue for a beholder of an artwork (or situation) is central to the text, and Azoulay’s use of the Holocaust-as-subject-matter paradigm is a powerful starting point.

Azoulay explains Guillenimot’s gesture: “The manual reconstructive act is… to resist the transformation of the world into a two-dimensional surface, into a picture which posits the viewers into the position of merely addressees whose only function is to confirm the seen by saying yes or no.” This assertion has dramatic resonance in the rest of her text.

The second half of the book begins with an extrapolation on the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995. On a level, this section academicises the murder, with its close examination of the role of space, chance, witness and time, in the events which effectively changed Israel’s political future. For this reason, the conceptual hyper-analysis of such an event, not ten years after the event, could be seen as problematically close to the bone. Azoulay’s narrative then unfolds to embrace Jerusalem, with all its socio-political and religious contradiction and solemnity. She examines how notions of space colour the power of this city, moving on to a teasing out of the contemporary Middle Eastern conflict.

Her insight into the situation between Palestinian nomads and Israeli settlers is lucid. Azoulay’s digression from the ideologies surrounding death to a development of the complex socio-political situation in contemporary Israel is difficult to rationalise at this point in her text. It tenuously challenges the established boundaries of the book, resting on spatial awareness and emotional associations pertaining to mapping a place on paper, and issues raised regarding space as central in the presentation of Rabin’s assassination. But in the penultimate chapter of this book, the ostensible tenuousness is given hard-hitting coherence, which in turn renders this publication nothing short of brilliant in its development on a perspective on the regional status quo. This is something as brave as it is introspective, academic as it is practical.

In this chapter, Azoulay as the critical theorist takes a back seat, as she presents a group of verbatim interviews with photographers and role players in the war-torn scenario of contemporary Israel. The notion of war as a literary construct, as well as a very real one, which can be coloured by surprise, tactic, rules, or none of the above, is presented, not only in words, but through extraordinary photographic images. This chapter resoundingly brings the book a full circle, bringing violent photographic images in Israel under the Barthesian scrutiny Azoulay put forward at the outset. “Photography is the place of death,” Azoulay quotes Barthes saying in 1980 and a couple of pages later, photographer Alex Levac corroborates: “Death is a frozen standstill… The moment you’ve taken someone’s picture, you’ve completely isolated him from reality. You’ve given him eternal life, but on the other hand, you’ve killed him. He won’t move anymore, he won’t sit down, he won’t walk. Wherever you’ve left him, that’s where he stays.”

Here the converse of photography as a propaganda weapon is examined. The photographer is seen as role player on battle frontlines, but ostensibly neutral, subject to outrage on both sides, but blessed by the muse to create strong images by being in the right place at the right time — a double- sided muse if ever there was. In interviewing people central to the crisis in the Middle East, Azoulay plays a balanced, interpretative hand. The issues revealed through the interviews she uses are academically and socially interesting, playing back into her reading of Benjamin, but also presenting a picture of the arrogance and foolhardiness of both Israelis and Palestinians that has snowballed to impact innocent lives.

The conclusion loops the book back to assertions in the introduction and its seemingly tenuous links with Israeli politics slip neatly into cohesion. Death’s Showcase is about visuality and the power of the seen image to play a complicit, antagonistic, propagandistic, or destructive role, given the eyes through which it is seen. The soundness of logic in this book is exhilarating, but it needs to be seen in entirety. It scrutinises, dissects and re-offers a set of established and worked-over values in a fresh light. While it doesn’t confront other issues of innocent, politically-evoked deaths which have coloured Israel’s and indeed the world’s landscape, of recent years, the book doesn’t date politically: Its assertions are consistently about that socially intricate space, the museum, timeless in its propensity for political inappropriateness, as a powerful propaganda weapon, a repository for the culturally valuable, and ubiquitous through our technology, casting images of death intimately into our lives like an unseeing eye.