A beautifully illustrated tale of traditional crafts and communal power.

Rachelle is a young girl living in Fès, Morocco in 1920. Surrounded by a warm community of friends, family, and craftspeople--both Jewish and Muslim--Rachelle spends her days playing with other young girls in her neighborhood, trying on her grandmother's amulets, playing jokes on a nosy photographer, and watching her parents as they spin delicate threads made of gold at their jewelry workshop each day. Life in Rachelle's neighborhood, the mellah, is busy, nourishing, and filled with magic. But rumors of a machine (or is it a monster?) coming from across the sea threaten to change the mellah and the lives of its craftspeople forever. Banding together with her grandmother, her parents, and the other jewelry makers, Rachelle and four of her friends work together to put a stop to the machine's arrival--but only time will tell if they can save the vibrant world of the mellah and its beautiful golden threads for good.

Golden Threads draws on a series of inspiring historical episodes in Fès, when Jewish and Muslim artisans organized together against the introduction of a new machine that threatened to replace their manual labor and compromise their cherished way of life. A book for both middle grade readers and for adults reading aloud to younger children, Golden Threads will take people of all ages on a journey into the multi-faith world of Morocco's craftspeople, inspiring generative conversations about art, labor, community, and technology for years to come.

Collaboration is a groundbreaking publication, by five great thinkers and practitioners in photography, in collaboration with hundreds of photographers, writers, critics, artists, and academics. This collection uses the lens of collaboration to challenge dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship. Working with an accumulation of more than six hundred photographs, each entry breaks apart photography's single creator tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration--the various relationships, exchanges, and interactions that occur in the making of any photograph and in the shaping, undoing and transforming archives.

The book explores themes such as coercion and cooperation, friendship and exploitation, shared interests and competition, and rivalry or antagonistic partnership. Collaboration foregrounds key issues facing photography, including gender, race, and societal hierarchies/divisions--and their role in shaping and reshaping identities and communities, and provoking resistance or conformity.

The photographs are presented alongside quotes, testimonies, and short texts offering perspectives on the array of themes, geographies, contexts, and events. The editors introduce each cluster of projects by providing a framework to understand and decode the complex politics, temporalities, and potentialities of photography. Collaboration reconstructs the infrastructure of photography as a collaborative practice and offers a pedagogical tool for practitioners and scholars of photography.

A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share, from one of our most compelling political theorists

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella A sha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.

Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.

By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King L opold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions--an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums--to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.

Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as past and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

This remarkable book enhances Ariella Azoulay's position as the most compelling theorist of photography writing today.
-Jonathan Crary, author of Scorched Earth

A groundbreaking work on the power of photography as a vehicle for civil protest

Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted.

Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the civil must be distinguished from the political as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay's book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship--inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct.

Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.

Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted.

Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the civil must be distinguished from the political as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay's book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship--inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct.

Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.