Short abstract:

Taking photographs as events--things that happen and things that continue to happen—is a strategy for working with archival images as sites for collective emotion and action by people living with the ongoing violence of genocide, displacement, and racialization.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the ongoing work of Archive Actions, a project of artists, community organizers, archivists, and university students that explores ways to “activate” the Elizabeth Becker Cambodia and Khmer Rouge Collection (1970–88) held at the University of Washington and the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center. The photographs in this collection are unlikely humanitarian images in that they do not depict graphic violence or suffering; they seem to depict everyday life. But they are photographs of genocide, of everyday dying. Drawing from Azoulay’s (2010) theorization of photographs as events--things that happen and things that continue to happen—the paper describes strategies of working with images as sites for collective emotion and action by people living with the ongoing effects of humanitarian crises, including Cambodian American diasporic communities. If we consider photographs as event-full, existing in multiple temporalities, there is opening to imagine an archive as a repository of the challenges that images provoke (Odumosu 2020). Thus, critical understanding and questioning of unlikely humanitarian images are practices of repair that are part of the image, not other to it.