ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to rethink the experience of trauma and its connection to photography, the photographer and its viewer. The photographer and the photographed are not distanced by the focal length of the lens but come together to collaborate with an understanding of common interest. The act of displaying these images at the memorial extends their potential for a 'civil political space' in which, survivors may claim a place in the 'citizenry of photography' by collaborating not only at the level of making of the photographs but also of their dissemination and ownership. Survivors of the Gujarat riots do not remain in a frozen moment without having much agency over their images. By taking charge of their own photographs, modes of representation and interventions in the mainstream dissemination of their images the survivors of riots turned their bodies within these photographs into a site of protest.
