Art, affect, and art effects

Abstract

Camilo Leon-Quijano’s “phenomenology of photographic experiences,” centers on the proud, strong young women of the Chantereine rugby team in Sarcelles, reflecting a remarkable process of collaborative visual ethnography and aesthetic brokerage. Sarcelles becomes “an icon in an urban mythology,” visually conveyed in Figures 2 and 3 in his article, with blurry impressions of an urban landscape, the former image conveying a sense of being under construction—or unfinished—through cranes in the foreground of housing projects. In this poor banlieue on the edge of Paris, inhabited by a large population of immigrants of color, the Chantereine high school girls’ rugby team trains, competes, and bonds. Leon-Quijano’s photographs memorialize in a caring, intimate way the young women on this team, and the racial and gender barriers they challenge for the love of this sport. The different formats in which these images circulate, from reproductions printed on gift rugby balls, to small cards exchanged with messages among the players, from slide shows to gigantic portraits on the school’s external walls, are the result of dialogic exchanges between photographer and players, between the ethnographer and his interlocutors. The article also presents an erudite critique of the indexical use of photography as a tool in support of ethnographic data-gathering, in favor of using this medium as “poietic practice.”