Citizens of Photography Book Launch

Thu 30 Nov 2023 6 – 8pm

We have an exciting event coming up to accompany the launch of our PhotoDemos co-edited volume “Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination”. The panel discussion includes esteemed speakers Nze Emeka Ed Keazor, Sabes Sugunasabesan, Helen Dixon and will be chaired by Christopher Pinney and Naluwembe Binaisa who has organised this event in collaboration with Autograph ABP. Participation is free of charge, however registration is essential.

Join us in conversation with a panel of artists, activists, scholars and writers to launch the ground-breaking book Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination. This exciting volume brings together the work of The PhotoDemos Collective who through in-depth ethnographic investigation trace the resonances between political and photographic representation in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Cambodia.

In this discussion, we explore how the authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities across time, space and place. They analyse photographies ranging from family albums and social media to state and public archives, showing how they point to new destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices.

The panel speakers draw on their own practice and experiences to reflect on the central themes that the volume highlights. Autograph as a hub for diasporic and transnational image worlds provides a platform to focus on the relevance of these discussions to all contemporary communities. Citizens of Photography by foregrounding photography’s open-ended and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identifications, demonstrates that as much as photography looks to the past, it points to the future, acting in advance of social reality.

PhotoDemos Collective are Christopher Pinney, Naluwembe Binaisa, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Konstantinos Kalantzis, Ileana L Selejan, Sokphea Young.