Introduction: Special Section on Recent Photography Theory: The State in Visual Matters

Abstract

This introduction to a special section on 'Photography and the State' reflects on trends in photography theory exemplified in essays by Jens Andermann, Ariella Azoulay, Andrea Noble, and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. It suggests that the contributors make a powerful argument for photography's emergent contribution to theories of the state and of sovereignty. It situates this work in the context of a growing body of scholarship (by theorists such as Natalia Brizuela, Paula Corté s-Rocca, Clare Harris, Chris Pinney, and Karen Strassler) attuned to photography's role in political imagination in post-colonial and post-imperial spaces, and underscores movement of the field away from intersubjective conceptions of photographic ethics and debates about indexicality.Key words archive j photography j sovereignty j the state T HE ARTICLES gathered here share a sense of contemporaneity and relevance to our time, whether defined as a moment in the use of photography as such, in the unfolding of its 'world history', or as a moment in its theory. In fact, if there is any unity across these pieces,

Seeing Cellular Debris, Remembering a Soviet Method

“…This is where visual anthropology can provide conceptual mileage. Ethnographic engagements with photographs and photographic practices have emphasized the multiple agencies of images to extend kinship, enact personhood and transmit cultural memory [Bajorek 2010;Edwards 2009;Empson 2011;Pinney 2011]. In these accounts, the complex temporalities of the photo as past event, present resource and future orientation are negotiated within multiple contexts of use [Buckley 2005].…”

A spatial testimony: The politics of do-it-yourself aerial photography in East Jerusalem

“…Yet it took more than a century, she writes, to shift from the conventional boundaries of the conception of photography as merely the operation of a technical device by a technician or a photographer (Azoulay, 2011: 1). It is only in the past three decades that photography has come to be considered through its political dimensions, as playing a role in disciplining, normalizing, and ordering human vision and activity as much as in processes of decolonizing and resisting oppressive regimes (Azoulay, 2008; Bajorek, 2010; Edwards, 2005; Ginsburg, 2016; Ingold, 2011; Mirzoeff, 2011; Sekula, 1986).…”

Projecting a Body Politic: Photographs, Time, and Immortality in the Kurdish Movement

“…Patricia Spyer (2022:8) has similarly written of how the "work of appearance," or the way in which the visual is apprehended and perceived, delimits "the particular places and stakes where politics unfold." Viewed from this perspective, photographic representation needs to be understood as a visual-material site where political collectivities are imagined, their boundaries staked out, and their terms of belonging negotiated (see also Bajorek 2010). While Azoulay champions photography primarily for how it can provide inclusion within spheres of civil society that exceed or upend the state form, including civil or human rights movements, I take up her proposition here to consider how photography may constitute or counter-sovereignties, even if these do not always take on state form.…”