Periodic Reporting for period 4 - PHOTODEMOS (Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-01-01 do 2022-06-30
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 ethnographic 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, 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 has been 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.
Prolonged ethnographic fieldwork (by 6 anthropologists at postdoc and doctoral level) in Nepal, Bangladesh, 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 has been 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.
Fieldwork has been successfully completed in Nigeria (by Binaisa), Greece (by Kalantzis), Sri Lanka (by Buthpitiya), Nepal, Bangladesh & India (by Pinney), Nicaragua (by Selejan) and Cambodia (by Young). The collective hypothesis of the project has been tested against local circumstances and evidence. The comparative dimensions of the project have been advanced through two one day workshops (in Athens and London) convened on 20.12.2017 and 3.7.2019 and a three day online conference convened on 15.09.21-17.09.21.
The project website (www.citizensofphotorgaphy.org) makes available a large amount of video, photographic, and textual material. Over 3 hours of conversations between project members, more than 3 hours of short fieldwork films, 9 hours of conference presentations and several hours more of miscellaneous content. To this is added details of 22 events, 9 exhibitions, 130 sample fieldwork photographs, links to 53 publications, and 24 pamphlets which assemble many thousands more fieldwork photographs. The project has involved numerous local collaborations and interventions from its inception. These have included local exhibitions in Nigeria, Greece, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. 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.
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. In general Azoulay’s insights (which provided the key material for the project’s central hypotheses) were found to generative and productive but in need of modification. Specifically the political optimism implicit in the hypothesis presumes a unitary liberal public: the research pointed towards numerous counter-publics which were often committed to “messianic” rather than “empty homogenous time”.
More specifically the following 5 findings can be highlighted:
- “demotic” is a better way of describing popular practices that “vernacular”. Popular photographic practice is rarely a “vernacular” oppositional negation of dominant class or elite practices. “Demotic” implies horizontal and connected practices, “vernacular” implies vertical and differentiated practices. “Demotic” practices reveal a desire to engage with (rather than withdraw from) the cosmopolitan and enrols visual symptoms of a modernity and mobility that connect rather than disconnect. The project points to a “demotic” commonality that is “more than local and less than global”
- photography manifests as a “not-quite-secular” technique and serves as a space of heightened revelation in which futures can be glimpsed. Project research suggests that photography is as much future-oriented as it is a zone for the preservation of the past.
- photography’s ubiquity and permeation into almost every aspect of human existence, establishes a “photographability” even where no photographs exist. Consequently, some of the most heightened discussions about photography concern photographs which do not exist but which “ought” to, their hypothetical existence becoming an expectation of “modernity”, “transparency”, “equity”, or, most fundamentally, of “history” itself.
- diversity of practice might be consistent with a strong ontology of photography, ie an insistence on some level of “medium specificity”. The research highlighted a set of recurring tropes and architectures that point to photography’s ambivalently determining presence. Difference does not necessarily fragment a practice: it may indeed reveal a complex and constraining “tensility”.
- Alongside established ideas about photography and the “optical unconscious” the research also pointed to a “political unconscious”. Research provided insights about the political identifications, projections, fluidities, and erasures that photography facilitates. This illuminates the role of visual practices in political imaginaries. Photography allows access to a level of the social imagination, a political unconscious of sorts that may be in tension with the formal political rhetoric that would otherwise be mobilized. This points to photography’s generation of “altentities” rather than perpetuation of established “identities”.
The project website (www.citizensofphotorgaphy.org) makes available a large amount of video, photographic, and textual material. Over 3 hours of conversations between project members, more than 3 hours of short fieldwork films, 9 hours of conference presentations and several hours more of miscellaneous content. To this is added details of 22 events, 9 exhibitions, 130 sample fieldwork photographs, links to 53 publications, and 24 pamphlets which assemble many thousands more fieldwork photographs. The project has involved numerous local collaborations and interventions from its inception. These have included local exhibitions in Nigeria, Greece, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. 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.
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. In general Azoulay’s insights (which provided the key material for the project’s central hypotheses) were found to generative and productive but in need of modification. Specifically the political optimism implicit in the hypothesis presumes a unitary liberal public: the research pointed towards numerous counter-publics which were often committed to “messianic” rather than “empty homogenous time”.
More specifically the following 5 findings can be highlighted:
- “demotic” is a better way of describing popular practices that “vernacular”. Popular photographic practice is rarely a “vernacular” oppositional negation of dominant class or elite practices. “Demotic” implies horizontal and connected practices, “vernacular” implies vertical and differentiated practices. “Demotic” practices reveal a desire to engage with (rather than withdraw from) the cosmopolitan and enrols visual symptoms of a modernity and mobility that connect rather than disconnect. The project points to a “demotic” commonality that is “more than local and less than global”
- photography manifests as a “not-quite-secular” technique and serves as a space of heightened revelation in which futures can be glimpsed. Project research suggests that photography is as much future-oriented as it is a zone for the preservation of the past.
- photography’s ubiquity and permeation into almost every aspect of human existence, establishes a “photographability” even where no photographs exist. Consequently, some of the most heightened discussions about photography concern photographs which do not exist but which “ought” to, their hypothetical existence becoming an expectation of “modernity”, “transparency”, “equity”, or, most fundamentally, of “history” itself.
- diversity of practice might be consistent with a strong ontology of photography, ie an insistence on some level of “medium specificity”. The research highlighted a set of recurring tropes and architectures that point to photography’s ambivalently determining presence. Difference does not necessarily fragment a practice: it may indeed reveal a complex and constraining “tensility”.
- Alongside established ideas about photography and the “optical unconscious” the research also pointed to a “political unconscious”. Research provided insights about the political identifications, projections, fluidities, and erasures that photography facilitates. This illuminates the role of visual practices in political imaginaries. Photography allows access to a level of the social imagination, a political unconscious of sorts that may be in tension with the formal political rhetoric that would otherwise be mobilized. This points to photography’s generation of “altentities” rather than perpetuation of established “identities”.
An Open Access summary volume, Citizens of Photography will be published by Duke University Press in 2023. Advance praise suggests its possible impact: “A triumph…the PhotoDemos Collective has produced a varied, clear, and inspired intervention into photographic history and criticism, one that others will be able to learn from and add to… and will inaugurate, I predict, a lot of other studies”. Ongoing further 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.