Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PHOTODEMOS (Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination)

Teaser

\"Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination is an empirical anthropological investigation of a hypothesis about the relationship between photographic self-representation and different societies\' understanding of what is politically possible. It explores...

Summary

\"Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination is an empirical anthropological investigation of a hypothesis about the relationship between photographic self-representation and different societies\' understanding of what is politically possible. It explores, through field research, recent ideas about the \'prophetic\' nature of visibility, and the possibility that the camera can offer a form of political recognition in advance of ordinary citizenship. Its importance lies in the manner in which it opens up questions and debates which have long been foreclosed within photographic theory and discussions around visual culture.

Prolonged ethnographic fieldwork (by 6 anthropologists at postdoc and doctoral level) in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Greece, Nigeria and Nicaragua has studied how local communities use photography to represent individuals, families and other identities and explore whether this plays a role in the manner in which people articulate their political hopes and demands.The central objective of the project is to test the hypothesis through the observation of actual social practices.

The conceptual starting point of the project is recent work by photographic theorists including Ariella Azoulay. She has argued that photography makes possible a new form of \"\"Civil Imagination\"\" because of its inclusiveness and contingency. Azoulay develops her argument in the context of historical images and also in relation to contemporary photojournalism and the manner in which photographic images appear to provoke actions with political consequences. At the heart of this hypothesis is a refusal to reduce \'representation\' to mere power, and to instead see it as an active, unpredictable, and potentially transformative process. This project takes some of Azoulay\'s insights and seeks to explore them at a local level, through the examination of actual practices, in relation to popular photography

The locations for the ethnographic investigations were chosen because they are either

sites of former political conflict
sites of current crisis
sites where differences in religious practices are evident
sites that have significance in the history of Visual Anthropology.

One central aim of the project concerns the relationship between \"\"representation\"\" through images and \"\"representation\"\" through politics. Further, the research hopes to throw light on the role that \"\"individuals\"\" and other units of identity may play in allowing people to imagine a role for different kinds of politics in their life. For instance, attitudes to democratic processes may be much easier to imagine if an individual has multiple representations of themselves and if those images permit what has been called \"\"self-archiving\"\" ie the strong consolidation of a historically rooted individual agent through the regular use of photography. Democratic processes may appear much less attractive in the absence of representational practices that foreground individuals. Other units of identity (family, clan, caste etc) may feature in photography and be important idioms through which political claims are made.

In summary, this project is a social science investigation, through intensive ethnography, of a hypothesis which has been much discussed by photographic historians and political theorists as a philosophical issue. This project seeks to turn this into a set of empirically testable hypotheses by looking at how different groups of people actually use photography and what they have to say (and what they do) about politics. At its core is the question of the relationship between visual representation and political representation.\"

Work performed

Fieldwork has been successfully completed in Nigeria (by Binaisa), Greece (by Kalantzis), Sri Lanka (by Buthpitiya), Nepal (by Pinney), India (by Pinney), and Cambodia (by Young). Further fieldwork remains to be completed in Nicaragua, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The collective hypothesis of the project has been tested against local circumstances and evidence. In general the central hypothesis of the project, that photography can open up progressive and inclusive forms of politics, has been qualified by the region-specific findings of the individual field investigations. The comparative dimensions of the project have been advanced through two one day conferences (in Athens and London) convened on 20.12.2017 and 3.7.2019.
To give something of the flavour of these: In Cambodia, Greece, and Nigeria the fluctuating ‘demographics’ of the image (its literal presence and absence, abundance and scarcity), provides a vital way of understanding history. In Nicaragua and Bangladesh, iconic images recirculate in ways facilitating new forms of politics. In all regions, and especially India, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia, image-saturated social media plays a central role in socially and culturally polarising politics (cohesion around a shared image-world forming the basis for political division). In Greece photography serves to consolidate historical oppositions and to constructively mediate them.
Images of travel and topography in Greece, Nepal, and Sri Lanka compete with more conventionally politicised visual projections of the nation. Leisure competes with atrocity. Whether killing fields can be translated into tourist beaches becomes the subject of contention in Sri Lanka. Beaches can also be the destination of migrants, as in Greece, and become conflict zones for different genres of photojournalistic and touristic images.
Atrocity has a differential visibility. In Latin America atrocity is configured as the precondition for the ‘heroic image’ offering the promise of transformation. In Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Greece past atrocity becomes foundational to state-approved national identity. In Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Nicaragua, atrocity is mobilized through a non-consensual, contested, history. In Sri Lanka history is no longer taught: history is reactivated through vernacular photographs of landscape and atrocity. In Nigeria atrocity (eg that in 1960s Biafra) is suppressed in order to preserve a fragile nation state. The image becomes a space for strong national inclusion and exclusion.
Photographic images have been studied by the project ethnographically as migrating objects in movement. Migrational ‘pull’ forces in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, are profoundly visually informed: people move in order to be closer (experientially) to images. In Nigeria the image allows the exploration of aspirations freed from material realities. Photography encourages the inhabitation of a putative global citizenship by the aspirant migrant, but this sentiment is not reciprocated by the global North. The ‘civil contract’ is in this sense asymmetrical. Asymmetry is also evident in the disparity between touristic images desiring ‘rootednes’ and lack of mobility as ‘authentic’. These clash with the global imagescapes that invade the migrant imagination.
Photography emerges as powerfully concerned with the past (as a conduit to wartime atrocities in Greece or Khmer Rouge tyranny in Cambodia) as one would expect, but also as a future-oriented medium deployed to open up possibility. In Nigeria photography allows a powerful nostalgia but also triggers regret about the moral losses in modernity. In Nigeria the materiality of the photograph captures future possibilities, the past opening futures when its ‘talk’ will become more relevant. In Nicaragua and Bangladesh there is a ‘deep-time’ of photography, across which iconic images endure.
Another common theme has concerned the visual modalities through which

Final results

\"
The published, Open Access, individual ethnographic studies will all make substantial contributions to the broadening of the study of ‘World System Photography’. The study of the History of Photography still remains focused on Europe and north America and on elite practices. It is anticipated that the project outputs will also significantly revise the understanding of ‘indigenous media’ within Visual Anthropology (encouraging a refocus on pervasive everyday practices), and help redress the Eurocentric bias within the History of Photography.

During the remaining two years of the project each project member will complete an individual monograph (to be made available through Open Access) which will fully describe the nuances of each fieldsite and the photographic practices within them. These are currently between 35% and 50% complete. The first draft of a PhD thesis, on which a book will be based, is very nearly complete. An edited collective volume, to be titled \"\"Citizens of Photography\"\" will synthesize and finesse the comparative aspects of the project. This will have two aims. Firstly it will assess the evidence both supporting and complicating Azoulay\'s hypothesis. The general conclusion will be that the hypothesis is hugely generative and liberates discussions of photography and politics from constraints that have had a negative impact on the development of photographic theory. On the other hand, seen in the light of the empirical evidence from the various field sites the hypothesis appears utopian. The field research demonstrates how the prophetic political identifications of the photographic images, especially when harnessed to social media platforms, can intensify divisive and exclusionary identifications. The edited volume will also outline a new theory of \'demotic\' photography as opposed to \'vernacular\' practice. \'Demotic\' assumes a widespread subaltern practice which is \'more than local & less than global\', while \'vernacular\', based on linguistic models, assumes popular practices which are reactive to dominant hierarchies, as for instance in Pierre Bourdieu\'s influential work on French popular photography. The PI has given one hour presentations in Delhi and Kathmandu outlining the shape of a revised edition of \"\"Camera Indica\"\" in the light of India\'s changing media landscape and practices and work on that new volume is progressing. All project members will also complete and submit 2 additional articles by the end of the project. Other outputs include commissioned blog pieces (Buthpitiya), podcasts (Binaisa), & press interviews (Young), among others.

The project has involved numerous local collaborations and interventions from its inception. These have included local exhibitions in Nigeria, Greece, Sri Lanka and Cambodia. Nicaraguan images have recently been exhibited with great success in New York.Other exhibitions are planned in Nicaragua and Nepal. Project members have participated in a very large number of symposia and local courses. Conventional anthropological participant-observation has been complemented throughout by the sharing of research findings with local audiences through courses, symposia and the exhibition of research findings.

Building upon the several field site-based exhibitions, an interim exhibition will be displayed at the Tbilisi Photo festival in September 2019 where project members will also participate in a symposium. A final and larger exhibition and set of interventions will be mounted in London, possibly at Autograph ABP, in June 2021. Also titled \"\"Citizens of Photography\"\" the display will consist of seven sections: \"\"Who is a Citizen?\"\"; \"\"Past and Futures\"\"; \"\"Contingency\"\"; \"\"The Eternal Time of Photography\"\"; \"\"The Demand to Be Seen\"\"; \"\"Lives of Images\"\"; & \"\"Photography After the Event\"\". Planning is active and ongoing.\"

Website & more info

More info: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/research/photodemos.