Visual Economies Research Articles

Transmission and Transfer: Plantation Imagery and Medical Management in the British Empire

This essay centralizes representations of the Caribbean plantation in British art, and examines their importance to the development of landscape representation and the history of medicine. The plantation came into view through the overlapping conventions of the picturesque genre and colonial medicine. Tracing their relationship to, and distancing from, the development of British art ‘at home’, I address how these visual economies – connecting art and medicine – can challenge our conception of the ‘global’ nature of British art. This essay also considers what these terms – global/colonial/British – mean as we grapple with the legacy of these imperial histories by examining the work of contemporary artists Ingrid Pollard and Annalee Davis who conceive of, and visualize, alternative histories of relation.

Cartographies of poverty: Rethinking statistics, aesthetics and the law

The article explores cartographic and statistical registers of poverty as geo-legal technologies operating across shifting visual economies which structure ways of seeing and concealing ‘the poor’ in the urban landscape. Drawing on the fields of critical cartography and digital urbanism, and taking a 2013 controversy around Google Maps’ mapping of favelas in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point, it investigates the aesthetic role of digital maps and data in the legal geographies of urban poverty. It is argued that sociospatial encodings give form to poverty in ways that activate antipoverty responses and continuously support correlations between poverty and criminality. This argument entails a post-representational approach to maps considering their inscriptional, propositional and normative functions. Cartography, statistics and law are interrogated as devices of global governance that work aesthetically to shape poverty and its modes of appearance in the city, i.e., as productive methods of documentation as well as world-making, through which geocodings simultaneously create images of poverty and become functional of spatial transformations. Poverty is thus conceptualized as it is made into an aesthetic category subjected to continuous geo-legal modulations.

Colonialism and its Regimes of Visibility: Edgard Imbert’s Views of the French Empire

ABSTRACT This article explores some of the mechanisms underlying the photographic visualisations of the French Empire between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, This study focuses in particular on Edgard Imbert’s photographic work, a collection of albums, glass plates, and loose photographs held at the Etablissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense in Ivry, Franc. Imbert was one of the most prolific photographers of French colonisation in Madagascar and Indochina. The thousands of negatives he made offer a unique perspective on the visual economies of French expansionism in these territories. Through a thorough analysis of what Imbert kept to himself, showed to his family circle, or published with a view to propagandise French colonialism in Asia and Africa, this work shows how careful historians should be in their analyses of colonial-era photographs. Those who were most involved in fashioning the colonial imaginary effectively constructed a visual repertoire to promote their vision, and not just for their contemporaries but also for posterity. A large part of the colonial images that circulate more than a century later are drawn for these registers of self-representation. Leading figures of French colonialism, such as Hubert Lyautey and Joseph Gallieni, were very familiar with the structure of the colonial archive in construction. They anticipated which effect the photographic elaboration of the colonies would have in the long term. The agency of French archives generally favoured the conservation of albums and views that are the direct inheritors from this colonial self-fashioning. Such an archival effect tends to distort heavily the repertoire of French colonial imagery. Imbert’s collection therefore offers a rare insight on the various regimes of in/visibility of French colonial activities in the early twentieth century and their subsequent curatorial itineraries.

African Photographer J.A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial

African Photographer J.A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial

The Image World of Maternal Mortality: Visual Economies of Hope and Aspiration in the Global Campaigns to Reduce Maternal Mortality

This essay explores the aesthetic and narrative conventions of the still and moving images deployed in global campaigns to reduce maternal mortality since the 1980s. I focus on how an international community of advocates, policy makers, and practitioners choose, understand, and use images to create awareness, rouse public sympathy and interest, and call people to action on this issue. I argue that the global maternal health community has constructed an “image world” not of suffering but of hope and aspiration by which they hope to foment the shared sense of humanity and impulse to act that is said to be at the heart of humanitarianism.

The Narrative Power of the Black Maternal Body: Resisting and Exceeding Visual Economies of Discipline in Margaret Walker'sJubilee

AbstractAs theorist Robyn Wiegman has established, specular, and panoptic disciplinary measures together served to maintain hegemonic systems of power in American slavery, the Reconstruction period, and the era of segregation. Specular discipline is characterized by public scenes of torture, which discourage acts of opposition to the dominant power structure, while panoptic discipline uses constant surveillance, both real and imagined, to cause subjects to internalize the order of the discipline. In this article, I argue that Jubilee investigates and resists the visual control of the black maternal body in US slavery and Reconstruction, as these periods are depicted in the novel, as well as in the Civil Rights era contemporary to its publication. I focus on the changing narrative significance of the black maternal body in Jubilee as the protagonist carves out space within a disciplinary system of ocular control to claim ownership of her black maternal body and tell her story. I claim that the novel positions the black mother as uniquely able to subvert the narrative power enforced by the gaze throughout the past several centuries and counters stereotypical discourses about black women with an account of the strength and survival of the black female body.

Ultimate Tests: Children, Rights, and the Politics of Protection

Whether in the rhetorical strategies of the campaign to ban landlines, appeals for famine relief, or the present historical apex of mass refugee migration, deployed images of abject childhood are central to the visual economies of humanitarian crisis. As the quintessential innocents deemed in need of protection, children are constructed outside of meaningful subjecthood and objectified as the evocative ‘scenery’ of the politics of protection. As such, children’s place in these visual economies together with their relative voicelessness are particularly revealing of how the concept of protection is beset by a paradox it cannot resolve: simultaneously imperative in consequence of diminished political subjecthood and itself demeaning of that same subjecthood. Tracing the problematique of children’s agency and subjecthood through the un Convention on the Rights of the Child and applicable aspects of legal regimes in Canada both beholden to the Convention and charged with care and protection of children, this article offers insights relevant to but perhaps less immediately apparent in the context of the R2P regarding the tricky and fraught intersections of childhood, subjecthood, and protection.

Glimpses of Emergence in the Ayoreo Video Project

Drawing upon scenes from a recent Indigenous video workshop in Paraguay, the essay details the emergent forms of perception, imagery, and experience that were unique to the video workshop form. The aim of the essay is to write present‐tense difference through such emergent visual forms rather than through increasingly common aesthetic frameworks of inevitable endings or cultural, technological, and economic determinisms. In doing so, the essay crafts a larger argument about how ethnographic attention to community video workshops and unauthorized Indigenous self‐imagery may offer correctives to the visual economies and political lexicons often presumed to define the present. It asks how Ayoreo remediations of self and world may charter novel axes for ethnographic writing and critique.

Visualising Traces of the Past in Latin America

The articles included in this special issue address the shifting relationship between traces of the past and photography in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present day. Looking at different forms of materiality and trace in Latin America, from pre-Columbian remains to body art and industrial ruins, this issue also understands photographs as material objects that ‘act’ within particular visual economies. In this introduction, we offer some brief reflections on ruins and ruination in Latin America, and on the relationship between photography and the past.

Picturing Culture: The Photography of Muttappan teyyam between 1920 and Today

Three different appropriations of a 1928 photograph from South India allow insights into German anthropology in the 1920s, contemporary German museum practices, and present-day ritual forms in northern Kerala. Juxtaposing these readings as what Edwards named evidential strategies, power of representation, and re-experiencing demonstrates the possibilities and limits of visual representation. The article contributes to a Picturing Culture debate that considers entrenched visual economies of archived photographs, and opts for an understanding of different aspects of cultural knowledge transported through photographs.

Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods by laura zanotti

Reviewed by: Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods by laura zanotti Christopher Jarrett laura zanotti, Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. 229 pp. Laura Zanotti's Radical Territories offers a historically grounded, politically astute, and ethnographically vivid account of how the Kayapó of the Brazilian Amazon build diverse livelihoods in plural landscapes. With a keen sense of ethics and a commitment to justice, Zanotti provides a complex picture of an indigenous Amazonian people who actively maintain and defend the ceremonial and material practices of their ancestors while thoughtfully and open-mindedly engaging with new opportunities for collaboration with a range of external allies. Zanotti's narrative describes how the Kayapó sustain "beautiful" living in geographies defined at once by their political potency as legally recognized indigenous "territories," their complexity and particularity as meaningful places, and their liberating potential as spaces of experimentation with different kinds of economies. Zanotti situates the book in a "territorial turn" in Latin America (36; Offen 2003, Bryan 2012). The focus of the text is on how the Kayapó have not only gained legal recognition for their territory through political struggle, but also continously make their territory. They do so through long-term occupation and adaptation to changing circumstances, ceremonial and spiritual engagement, productive practices that sustain their lifeways, and experimental alliances with outside groups. Kayapó territorialities are thus composed of historically sedimented, socially meaningful landscapes populated by multiple human and non-human actors. Such a wide-ranging account invariably leads Zanotti to engage with diverse theoretical movements, but the core of her approach is rooted in theories of space and place, feminist political ecology, and post-colonial [End Page 1283] scholarship. She skillfully depicts an example of "place as process" (12), and demonstrates the ways in which Western notions of abstract and capital-defined space both fail to capture and do violence to indigenous forms of territorial construction. She also tells "stories" of indigenous people that simultaneously support their struggles in regional and global arenas and carefully convey the heterogeneity of their positionalities, perspectives, and experiences (40). Radical Territories opens with an introduction that discusses Kayapó efforts to secure their current territory and to enact territorialities that reflect both a Kayapóspecific cosmological orientation and global efforts to construct "new geographies of well-being and living well" in contexts of neodevelopmentalism and neoextractivism (10). Zanotti explains that Kayapó livelihoods are dependent on "healthy lands and waters, but also demand creative entrepeneurship and political acumen to generate income and foster pathways to success" (4). Accordingly, she describes how Kayapó territory construction complicates simple critiques of the commodification of nature, for instance. At the same time, she outlines how Kayapó notions of well-being, and struggles in pursuit of such notions, contribute to movements for hope and justice. In the introduction, she also explains her methodological approach, which was grounded in community-based work in the Kayapó village of A'Ukre, but was also attentive to how this village is linked to outside places through "intersections of commodity chains, visual economies, rights-based efforts, and daily routines" (45). In the subsequent five chapters, Zanotti addresses various dimensions of Kayapó territory-making, such as history and political struggle (Chapter 1), ceremonial life (Chapter 2), foodways and swidden agriculture (Chapter 3), the non-timber forest product trade (Chapter 4), and community–conservation alliances (Chapter 5). Chapter 1 outlines Kayapó history and struggles to obtain and protect their formal territory, as well as ways in which Kayapó place-making is more expansive than juridical definitions. Here, it would have been interesting to learn more about Kayapó understandings of their identity beyond its articulation in the context of political struggles. Chapter 2 provides vivid, detailed descriptions of naming ceremonies and other Kayapó social processes that sustain collective life. Zanotti emphasizes that the Kayapó understand their lifeways as involving a multitude of species with whom they co-inhabit the landscapes in their territory. This chapter contributes to current efforts in Amazonian anthropology to examine the [End Page 1284] relationship between cosmology and politics without conceptually isolating the two (Cepek 2012). Toward...

Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture by Vanita Reddy

Reviewed by: Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture by Vanita Reddy Suzanne Enzerink Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture, by Vanita Reddy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016. Xiii + 261 pp. $84.50 cloth. $32.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1-4399-1155-6. A few years ago, a friend sent me a card so striking that it is still up on my wall today. Taken from Canadian visual artist Meera Sethi's series Firangi Rang Barangi, Hindi for "colorful stranger," the card ("Pyaari") features a woman dressed in a bright green floral headscarf, a sari blouse, geometrically patterned blue pants, bright orange pumps, and a mix of jewelry all over her body. More accurately, the card depicts the clothing itself: the woman is visible only as a trace outline. Fashion here emerges not as adornment, but as constitutive of identity. In this case, the sartorial reveals a distinctly hybrid sense of self, a combination of North American sensibilities with Indian fabrics and adornments. It is fitting that Vanita Reddy's excellent new book, Fashioning Diaspora, takes another of Sethi's prints ("Jaan") as its cover. The book traces transnational itineraries of Indian beauty, especially as it emerges in U.S. cultural imaginaries and diasporic formations. Just as Sethi does through her art, Reddy looks at beauty and fashion as wielding material and affective force, as opening up intimacies and affiliations that can put pressure on normative notions of belonging. Fashioning Diaspora opens with a spectacular moment of racial formation and such contested belonging. After Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America in 2013, the first Indian American woman to win the competition, a fierce debate erupted that sought to both interpret her win within the U.S. racial landscape and situate her within larger diasporic framework of Indian beauty. She was both claimed as American and derided as a perpetual foreigner, celebrated as reflective of India's prominence in beauty and upheld to critique its investment in whiteness. From this starting point, Reddy compellingly outlines how episodes like this are both "symptom and provocation" of much larger forces—beauty, fashion, race, diaspora, femininity—whose interactions shape South Asian American cultural forms (4). Beauty, in particular, generates [End Page 467] emergent forms of belonging that transcend class and generational divides, and that draw on the aesthetic to address raced and gendered practices within the nation and the diaspora. Reddy posits that beauty, while often figured as commodity or commodifying (of women), more importantly needs to be understood as intimately tied to the social, as a force with material effects. As part of this focus on the material, the actual women that are so often elided in narratives of Indian beauty are brought into focus by Reddy. As she writes, circulations of Indian beauty in mass media "are not merely images but also embodied and desiring subjects, bodies with flesh and bones" (12). However, rather than through ethnography, Reddy effectively and engagingly tends to this by tracing what beauty does. Beauty (and in the second half of the book, fashion) functions as a social domain, constitutive of diasporic embodiments that challenge neoliberal forms of belonging. For diasporic subjects, "the practices associated with beauty are socializing in the way that they make possible new racialized subject formations, affiliations, and forms of diasporic belonging" (17). Reddy mines an exciting and diverse archive to show how such attachments, and South Asian racial and cultural formations, come into being. Her first three chapters hone in on literary productions, both by canonical authors like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri and lesser-known figures like Palavi Dixit. Her final two chapters take up the visual field in which beauty and fashion operate. Chapter 4 examines experimental feminist art that constitutes "oppositional visual economies of fashion," using parody and aesthetic play to resignify markers such as the bindi (141), while the final chapter reads Shailja Patel's 2006 performance art piece Migritude. Part of what is so exciting about the book is exactly this reading together of texts that cross genres and political and theoretical leanings. Lahiri's "feminist cosmopolitics" are not Mukherjee's racial and gendered exceptionalism, though both push against the terms of...

Proof of death: Police power and the visual economies of seizure, accumulation and trophy

The phrase proof of life describes visual evidence meant to prove a kidnap victim or prisoner of war is alive. As developed here, proof of death describes a similar technique of seizure and display practiced by hunters, native warriors, soldiers and narco-traffickers meant to denote hunting prowess, domination and death. This article elaborates upon these representational practices, extending them to “police trophy shots”, the police practice of displaying large sums of money, illicit drugs, weapons and other seized materials. In the context of precarious late-capitalist economies, trophy shots as proof of death usefully reveal how police are actively involved in seizing the means of subsistence and administering, displaying and celebrating everyday domination and death.

Anthropology and Medical Photography: Ethnographic, Critical and Comparative Perspectives

The study of medical photography, inclusive of epidemiological and humanitarian applications of the genre, is a promising new field for visual anthropology. Focusing on the interlinked questions of visual witnessing and evidential ethics of medical photography, as well as on the entangled temporalities and dialectics of visibility and invisibility underlying this visual practice, the introduction to this special issue on medicine, anthropology and photography explores key issues arising out of recent work in the area. While reviewing the contributions of history, STS and photographic theory to the study of medical visual cultures, regimes and economies, we explore what a distinctively anthropological approach—through its ethnographic and comparative scope—offers to the topic.

Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology, and Popular Culture

This volume brings together a dozen or so studies that afford vivid insight into the diversity and complexity of expeditionary collecting between the First and Second World Wars. The chapters are structured more or less chronologically and explore an impressive range of expeditions and collecting practices in diverse locations: Africa, the Americas, the Soviet Union, Iran, New Guinea and Australia. The expeditions variously collected zoological, botanical and ethnographic specimens, recorded census data, and shot still and motion pictures. Their aims fluctuated from scientific to popular/commercial, to governmental and military. The editors seek to challenge the persistence of the rhetoric of first contact that expeditions and their films helped to create, by excavating their histories of global interaction and exchange and the visual economies they helped to create. They argue that adventure expeditions of this period, and more particularly the film footage shot, constitute a missing link between anthropology and popular culture – one that has been consistently downplayed in the history of anthropology.

Staring Down the State: Police Power, Visual Economies, and the “War on Cameras”

This paper considers how the politics of security and order are also a politics of aesthetics encompassing practical struggles over the authority and regulation of ways of looking and knowing. To do this, the paper considers the visual economies of police power in the United States by engaging what has been called the “war on cameras”, or the police crackdown on citizen photographers who “shoot back” or “stare down” police. Despite US law generally endorsing the right for citizens to film or photograph on-duty public police officers, in recent years hundreds of cases have been documented where police have confiscated or smashed cameras, deleted film, or intimidated and threatened those wielding an unauthorized camera. For us, this crackdown on the unauthorized stare is a theoretically and politically insightful case study—a diagnostic moment—for engaging more openly and starkly the assumptions underpinning police power more generally, particularly the ways police power aims to actively fabricate social order by eradicating anything it deems a threat in the name of security. Ultimately, we argue that the violence holstered, literally and figuratively, on the hip of modern policing is inseparable from an attendant politics of staring and visuality that further extends and perpetuates state power’s aim of pacification.

Representations of violence in the first-person documentary: Archival footage and documentary consciousness

Abstract In this article, I argue that archival footage of the historical real constitutes the documentary’s unique truth claim and examine three instances of films (Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside (1998), Mani Rathnam’s fictional Bombay (1995) and Rakesh Sharma’s testimonial documentary Final Solution (2004)) that use such archival footage in different visual economies of the indexical, iconic and symbolic, or in tension between them. As examples of films that represent communal violence in India, I compare their differing modes of invoking this footage aimed at activating a documentary consciousness that in turn addresses and creates a particular kind of embodied, ethical citizen/spectator.

Observing, Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's Fieldwork Agencements

This paper explores the relationship between oligoptic visual economies and liberal technologies of government which emerge from a consideration of the field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War which attempted to develop an anthropology of British “everyday” life. Focussing on MO's fieldwork agencements, the paper shows how the project brought together museological methods of collecting and curating with new mechanisms of collective self-watching, and the ways in which these mechanisms became implicated in technologies of government through its archival operations. In the connections it drew between the liberal subjectivities of collective self-watching and surrealist aesthetic practices, MO played a significant role in shaping new governmental rationalities, with implications for both metropolitan and colonial populations, through its interlinked conceptions of “mass” and “morale”. These formed part of a broader scientific–administrative–bureaucratic apparatus which facilitated the classification, ordering and governance of populations and “things” in this and later periods.

Visual Impersonation — Population Registration, Reference Books and Identification in the Eastern Cape, 1950s–1960s

AbstractThe paper looks at the population registration and issuing of reference books in the Transkei in the 1950s and 1960s. Thedompasbecame the iconic object of apartheid policing within the logic of urban racial segregation and capitalist labour exploitation. The analysis proposed here investigates population registration through the lens of materiality and visuality. It sketches the visual economies that facilitated the scheme in a rural area and explores the role of photography in one of apartheid’s most notorious administrative schemes. Along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on technological mediation the paper retraces how thedompasas an image/object oscillated between panoptic surveillance and subaltern contestation.

‘Photographer Unknown’: Neils Walwin Holm and the (Ir)retrievable Lives of African Photographers

Of the myriad analytical approaches to photography and its practices in colonial Africa, the perspective most often muted is that of black African photographers who were among the most numerous and prolific producers of these early image-objects. The lack of attention to their activities represents a glaring omission in photographic histories of the continent and further evidence of the legacies of silence perpetuated by the colonial project. As a consequence, there are undeniable archival difficulties in recuperating the lives and careers of black African photographers. However, these photographers are important actors worthy of the effort because of their level of immersion within the geographies and processes of visual economies of this formative period. Using Gold Coast-born and Lagos-based Neils Walwin Holm as a case in point, this article explores how black African photographers not only produced image-objects for their clients, but used their photographic oeuvres, practices and networks to advance their own personal ambitions, professional careers and social reputations. Ultimately, this article underscores the need for greater breadth and depth of scholarship on these early colonial-era African photographers – invisible black actors who were essential contributors to the history of photography in Africa.