Hara Kazuo’s seminal documentary film, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, actively disturbs presumed boundaries and, in so doing, foregrounds the centrality of performance in documentary filmmaking. While existing scholarship on this documentary focuses primarily on the moving images, in this essay I focus on a series of photographic images inserted in the beginning and examine the impact and workings of photography in the composition of this documentary. The opening photo-sequence proceeds to draw a narrative of the familial relationship existing in the past, facilitating our spectatorial understanding of the personal history of those who are involved in the making of this documentary. At the same time, the photography in the sequence casts its gaze upon us viewers, creating the sensation that we are the ones who are interrogated. As such, the photo-sequence calls on us, pushing us to form a personal relationship with what we see. I contend that the photography in this documentary film engenders a moment for a broader scale of reflection on our own precarity, irrelevance, and non-necessity in the world surrounding Extreme Private Eros.

This portfolio and artist statement addresses the ongoing photographic series Drift Alignment, which explores the historical and contemporary conditions along the US-Mexico border. The work examines the legacy of Spanish colonization, US territorial expansion and contemporary migration with an emphasis on the various ways in which astronomy and celestial navigation have played a role in the evolution of the border region of southern Arizona.

Sir Peter Heatly is a former Scottish diver who competed in three British Empire Games and one Olympic Games. On all his journeys to major competitions, he took personal photographs and kept published material and ephemera related to his trips, which were subsequently neatly stored in albums and scrapbooks, and, until 2018, were kept by his family when they deposited the personal archive to the University of Stirling. The vernacular photography of Heatly provides personal evidence of sport mega-events from the mid-twentieth century from an athlete’s perspective. It raises questions about the value of vernacular photography, family albums, and scrapbooks for interpreting and understanding the cultural historiography of sport and how much visual culture helps make sense of the cultures of international sport during the post-war period. The article provides some critical and analytical approaches to the use of such material, questioning the motivations for their original production and archiving, as well as recognizing such photographs are not simple documents of the past with unproblematic meanings but are contingent on specific “networks of authority” and open to contested meanings.

Maleonn is a prominent photographer and artist of contemporary Chinese photography. Many of his photographic works, particularly the Secondhand Tang Poems series, offer valuable perspectives on how traditional Chinese poetic culture is integrated into contemporary digital photography. By analyzing the inspirations, compositions and framing of Secondhand Tang Poems, the study strives to present the extension, distortion, and reinterpretation of traditional Chinese poetry by the photographer, and these practices have allowed poems in the history to travel across time, confronting sociocultural issues in contemporary Chinese society.

This paper explores the differences between Māori and Samoan approaches to post-mortem photography. This paper will show that Māori consider the notion of post-mortem photography as offensive, while for some Samoans, post-mortem photography is acceptable. This article emerges due to the scarcity of research on post-mortem photography in Indigenous communities. We analyze the underlying beliefs of these communities in relation to post-mortem photography. As two researchers from these communities, we call upon our ancestral and academic knowledge to tell this story.

To support the Silk Roads Transboundary Serial Nomination Project, the International Conservation Center-Xi’an developed the Silk Roads Archive and Information Management System (AIMS), with a primary function of exploring SR’s transcultural narrative. Focusing on the historical and contemporary photographs documented in AIMS, this essay introduces the different types of photographs from different times to demonstrate Silk Road’s narrative.

Rather than merely draw inspiration from Surrealism, I argue that Mexican photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo actually subverts some of its founding tenets and iconography. Though archived letters documenting the turbulent relationship with her former husband Manuel Álvarez Bravo, I contend that empirical experience incited her to deconstruct the male anatomy similarly to the surrealist treatment of the female body, photographically subverting surrealist iconography from within. I consider how Lola’s staunchly Catholic religious beliefs impacted upon her feminist stance and how she navigated the female iconography of the Catholic faith in a Surrealist manner. Subsequently, I chart how Lola’s photography reversed stereotypical gender roles in a post-revolutionary society, repurposing the surrealist penchant for the mannequin in the service of feminism. Lola’s practice corresponds to a form of intersectional feminism, whereby her own battles concurrently engender sympathy for other marginalized communities such as the poor and the indigenous. Nevertheless, due to her reliance upon government commissions, her photographic repertoire does sometimes stray into propaganda despite her ardent denials thereof; Manuel clearly had more artistic freedom compared to Lola. Lola’s subversion of surrealism is underpinned by the dichotomy of the generalized and concrete other, elaborated by feminist-cosmopolitan philosopher Seyla Benhabib.