The image above documents a fold-out picture spread from a rather large, sumptuous coffee table book about “Ancient Egypt”. It was purchased at a discount at a busy estate sale, which I guess means a third-party business managed a garage sale at a gigantic home.
I remembered this picture spread when I read the two passages below from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Reading them made me think about how photography, especially my earliest childhood encounters and consumption of pictures of the art and artifacts of “Ancient Egypt” and other civilizations, provided so much of the literal and figurative framings and frameworks for understanding the past. And later popular movies. The picture above, of a modestly sized space and the rough stacking of items, is nowhere near how movies like The Mummy have reimagined the vast, treasured halls of a Pharaoh’s just-broken-into-and-about-to-be-ransacked tomb, or something.
“The murder of five thousand Egyptians who struggled against Napoleon’s invasion of their sacred places and the looting of old treasures, which were to be “salvaged” and displayed in Napoleon’s new museum in Paris, is just one example of this. In the imperial histories of new technologies of visualization, both the resistance and the murder of these people are nonexistent, while the depictions of Egypt’s looted treasures, which were rendered in almost photographic detail, establish a benchmark, indicating what photography came to improve. ”
“My proposition, however, is that photography did not initiate a new world; yet, it was built upon and benefitted from imperial looting, divisions, and rights that were operative in the colonization of the world in which photography was assigned the role of documenting, recording, or contemplating what-is-already-there. In order to acknowledge that photography’s origins are in 1492, we have to unlearn the expertise and knowledge that call upon us to account for photography as having its own origins, histories, practices, or futures, and to explore it as part of the imperial world in which we, as scholars, photographers, or curators, operate.”
This particular experience and deployment of photography is not unique, it’s commonplace, and continues to enact and reproduce ideas of desire, sympathy, consensus, and extraction, croping out so much of the terror, power, and violence exercised upon others and their capacities for self-determination.
Azoulay’s article, published in 2018, was in service of her eventual book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, which was published in 2019.
