With the establishment of the practice of photography in the 1830s, those who controlled that dark image-making machine—the camera—and its photographs, inherited the imperial claim of monopoly on truth and history. And yet, as the political theorist of photography, Ariella Azoulay, elucidates, the event of photography involves more than just the photographer and the camera; rather, those photographed, and later the spectators of images, also figure into the

social meanings forged by the shutter’s verdict. This more comprehensive conceptualization of photographic images, and the histories in which they are embedded, uncenters and unsettles the photographer’s gaze, opening up space for alternative histories, memories and stories.

It is with this sense of unsettling the European history of conflict in mind, that Maaza Mengiste’s acclaimed second novel, The Shadow King, confronts the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of the late 1930s. Rather than fixating merely on the war’s most prominent events and depictions, Mengiste transcends the traditional historic frame of the battlefield by exposing readers to the intimacy of her characters’ lives, each with their different vantages to invasion. In the unfolding of the story, she draws from the shadows struggles of both the everyday and the extraordinary, waged on the fronts of class, religion, gender, the body and photography.

To shed light on the deeply textured specter of photography in The Shadow King, which intersects in myriad ways with these other themes, Mengiste generously spoke to us about the imperial legacy of the camera, modes of resisting the colonial gaze, differences in the narrative power of words and images, and her new image-oriented archive initiative—Project 3541.