Death's Showcase

...nothing less than a wholesale restatement of the contemporary political stakes of the image...

Art Review

The Civil Contract of Photography does not simply delineate how meaning is contained in or created through photograph; it demonstrates precisely how meaning avoids being cheated. If there is one lesson to take from Azoulay's writing, it is that photography is a profoundly political act—an act that is also, in the strictest sense, public.

Aperture

How the author could have come to understand the history of the interaction of computation and mathematics so thoroughly and accurately is utterly beyond me. Given the immense number of people involved in the research described, it is thoroughly amazing that someone has surveyed it all and put it together. And done it superbly.

Robert Boyer, Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin

The Civil Contract of Photography will likely be one of the most influential books to shape the contemporary inquiry of photography and public culture.

Argumentation and Advocacy

A book of both profound and theoretical weight and immediate social resonance.

Afterimage

Azoulay has an eye for seeking engaging artwork and combining theoretical tools.

Al Jadid

The various parts of this work add up to a most valuable, comprehensive statement about the changing relations between art, culture, and power in contemporary democracy.

Yaron Ezrahi, Department of Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In this original and daring analysis of the politics of art, Azoulay shows how photography, the organization of public space, and the museum as an institution both conceal and reveal basic ideological commitments. Few accounts of the aftermath of the Holocaust or of Israel's recent strife-ridden history uncover as keenly as this work does the close ties to be found between political act and rhetorical representation.

Berel Lang, Professor of Humanities, Trinity College

Ariella Azoulay's Death's Showcase is critical discourse at its best: irreverent, politically charged, and yet scrupulously attentive to both specific artworks and the philosophical dimensions of the task of interpretation. We need to learn new ways of seeing, Azoulay insists in incisive analyses of contemporary art, photojournalism, philosophy, and interviews with military surveillance experts, because how we see our surroundings directly determines the politics of being—and the politics of non-being as well.

Ulrich Baer, Department of German, New York University, author of Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma

Zoom forward, track back. Death's Showcase is a fascinating unfolding of these simultaneous operations, whereby photographic, televisual, and museological spaces create an unbridgeable, permanently mourned distance from some auratic object as they draw us closer to things. Ariella Azoulay's is an exciting new voice on the critical scene, politically savvy, artistically astute, and smart on the whole range of issues surrounding the display of death in modern culture.

Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There's No Woman

This is an original and important book on a significant topic. Spectral Evidence is at once learned and critical, informative and imaginative, concrete in its own practice and theoretically sophisticated. It is clearly formulated even when addressing complex issues.

Berel Lang, Professor of Humanities, Trinity College

Azoulay's Book is a complex combination of cultural studies, visual culture analysis, and the study of Jewish and Israeli political culture. In each field, she offers a unique reading, unique in its freshness and its ability to turn accepted understandings upside down through brilliant insight informed by a vast knowledg in, and profound understanding of, a plethora of theories.

Hannan Hever, Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv University