Abstract

Written in relation to After the Last Sky, WJT Mitchell notes how ‘extraordinarily limited’ the image of the Palestinian is. Obscured from the dominant field of vision, Mitchell suggests that ‘visual facts’ which everyone knows in theory, but is rarely seen in practice – the Palestinian woman, the domestic space and children are subsequently constituted as ‘icons’ of an unseen reality that underpin Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s project. As a photo-essay, After the Last Sky has been referred to as a ‘nation-making’ text that sought to produce a new type of visibility concerning the Palestinian. With this in mind, my paper will focus on an online photo-essay facilitated by the Israeli activist photography collective, Activestills in 2012. Based in the Bedouin village of Susiya, located in the Southern Hebron Hills of the Occupied Territories, the photography collective worked in collaboration with the female villagers to produce a series of images based on their own lives. Thus, firstly, I will explore how the photo-essay challenges the universal legibility of an individual photo, interrupting the visual order by which the Palestinian is most commonly framed. Secondly, by focusing specifically on the collaboration between Israeli citizen and unrecognized Palestinian, I will identify how visual activism promotes a widening of the space in which politics can be conceived and performed. By creating new visibilities, in a political process that Jacques Rancière defines as a ‘sense-making practice’, visual activism tackles the issues of democracy creatively, not as a goal but as a practice that is democratic in its very development.