Photography and Resistance

This book argues that photography, with its inherent connection to the embodied material world and its ease of transmissibility, operates as an implicitly political medium. It makes the case that the right to see is fundamental to the right to be. Limning the paradoxical links between photography as a medium and the conditions of political, social, and epistemological disappearance, the book interprets works by African American, Indigenous American, Latinx, and Asian American photographers as acts of political activism in the contemporary idiom. Placing photographic praxis at the crux of 21st-century crises of political equity and sociality, the book uncovers the discursive visual movements through which photography enacts reappearances, bringing to visibility erased and elided histories in the Americas. Artists discussed in-depth include Shelley Niro, Carrie Mae Weems, Paula Luttringer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Matika Wilbur, Martine Gutiérrez, Ana Mendieta, An-My Lê, and Rebecca Belmore. The book makes visible the American land as a site of contestation, an as-yet not fully recognized battlefield.

Advances a compelling thesis bridging photographic works by artists in the United States, Canada, Cuba, and Argentina Explores the political repercussions of photography shown in public space Links photography to the problematic of cultural erasures, showing that the right to see is the right to be

Autorentext

Claire Raymond teaches at the University of Maine (USA) and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (USA). She is the author of eight previous books of feminist scholarship, including The Photographic Uncanny: Photography, Homelessness, and Homesickness and The Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography.

Inhalt

1.Introduction: Photography and Disappearance.- 2.The Disappeared: Paula Luttringer's and Rebecca Belmore's Hauntings.- 3.Exiles: Shelley Niro and Ana Mendieta, Crossing the Water.- 4.Magazine Work: Martine Gutierrez.- 5.America's Dirty Wars: Carrie Mae Weems and An-My Le.- 6.Drowning and Rising: Cara Romero's Spirits.- 7.Conclusion: Revenants are Photographs.