ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how one media practice – photography – has been incarnated as utopia and dystopia and reconcile this very difference with what is in part a media logic. It considers controversies about violations of privacy, via multimedia messaging service (MMS) scandals in North India, in which photography plays the role of an intruder in which 'every participant not only contemplates what can be seen but is also herself, exposed and visible', as Ariella Azoulay puts it. She develops an alternative to once hegemonic Foucauldian approaches to photography that stressed photographic practice's subservience to power. Azoulay's approach would incline to find Indians who became photographic citizens long before they became citizens in the ordinary sense of the term. A Taggian approach would stress that ordinary Indians became colonized subjects through the agency of photography. The chapter shows that colonial photographic practice seemingly untroubled by what Azoulay calls the civil contract.
