Pointing and Knowing: An Activist's Photographic Practice in Palestine

Michael Baxandall described the role of the art historian as that of the man on the tour bus who points out to others the “beauty or interest of the things they encounter.” He thought that it takes “nerve” to verbalize to others what they can already see and perhaps it does. His concern was verbalization, but I would like to talk about “pointing.” Whenever we look for meaning we end up pointing - to the visible, tangible or otherwise sensory presence of our idea. Sensory practices and verbal explanation are reciprocal. This talk “points” at pointing. Pointing is, first, a non-verbal gesture. It creates meaning by creating a relation between the pointer and the object of pointing. My photographic practice with an anti-occupation NGO in Israel-Palestine is a fitting basis for a study of knowledge production in photography: photography is a subset of pointing, and activist photography is literally focused on the formation of relationships, positive or negative. In Totality and Infinity Emanuel Levinas regarded “knowledge” as a form of relationship, but one that involved “mastery,” in contrast to a relation he called “infinity,” that precludes the production of “knowledge.” For Levinas, “Infinity” resided in the face. Neither Levinas nor I would regard represented faces as pertinent to this discussion. But I will argue that the relational gesture of photography (pointing) is itself a form of research that hovers between producing “knowledge” and participating in “infinity.”