Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination
Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination
edited by Christopher Pinney, Naluwembe Binaisa, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Konstantinos Kalantzis, Ileana L. Selejan and Sokphea Young
Duke University Press, 2023 Paper: 978-1-4780-2076-9 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-2000-4 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-2459-0 Library of Congress Classification TR184.C58 2023
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Citizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums and social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to new destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices. By foregrounding photography’s open-ended and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identifications, this volume demonstrates that as much as photography looks to the past, it points to the future, acting in advance of social reality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London and author of The Waterless Sea: A Curious History of Mirages.
Naluwembe Binaisa researches mobilities, belonging, and citizenship within Africa.
Vindhya Buthpitiya is Associate Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews.
Konstantinos Kalantzis is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Thessaly.
Ileana L. Selejan is Lecturer in Art History, Culture, and Society at the University of Edinburgh.
Sokphea Young is an honorary Research Fellow at University College London.
REVIEWS
“Ambitious in its theoretical and ethnographic reach, this vital volume robustly explores the unruly political potentialities of photography while laying out multiple directions for a future anthropology of photography. Citizens of Photography is a landmark book.”
-- Karen Strassler, author of Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Photographing; or, the Future of the Image / Christopher Pinney 1 1. “The Truth Is in the Soil”—The Political Work of Photography in Northern Sri Lanka / Vidhya Buthpitiya 63 2. Visual Citizenship in Cambodia—From Apocalypse to Visual “Political Emancipation” / Sokphea Young 111 3. Photography, Citizenship, and Accusatory Memory in the Greek Crisis / Konstantinos Kalantzis 150 4. Insurgent Archive—The Photographic Making and Unmaking of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary State / Ileana L. Selejan 192 5. “We Are Moving with Technology”—Photographing Voice and Belonging in Nigeria / Naluwembe Binaisa 234 6. Citizenship, Contingency, and Futurity—Photographic Ethnographies from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh / Christopher Pinney 273 Bibliography 319 Contributors 337 Index 339
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