Photographs offer a colonialist window to the past – one that must be challenged

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s worldview was shaped by the complexities of her experience of growing up and rejecting Israeli citizenship and the ‘settler colonial identity’ that she had been assigned. Now, as a writer, art curator and professor of comparative literature and modern culture and media at Brown University, she works to reframe the past to challenge concepts of knowledge, art, history and human rights as they’ve been framed by imperialism. Made on the occasion of her being awarded the International Center of Photography’s 2023 Infinity Award for Critical Writing, Research and Theory, in this video Azoulay draws from her writings to argue for the collective imperative to ‘unlearn’ the omnipresent colonial constructs that surround us. In particular, she focuses on the need to view photographs as part of ongoing conflicts and questions that can still be grappled with today, rather than just past documentation of an inevitable, settled present and future.