When it comes to the medium of photography, to what extent is seeing believing? While at first glance photography appears to be an unimpeachable medium, with raw, unedited photographs offering more verisimilitude than any other representative medium, Liat Berdugo, an associate professor of art and architecture at the University of San Francisco, views things differently. In her book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East, she critically examines the role of technology and video capture in Israel-Palestine from an aesthetic perspective. On November 8, 2021, Keith Feldman and the Berkeley Center for New Media hosted a Commons Conversation over Zoom entitled “Seeing is not Enough,” where Berdugo shared her experiences in the Middle East and discussed her analysis of citizen videography aesthetics.  

Berdugo’s perspective as an American-Israeli citizen and her desire to reframe the violence in Israel-Palestine precipitated her foray into the study of citizen videography. Taking a visual studies approach in her work, Berdugo frames this conflict around inequalities surrounding visual rights: the right to see and be seen, the right to be out of sight and surveillance, and the right to have one’s image trusted and protected. In researching her book, she has established a relationship with B’Tselem, an organization that distributes video cameras to Palestinian citizens and compiles an archive of their footage. B’Tselem emerged in 1989 in an effort to secure political justice by collecting what its members hoped would be unimpeachable evidence of injustice. According to Berdugo, Israeli law is incredibly lenient in terms of public videography (even more so than some American states), precipitating the phenomenon of the camera as a weapon. 

The weaponization of the camera is as much a tactical tool as it is a creative one. As Berdugo sifted through the B’Tselem archives and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) footage on YouTube, she noted a motif of two perspectives that situate the camera among other weapons. A “gunshot point of view” aligns the camera with the artillery itself: the barrel of the gun and the barrel of the camera lens become one and the same. Conversely, a “barrel point of view” positions the camera as the target of the weapon; the camera looks directly down the barrel of a lethal weapon. The result of these two points of view frames the violence it captures as either offensive or defensive. The defensive position of the barrel point of view by no means minimizes the power of the camera as a weapon. Subjects who appear powerless in front of a gun nonetheless challenge the right to frame violence. By asserting the right to complicate prevailing narratives, the camera thus becomes a weapon of exposure. In both the Commons Conversation and in her book, Liat Berdugo eloquently articulated the power of the camera’s provocation: “Cameras are weapons, not the kind that inflict bodily harm, but the kind of weapon that is used to take advantage or exert control of an opponent.” By wielding a camera, Palestinian citizens not only force a consideration of their perspective but also use it as a shield, a shame-producer, and a mirror. For B’Tselem, arming Palestinians with cameras evolved into a mission to upend the order of visual domination under Israeli occupation: a reversal of the usual display of bodies and identification cards at checkpoints that instead displayed the violence, both overt and suspended, unjustly levied against civilians. 

As archives like B’Tselem collect more and more footage, news outlets often amalgamate these videos to craft a forensic compilation of an attack or altercation. These displays, pervasive on popular websites of news outlets like the New York Times and CNN, attempt to present events from a supposedly objective perspective by anonymizing both victims and attackers by turning the images of them into monochrome human-shaped apparitions. Describing these anonymized images, Berdugo argued that the victims they depict are killed twice: once by the attackers and again by this abstraction. Their humanity and individuality are lost in the pursuit of objectivity, she explained, and so too is the cruelty of the attacker. Often, computer graphics (CG) stand in for the individuals involved until their actual photographs and video footage are inscribed, bridging the “uncanny valley of CG and the messy representations of the world of the living,” according to Berdugo. She warned the audience to be wary of these abstractions. As real bodies only appear in service to forensic analysis, the result is a homogenization and erasure of the real bodies of the Palestinians victims. 

The theme of misrepresentation is eerily pervasive across the many domains of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Berdugo distinguishes between ordinary political misrepresentation, where governments overtly deny the opportunity for fair decision making; and metapolitical injustice, where governments unethically draw the boundary between who does and does not count as a citizen. B’Tselem originally sought to correct ordinary political misrepresentation by expanding the opportunity to introduce empirical evidence in trials against IDF soldiers accused of wrongdoing. Because metapolitical injustice exists covertly in the Israeli justice system, however, these attempts did not produce the sweeping victories B’Tselem hoped for: in many cases, the footage was dismissed, ruled inadmissible, or was simply unpersuasive to a jury of Israeli citizens. These rulings offer another piece of evidence to debunk the apparent objectivity of photography and videography; civilian content, no matter how impartial, cannot escape an inherently subjective framework. 

When cameras become a threat, Berdugo explained, retaliatory measures follow. B’Tselem archives show Israeli citizens throwing objects at cameras and using mirrors and directed light to obstruct their view. In 2012, the IDF instituted combat cameramen to wear body cameras and thus capture video at their posts. Most IDF footage was erased at the end of each of week; its purpose was not to actively surveil Palestinian citizens, but rather to instill the fear of surveillance. In her work with B’Tselem, Berdugo came across footage shot by Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh during an IDF raid of her home. Before doing anything else, the soldiers took photographs of each resident, after which they inspected each resident’s video archives, which mostly contained footage of other IDF soldiers. Abu Shamsiyeh’s focus on the soldiers in her home obfuscates the role of the surveilled and the surveillants: the soldiers are first the auteurs, taking photographs of everyone in the home, but they subsequently become the object of Abu Shamsiyeh’s camera as she captures them watching themselves on her other tapes. 

After presenting Abu Shamsiyeh’s first-hand footage, Berdugo took a moment to ask the audience who, really, is the subject? Who should we be watching? What is the point? This existential turn reflected back on the lecture’s original conceit: seeing is not, in fact, believing. Rather, believing precedes seeing. The point of this footage is already determined by who we are and what we think. Photography and videography suddenly become incredibly subjective when such charged beliefs, such as those surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict, are involved. Berdugo acknowledges her cynicism as she claims that more cameras and footage alone cannot persuade populations. These images do not speak for themselves; instead, what one sees in an image follows from existing structures of power. At the same time, the image and the viewer’s response to it are not fixed and determined. They are constructed by the framing of the image, which is inherently volatile and subject to change depending on who holds power. In the United States, images of lynching used to be passed around as souvenirs, as a celebration of white supremacy. Today, the images evoke horror and are seen in a very different light, proof that shifting societal views can collectively reframe events. Videographers like Abu Shamsiyeh give their footage to B’Tselem, not to experience any immediate relief, but in hopes that future generations can look back on those images from a different perspective. While seeing might not necessarily mean believing, establishing an archive of images refuses to abandon the pursuit of justice amidst a conflict that has embedded itself into the social psyche of generations of Israelis and Palestinians. 

To watch the full recorded conversation, click here.