Citizens of Photography

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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. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, Citizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. 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. 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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