ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to delineate and advance current critical debates about the possibilities and limitations of camera-mediated imagery to re/create political and moral imagination and contribute to struggles against injustice. It argues that the deeper political promise of photography and video for human rights might be found in the performative practices of making, mobilizing and viewing such imagery in the contexts where the injustice or violence occur. One major line of argument poses that the imaging of extreme trauma always involves an ethical crisis of representation, including most centrally the charges of aestheticisation, objectification and the idea that such images are implicated in the violence they depict. In her important book Visual Occupations, Gil S. Hochberg explores the political importance of various artistic attempts to challenge the extreme inequity of visual rights within the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Palestinians under occupation are hypervisible, given the emergence of the 'human rights industry' and the oppressive presence of global media in Palestine.
