Unveiling a photograph: cemile, state violence, and death

This article interprets a news photograph from southeastern Turkey that documents state-perpetrated violence against Kurds. There are two primary reasons for selecting this photograph for analysis. First, it embodies necropolitical violence against Kurds rarely visible in the Turkish public sphere. Second, it obscures its intended message, unlike typical news photography. However, the subject of the photograph demands visibility, and its peculiarities open the door for productive theoretical discussions. The aim of this article is to make this implicit photograph visible without exceeding the ethical boundaries of the image itself and to contribute to its visibility in the public sphere. In this regard, the methodological framework of the paper is primarily informed by Ariella Azoulay’s contemporary discussions on photography. The analysis employs her concepts of the photographed event and the event of photography, which effectively overcome the limitations of early photographic theories, such as those of Sontag. These two concepts expand the definition and spatio-temporal existence of photography, facilitating an exploration of the implicit redundancy within the photograph. Additionally, Barbie Zelizer’s notion of the subjunctive voice is applied to address the silence within the image and to create a space and a voice for the photograph within Turkey’s civil-political discourse.