Season One Roundtable Discussion
The By/For: Photography & Democracy initiative began with the aim of expanding conventional understandings of the relationship between photography and democracy. Photography has often been framed as a democratic tool, but it has equally been critiqued as a mechanism of control. We sought to move beyond this binary and instead ask: how does photography function in relation to democracy, and in what ways does the medium shape our ideas of and approaches to democratic citizenship or participation?
This question guided our invitation to six leading scholars—Shawn Michelle Smith, Brenna Wynn Greer, Thy Phu, Darren Newbury, Ileana L. Selejan, and Patricia Hayes—each of whom examined this theme through the lens of their research. For our inaugural 2024/25 program, we presented a six-part series of virtual lectures accompanied by selected readings recommended by the speakers.
To conclude the series, we reconvened all six scholars for a reflective discussion on the questions and tensions that emerged during the inaugural program. The edited transcript of that conversation, held on May 30, 2025, appears below.
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By/For (Colleen O’Reilly): Firstly, what do we mean when we describe photography as democratic or undemocratic? In your view, which aspects of these terms matter most in relation to photography?
Brenna Wynn Greer: I can weigh in. I just came back from [a conference at] the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, where I spoke on the material that I discussed with you in November. So, their questions and mine are still swirling about. That democracy piece—I realized that one of the things that I always thought when I hear [that term]…you know, I talked about Frederick Douglass in my paper, and I talked about him more the last two days, one of the things that he really delights in is the democracy of photography. I remember the first time I read that, even coming from him, I always really blanched at it. It just always struck me wrong, and part of that, I think, was more [to do with] class and access at that point in time, in terms of thinking who actually had the ability to have their photograph taken, even if it was much more affordable and accessible.
Your question was really helpful for me because I realized when I think about it [photography] in terms of democracy, the representation and justice piece is really big for me, specifically in relation to Black freedom struggles. This work is not attached to my book; it’s coming out of this really urgent moment I feel in terms of what's happening in my classroom and the world. I’m thinking about what type of images, what type of representation, can be useful in a very real political sense for African-Americans in the United States, and obviously more broadly, just in terms of marginalized communities.
When it comes to African-Americans in the U.S., I've really been thinking: is there representation of politics that's liberating through photography? And then, what does that mean in terms of justice? I've been really pessimistic about it. So, that representation and justice piece is what really matters to me when we talk about photography and democracy.
By/For (Colleen O’Reilly): And I feel there's a really important point here about how visual representation relates to political representation. The word [representation] is the same, but those are two completely different things.
Shawn Michelle Smith: I agree with Brenna. I think about Frederick Douglass, too, when faced with this question. I have been struck by how enthusiastically Douglass embraced photography as a new technology of self-representation, especially at a moment when he could claim access to legal personhood for the first time.
The question about access to self-representation gets really sharpened if we consider Douglass, as a formerly enslaved person, seizing upon his new ability to represent himself as a legally defined human and as someone who was represented politically. He saw photography as a tool to visualize a new definition of personhood, a new recognition of legal personhood.
Douglass was also aware of the misrepresentations of African Americans circulating at the time, and he was hopeful that, in the hands of the right people, photography could be a powerful force in contesting those misrepresentations. But even as there was an impulse towards a new kind of access to self-representation (and I think Brenna’s right, for some people), I'm also thinking about how quickly and readily the police adopted photography for surveillance, coercion, and oppression. Photography is a tool that is used toward very different ends, and that happens right from the very beginning of the medium. Some of these uses we might call more democratic, progressive, or liberatory, and some are really aimed in the other direction, towards repression.
Ileana L. Selejan: I was thinking about what Colleen was just saying now about the different meanings of representation, and how we distinguish between representative and direct democracy.
Where does representation in photographic terms come in within all that? Somewhere between the two, perhaps. On the one hand, someone else can represent you, someone else takes charge of the photographic process, and that whole act can occur with or without your consent. Also, politically, representatives could act, since they're acting on your behalf, without your consent or without your explicit consent. Just because they're your representative, it doesn't mean they fully represent what you stand for and your values. On the other hand, photography can be restored in the hands of the represented as a means for direct democracy, and I think that's where things get really interesting.
We've become somewhat habituated, not least in the history of photography as a consequence of very important contributions by Allan Sekula, John Tagg, and so forth, to think of the oppressive structures through which photography is imposed upon the subject, especially in the early modern period. But there’s enough evidence now to show that there's always been contestations of that, and that it was never just a universally applied top-down structure.
And more closely related to this idea of direct representation, we have countless examples in Latin America, which is the region I study. The more research is done, the more examples come forth, and I was specifically thinking about cases of forced disappearances from the 1970s onwards in Argentina and Chile. Members of the public, usually family members but also other members of the community, came out into public spaces carrying portraits of the disappeared. That goes hand in hand with an actual legal process, whether that legal process is enabled concurrently or in the aftermath, which seeks… it really revolves around cases of habeas corpus. There is a very direct legal implication that hinges on whether the state is actually capable of responding to those requests. Those claims might be postponed or cancelled. All sorts of possibilities emerge from that point on.
I do find this quite interesting to consider the actual workings of photography within the manifestations of power in a political sense, and by relation to what is possible, I suppose I’m thinking about democratic processes in the post-war era specifically.
Patricia Hayes: To follow on from Shawn and Ileana, the questions posed made me think about how photography can be used against democracy very literally and I even went so far as to start checking through photographs I happen to have in folders. It's a very interesting question how many of us work around these questions and don't spend enough time thinking of the efforts to repress democratic movements through photography.
First of all, I was reminded of Jacob Dlamini's book, which is about a collection of mainly ID photos of South African activists—some of them weren't even activists—who were labeled “terrorist” and put into a couple of albums that were circulated to all police stations at a certain period in the '70s, and it might have even been earlier than that. The definition of someone who got into this album was that they had to have crossed the border out of the country illegally, without going through the proper channels, which actually made me think of Thy's work and her talk in the session here.
To me it’s quite rare that we focus on this question, the use of photographic images to really control people. In Dlamini’s book people were interrogated and confronted with their photographs in the “Terrorist Album” as a means of repression and disincentive, intimidation, and all the rest of it and I mean it also had many absurd implications and didn't work, which is the sort of conclusion reached by this book.
But there are lots of [relevant] examples by photographers that I've worked with [like Santu Mofokeng and John Liebenberg] where you can see the police, or a video camera policeman at a demonstration in Namibia, and so it goes on. I was also reminded of a very famous photograph by John Liebenberg of the picnic of the family of members of a counterinsurgency unit on the Namibian border with Angola using military vehicles and even grenade boxes to carry their picnic goods on the occasion of a visit by a journalist from a woman's magazine (which usually dealt with more frivolous matters).
So just thinking about all of these points and following on from Ileana's thoughts, most of the images from those police surveillances, maybe sometimes they were used for interrogations or identification, but I think a lot of the time they had absolutely no use whatsoever and are sitting very inactive, if they haven't been destroyed.
I do know from researchers from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [in South Africa] that the fingerprint division in all police stations also stored ID photos, that's where photographers were based, and lots of police documentation got destroyed, but not the fingerprint section and the photographic section.
So just a set of thoughts prompted by your questions and the discussion so far. Even if we think ostensibly the intention is to repress multitudes, activists, by using photography against them, it can be very counterproductive, it can be absolutely a waste, it can sit there in a repository and never be used. So these things also bring us to the point about circulation that also comes up in your questions a bit further on, as do, going back to Brenna and Shawn, talking about that control over self-representation and Frederick Douglass and that impulse. I've come across photographs of activists which were taken for personal purposes with friends in informal settings which have ended up in secret police files as well, so the circulation thing is something that I've certainly not devoted enough thought to, which is all brought to the surface by your questions.
Thy Phu: I’ve also been thinking about how regimes of surveillance are often the most visible photographic structures in authoritarian contexts—images made by the state, rather than against it. But it’s not necessarily the case that there is a clear counter-image. Sometimes opposition works by eroding the dominance of the official archive—through dispersal, through vernacularity, or through acts of rejection or creative reinterpretation that redefines ID images as visual forms that serve other, more personal purposes.
Darren Newbury: I want to ask a slightly different question, but first let me just pick up one point: the thing about photography is that it often promises more than it delivers, in both directions. This relates to the absurdities and excesses of the collection of imagery that Patricia mentioned.
It makes me think about the kind of developments in the processing of imagery, thinking about Thy’s talk and the use of facial recognition, and whether the accumulation of photographs in police files that are very difficult to access—are we in a similar position with AI and facial recognition, or is the kind of processing of that developing in a way that that lends itself to more productive uses of that imagery?
The other thing this question made me think about was the conversation I had with Kylie Thomas, which was recently published. Kylie was talking about participating in a protest in the US, where one of the chants was “this is what democracy looks like,” which made me think of—across the different talks—the images of protest, Ileana particularly, but in some of the other talks, those kinds of images but also then in a sense perhaps the insufficiency of that question.
If you ask that question in a different way, or think of a different way of answering that question…it made me think of firstly the kind of work I've been doing around the USIA [United States Information Agency] collection, where there's this quite literal attempt to photograph democratic processes in order to present them in other contexts.
It also resonated I think with—and Patricia, you can tell me if I'm misinterpreting that—but Santu's images of South Africa as, actually, this might have been what we imagined, but this is what the imperfections of democracy look like. Some of those, I don't know, post-1990 for sure, probably post-1994 images of, oh, actually, this is what democracy looks like.
That also then made me think of—Thy and Ileana and I were at a conference last week, where there was a discussion about the revolutionary image. So, we might have the democratic image, but there's also this question of an elusive revolutionary image, and there are those kinds of images associated with liberation movements and protest. But, then, what happens to that? Part of what happens is that liberation movements become governments, and their visual demands become quite different. That does something to the place of photography in that transition.
Thy Phu: That moment stayed with me as well, especially because, increasingly, my own work contends with what it means to work with photography in contexts where democracy is aspirational, or altogether absent. In postwar Vietnam, for example, photographic archives are often fragmented, censored, or inaccessible. Yet within this, I’ve become interested in what I think of as everyday forms of photography that might be revolutionary photography—or images taken by ordinary people that sustain political memory, even under regimes that limit expressive freedoms. These images may not circulate widely or conform to official narratives of revolution, but they preserve affective ties to struggles that aren’t easily visible or officially recognized. In such contexts, photography’s revolutionary potential lies not in formal aesthetics, public visibility, or state-sanctioned narratives, but in its quiet persistence as a counter-memory.
By/For (Colleen O’Reilly): I’m so interested in questions around circulation as a product of the material qualities of photographs in these situations where certain kinds of imagery might initially appear attached to democratic values, but then can be used for other purposes, or perhaps are used for a very specific, politically democratic governmental purpose, but then later that “democratic” government becomes undemocratic in values.
When the imagery moves around, what’s going on with the photograph itself? Even today, photographs still possess material qualities, despite being stored on servers and circulated by technology. Does that prompt any thoughts for you all in terms of the physical attributes of photographs, past and present, and how they contribute to the relationship between photography and democratic values?
Brenna Wynn Greer: One of the topics that came up in the last couple of days [during my talks] was new technologies, AI, social media, and so on, that are being put forward as democratizing forces. In particular, the conversations I was having focused on how African-Americans, like we all, have these high-powered cameras and what that means in terms of self-representation, documentation, and all of those things. The question that kept being posed to me was: Does that allow for a different archive? Or, does the fact that there is a different way these things are materially actually allow greater access?
I've really struggled with that. Even going back to the last question, I really feel that photographs—again, I'm speaking specifically to African-Americans and Black freedom struggles—just function differently when they're picturing African-Americans and in a U.S. context. I like the idea of a revolutionary versus a democratic [image]…or depicting revolution or democracy. Still, I think that's different from whether they support or can act, you know, whether they picture it versus whether they can function that way.
What kept coming up for me is that we're in a time when photographs can't possibly work the way they have before, precisely because everybody has access to them and there's so much artifice assumed. The control that people do have is now another challenge in terms of trying to put forth any image, because you can count on people reading it through skepticism. So, that seems like another layer. Then the other piece is that just because there is so much more access, and so much more production, I kept talking about how it seems we have these iconic images of civil rights figures or freedom fighters when it comes to Black Americans. Still, the only other archive that's rising up to meet that, that everybody's seeing, are these images of police brutality. And everything else is so diffused, because there's so much that ideally would counteract some of these images, but this seems to be diffused in a way.
Shawn Michelle Smith: When I thought about this question, I thought first about the camera as a technology. So, before we talk about photographs, we might think about the camera as an object and the way Ariella Azoulay suggests that whenever there is a camera among people, the camera is setting up relationships between them.
For Azoulay, the camera can bring people together but it mostly divides them. Addressing 19th and 20th-century photographs, Azoulay thinks about who is behind the camera and who is in front of it. In her earlier work, The Civil Contract of Photography, there was more imagined potential for collaboration across that space, but in her more recent work, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, she emphasizes the divide that the camera creates between people.
So, it's important to think about the way the presence of a camera can change the relationships between people in a space, and then to think about the way that photographs travel across space and time, finding new viewers. This traveling through time is something I investigated in my book Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography. Patricia and Darren have also been talking about this here: that photographs mean different things to different people at different moments. That is exciting: photographs are not just fixed or stable, even if they purport to be. So, I like the idea of creating a different kind of access to photographic meaning -- one can interpret a photograph differently, and one can use it differently. I teach at an art school, and I am excited by the ways artists are making all kinds of interventions in archives, appropriating and reappropriating, and engaging with historical photographs to bring new things into visibility and legibility.
Darren Newbury: It’s an interesting question to think about how, historically, the role of the camera in spaces is changing. Even in the images Patricia showed us a few moments ago, you've one or two film recording or camera devices, whereas in an equivalent setting now, you will probably have several hundred of those operating, so there's clearly a different dynamic there.
Also, it seems to me—and I’m not sure I’ve really thought this through—but photography is becoming more ubiquitous. Nevertheless, we've stepped back from a certain public sense of photography, or a public… “responsibility” is not quite the right word, but there is an increasingly atomized, private form of photography that’s continually happening. So, the privatization of space, and the idea that one can just go into a public space and make photographs of whoever, which was something that was probably contested and challenged, but there was a sort of recognized place for that, whereas now I think that’s very much more likely to be challenged.
Even within institutional contexts, the ethical demands placed on researchers or students doing that kind of work, there's almost a default question of, would you have everyone's permission who's in that image? This is a question that wouldn't have arisen, I don't think, 15 or 20 years ago.
So, something is changing in that relationship. Also, when you think about the circulation of images, and go back to the 1980s in South Africa, images were being made and sent in packets abroad, and then presented to an external audience.
If you think of more recent protests, those images are being exchanged within the people protesting in a much more rapid way, almost [functioning] as a kind of speech. So, it's not literature, it's speech, and that distinction between different kinds of visual uses or functions [is important]. There are quite a number of different things going on with the medium and the camera, and in those public spaces.
Ileana L. Selejan: I was thinking about how circulation enables the photograph to float in a sea of possibility. Of course, there are all sorts of power structures to take into consideration in terms of how those circulations might emerge, and also, sometimes it could be that there’s a voluntary act of removing an image from circulation for whatever reason.
Recently, I was reading an article about family photographs of Italian Jews who had made fake identity documents to survive the occupation and later on someone discovered those documents, which were never, ever, discussed in the family. So, it's like a shock for the person finding them to understand that this is actually something that was a part of the family. These images had been very much in circulation previously and had ensured that the family could survive. But then they were completely withdrawn from circulation, put underneath piles of clothing in a closet, and sealed away “forever,” so there's something there that's quite interesting, I think, to reflect on.
When we bring together these ideas around circulation and materiality, for me, especially in cases of human rights violations which is at the center of some of the work I'm doing with Nicaragua right now, I think that the possibility of a photographic image to serve a reparative purpose at some point in the future is enabled through the coming together of this circulation and materiality.
For instance, one of the most notable examples comes from 2005 in Guatemala City, when the archives of the national police were found. Kirsten Weld has a brilliant book on this topic called Paper Cadavers, and there was a massive effort to preserve that archive and digitize it. It consisted of, on the one hand, ID photographs, but also family photographs that were somehow extracted by the police from the community, and then tons of surveillance photographs that are, you know, similar to those found in Stasi archives or other types of police archives that breach the limit between public and private space.
What I find really interesting is that for a very long time, the possibility of prosecuting people who were responsible for the massacres that were committed in Guatemala during the period of armed conflict hinged upon the finding of evidence. And there was complete denial that these records existed. Then, completely by accident, they were found. It was actually an accident; someone discovered them during a cleaning at a certain facility. It's absolutely astounding. So, I always go back to that example.
Most recently, I learned about the National Security Archives in D.C. They did this incredible project. The book is called The Top-Secret Computer Messages that the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy. It’s basically a huge stack of emails that document the Iran-Contra affair and its aftermath, which Reagan first tried to get rid of, then Bush, then, apparently, even Clinton had an ambiguous relationship with them—they were rescued. They actually deleted them on several servers, but again, circulation, materiality, right? Even with digital material, somewhere there had been other copies, and they were able to recover them. This is something that I think is quite interesting, especially as, like Brenna was saying, things are getting more and more diluted in this massive mass of information, of pictures, of photography, in this very expanded sense. And, a lot of the material is, to quote Hito Steryl, made up of “poor images,” the great bulk at least.
Brenna Wynn Greer: I've never realized until you were speaking, Ileana, that part of the trouble that I keep sensing is that the value of photography for justice isn't the same as photography for liberation.
When photography is so often evidence, it sets up frameworks for seeing that in my mind are closing images down in a way, or closing ideas down in terms of particular groups. That is at odds, or at least complicating that ability for images to liberate, to open up ideas, or images, of people to take them out of different contexts. So that was just an “aha” moment for me, so I appreciated that.
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Since its inception, By/For: Photography & Democracy has maintained that a historical perspective on the complex relationship between photography and democracy is essential to understanding how the medium and its related visual technologies can engage with the social and political issues of our time. Archives not only reshape our understanding of the past but also influence how we envision the future. Many contemporary artists recognize this liberatory potential, engaging with archives to craft counter-narratives, surface previously untold stories, and create transformative spaces for imagining more equitable futures. In doing so, they continue to address the trauma and resilience of past generations. Accordingly, our third and final question turned to contemporary practice.
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By/For (Colleen O’Reilly): In the wake of all of these complexities and as scholars who are invested in certain values, what's most exciting and interesting about contemporary photography for you—in terms of either making new photographs or engaging with historical ones—for the future? Because ultimately, that's why we are invested in this.
Thy Phu: What I find most compelling about recent efforts to engage with photography is the provocative ways of grappling with the past—especially through the growing attention to vintage and vernacular images that have been orphaned, lost, or stripped of context. These photographs often circulate without names, dates, or identifiable provenance. Yet they persist—kept in shoeboxes, sold in markets, and perhaps most intriguingly shared online—and they carry affective force. They ask to be seen, even when what they show is unclear.
What makes this moment so interesting is the collective effort across disciplines and communities to develop new ways of attending to these images. Conventional methods that privilege authorship or institutional framing fall short. Instead, we see approaches rooted in gesture, materiality, and affect; ways of reading that are speculative, relational, and attentive to what we don’t and may never know. This isn’t just a methodological shift; it’s an ethical one.
I find myself asking, Why should we care about these images? In contexts shaped by war, displacement, and authoritarian rule, the absence of context is often the result of erasure, not accident. To engage with these photographs is to confront the afterlives of rupture. It’s also to ask: who holds these images now? To whom do they belong? And what might it mean to reclaim them, not just as historical fragments, but as part of an ongoing struggle to repair the world we’ve inherited?
This, to me, is where photography intersects with democracy—not just as a potent tool for visibility or representation, but as a means of reconstituting relationships: with the past, with each other, and with the futures we’re trying to build.
Patricia Hayes: I think there are really many, many cases of contemporary artists doing astounding work with past photographs, whether from 30 years ago or from 100 years ago. I work with both kinds of archives: colonial photographic archives and more recent anti-apartheid, anticolonial, and really interesting postcolonial work. For many years, I've been addressing those questions in my classrooms here at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town.
Much of what Brenna has been saying is really appropriate here because we have this dilemma: people's ancestors have been photographed, but in ways that are very difficult to deal with for young people. It takes some very brave artists to work with that, and there's some really outstanding work that's been done to re-position, to rethink, to make palimpsest, to re-perform, to re-enact, and again, Shawn’s work is really suggestive here.
I've just been asked to write an essay for a big exhibition and catalog, which is in a former ethnographic museum in Europe. It’s a very challenging prospect, but there's lots of creativity around that's really quite astonishing. But, I do not want to underestimate the difficulties posed by some of those past archives. You might think it's understandable with colonial-era imagery, which might be thought to objectify people. It requires a huge amount of work to think about what the implications are of that deep time and that the fact that there might be signs of the pre-colonial that are really positive in those photographic encounters as well. So, that’s something that I'm working on with a number of people.
But there’s another difficult aspect with recent anti-apartheid photographs, as we wrote about in the book Ambivalent a few years ago. Many of our students now are the generation born in the wake of apartheid; they don't want to look at images from the period of the anti-apartheid struggle, the black-and-white photographs, because they are miserable and ugly and show suffering, and there's another set of visual desires that the current generation have. But at the same time, there's also many signs that the kind of intergenerational transfer of what's positive, and actually how to struggle, how to be an activist, are also being increasingly picked up, particularly by women artists who I hugely admire, like Senzeni Marasela, the curator Portia Malatjie, and a number of others.
But it's a very double-edged thing. I also know a few Namibian artists in their 20s and 30s who have been in a position of being invited to go and work with very difficult photographic collections and object collections in German museums which hold colonial collections, even including materials and images connected with genocide and just how terribly difficult that is and how isolating it is. There’s a need for recognition, support systems, networking, and promoting people who have the courage to undertake that really difficult work because it's really very hard.
That's from my South African/Southern African perspective; it might be different for other parts of the world.
Shawn Michelle Smith: I really appreciate what Patricia is saying about support systems for young artists who are being invited to work with very violent colonial archives.
That is really important. I would also add that I think there need to be support systems for artists to say, "no, it is not my job to engage your racist archive." Some of the students that I have been working with at SAIC [School of the Art Institute of Chicago] have been negotiating that question: to what degree do they need to feel responsible to these archives, and to what degree can they say no, this is actually not their job? So, I would simply advocate for support both ways: for people who are brave enough to do this work, and also for those who are brave enough to say “no, I'm not going to do that work.”
Brenna Wynn Greer: I think that's key, because I was thinking, Patricia, when you were speaking about this kind of cycle of trauma, in terms of having these photographs, perhaps having ancestors appear in these photographs, having the photographs, seeing the photographs, working with the photographs, being the people who can perhaps trouble the photographs in a way where they don't do the same work, but in that process having been re-traumatized by the photographs. So, that's really to both your and Shawn’s point, that support aspect.
I have yet—I say yet, but I'm not going to—I have never watched the George Floyd video. Routinely, students will ask me: “Well, how can you speak about it?” And it's like, no, I think I have enough information to be able to wade into that conversation. I'm not watching that for my job. It does limit me in terms of what I can responsibly say about it, so I just think that support aspect is really important; I appreciate that.
Ileana L. Selejan: Directly responding to that, you've all seen the news, I'm sure, about Harvard settling in the Lanier case and returning Joseph T. Zealy’s daguerreotype of Renty. I was thinking, precisely, this is about withdrawing something from circulation. I mean, consider the enormity of the effort that went into withdrawing that image from circulation. There's been just so much written about those photographs and artists like Sasha Huber, have attempted to respond through gestures such as clothing the subjects, and all sorts of interventions that are meant to shield or restore… maybe just to shield the memory of those figures, of those ancestors.
Personally, I am still processing that the case is closed and in the way it did, because I had no hope really that this would actually happen.
Going beyond artist interventions, this discussion, between Patricia, Shawn, and Brenna, made me think also about the members of the public. Maybe this is where—just because Azoulay came up earlier—whenever I teach Azoulay in class, my students ask, “okay, we get it, there’s a responsibility we have as members of the public, as viewers of images, as consumers of art, etc., but what do we do?” And, I don't know, I don't have those answers. But I keep turning to Tamara Lanier and [thinking], wow, right?
Brenna Wynn Greer: The point about students has come up, and I’ve been thinking in terms of younger people, particularly in western societies, and I've been thinking about it with my own kid all the time: her relationship to photography.
My sense is that someone who is photographed, and/or photographs themselves constantly, has a different relationship [to it]. It's almost as if I see my students…when they look at a photograph, they're centering themselves in the process, because their relationship is so…they're tied so much to that process in a way that they're almost always kind of looking for themselves, even without knowing it. So that responsibility question is really interesting to me to think about in relationship to that, because you'd have to de-center yourself to be thinking about the people in the photograph, to be thinking about how else the photograph could work, or what work it is doing, and the work of art, going back to you, Shawn.
For me, it’s these images and the images of putting clothes on these figures, it’s like highlighting, revealing, exposing these regimes of representation. To me that's where I've landed thus far in terms of things that are effective. But really, these kids, their relationship to photography is so different…I said to them, there's maybe 50 Polaroids of me from age zero to like 12, and I can look at my phone and I'm sure there's 20,000 photographs on there, 90% which are of my one kid. That's just got to be a different relationship to what a photograph even means.
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We want to thank our six speakers for coming together for this conversation, which distills so many of the ideas that came up in this year’s talks about the stakes of photography in our current world and the complexity of its operations in relation to power structures and systemic injustices. It also points the way forward for our next series, in which we will continue to invite scholars to share work on what exactly seems to make a photograph liberatory or oppressive. How can we further expand on this shift from ascribing photography an inherent “democratic” power to pinpointing more specifically how this has worked historically and what might be changing about it in our present-day context?
