Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination

Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination will study a set of questions which recent transformations in political and photographic theory have made possible and which the current ‘war of images’ makes urgent and necessary.Recent conceptual work suggests that photography makes available a form of citizenry, a form of civil imagination that may be available in advance of conventional political citizenship. This argument has been made chiefly with respect to photojournalism and the ‘photography of atrocity’. This project will investigate this hypothesis with respect to everyday photographic practices of self-representation. It asks whether arguments about the “distribution of the visible” (Rancière) and the way in which political possibility is related to “a certain field of perceptible reality” (Butler) can be illuminated through the study of quotidian practices of photography. This question of the literal ‘visibility’ of the citizen has emerged through the PI’s ethnographic and historical work in India where democratic protocols are fundamentally embedded. The PI’s work has proposed that photography’s ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘seriality’, its ‘individuating’ propensity, and its subjunctive ‘as if’ quality all work to constitute citizens as potential co-equals, able to consciously chose idioms of self-representation. Historically informed ethnographies of vernacular photographic practices in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Greece, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria will generate data that will permit the rigorous testing of these formulations. Photographs clearly have the power to crystalize and precipitate political sentiment. This project involves the relocation of a set of insights about photography and politics from one domain (photojournalism) to another domain (self-representation), where those questions are rarely asked, but may be more consequential.