DISPOSSESSION: PHOTOGRAPHY, MIGRATION, AND OBJECT ONTOLOGY AT THE BORDER

Abstract

While working as a janitor at an Arizona-based U.S. Customs and Border Patrol processing facility, Tom Kiefer began photographing the personal belongings of migrants and asylum seekers. These were objects seized and discarded by officials, deemed ‘non-essential’ or ‘potentially lethal,’ and included backpacks, bibles, water bottles, belts, and contraceptives, among other things. Shot in isolation, these seemingly meagre possessions take on lives of their own under the scrutiny of the camera. Displayed as high-resolution colour images, these traces act as embodiments of vulnerable people. Subjecting objects (as opposed to people) to the camera counters the dominant strain of humanitarian photography which focuses on portraiture. Using Kiefer’s photographs as a starting point, this essay explores ways photography can encourage a rethinking of representations of migration and border crossings in the context of large-scale global displacement, rising nationalism, and the prevalence of violent bordering practices. Drawing connections to the work of Andreas Gursky, Taryn Simon, New Objectivity, and stock photography, I mark photography’s link to appropriation and capitalist extraction, and the medium’s unique, often problematic, ability to move between subject and object positions, prompting negotiations between the boundaries of self and other in a world where accumulation is inseparable from dispossession.