The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Videography, Aesthetics, and Politics in Israel and Palestine

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Description

Drawing on unprecedented access to the video archives of BTselem, an Israeli NGO that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Liat Berdugo lays out an argument for a visual studies approach to videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine. Using video stills as core material, it discusses the politics of videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine by demonstrating that the conflict is one that has produced an inequality of visual rights. The book highlights visual surveillance and counter surveillance at the citizen level, how Palestinians originally filmed to shoot back at Israelis, who were armed with shooting power via weapons as the occupying force. It also traces how Israeli private citizens began filming back at Palestinians with their own cameras, including personal cell phone cameras, thus creating a simultaneous, echoing counter surveillance. Complicating the notion that visual evidence alone can secure justice, the Weaponized Camera in The Middle East asks how what is seen, but also who is seeing, affects how conflicts are visually recorded. Drawing on over 5,000 hours of footage, only a fraction of which is easily accessible to the public domain, this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies and battlegrounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Reviews

Engaging and accessible. * The New Arab *
After viewing thousands of hours of citizen-made video from the BTselem Camera Project archive, Liat Berdugo has written a complex and moving study of the Palestinian struggle for visibility and self-representation in the face of overwhelming Israeli military and media domination. Through a series of case studies, the book analyzes the different ways the video camera has been used by Palestinians and other media activists to counter the visual dominance of the Israeli regime. Meticulously researched and theoretically informed, it adds significantly to the study of grassroots activist media practices and the counter-tactics of visual representation when the camera has become weaponized." -- Jeffrey Skoller, Film & Media Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Berdugos entrance into the BTselem audio-visual archive is a passage into a thick forest of gazes, lenses and bullets, where vision is often impaired, and darkness prevails. But from this obscure night, Berdugo brilliantly proposes a taxonomy of cameras that illuminates new ways out of the political impasse that renders the violence in Israel-Palestine both spectacularly visible and systematically concealed. Extracting moments and fragments from the BTselem archive, Berdugo exposes yet another order of things, wherein cameras emancipate and shield inasmuch as they are wielded as weapons. -- Daniel Mann, Kings College London, UK

Author Bio

Liat Berdugo is Assistant Professor in Art and Architecture at the University of San Francisco. She is also an artist, writer and curator and has exhibited in galleries and festivals nationally and internationally. Her work has won several awards, including fellowships at the Hambidge Center, the Vermont Studio center, and a year-long residency in Tel Aviv, Israel, through the Dorot Foundation.