Interpretive reading of the Palestinian security prisoners' representation

This paper is trying to analyze the construction of "security prisoners representations" in images of public relations pamphlets of the Israeli Prison Service.

In doing that I follow Walter Benjamin's investigation of the textual and visual representations that a separation between them constitutes in modern era as a mechanism of control (Azoulay, 2006). In this case, the visual representation of the image is the only representation of the penal colony security prison, when the silence of the voices of the prisoners take place.

In addition, the author relies on Roland Barthes  (1977) and its critical discourse on the visual representation. Where the dimension of connotation presents itself as denotation and thus mythologizes and naturalizes the visual message in the eyes of the recipient. I shall discuss the analysis of image's different signifiers and  the  meanings that emerge from them. Meanings that create a dominant- hegemonic discourse on the one hand, and the fact that they can be read on the other critical-subversive reading.

In this work the author wants to show that the photographs from the security prison  exist and are not used only to discipline , punish and supervise the penal colony, but also serve the discipline of the public's consciousness. On the other hand it seems that the very practice is itself problematic, and once the pictures came out into the world they have multiple dimensions of interpretation.

The history of this work go far beyond the world of academic life. This work is an expression of one's life story, as it expressed the existence of an abstract group. This is an auto-ethnography of the writer, in a total institution of the Israeli security prison .