ABSTRACT

Written in the context of unprecedented dislocation and a global refugee crisis, this edited volume thinks through photography’s long and complex relationship to human migration.

While contemporary media images largely frame migration in terms of trauma, victimhood, and pity, so much more can be said of photography’s role in the movement of people around the world. Cameras can document, enable, or control human movement across geographical, cultural, and political divides. Their operators put faces on forced and voluntary migrations, making visible hardships and suffering as well as opportunity and optimism. Photographers include migrating subjects who take pictures for their own consumption, not for international recognition. And photographs themselves migrate with their makers, subjects, and viewers, as the very concept of photography takes on new functions and meanings.

Photography and Migration places into conversation media images and other photographs that the contributors have witnessed, collected, or created through their diverse national, regional, and local contexts. Developed across thirteen chapters, this conversation encompasses images, histories, and testimonies offering analysis of new perspectives on photography and migration today.

chapter 1|21 pages

Photography and Migration

Keywords

part I|56 pages

(Im)mobility

chapter 2|18 pages

Back to America

Photography and Japanese Americans from incarceration to resettlement

chapter 3|18 pages

Residential School Photographs

The visual rhetoric of Indigenous removal and containment

chapter 4|16 pages

Animating Death

Stills that migrate

part II|51 pages

Border

chapter 5|17 pages

The Razor’s Edge

Image and corpo-reality at Europe’s borders

chapter 6|15 pages

Fantasy Islands

Photography, empathy, and Australia’s detention archipelago

chapter 7|15 pages

The Indecisive Moment

Photoethnography on the undocumented migration trail

part III|46 pages

Refugee

chapter 9|12 pages

Feelings, Facebook, Forced Migration

Photographs of refugees and affective spaces online

part IV|56 pages

Diaspora

chapter 11|18 pages

Photography and Diaspora

A roundtable

chapter 12|17 pages

Intimacy Out of Doors

Landscape, labor, and Chinese diasporic practices of looking

chapter 13|17 pages

Kan Azuma and the Japanese Canadian Diaspora

Perception, identity, and their erosion