Review: Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination, edited by Christopher Pinney with the PhotoDemos Collective

Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination, edited by anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney with the PhotoDemos Collective, is an ambitious collection of essays that attends to popular uses of photography in specific locales with a history of conflict. The authors' central aim is to study how specific communities grapple with "the relationship between photographic self-representation and different societies' understanding of what is politically possible" (2). This is an expansive goal that generates promising results from the PhotoDemos Collective, a working group of six anthropologists that includes Pinney, Naluwembe Binaisa, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Konstantinos Kalantzis, Ileana L. Selejan, and Sokphea Young. Each member offers an essay informed by their fieldwork across locations including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Greece, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The group's name explicitly evokes the Greek demos, "the people," thus signaling their investment in popular photographic practices and the complex ways everyday people incorporate such practices into their daily lives.1 In this vein, the types of images that are privileged in the book are often portraits—studio portraits, family photographs, registration and identity card headshots, and personal photographs commemorating life events such as weddings and birthdays. The makers of these images are often anonymous, as the authors pivot to the afterlives of these images, rather than the moment of their creation. These diverse practices, networks, and modes of circulation constructed by "the people" stand apart from images circulated by the media or the state, such as photojournalism or state-sponsored photo projects. The authors focus on popular photographic practices, privileging the term "demotic" (literally "of the people") over "vernacular," the latter implying a reactive, vertically oriented, hierarchal structure that the group attempts to move beyond. For the authors, these diverse imaging practices have affective, political consequences. As Buthpitiya insists, "Everyday photographs that were unremarkable in their making and mundane in their circulation still contained extraordinary political promise" (103). That everyday acts of self-representation have political effects is a central throughline of the book, and each contributor grapples with a question that thrums throughout—namely, how are images used and circulated by "the people" during periods of political conflict, mourning, memorialization, or struggle?Each chapter is a case study that responds to this question. Pinney introduces this study of the relationship between photographic self-representation and political representation, as he establishes the overarching questions, stakes, and themes that run throughout the subsequent essays. He begins with a quote from Ariella Azoulay's book Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (2012): "Anyone who stands in any relation whatsoever to photography has membership of the citizenry of photography."2 Azoulay's theorization of a citizenry of photography that is sovereign to ordinary citizenship is the starting point of this collection and is continually referenced throughout each chapter (and made explicit through its very title). Each contributor puts pressure on the promises and limitations of this potential citizenry and how such a citizenry is materially enacted in their particular locales, specifically in certain instances where communities often have an ambivalent, if not antagonistic, relationship to the citizenship-granting state authority. While this concept of a citizenry of photography is perhaps the most well-known of Azoulay's propositions, another significant idea from Azoulay appears at several moments: no one actor ever gains total control of the photographic event. As Azoulay asserts, "The photograph escapes the authority of anyone who might claim to be its author, refuting anyone's claim to sovereignty."3 This understanding of the photographic event offers everyday people the agency and ability to reanimate, repurpose, and refashion images of themselves to further their own political goals that often deviate from other political actors or the initial impulses driving the photographic event. As the contributors emphasize, that no one lays total and final claim on the photographic event comes from Walter Benjamin, who insists on photography's contingency, ambivalence, instability, and open-endedness. For Benjamin and the contributors of Citizens of Photography, new political potentialities (and liberatory futures) can be located in this unpredictability. In line with this Benjaminian understanding of photography's contingency, the authors prioritize photography's performativity and openness over what is visually captured within the frame. They are in dialogue with other scholars also in tune with this position, such as cultural anthropologist Karen Strassler's Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (2010) and more recently, Jennifer Bajorek's Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination (2020) and Thy Phu's Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam (2022).4 In line with these earlier works, the authors of Citizens of Photography privilege the photograph's elasticity to warp and shift according to the present political needs of the people and their creative maneuverings of already existing images. For example, Buthpitiya discusses the Tamil community's production of memorial portraits made from repurposed national identity cards of their deceased, as these were often the only images families of the deceased had in their possession. As Buthpitiya observes how her interlocuters have recast these images, she asserts, "Portraits that had made subjects visible to the state now confronted the state with new demands" (74).Azoulay's voice looms large throughout each chapter, reinforcing how significant her work is for scholars currently grappling with the relationship between photographic practices and political representation. At times, the authors' rehearsals of her work feel repetitive and run the risk of overshadowing the specificities and urgencies of their own fieldwork. Arguably, the most compelling moments occur when the authors attempt to move beyond her theorizations. This unfolds primarily through their discussions of digital platforms and their engagement with digital manipulation, smartphones, and the user-generated mapping and aggregation that social media makes possible. For example, Buthpitiya discusses how Tamil users of Instagram populate the "Tamil Eelam" geotag on the social media platform with a user-generated map of photographs that visualize the physical contours of an independent Tamil state. Elsewhere, Young highlights the popular practice of digitally manipulating portraits of university graduates to include Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to visually symbolize their aspired proximity to power and success.The precarity of relying on social media platforms to enact or propel this citizenry is briefly mentioned, and more pressure and analysis needs to be applied to these virtual networks. For example, when does a citizenry of photography run counter to the community guidelines of social media platforms? What are the creative strategies used to circumvent and subvert guidelines that may run counter to the political aims of this citizenry? The authors' engagement with individual camera phones and digital platforms highlights how much more work needs to be done regarding popular photography, the complex intricacies of social media networks, and the opacity around shadow banning, community guidelines, and censorship on such platforms.The book spans multiple geographies and includes a diverse set of actors and interlocuters. As Pinney clarifies in the introduction, the specific locales in the book were selected because "they are sites of current crisis or former political conflict, sites where differences in religious practices are evident, or sites that have significance in the history of visual anthropology" (5). For example, Selejan attends to uses of photography in the 2018 protests in Nicaragua, the deadliest civil conflicts to take place in the country since the Sandinista Revolution. Elsewhere, Buthpitiya focuses on the image worlds of the Vanni Tamil community in northern Sri Lanka where the local population and the region's infrastructure were devastated by the war between the Sri Lankan state forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian casualties. This includes what she describes as "the photographic debris of war" (64)—banners and signs made up of photographs taken during the war, makeshift memorial portraits and shrines made up of studio portraits and national identity cards, and protests displaying portraits of the disappeared. Young attends to the everyday photographic practices in Cambodia during and after the Khmer Rouge, while Kalantzis takes as his starting point the photographic images from the 1944 Distomo slaughter in Greece and photographic portraits of Sfakians of western Crete taken by German tourists. By studying this exchange, Kalantzis opens up "a (photographic) citizenship…tourists and locals, hosts and guests, perpetrators and victims, powerful and peripheral nation-states" (159). By focusing on popular photographic practices, the authors reorient the dominant understandings of "conflict" photography that are often shaped by photojournalists, the media, or political leaders.Taken together, the book offers a thought-provoking and convincing argument for how everyday photographic practices utilized by "the people" have profound political effects. The authors offer a vertiginous, if at times rushed itinerary across the globe to construct a critical way of thinking through political conflict using popular photographic practices. Citizens of Photography is ultimately generative, insisting that a photograph's itinerary (and the event of photography) is always unpredictable and open-ended, resisting closure. As the authors express in their individual contributions, this line of thinking is oriented toward the future. That images can (and often do) subvert its initial intent opens onto new worlds and more liberatory futures.