In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bystanders and police. Screen Shots studies this phenomenon from the vantage point of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Here, cameras have proliferated as political tools in the hands of a broad range of actors and institutions, including Palestinian activists, Israeli soldiers, Jewish settlers, and human rights workers. All trained their lens on Israeli state violence, propelled by a shared dream: that advances in digital photography—closer, sharper, faster—would advance their respective political agendas. Most would be let down.
Drawing on ethnographic work, Rebecca L. Stein chronicles Palestinian video-activists seeking justice, Israeli soldiers laboring to perfect the military's image, and Zionist conspiracy theorists accusing Palestinians of "playing dead." Writing against techno-optimism, Stein investigates what camera dreams and disillusionment across these political divides reveal about the Israeli and Palestinian colonial present, and the shifting terms of power and struggle in the smartphone age.
Price: $28.00
Pages: 248
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Series: Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
Publication Date:
01 June 2021
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781503628021
Format: Paperback
"Screen Shots teaches as it describes, instructs as it unsettles what we know about the expanse and limits of digital photography in the civilian landscapes of perpetual war, of photographic encounters with Israel state violence in the occupied Palestinian territories over the last two decades. Avoiding a predictable rehearsal of digital photography as a versatile and effective weapon of war, Screen Shots strikes precisely and pointedly elsewhere: at the political nerve of visualized failures, at the unnerving state of faulty images and unsteady cameras not properly loaded, apertures not set for the scale of violence confronted, witnessing that misses its mark.
Screen Shots makes evident what aperture settings can't tell: how the images captured at once buttress and undermine claims of brutalizing settlers, humanitarian NGOs, and Palestinian activists—depending on what sits resolutely askew or adjacent to the photographer's lens. In this war of images, none of those tasked with recording can wholly control how violence will be applauded or vilified, how perpetrators will be cast, and how those images and their self-proclaimed heroes will be politically framed. In the end, Rebecca L. Stein's lucid account both acknowledges and defies the grotesque features of this infamously ugly military occupation."—Ann Stoler, The New School for Social Research, author of Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times
Rebecca L. Stein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford, 2015, with Adi Kuntsman) and Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (2008).
Introduction: State Violence and the Dream of the Perfect Camera
1. Sniper Portraiture: Personal Technologies in Military Theaters
2. Cameras Under Curfew: Occupied Media Infrastructures
3. Settler Scripts: Conspiracy Cameras and Fake News
4. The Eyes of Human Rights: Curating Military Occupation
5. The Military's Lament: Combat Cameras and State Fantasies
Coda: Broken Bones, Broken Dreams: The Politics of Failure
