Encounters

‘The objective dimension possessed by an image imprinted in a photograph by virtue of its being, always, of necessity, the product of an encounter – even if a violent one – between a pho- tographer, a photographed subject, and a camera, an encounter whose involuntary traces in the photograph transform the latter into a docu- ment that is not the creation of an individual and can never belong to any one person or narrative exclusively. The photograph is out there, an object in the world, and anyone, always (at least in principle), can pull at one of its threads and trace it in such a way as to reopen the image and renegotiate what it shows, possibly even completely over- turning what was seen in it before’ - Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 13