Migrations and Metropolises: Photographic Views

Abstract

Since photography was invented, its techniques and uses have kept evolving throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The Thirties marked a turning point when American anthropologists considered photographic images as a legitimate instrument for ethnographic research. Renewed historical conditions, migration currents and the recent digital revolutions radically changed the connection between this media and the social sciences. Considering the last thirty years of research on migration and its visibility in contemporary metropolises, seven researchers contribute here to give an account of how photographic documentation moved from “social photography” to “participative photography” – nevertheless keeping ethnographic purposes in mind. In this process, migrants may have become active participants in producing images, which enhance the city, more precisely their own neighbourhood, and in staging local otherness. As for the photographer-researcher, s/he may choose between a variety of positions, working as an active witness of their individual or collective history, as an ethnographer revealing cultural particularisms, an artist catalyst of social perceptions, a flâneur drifting along floating observations… so following the democratization of the use of images which allows a permanent invention of means of expression.