Political Disavowal and the Refusal to Look: On the Repurposing of Family Photographs in Contemporary Activism

My paper focuses on the use and repurposing of family photographs in contemporary activism. I focus on a series of actions by Israeli activists, grouped under the hashtag “forcibly involved,” who stand in silence in public spaces holding posters with photographs and names of the children who died in Gaza since the outbreak of the war. With these actions, numerical data is concretized and visualized, and while the protestors’ bodies turn into affective conduits of mourning and loss.

This project points to an epistemological impasse within contemporary visual activism as it oscillates between the need to inform the public of the catastrophic consequences of the war that are completely censored within Israeli media; and the desire to affectively move citizens by re-humanizing the most vulnerable victims of the war in Gaza. On the one hand, it aims not simply to “demystify” facts by providing concealed knowledge, but to challenge what Alenka Zupančič defines as a predominant feature of current political life—a perverse form of disavowal that does not deny facts, rather, it affects the meaning of something as a “real” extra-ordinary and shattering event. Current forms of power cannot be challenged through strategies of exposure because they exercise direct power rather than representational one. On the other hand, it is precisely the weakest members of society who are dehumanized so they can be annihilated. Thus the problem now is how to evoke any kind of emotional response in a world where the universal premises of humanism have become contested.