3D Ziyarat : Lenticularity and technologies of the moving image in material and visual piety

Sidestepping the debate around “photography” versus “photographies” (a.k.a. “technomaterialism” versus “culturalism”), the gerund “photographing” is proposed. This is intended to direct attention to photography as an actually existing practice, that is, as a performance rather than an essence, and a phenomenon that ethnography is ideally suited to understand. Credit is given to Ariella Azoulay for opening up a set of questions that hegemonic photographic theory had foreclosed. Ethnography is the method used to study photographing's “ambivalently determining presence.” The range of ethnographies suggests various interrelated conclusions about photographing: its orientation to the future, its “demotic” rather than “vernacular” character, the pervasive assumption that the real is characterized by its “photographability,” and the political and ethical demands that are built upon the expectation that certain things must be photographed.

Introduction

Pinney¹

2023

“The Truth Is in the Soil”

Buthpitiya¹

2023

This chapter examines the political work of photography in northern Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the island's civil war (1983–2009). Here, everyday “photographing” and the vibrant personal and political recontextualization and rematerialization of photographic images illuminate the effects of war and the lingering political frictions and grievances of the postwar. Within diverse ethnographic contexts spanning commemoration, activism, and state surveillance, the making and moving of photography play a significant role in improvisations to imagine and secure personal and collective political futures. Where Tamil citizenship is defined as one of complexity and impairment against a backdrop of ethno-nationalist conflict, photography serves as a means to claim and make visible what is suppressed in the wake of war and enduring violence. The medium reveals, importantly, its potential for cultivating borderless political socialities and solidarities that foreground possibilities for self-determination.

Visual Citizenship in Cambodia

Young¹

2023

The chapter opens with an autobiographical account that entangles the absence and presence of media with Cambodia's political history. The historical scarcity of photography in Cambodia is documented. The proliferation of images is a recent phenomenon. The Khmer Rouge genocide coded photographs as signs of bourgeois identity and led to the burying of many photographs. Photographs remain politically charged in the present, their talismanic and magical properties being recognized by both government supporters and protestors. However, photographic effects are paradoxical: they proliferate the presence of the ruler but also render his distributed personhood vulnerable to defacement by hostile citizens. Current digital practices may seem to proffer the utopia of “borderless” images but in practice open the citizenry to state surveillance. Photography emerges as a key facilitator of the current authoritarian regime's reworking of the Khmer Rouge's “Angkar,” the “pineapple eyes” metaphor that underpins obedience to the state.