T he B od y P o l itic

A Visual Declaration of Human Rights | Curator: Ariella Azoulay

A declaration is a binding statement, a decree, an order, an edict, a ruling, an act of profession, an shown but can be prescribed, demanded, or claimed. The Body Politic consists of multiple photographic
assertion, an insistence, a claim, an affirmation, an assurance, a complaint, an objection, a disapproval, situations whose juxtapositions seek to produce prescriptive statements through which universal rights
a challenge, a dissent, an outcry, a remonstration, a kind of protestation. What is a declaration of can be imagined if the rights claimed are meant to reduce the actual discrepancies between groups of
human rights? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafted in 1948 by the United Nations is populations who are ruled differentially under the same regimes: citizens and noncitizens, workers and
the most familiar example of the genre. A textual declaration, it poses the abstract “everyone” as managers, men and women, and so on.
the bearer of rights. Drafted under the colonial condition that characterized the world order during A declaration of human rights is necessarily an unfinished text, having neither a beginning nor an end;
the 1940s and by political leaders who were engaged in the perpetuation of colonial and imperial it is a text whose constant rewriting and updating is required by the very fact of living with and among
regimes, the Declaration’s universal “everyone” was a shrewd way to exclude from the discussion the others. The Body Politic uses the visual afterimage of one series of photographs from The Family of
rights claimed by concrete people all over the world, as well as the ongoing and unacknowledged Man—the “lovers”—to generate one of the layers of this palimpsest-like declaration of human rights.
abuses committed by colonial regimes. Juxtaposing the original photographs from the Family of Man exhibition with photographs from the same
In 1955, Edward Steichen curated the milestone Family of Man exhibition, which toured more than era (mostly the 1930s–1950s) that record people claiming a variety of rights, the present installation
seventy venues around the world. I address this photographic event not as the “oeuvre” of a single invites its spectators to reconstruct as well as to imagine what rights those people performed in public.
author but as an archive of the human condition. However, this is not simply an archive of how people Contemporary descriptions of the situations recorded in the images (often typed on the back of the
live, act, and look but a repertoire of the rights they have or should enjoy—from the right to give birth photographs and written by the photographers themselves, or by archivists, journalists, or the editors
safely to the right to leisure. Once this reading of the Family of Man is adopted, a different type of of the newspapers where these photographs were published or archived), as well as the proximity and
universal declaration ensues—a visual declaration of human rights. affinities created between different photographs, may be of some help. These are press photographs.
The Family of Man’s archive of the human condition was put together by Steichen and his team after Not all of them were printed, and of those that were, few were widely distributed. Of those few, fewer
World War II. A rift was growing between, on the one hand, those (the Allies, mediated by the recently still became canonic. All of them document a phenomenon—the strike—that everything about the
founded United Nations) who were implementing a new world order (one based on the principle new world order was made to suppress. The strikers shown here are lovers of life, people who are
of “differential sovereignty” in sovereign nation-states) and, on the other hand, the increasingly committed to improving their own lives as well as the lives of others. When these images are juxtaposed
disappointed and resistant many who suffered from this new order and continued to dream of and with the “lovers” series of The Family of Man, the latter can no longer be seen or read solely along the
imagine different political horizons for being-together. course that goes from courting to wedding. The people shown in The Body Politic are also engaged in
The present installation—The Body Politic—seeks to rely on the memory of Steichen’s archive and love with their partners, but they are always also engaged intimately and politically in other activities,
expand its scope with photographs from the same period documenting these struggles, showing people in other spheres of life and with other people, doing their best to change their lives. They seek ways to
who address their concrete employers—but no less so the general public and their governments—with transform the means of their abuse into sources of empowerment. They imagine and sometimes perform
rights claims of all sorts, even as those they address remain deaf to their claims and often use violence different political formations and structures. These are not the abstract “everyone” but concrete people
to disperse protests and suppress strikes. The Body Politic seeks to document “rights in action,” at whose dreams and needs do not always coincide—the one opts for a strike, the other may object;
the moment they are imagined and claimed, to recover them from people’s resistance to the new one sits down involuntarily, the other joyfully joins the sit-in; a group starts to dance, some share their
world order that perpetuated a differential body politic and prepared the terrain for the merging of blankets, others improvise blockades. When they stand together, they can face those who betray them,
neoliberalism with the sovereignty of the nation-state. say “no more,” feel the bliss and power of the many, experiment in learning together and be enriched
A declaration of human rights that claims universal validity, one that may constitute a frame of reference by the lessons they learn, enjoy outside support, stand firm against the violence of the authorities who
for governing human lives, cannot be a document composed by a single author, nor by a group try to divide and rule, and so on. Together they form the body politic that declares the right to leisure, to
composed of the same type of people. A declaration of rights composed of photographs and their decent wages, to friendship, to a nurturing future, as well as aspirations for better working conditions,
accompanying texts makes clear that the universal aspirations of the many involved in the photographic food for the starving (even if those who starve today are the enemies of yesterday), and the right to vote
events—photographers, photographed persons, spectators—are not issued from an abstract textual and to shape the way they are ruled as well as the way others rule in their names.
source and do not address an abstract universal audience. They instead address concrete inequalities If the possibility to formulate such a declaration is embodied by the Family of Man exhibition, Steichen
and abuses that should be eliminated, and they seek reparations for persistent wrongs. Against Steichen, is not—and should not be—its sole author. Steichen took the initiative to collect drafts from various
the curator of the Family of Man, and Roland Barthes, the exhibition’s most famous critic, who claimed places and organize them in a composition loose enough to enable millions of human beings to identify
that the exhibition shows universality—“the aim of which was to show the universality of human actions in it themselves, their aspirations, their dreams, and to remind the viewer of her ability to participate in
in daily life”—the present exhibition—The Body Politic—seeks to clarify that “universality” cannot be the updating of such a document and make it a committing one.
n a M f o yl i m aF e h T

Ariella Azoulay
A Visual Declaration of Human Rights |, 2014