Miki Kratsman has photographed in the Palestinian Occupied Territories for more than three decades, most of that time on assignment for the daily press. The Resolution of the Suspect returns to that archive and dismantles its original function. Frames made for the next day’s newspaper are cropped, enlarged and re-presented, so that figures who once stood at the edge of an image move to its centre. The book’s subjects are both “wanted men” sought by the Israeli state and ordinary people on the street who, simply by being Palestinian in a given place and time, fall under the same suspicion. As the publisher notes, the resulting work crosses the border between street photography and surveillance imagery without resolving which side it occupies.
That ambiguity is the project’s subject, not a byproduct of it. By removing photographs from their news context and enlarging incidental detail, Kratsman makes visible the mechanics of the gaze under occupation: who is permitted to look, who is looked at, and what those positions do to both parties. The reworked images are at once transgressive and banal, and the book holds that double quality rather than resolving it.
Ariella Azoulay contributes an essay that engages closely with Kratsman’s images, considering historical and civil constructions of the gaze and the way the threat of death shadows the people he photographs. A supplementary booklet extends the project into an unusual register: it gathers hundreds of portraits alongside messages drawn from a Facebook page where viewers were invited to identify those portrayed and comment on their fate. The interaction around the images thus becomes part of the work, implicating the viewer in the act of identification.
Radius Books co-published the 216-page hardcover with the Peabody Museum Press, and the volume carries roughly 300 colour images. Collectors of documentary and conceptual photography will recognise the lineage: a working photojournalist subjecting his own archive to scrutiny, with a collaborator whose writing on photography and citizenship frames the stakes. The combination of essay, reworked plates and participatory booklet makes this a substantial and coherent object rather than a retrospective album.
