Human Rights In Camera

“Written with an admirable combination of intellectual sophistication and simplicity of expression, Human Rights In Camera successfully bridges the fields of visual culture and political theory while crafting an original approach to a topic of not only scholarly interest but broad public importance. It is an at once wide-ranging and fine-grained analysis of the complexly interrelated roles of pictures and aesthetic judgment in the conceptualization, development, application, and failures of human rights. Arresting and illuminating, this book definitely breaks new ground.”

“Presents a refreshing angle and a rich historical account, one that departs from the standard ‘Enlightenment origins’ tale of the evolution of human rights.”

“Sliwinski’s book marks a decisive break with the commonplace and received ideas about the history—and theory—of human rights and images. She pursues the way ‘human rights have come to be imagined and idealized on the wings of aesthetic experience,’ and she pushes this insight to the limit in a series of remarkable and even dramatic readings of visual images. She does nothing less than rewrite the history of human rights as a matter of looking: ‘when we speak of human rights we must first of all speak of the spectator of human rights,’ she says, and goes on to make this major shift so obvious and convincing that we are left wondering why it took so long for us to notice. This book joins groundbreaking work by the likes of Ariella Azoulay and Jacques Rancière in a new, and crucial, spectatorial turn in the study of human rights. It will surely be provocative, controversial, unnerving, and widely read.”