Session Date and Time:
11/19/2021
4:15 PM-6:00 PM
Session Title: Bureaucratic Images, Visualizing Citizenship
Session Type: Virtual Presentation
Session Abstract
In lay and academic discourse, bureaucracy almost seems coterminous with the production and circulation of paper, writing, and type. Indeed, the flows of bureaucratic paperwork and documentation weigh heavy, but how are other media and material forms implicated in bureaucratic relationships and encounters? This panel considers the photographic portrait as an enduring bureaucratic technology across different histories and geographies. How are people’s likenesses key for modes of social recognition, and in particular, claims of citizenship? Bureaucracy and its demands for identification importantly shaped photography and mobility by demanding certain kinds of images such as passport photos. Papers in the panel focus on the political work of photographic portraits in the context of migration, borders and belonging. In examining how photographic portraits are tied to statist forms of recognition and modes of claiming citizenship, the panel seeks to advance an understanding of the shifting aesthetics and modes of production and circulation of bureaucratic picture-making cultures as tied to possibilities for cross-border mobility. In attending to bureaucratic picture-making cultures from glass plates policing the emigration of Armenian families in the Ottoman Empire to the circulation of digital memes of Pakistani Hindu girls as part of refugee-migrant claims to Indian citizenship, we contend with the visual captures and affective resonances of bureaucracy that exceed its written expressions.
Participants:
Zeynep Gursel, Organizer;Chair;Paper Presenter
Romm Lewkowicz, Paper Presenter
Benjamin Hegarty, Paper Presenter
Karen Strassler, Paper Discussant
Ethiraj Dattatreyan, Paper Presenter
Natasha Raheja, Organizer;Paper Presenter
Reviewed by: Society for Visual Anthropology