The Lethal Art of Portraiture (original) (raw)

Photography and Culture, 2015

Abstract

Abstract Since the late 1980s, Miki Kratsman’s photographic work has been produced mainly in what are commonly called the “Occupied Territories.” As a Jewish Israeli citizen and through his work in these regions, Kratsman exposes the nonexternality of the occupation, and the implication of Israeli Jews in it through their actions and interactions with others. Readers of the newspapers where most of Kratsman’s photos have first been published can always indifferently turn the page or whiz by any photograph they encounter. Yet if they choose to pause and observe, Kratsman’s photos share the complexity of the entangled relations between Israelis and Palestinians. In this paper, Azoulay re-visits with Kratsman one single contact sheet of photos from Qabatiya that in the winter of 1988 seemed to be a miss on the part of an alert photojournalist present near a “crucial event”—a lynching that Palestinians had carried out a day earlier of a fellow Palestinian they suspected of collaborating with Israelis. Approached as an archival document, the contact is reconstructed not as a miss, but as a treasure to explore the modus operandi of the Israeli regime of occupation.

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